For those who were killed in my city this weekend, in Boston today, we pray that their families would find and take and be renewed by great comfort coming directly from you.  Give them strength.  Be gracious by supplying their needs according to your immeasurable wealth.  You give good things.  Turn the latest tragedies into opportunities to express your loving self, your hope-filled hand.  Be good to them so that they turn toward you, in their own ways, and find you struggling with them.

For those who live in fear–and this may be all of us in bits–grant that we might revisit your record and find you trustworthy.  Anchor us in something deeper than our first reactions.  Drop us into some penetrating truth that the world of death is a world on its way to a fitting close.  Open us to expectation for life.  Use us to bring life, to frustrate death the way Jesus did, to remind murder and all its cousins that life still wins.

In the strong name of the winner whose resurrection gives me hope, Amen.