UCC officers share prayer for victims of Brooklyn subway attack

On Tuesday, April 12, a gunman wearing a gas mask detonated a smoke bomb and opened fire on a Brooklyn, N.Y. subway train, shooting 10 people and injuring a dozen others. The National Officers of the United Church of Christ offered this prayer for those impacted.

Holy One,

We pray again today for all victims of senseless violence. Seeing bombs and guns go off in a New York subway frightens us all. We grow weary of the senselessness of it all. We fear our growing tendency to simply write the next mass shooting off as just another tragedy we don’t have the capacity to respond to.

We pray for the troubled spirits who lash out randomly with their anger or their hatred and ruin the lives of people they never knew or met. May they find the comfort or the solace they are so desperately searching for before the next one picks up a gun or a bomb and unleashes it on an unsuspecting crowd.

We pray for the injured and dead, as well as for their families who will spend the rest of their lives mourning the tragedy and recovering from the trauma.

Most of all we pray for the leaders of this country who must find the courage to respond to the moral mandate of our time, who must stand up to powerful lobbies that romanticize weapons and profit from their sales. Please, God, help them to help us end our love affair with weapons that take lives. Restore unto us your vision of Shalom – a vision of a world without war, without violence, without weapon. Turn our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks. Let us unlearn the ways of war and violence. Any may we all find our pathway to contentment and peace in each other’s presence. Amen.

The National Officers of the United Church of Christ

• The Rev. John C. Dorhauer — General Minister and President
• The Rev. Traci A. Blackmon — Associate General Minister
• The Rev. Karen Georgia Thompson — Associate General Minister

---

Content on ucc.org is copyrighted by the National Setting of the United Church of Christ and may be only shared according to the guidelines outlined here.