Tag: USA

God, when hope of peace is sullied – for Ukraine

God, when hope of peace is sullied 

God, when hope of peace is sullied,
sown with hatred, fed with lies, 
threaded through with blind rhetoric,
strengthen us and hear our cries.

Give us language to remodel 
human values lost in dust
sharing through our conversation 
lives of loving, living trust.

Take away all greed and grasping, 
soothe our sorrow, meet our need,
help us as we seek to nurture 
every bruised, or broken, reed.

May we see in every nation 
siblings of a common birth, 
seeing Christ in one another 
sharing heritage and worth.

Words © 2025 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.

Tune: ALL FOR JESUS

Written following President Trump’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, 28/2/2025.

God’s on our side

When will we ever learn…I have posted this hymn before but sadly I return to it without apology.

In 2001 the USA, and with it the world, was shaken with the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. This exacerbated the polarisation of faith traditions and ideologies across the globe. Tensions increased and an ‘us and them’ mentality, already present, was exaggerated by political posturing, understandable, to a degree, in the light of what had happened.

Broken bridges have still not been rebuilt. Walls have been erected.  Today those labelled enemies in Western nations are as much within as outside our borders inhabiting postions of influence and leadership. Ideologies are in tension with each other, not diminished by the experience of a global pandemic. International cooperation has never been more necessary. A hymn I wrote in 2001 within 24 hours of 9/11 is perhaps still pertinent…those we label or sense to be enemies inhabit the fabric of our own politics. Their actions are becoming obvious…trust is at a premium…

1 God's on our side, and God will grieve
 
at carnage, loss and death;
 
for Jesus wept, and we will weep
 
with every grieving breath.
 
 

2 God's on their side, the enemy,
 
the ones we would despise;
 
God quench our vengeance, still our pride,
 
don't let our anger rise.
 
 

3 God's on each side, God loves us all,
 
and through our hurt and pain
 
God shares the anguish, nail scarred hands
 
reach out love must remain.
 
 

4 God show us how to reconcile
 
each difference and fear,
 
that we might learn to love again
 
and dry the other's tear.
 
 

Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
 © 2001 Stainer and Bell Ltd., please include any use on your CCL Licence return or contact Stainer & Bell via www.stainer.co.uk. Administered in the USA by Hope Publishing. 
Tunes: AMAZING GRACE; BASIE (Kleinheksel)

Some of the poetry in Words, Images and Imagination are perhaps pertinent to this situation…

Our borders, our walls mock the faith that we own -Hymn/Poem

Our borders, our walls mock the faith that we own,
denying the Christ that we claim to enthrone,
for Christ is our neigbour to love or reject,
for us to disdain, or to treat with respect.

The justice of God is as real as our flesh,
as real as each life that we drown or refresh;
as active as righteousness seen in the cross,
where love met with hatred while bearing the loss.

And now, in this moment, we need to decide,
our crisis of conscience to love or deride:
to claim that some small print lets us off the hook,
or answer, with courage, Christ’s challenging look?

Andrew Pratt 14/7/2019
Words © 2019 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England, http://www.stainer.co.uk.
Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Tune: ST DEINIO