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O God, we pause as Americans five years after we watched the US Capitol eclipsed by the smoke of battle for the first time since the war of 1812. We stop and remember that the people who marched against the dome of democracy in 2020 were not a foreign enemy. They were - and still are - our neighbors, misdirected by lies. Five years later, the people responsible for manufacturing those lies control our government.
We acknowledge that we are a nation occupied by insurrectionists.
Though they were lied to and driven by a machine of misinformation, each person who broke the law to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th made a choice with the free will You have given each of us. They assaulted law enforcement officers and threatened to kill our elected representatives. They were held accountable by our courts. But the regime under which we now suffer pardoned 1600 of them, not so much to excuse their crimes as to justify its own.
We confess that we suffer under a lawless regime.
Like any people who have been wronged, we are tempted by this anniversary to simply blame those who have by captivated by this lawless spirit. We reject the temptation to simply be victims. Instead, we repent of the ways we as a people have accepted false pardons for our shared sins rather than doing the difficult work of repair and reconstruction. We have seen how lies diminish people, and we want to be free from the lies that justify our so-called privilege so we might become what the better angels of our nature and the best of our nation’s creeds call us toward.
We repent of the hubris that allowed us to succumb to this present political darkness.
We weep in this moment, God, because we recognize how many have been harmed by that madness that now dictates our daily lives. We weep with the families of those who died because of their service on January 6th. We weep with every family divided by the lies. We weep with the people who have lost their healthcare, their housing, their jobs, and their nutrition assistance under the present regime. We weep with those who’ve lost family members to masked men and those who’ve lost loved ones to needless wars waged without Congressional authorization.
We lament because we know our tears can clarify our vision.
You have shown us, O Lord, what is good and what You require of us: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before You. We have courage to face the truth and to acknowledge the pain of this long night because we know that when the light of Your truth shines, the darkness cannot overcome it. We thank You for the defenders of democracy who have not bowed and for the servants of the people who keep hope alive. We celebrate the moral resistance that has emerged and the rising movement that is committed to build power for a Third Reconstruction in America.
We give thanks because we have been sustained by a great cloud of witnesses, and we have not lost hope.
The insurrectionists of 1861 would have prevailed in holding America hostage to the lies of chattel slavery if the people most directly impacted by that lie had not volunteered to enlist in the Union army, join hands with those who had cooperated in their oppression, and win the war for their freedom. As we remember the insurrection that led to our current crisis, we pledge to learn from this past and take up the cause of those who worked for a more perfect union before us. We will trust the leadership of people who’ve been targeted by lies. We will link arms across the divides that have been used to pit us against one another. We will build a people’s movement to demand representatives who reject the lies, insist on accountability, and commit to use power to reconstruct a government that works for all of us.
We pledge ourselves to the work of building this moral movement, and we ask Your divine assistance to make us repairers of the breach in all that we do. Amen.

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