Friday, February 26
Matthew 10:36 – And a person’s enemies will be those of their own household.
The bronze statue (by Hank Willis Thomas) called "Raise Up" is part of the display at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, shown on April 23, 2018. Brynn Anderson / AP. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public on April 26, 2018, is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence. It is located in Montgomery, AL.
War against another nation damages both nations, war against our own nation devastates us all. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writing in Stony the Road, offers this chilling observation about our racist history, “In the broadest terms, Reconstruction was a revolutionary time in American life—a time of national renewal extended out from four years of Civil War, death, and destruction that narrowed the gap between the country’s ideals and laws and advanced racial progress. Yet it was also a turbulent and brutally violent period, one marked by in the broadest terms, rapid economic change and new forms of white resistance that included everything from organized paramilitary assaults and political assassination to night rides and domestic terror.”
Watching last month as Americans attacked our Capital in violent insurrection Gates’ words rang out in challenge describing our own times as, “a turbulent and brutally violent period, one marked by in the broadest terms, rapid economic change and new forms of white resistance that included everything from organized paramilitary assaults and political assassination to night rides and domestic terror.”
Action step: today, with brutal honesty ask how you can lower the temperature, counter the rhetoric, and preach an antiracist message as we look forward to the Resurrection Sunday. We are called to solemn ministry as our nation wakes to a spring of either emergence from isolation into love or a summer of violence – our time is now to lead the church of Jesus Christ with holy compassion.
Prayer:
God whose name has been used to enslave those who bear your image,
God whose name has been used to steal this land and kill those who bear your image,
God whose name was called upon by Moses and Miriam and Martin Luther King Jr and Sojourner Truth, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
God who raised up prophets to speak truth to power, and poets to speak truth to stupid,
We call on your holy name to give us what we need to undo what has been done in your name.
We call on your name to bring your fierce mercy upon us and remove our complacency and our complicity.
We call on your name to heal the wounds of those whose daily reality we do not understand.
We call on your name to give us a holy curiosity about what being Black in America is really like, Lord.
We call on your name to free us from our cherished notions of being “good” that keep us from hearing this truth,
We call on your name to give us this day our daily truth, our daily humility, our daily rage, our daily hope.
This country is burning Lord…may is be a cleansing Holy Spirit fire.
Guide us to believe that the true name of God is stronger than what has been done in God’s name.
Come, Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Nadia Boltz-Weber, Sunday Prayers, https://nadiabolzweber.substack.com/p/sunday-prayers-may-31st-2020