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Stillness comes with wisdom and age. It is in the later chapters of life you may come to realize you hear more and learn more when you make space and time for quiet stillness. In that place you can hear the soft voice of the Holy Spirit and what it has to reveal to you.
I don’t know what you did to cope, but I retreated into old school love songs to survive last week. Many of us feel betrayed. Betrayed across lines of gender, race, and class. Betrayal hurts both the victims and the perpetrators. I cope with this pain of betrayal by overindulging in old school love songs.
The waters of baptism and fire of the Holy Spirit frighten us because they are the birth pangs of new life. New life in kinship with the very people we have comfortably curated our lives to ignore, to forget, and to betray. Renewing our Baptismal Covenant reminds us that baptism into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus requires us to keep our word. To keep our promises to love God and to love all our neighbors as ourselves, in thought, word, and deed.
Do you find yourself in that land of deep darkness? Do you know someone working, watching, or weeping through grief, betrayal, or terror? Tonight, God’s Word and Sacrament remind us, that God became as human as you and me. So that in sanctifying our humanity we can shine God’s light into one another’s lives. Your presence in another person’s life is sacred. You are enough. You are loved.
by the Rev. Jeckonia Okoth
I wonder what was going in the mind of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini when she arrived in New York on March 31, 1889, accompanied by six other religious sisters. Did she see herself as an outsider coming in or as an insider coming home away from home? Let us fast-forward this: suppose someone from the Congo, or Libya or Sudan came in and wanted to start a religious order; what would be the response, and what kind of people would we see in that order?
“I wonder where we would have been in the Selma 1965 story? Would we have been among those beaten, hosed, and jailed? Would we have been actively registering voters and been present, even living with those struggling for dignity and equality? Would we have been Jonathan Myrick Daniels, willing to confront evil and hatred at the end of a shotgun?”
“We feel ashamed to tell the truth about the lowest nadirs in life when we are overwhelmed, exhausted, and depressed. Yet, telling the truth – the good, the bad, and the ugly – sets us all free.”
“I argued that to remain silent and not to act in defiance when the Apartheid regime had been taken over by the Principalities and Powers legitimatizing oppression, injustice and racism, seeing this as even Godly, was not an option for us.”
“Getting out of our own ego’s way, to graciously receive a prophet’s truthful and disruptive word from God, takes courage. Courage to surrender to God’s will. Herod was incapable of surrendering to God’s will to love. The courage it takes to listen, accept, and surrender to a prophet’s divine words is sorely lacking today. Herods are everywhere.”
“Perhaps another miracle in this story is about being brave enough to be reliant. Reliance is hard. It’s hard to go against cultural norms which prize independence, self-sufficiency, self-determination. It’s hard to admit that we need help an ask for it. It’s hard to risk the appearance of weakness. It’s hard, sometimes, to believe we are worthy of help.”
“Thankfully, we are slowly turning back to seeing existence as an ecosystem in which diverse organisms and species cooperate so that everything in creation can both survive and thrive together. Instead of a competitive mindset of extraction from the natural world, Biomimicry shows us how we can cooperate with and learn from creation. I would argue, based on this morning’s scriptures, that Ezekiel and Jesus are proponents of a biomimetic theology.”
“In her book, Tarry Awhile: Wisdom from Black Spirituality for People of Faith, African Caribbean Theologian Dr. Selina Stone explains that Tarrying ‘is a collective time of waiting on God… It is a time of surrender to God, in the hope of personal and communal transformation. It is also a moment for intercession, for bringing our spiritual needs to God as well as our loving concern for our neighbors and the world.’ I think we can agree that to face this world’s overwhelming destruction of human lives and of creation, tarrying together as a spiritual practice in community is an absolute necessity.”
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