We are in a crisis

I mean, this weekend feels like our entire world is falling apart.

Most immediately is George Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests and violent upheaval that is happening all over the country.

Once again, an unarmed black man has been unjustly killed by a white police officer.  Horrifically, this is a common occurrence in America.

As our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, wrote in his message to the church:

“Perhaps the deeper pain is the fact that this was not an isolated incident. It happened to Breonna Taylor on March 13 in Kentucky. It happened to Ahmaud Arbery on February 23 in Georgia. Racial terror in this form occurred when I was a teenager growing up black in Buffalo, New York. It extends back to the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and well before that. It’s not just our present or our history. It is part of the fabric of American life.”

This systematic suspicion of and violence against the Black community, and other communities of color,  is brutal, unnecessary, and sinful.

And the ensuing protests and violent outpouring of generations of anger has led to destruction and fire.  This violence does not heal the divisions, rather it keeps cycle of violence in motion.

It is a scary time.

But not only this,

this week also brought the news that the death toll in America from COVID-19 has reached at least 100,000 people.

That’s 100,000 people who have died from COVID in the span of 3 or 4 months.

Those are grandparents, and mothers, and fathers, and children.  And a disproportionally high number of those deaths are people of color.

And let’s be clear, that is because the economic and social context in which communities of color exist puts them at greater risk.

Our current economic and social systems push communities of color into poverty at a disproportionally high rate, and those communities as a whole have less access to health care and lack the means to safely shelter-in-place.

And despite this,

California, and the rest of the US, has aggressively begun to reopen: reopening shopping malls, restaurants, and reopening places of worship.

So in the midst of massive death that has disproportionally impacted communities of color, significant segments of White America has demanded that we have a “right” to live our lives however we see fit.

We are in a crisis.

But crisis is not something to be feared

If you know the story of our faith,

and I pray that you do…

if you know it, then you know that the people of God have  always been born out of crisis.

Since today is Pentecost, the birthday of the church, let’s just focus on the Christian branch of the people of God…what our Presiding Bishop calls “The Jesus Movement.”

The church begins with the crisis of the cross.  God empties himself of all privilege and power, identifying fully with the oppressed and the marginalized.

And this leads to the crisis of not just an innocent man, but God himself, being nailed to a cross by the number one military superpower of that world:  Rome.

And those who followed Jesus have to just stand there and watch.  They have a front row seat to the injustice of this world.

But Jesus came back to them, to help these followers not get stuck in their trauma, but to get moving.  To let God’s love heal them, and motivate them to go out and proclCaim that

God is Lord, and not Ceasar.

And then another crisis comes, the crisis of Pentecost.

In the first century world that is run by patriarchy, and military power, and economic exploitation, (sounding familiar yet?)

In a world such as that,

the crisis of Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit fills 3,000 people…people of all different ethnicities and nationalities, and gender, and class…leading them to live a new way.

The Holy Spirit forms a new community which seeks to overcome those systems of oppression and violence that divide us by living with one another in love.

If you read the end of Acts ch. 2, you’ll read a description of this Beloved Community formed by the Holy Spirit.  You see, Pentecost isn’t just about speaking in new ways that people hear us…Pentecost is also about living in new ways that bring people together, people who have been separated by the sins of patriarchy, classism, and racism.

When such a community exists, it indeed poses a crisis, a threat, to the status quo of power, violence, and oppression.

If such a community existed today, it would present a crisis to our status quo.

But the Church has always fallen short of this.

If you read Paul’s letters, you learn that really fast.

In Paul’s First letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11, he criticizes the church there for letting the rich come to the Eucharistic feast and eat all the food, leaving the poor who have to come later scraps.

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he calls out the Jews and Gentiles for self-segregating and refusing to eat with one another and be in relationship with one another.

And in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, he chastises those who do not work and contribute to the life of the community but gladly come and take free food.

It’s important to remember that the church has never fully embodied this vision of a Beloved Community which is painted in Acts 2.

And so in our own lives…

any one of us could name various examples both large and small, personal and systematic, in which the Church did not fully live into our identity as the Body of Christ.

The Episcopal Church’s participation in slavery,

The Church’s denial of women, people of color, the disabled, and LGBTQi of full membership and equal treatment,

The church’s justification of environmental exploitation for economic gain.

If we understand “the Church” to be this Beloved Community that transcends systems of oppression and violence, then we must admit that it is an aspirational term.  A term which points to not who we are now, but who we will be in God’s future reign of justice and mercy.  Who we will be when the Holy Spirit has finished Her work of transforming us into the Body of Christ.

I want to close by turning to a well-respected, Episcopal priest, theologian, and Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary in New York, the Very Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas.

I highly recommend her work, she is an Episcopal theologian who has helped me understand my own and the church’s complicitness in racism.

She was giving this talk as part of a webinar about how COVID-19 is showing us who the Church is called to become:

Play this video starting at 9:36 and ending at 10:48

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmjEKPLj06s&feature=youtu.be&mc_cid=6dbc42d624&mc_eid=b326216821