We have talked about the social construct of race, its meaning and implications for our lives for years.  Now, I think that it is time for us to not only acknowledge our complicity, name our experience and challenge the lies that we have been told based on the social construct of race but to confess what we have done in the name of and by this spirit of division.

Talk to God about the ways in which your hands have helped race and your heart has believed, trusted and hoped in race. Confess, expel, release the ways in which race has held you captive, tied your tongue, oppressed your body, limited your relationships. Make it plain. Speak freely as a starting point for freedom from race and through Christ.

Lord, I confess that I have accepted race’s rule of me, that I have blindly followed, that I never doubted its position in my life– though I regularly questioned Your place in and authority over my life.

I confess that I have attempted to make others in my image and in my likeness. I have looked at the outward appearance and not the heart, choosing who is right, good and pleasing to my eyes (I Samuel 16.7). I have recreated persons and in so doing, reduced Your image in them.

I confess that I have accepted and given priority to my image in race, that is to be a socially colored beige, brown, black, red, yellow or white person. Forgive me for making You in my image, for subjecting Your image to that of the social construct of race.

Forgive me for hating, hindering and hurting people in the name of race, for pledging allegiance to discrimination, segregation and this evil imagination.

Forgive me for exchanging Your will for my own, for making my cultural preferences those that You desire, for presuming to know You as a member and God of my culture.

Forgive me for using Your holy words to hide, to cripple, to afflict, to oppress, to condemn, to shame and to blame, to dismiss and diminish the presence of others that You have equally created and fully love.

Create in me a clean heart and renew in me a race- less spirit (Psalm 51.10).  Continue to reveal to me all those strings that race has attached to me so I might be cut loose, set free, delivered from the social construct of race.

In the name of Jesus Christ, who is not a Person of color, we pray. Amen.