Dear People of Christ Church,

This week, our Advent series on Biblical values continued on the topic of justice. Last week we talked about non-judgment, and next week we tackle inclusion. One of our Scripture texts was a foundational one for me in how I try to live my life: “As you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25). Those who are suffering demand our attention not as if Christ were with them, but because Christ is there. I’m all for reading Scripture awake and searching for metaphor, but this isn’t one of those times. Matthew 25 calls for more literalist Bible thumping.

Last weekend I was with our bishops and the Commission on Ministry, of which I’m a member (it’s the team that helps interview and support people for the ordination process who want to be priests or deacons). In a serendipitous turn someone forwarded me a daily Advent meditation on the spiritual dimensions of anti racist work from one of the people we spoke to, Olivia Hamilton, who’s working with the Harvard Episcopal Chaplaincy. She shares this from Anne Braden, a white southern Episcopalian who lived in the Jim Crow south and came to devote her life to ending the culture of white supremacy she grew up in.

Braden writes:
The passage from the Bible that impressed me the most deeply in my early religious training was the one from Christ’s story of the Last Judgement: ‘ for I was hungered, and ye gave me no meat, I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not…Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.’ I thought about that passage a great deal; it worried me almost constantly. And it would have been hard not to worry about it in those days, for this was the 1930s and there was hunger everywhere. The people I knew tried, I think, according to their lights to practice what Christ taught. My family did. They fed many people who were hungry. Sometimes my mother, growing weary of it, would turn away one of the beggars who came to our door, and that would cause me a sleepless night worrying for fear she was going to hell; but most generally she fed them. Especially, she and my father made sure that the Negro family who worked for us from time to time were not hungry or shelterless or naked. If they were short on money to pay the rent, my father provided the money. The family was always clothed because they got our cast off clothes after they were too faded and old for us to want them any more. But something happened to me each time I looked at the Negro girl who always inherited my clothes. Sometimes she would come to our house with her mother, wearing one of the dresses I had discarded. The dresses never fit her because she was fatter than I was. She would sit in a straight chair in our kitchen waiting for her mother, because of course she could not sit in one of our comfortable chairs in the living room. She would sit there looking uncomfortable, my old faded dress binding her at the waist and throat. And someway I knew that this was not what Jesus meant when he said ‘clothe the naked.’ I recalled that Jesus had also said, ‘therefore all things whatsoever ye would that man should do to you, do ye even so to them.’ And I knew that if I were in her place, if I had no clothes, I would not want the old abandoned dresses of a person who would not even invite me to come into her living room to sit down. And I could not talk to her because I felt ashamed. And as I watched her, I would feel a binding sensation around my own throat. And I would feel to see if my own dress was too tight. But of course it was not. My clothes were always well-cut and perfectly fitted. Instead there was a small straightjacket around my soul. (Anne Braden, The Wall Between, 1958)

Braden goes on to talk about how she began to understand how the racism she lived in was damaging to those who perpetuated it as well as to those who experienced the more severe oppression. “Racial bars built walls…around the white people as well, cramping their spirits and causing them to grow in distorted shapes.” In our conversation about Matthew 25, we talked about the shame of living in plenty when others are suffering; the Gospel tells us that meeting the needs of others is for their material need, but it’s also for our own souls. Or, as a quote from Nicolai Berdyaev has it that José Borrás shared with me a number of years ago has it, “Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.”

Where are you finding bread of all kinds these days?
Who’s sharing with you, and who are you sharing with?

Blessings,
Sara+