Sights and Insights
Devotion for May 25, 2021
What offering should I bring when I bow down to worship the Lord God Most High?
Should I try to please him by sacrificing calves a year old? Will thousands of sheep or rivers of olive oil make God satisfied with me? Should I sacrifice to the Lord my first-born child as payment for my terrible sins?
The Lord God has told us what is right and what he demands:“See that justice is done, let mercy be your first concern, and humbly obey your God.” (Micah 6:6-8, CEV)
The devotion for this week is an extended version of the Temple Talk given by Denise Cole this past Sunday during worship. This full version was too long to include during worship, and so she gave an abbreviated version of it.
My intention in starting the Sights and Insights devotions was to have a devotional space for the St. Matthew community. I need not be the sole author contributing to it. In fact, I have always hoped to be able to include stories of faith journeys from members of the congregation. If you would be interested in sharing a story of part of your walk of faith, please let me know. I will work with you to include it in Sights and Insights. These stories can be accounts of the ways you have wrestled with issues of faith. As such, they are not formal statements of theological positions. Not everyone will agree with the conclusions reached, but I do believe that having occasional testimonies of the thoughtful ways individuals engage their faith in looking at the world around them can open for all of us new things that we see and new insights that we gain through being the church together in respectful and honest discussion of the ways that we discern our faith to play out in our lives.
Pastor Eric
The topic of racism is fraught with emotion. Until now I have only written brief articles for the monthly messenger saying that we are “fulfilling our baptismal promise” and giving dates, times and carefully worded phrases about what we have read. Please bear with me as I dive deeper and ask the Holy Spirit to guide me.
In the middle of the pandemic, I was contacted by Pastor Peggy. It was time for Saint Matthew to respond to racism in our country and more specifically, to the circumstances of the death of George Floyd. As the Council Member representing Social Ministry, it was up to me to take up the mantle, although Council and other members of our church have all shared the load of this heavy topic. It didn’t take long forCouncil unanimously agreed to embrace the ELCA social statement written in 1993 to fight racism in our church and our community. The antiracism initiative was off and running.
The ELCA website- ELCA social statement – has a host of resources including articles, discussions, other churches’ resources and actions you can take. The site has a pledge that you can sign where you can commit to fighting racism. You don’t have to sign the pledge to review the resources privately.We used this website as a spring board for our initiative. Initially, we opened all discussions to the entire congregation. We continue the ongoing open conversation with the congregation every first and third Tuesday of the month, June 1 and June 15 have been scheduled. Please feel welcome to join us.
Out of that large group and much discussion, a smaller group emerged. One person didn’t want to sign the pledge until she understood what was being asked of her and what this all meant. Several wanted to learn to talk about racism without getting emotional. Some of us wanted to learn how to address racism with our children. All of us committed to meet every month to examine the Social Statement, read about racism and discuss our reactions. We also got homework. We each have taken a unique and personal journey in becoming more aware, knowledgeable and insightful about racism and the role it plays in our history, our church, our country and our lives.We read books and articles, watched videos, and shared our reactions and aha moments. We have all had aha moments. This group was not intended to exclude anyone from the conversation. Rather it was a group that committed to one another to do extra work to inform our discussions so that we were doing more than sharing immediate emotional reactions.
We read Dear Martin, by Nic Stone, a novel about a young black man whose black friend is killed during a road trip to Stone Mountain. As an aside, I learned that in 1972 the Stone Mountain bas relief carving of three confederate heroes (Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis) was completed. The park was officially opened in 1965, exactly one hundred years after Lincoln’s death. The irony of the fictional scenario in Dear Martin did not escape me.
I read a good portion of Isabelle Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, that explains the social hierarchy in our country as well as in India and Nazi Germany.
I read Ryan Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Upon graduating from Harvard Law School, Stevenson “opened a legal practice to defend the poor, wrongly condemned and those trapped in the furthest reaches of our criminal justice system.” It includes the story of Walter McMillan who spent 6 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. Stevenson secured McMillan’s release in 1993. He tells of children as young as 14 being prosecuted and sentenced as adults, who have no hope of parole. In 2015, nearly 3,000 children had been sentenced to die in prison, most of them black. He also describes how our legal system devolved to this state over the decades. Now I have some idea of what “systemic racism” means.
Sometimes I was so worn out and demoralized, I stopped reading for a month or two. I was lucky that I could put it down and not think about it. I learned that this is my “white privilege.” But the Holy Spirit nagged at me and I always reopened the books, newspapers and websites. Because this is the story of my black friends and their families and it goes back 400 years. Generation after generation, story after story, ancestor after ancestor. And it continues today. Some of my black friends have quietly said that they are truly weary of this history not to mention the events that have happened in my lifetime. I believe them.
I can’t imagine telling my numerous Jewish friends whose grandparents, aunts and uncles were killed in concentration camps to “get over the Holocaust and move on.” I wouldn’t ask the soldiers who freed Europe from the Nazis to forget the deaths of their brothers-in-arms and the traumas that they experienced there. How can I, in good conscience, say to my black friends, “I’m sorry this is your history and our world, but just put it in the past and move on?” I certainly can’t do that with the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile and most recently Ronald Greenstill hanging in the air. Frankly, there are just too many of them to list here.
By education, I am a professional in adult workplace learning. Leaders in my field say that true learning happens when we undergo an emotional transformation that causes us to see the world differently. Learning what I have about racism and black history in America has transformed me. I cannot unsee what I have seen, nor unlearn what I have learned. And I realize that one day our current events will be my daughter’s past and her mother’s story. I certainly can’t pretend that there isn’t a lot of racial injustice and wrongdoing in my world. So, I will continue to work on this critically important ministry of antiracism. While I may not make a huge difference, I will know that I have tried. Through our ministry, many of us have grown more confident and much clearer about what we can do to support people of color and fight racism. And that gives me so much hope. I invite you to join us in learning about and planning this important work. Because when I look into the eyes of the stranger, I have to remember to see my equal and a child of God.
- Denise Cole