sermons

Praying with the Psalms

Praying for Our Nation

Steve Watson

Jan 18, 2026

Two and a half months ago, Ivy led us in a participatory liturgy here around heartbreak and hope. It was the one where we took hammers and smashed all the plates. 

And when it came to naming our heartbreak and rage smashing it all for catharsis, you all went into it with gusto. 

But we also took more plates and turned them into prayers of hope, where we used the first words attributed to God in the Bible to make our own blessings of what we would love, with the help of God, to see into being. 

Let there be…

Let there be…

Let there be…

Let there be…

And in case you weren’t there and were curious, this is why our sanctuary walls are still covered with plates. 

Because together, we have so many hopes and wishes, and together we have so much heartbreak and disappointment.

And this past year, if we’ve been listening to each other, we’ve heard that a lot of this heartbreak, and a lot of our dreams and hope deferred, has to do with our country.

• We’ve heard in our community the heartbreak of friends whose work in public health was eliminated.
• The heartbreak over our country’s support of genocide in Gaza.
• The heartbreak over the scapegoating attacks on black history and transgender identity and immigrant lives.
• And we’re hearing the heartbreak over the weaponization of armed agents of the government against our American cities. 
• We’ve been hearing about the 2000 ICE agents that have flooded Minneapolis, about the shooting in the face of Renee Good.

And Massachusetts leaders are concerned that Boston could be targeted in the near future as well. So I texted a couple of my friends who are pastors in Minneapolis, asking how they’re doing and how we can pray for them, and one of them wrote this to me:

“Thanks for thinking of us and Minneapolis. It’s scary here. People really are being disappeared. Protesters are being targeted. Civil rights are being trampled.” 

And he said he really appreciates our prayer. 

At Reservoir, we talk about the things we can do to see a more just world into being. One of our core values is action. We say:

Love for Jesus compels us to act—to seek justice, show compassion, work for reconciliation, and hope for transformation in joyful engagement with the world.

And that’s really, really important to us. 

But today I want to talk about another expression of faith we can practice that can complement and deepen and sustain our action. It’s the practice of praying for our country. 

The context for this is our Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday tomorrow, and we’ll come back to Brother Martin and his movement’s prayers and actions in a moment.

And the context for this is our January to early February series Praying with the Psalms. I gave an introduction to the series a couple of weeks back and shared about the impact of my practice praying with the psalms. And then Ivy gave a banger of a sermon last week on rage and vengeance prayer. 

Today we read one of several psalms that comes up when people pray for their nation. We’ll read most of Psalm 72. It goes like this:

Psalm 72:1-14 (Common English Bible)

God, give your judgments to the king.
    Give your righteousness to the king’s son.

2 Let him judge your people with righteousness
    and your poor ones with justice.

3 Let the mountains bring peace to the people;
    let the hills bring righteousness.

4 Let the king bring justice to people who are poor;
    let him save the children of those who are needy,
        but let him crush oppressors!

5 Let the king live as long as the sun,
    as long as the moon,
        generation to generation.

6 Let him fall like rain upon fresh-cut grass,
    like showers that water the earth.

7 Let the righteous flourish throughout their lives,
    and let peace prosper until the moon is no more.

8 Let the king rule from sea to sea,
    from the river to the ends of the earth.

9 Let the desert dwellers bow low before him;
    let his enemies lick the dust.

10 Let the kings of Tarshish and the islands bring tribute;
    let the kings of Sheba and Seba present gifts.

11 Let all the kings bow down before him;
    let all the nations serve him.

12 Let it be so, because he delivers the needy who cry out,
    the poor, and those who have no helper.

13 He has compassion on the weak and the needy;
    he saves the lives of those who are in need.

14 He redeems their lives from oppression and violence;
    their blood is precious in his eyes.

Now when you pray with the psalms, you don’t have to understand all the lines, all the context. You can just grab bits here and there and make them your own. Freestyle, out of context, is totally fine.

But if you grab the words of the Psalm – or really any words of the Bible – and you twist them to mean something super-weird, it’s at least good to notice you’re doing that, so you don’t feel like you stand on any special authority with your prayer.

So let me use Psalm 72 to show you really briefly some terrible ways to pray for your nation. And then I’ll share a little about the power of praying well for our nation.

So first the terrible. 

If you catch that line about ruling from sea to sea, and you’re like –

hey, my country stretches from one sea to another – or if I keep conquering a little more land, it could stretch from sea to sea – this psalm is probably about us. Thank you, Jesus.

Actually, it was Canada who did this. We think of them as our peaceloving neighbors to the north, but they have an imperial past too, and they lifted their motto – a mari usque ad mari – from sea to sea – from this psalm. I mean, do that if you want, but don’t call it Christian or anything. 

Or maybe you read about this bit of tribute paid to kings and think – this reminds me of tariffs, and I think – there’s another sign that Trump is God’s man, again, it’s a free country, think what you want, but it has nothing to do with the Bible.

American Christians have done this a ton with our own country and with a country that we do a lot of cheerleading and arms dealing for, Israel. If you live in the US as we do, and you Google about praying for your country, you’ll come across psalms you can use and sometimes they’ll say psalms you can use to pray for Israel and America, as if these two modern day nation states are God’s two favorite countries. And as if these two modern day nation states – Israel and the United States of America – are kind of equivalent to the ancient Israeli nation of the Old Testament. 

Since this country was founded, some Christians have wanted to think that the US is like the new Israel. The most special, most religious, most important, most blessed by the God who blesses America – has no basis in the Bible or anywhere else but in the self-centered, white supremacist arrogance of the American colonizing fantasy. 

But friends, American exceptionalism was unknown to the authors of the Bible. Same with Christian Zionism, the Christian idea that modern day Israel is a key part of God’s plans for the fulfillment of history. This belief – very popular in America, very influential in American military policy toward Israel and Palestine – is a modern idea attached to a screwy, but very popular modern theological scheme called dispensationalism. And I at least think it’s not a very faithful way to pray – that God would bless Israel but not all of its neighbors. 

What American exceptionalism and Christian Zionism have in common as ways of praying for nations, is both these ideas think God plays favorites. We know who they are, and we as the people praying get to be on the winning team – with the human enemies of these nations damned by God and us and doomed to suffering. 

And friends, that is not to pray for our nation or any other, like God and us are getting together to cheer on the winning team.

Instead, here are two ways to pray for our nation in the tradition of the psalms that do really good things for us and God and for our nations.

The first is to pray for your nation as a way to love it more. 

Before I was a pastor here, my wife Grace and I were members for about seven  years. We had three little kids, but we loved this church’s call for all its members to chip in and help out at least once a month. We led a community group together. And Grace sang here on the band, while I kind of hopped around – served as a teacher’s helper with the preschool kids, was a youth mentor for a while. And for a couple years, I was on the prayer team.

I’m actually not the most dedicated person I know in praying for others. I do it, I pray for you all, but it takes intention, it doesn’t just come naturally to me. So I joined the prayer team for a while back in the day not because I was so dedicated to praying for others, but because other people stressed me out too much sometimes, and I wanted to build a greater habit of entrusting people to God, and not worrying about them. So I joined the prayer team and as I prayed for people more, I learned that prayer is a great way to love people more. 

Because sometimes when I pray for people, I find I’m not sure what to pray, I don’t have the words, and I learned from my friend Ken this way of praying for people where you just picture them and their name, and you imagine that they are coming before God, and that God loves them and wants the best for them. And maybe you have words to say as you imagine that and maybe you don’t, but it’s a way of hoping and believing that God sees and knows them and loves them and can help them. 

And friends, I can tell you that when you do this for someone enough, you do have more hope for them and believing that God loves them, you start to love them more too. 

And I think that’s part of what prayer is for – to grow faith and hope, and also to grow love. Richard Benson, the founder of a local monastery I visit often, wrote this: 

“In praying for others we learn really and truly to love them. As we approach God on their behalf we carry the thought of them into the very being of eternal Love, and as we go into the being of him who is eternal Love, so we learn to love whatever we take with us there.” 

There’s a place I sit every morning, where I keep my bible and in it some cards with daily and weekly prayer lists on them. And names from this community come on and off those lists, and I’m not the most diligent in prayer by any means, but as I hold your names and the names of others I love, and sometimes the names of people I can’t stand, before the being of God who is eternal love, I learn to love them all more. 

The psalmist is doing that – praying for their king, starting off as a homer, probably paid, commissioned to write royal propaganda. And partly, Psalm 72 is royal, patriotic propaganda, and it annoys the hell out of me, to be honest. This is not my favorite psalm. But as they pray for the king, they find something to love. 

They think: my king, my government prioritizes the needs of the poorest and weakest and neediest, focuses on protecting them from oppression and harm, and I love that about them. God bless them for their just compassion. 

And maybe we’ve never had a government like that, but as we hold the United States before God, who loves all the nations, our own included, maybe we give thanks for things we love – favorite places (this is a beautiful country, after all), favorite blessings, favorite parts of the culture, and maybe we pray for this country’s most beautiful aspirations, those which still aren’t fulfilled. 

Like the preamble to our Constitution, our founding charter. It begins with these words:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

We the people – all the people. A more perfect union. Domestic tranquility and the general welfare – the welfare for all the people. We’ve struggled with these words, haven’t we? I mean mostly probably just not reading them, but certainly not living by them, like it’s our generation’s call to make the union more perfect, like all the people of the country deserve tranquility and general welfare, all the people. 

And if we were to pray that our country would live by these words, maybe sometimes we notice the answers to our prayers. 

My colleague in Minneapolis, after sharing how scary and dangerous things are during the ICE raids there, wrote this:

“At the same time, there have been many really beautiful examples of solidarity and mutual aid. Neighbors are raising money to help neighbors who are too afraid to leave their house. Minnesotans are generous.”

Thanks be to God, friends, for all the beautiful people of the earth, including all the beautiful people of this country. 

And maybe when we pray with love for our country, we also pray that our country will be true to its best self, and we even start praying that we and others would become the answers to our prayers as well….

Which takes us to the second way to pray for our nation, which is to pray that its people – us included – will help it be true to its best self…

We are not the first generation to be disappointed in our country. 

On this Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, I think of the more than a million African Americans who served their country during World War II – soldiers, nurses, technicians, factory workers devoting years of their lives to their country’s cause.

For generations, their ancestors had been enslaved here, and for three generations after the Civil War, subjected to second-class citizenship, segregation, state-sponsored and vigilante violence, and yet they responded to the call to serve their country’s freedom abroad, then secure their freedom and prosperity at home. But the war ended, and that freedom and prosperity were not available, but were still repeatedly and systematically withheld. 

And out of a praying people and a praying church, praying for their liberty and survival and prosperity, and praying with love for the health of this country, Black Americans started quoting the scriptures to their country and quoting America’s founding documents back to itself as well, loving their country enough to insist that it keep forming a more perfect union, 

And Martin Luther King, Jr. did this with uncommon eloquence and persistence, reminding America that we claim to believe that all men, all people, are created equal, that regardless of race or religion, we were to be guaranteed the unalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That security, peace of mind, domestic tranquility, general welfare were promised to we the people, all the people. 

And he famously said that to Black Americans, that promise, that check had been a bad check, come back marked insufficient funds. But he said –

we love this country, and we love the God of justice enough as well, to insist that we all get to cash this check, to insist that the bank of justice is not bankrupt. To insist that “the great vaults of opportunity of this nation” have enough promise for us all. 

And those prayers were made with words, and those prayers were embodied in action, praying with hands and feet and lives as well. Praying, insisting, that this country live up to its highest aspirations and most sacred promises. 

We’ll have opportunities to explore this legacy in our Lenten season, which starts in four weeks. We have a description available for you today we’d love for you to pick up and look over. This year, our Lenten season before Easter is called “For Such a Time as This,” language drawn from the Bible’s book of Esther, about resistance to tyranny. There’s information about a field trip we’re encouraging, about the time and dates of the holidays and our church retreat and other things. And about the devotional guide we’ll be using.

This time, rather than writing our own, we’re promoting a powerful devotional published this past year by Hanna Reichel, also called “For Such a Time as This.” It’s a timely set of reflections on what we can pray and learn from the confessing church who resisted that Nazi regime during the Holocaust and World War II. While most Christians in Germany collaborated with the Nazis or were bystanders, a few leaned into the best of their faith and resisted, and we’ll learn from them. We’ll have the books for sale here – sliding scale $10 to $20 in throughout early February. 

We’re calling this Lent a season of faithfulness and resilience, in hard times. It’s our call to one another to 

• Radical resistance…
• Radical love… and
• Deep prayer…

So we hope you’ll all take a look and be ready to participate next month.

But today, friends, on this holiday, I ask us to remember Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a model of praying for our nation. That we pray for our nation to love it more. That we pray for our nation to fulfill its best self and most beautiful promises. And that we pray for justice and flourishing not just for me and mine but generously, for all the people. And that we pray in the legacy and spirit and strength of the prayers of America’s Black church that we not get stuck in our worst habits, our smallest and worst hatreds, but that we rise to our most inclusive and just and healthy self as a nation. And let those prayers be on our lips and in our feet.