Month

These are the high holy days of gardening. If you are a gardener, these are the days in which all the hard work comes to its glorious fruition. If you planted zucchini, more than likely you have paper bags full of the green torpedos ready to gift to all your friends. I myself did not plant zucchini so feel free to pass a few my way.

Zucchini is my favorite reminder of creation. That God gives all things and wastes nothing. I roast them with olive oil, bake them into lasagnas, grate them and make zucchini bread, sneak them into chocolate chip cookies for vegetable-averse youngsters. Nothing on a zucchini is wasted, all gets used and used in a variety of ways.

God carries this principle into all creation and all things. However difficult an event or experience may be, God works to bring the good from it and to turn it to good. Nothing gets wasted. I find this comforting. To know that tragic events will ultimately, through God’s intervention and grace, yield some fruit that is Good, tells me that God is Good.

God’s creation of zucchini gives me hope. You who are trying to figure out ways to give away all that extra zucchini may not have as pleasant a view, but in zucchini, I see hope of God’s goodness.

May you too see God’s goodness in all of creation.

—a portion of the sermon by Jaime Bonney on August 20, 2017
Matthew 16:30-20

Like the Pharisees today, the Canaanites were seen as foreigners with dubious traits. The Canaanite woman’s shouts for mercy have to overcome obstacles of prejudice and perceived superiority that would separate her from Jesus. The hardest part of the story is that Jesus himself confronts her with those divisions. What the woman seeks is healing for her daughter, and in light of that, it stings especially that Jesus compares the disciples to children, while the Canaanite woman he likens to a dog. For me, the fact the Jesus himself says these words is chilling: Jesus is the Word made flesh, so when he says these words, they become real. It reminds me that none of us can discount when we hear expressions of prejudice in our own culture by thinking that the speaker doesn’t have the power or authority to wield such words. Speech has power. Only the power of our words can make us unclean.

There is a reckoning in the interplay of Jesus and the Canaanite woman—and how many of us, if we thought that it was God who was telling us something that made us feel hopeless would have the fortitude to keep shouting? But out of the depth of love, we can.

I find myself thinking of the power of the antisemitic words spoken in Charlottesville, said to Jews; or what confederate statues say to African Americans without using any words at all—and using my voice to shout to God about it. Each of us has a shout for mercy that we can keep shouting as long as it takes, and each of us has the will to know when it is ours to take up, just by hearing which cries rise from our own lips.

What upends injustice is only the willingness to shout, persistence and fierceness, clear-eyed perspective, and the ecstatic love of God working in us and through us.

The work of reconciliation and justice is hard and ongoing; one of the blessings for today is to rejoice along with Isaiah in the imagery of the world reconciled to God and with the Canaanite woman in her child’s restoration to health. And I would like to share with you another piece that brought me comfort from an unexpected place: an excerpt from a letter written by two great-great-grandsons of Stonewall Jackson to the mayor of Richmond, VA, requesting the removal of a monument for Jackson. They write:

Dear Mayor of Richmond,
As two of the closest living relatives to Stonewall, we are
writing today to ask for the removal of his statue….
Through our upbringing and education, we have learned
much about Stonewall Jackson. We have learned about his
reluctance to fight and his teaching of Sunday School to
enslaved peoples–in Lexington, Virginia, a potentially
criminal activity at the time. We have learned how
thoughtful and loving he was toward his family. But we
cannot ignore his decision to own slaves, his decision to go
to war for the Confederacy, and, ultimately, the fact that he
was a white man fighting on the side of white supremacy.
While we are not ashamed of our great-great-grandfather,
we are ashamed to benefit from white supremacy while our
black family and friends suffer. We are ashamed of the
monument.
In fact, instead of lauding Jackson’s violence, we choose to
celebrate Stonewall’s sister—our great-great-grandaunt—
Laura Jackson Arnold. As an adult Laura became a
staunch Unionist and abolitionist. Though she and
Stonewall were incredibly close through childhood,
she never spoke to Stonewall after his decision to support
the Confederacy. We choose to stand on the right side of
history with Laura Jackson Arnold….
One thing that bonds our extended family, besides our
common ancestor, is that many have worked, often as
clergy and as educators, for justice in their communities.
While we do not purport to speak for all of Stonewall’s kin,
our sense of justice leads us to believe that removing the
Stonewall statue and other monuments should be part of a
larger project of actively mending the racial disparities
that hundreds of years of white supremacy have wrought.
Respectfully,
William Jackson Christian
Warren Edmund Christian
Great-great-grandsons of “Stonewall” Jackson

Like the great-great grandsons of Stonewall Jackson, each of us has a message born from our experience and our pain, and a voice to speak it, of the love of God and the deliverance of all people. God bless each of us to its use. AMEN.

To see the full sermon preached that day, click here.

I am deeply saddened and angered by the events of this past weekend in Charlotteseville Va. I am not surprised by white supremacists in America – it has been part of my calling to work on anti-racism initiatives and training for nearly 30 years. I grew up in the South when segregation was till practiced, so racism in America is not new or surprising. It is not in some far off past. We have seen this level of acceptance of racism before; we have seen the openness with which it is displayed before.

The evil that believes any of God’s children are more valuable or deserve a larger share of the world has never been eradicated. And, I firmly believe, the call of all Christians is to stand against it.

Anyone who benefits from the systemic oppression of people of color which has resulted in unequal access to power, success, education and elected representation is complicit in that evil. It isn’t a comfortable thought.

And anyone who benefits from evil has a call from God to resist it, to dismantle its systems, to break its power, and to work for the freedom of those who are oppressed by it.

The evil of racism both creates fear and is the result of fear. We have been given the power to rise above fear and work on God’s behalf to change the world.

For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.
2 Timothy 1:6-7

–The Rev. Rebecca Black

Awaken to the awesome mystery of God
Who cradles the earth and all her peoples,
Who planted the laws of justice and mercy in our hearts,
Who nurtured and nudged the saints of the ages
and the teachers of the people
Forgiving them their faults, mistakes,
addictions, and selfishness,
And invited them to grow and change.
Awaken to this awesome mystery
Follow it all your days.
—Christine Robinson  Psalm 99 Awaken!

Where do you see the awesome mystery of God unfolding here at Christ Church?

I see it in the care taken in setting and adorning the altar each week by the Altar Guild; I see it in the careful and thoughtful work of the Search Committee. I see it in the dedication and commitment of the Vestry and Officers of the Parish.

I see the awesome mystery of God, that which nurtures and nudges, plants justice and forgives in the faces of the entire gathered community at 750 Main St–the outreach work of Diaper Depot and Grandma’s Pantry, the collective prayer and worship and praise of THREE congregations using the building, the loving care of the Chaplains on the Way and the nurture of people and nature taking place every day.

God will always invite us to growth and change and awe if only we assent.I hope you are, in the midst of worries, anxieties and feeling the pressures of life, following the unfolding mystery of God in this familiar space.

The Rev. Rebecca Black

Dear Christ Church friends,
Transitions bring to light new needs, as old norms may no longer be useful or needed. As changes surface, they reveal hidden diversities and perspectives. Complexity increases, especially for groups like the Search Committee, whose work is not only to produce as accurate a “snapshot” of the parish as possible, but also to discern the overall viewpoint and desires of the entire gathered community — a tall order! Of course, as the Church, we have an advantage that secular groups do not—the love and care of God, the certainty of belonging through Jesus Christ, and the guidance and wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

In all of perplexity and complexity, our task as God’s people is to slow down and to listen and discern God’s direction.

The following was brought to me by Becky Sheble-Hall of Chaplains on the Way:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a long time.

And so I think it is with us;
Our ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within us will be.
Let us believe that God’s hand is leading us
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

The Rev. Rebecca Black