Monday, February 22
Revelations 3:14-17 And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write… “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.’ You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.”
Norman Rockwell’s desire to reach out to a global community and emphasize the commonality of humankind found its forum on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post with his masterful work, Golden Rule, in 1961.
What would the letter to the church in Greater New Jersey read? Antiracist is not an easy position to take, the work ahead will be difficult. These days, amid the pandemic, our people are weary and we clergy often feel weighed down. Again it is Ibram X. Kendi, writing in How to be an Antiracist, who challenges us amid our weariness to learn from our past. “The racist champions of racist discrimination engineered to maintain racial inequities before the 1960s are now the racist opponents of antiracist discrimination engineered to dismantle those racial inequities. The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one.”
Action step: today, with brutal honesty consider what the letter to your local church would contain. Would you receive a letter like that written to the church in Philadelphia, or has your ministry or church grown lukewarm? These are not question of shame, they are questions of renewal. We are at the end of the day the Easter people. Renewal is at the heart of Christianity, and powerfully present in the DNA of Methodism.
Prayer:
We thank you for your church, founded upon your Word, that challenges us to do more than sing and pray, but go out and work as though the very answer to our prayers depended on us and not upon you. Help us to realize that humanity was created to shine like the stars and live on through all eternity. Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace. Help us to walk together, pray together, sing together, and live together until that day when all God’s children — Black, White, Red, Brown and Yellow — will rejoice in one common band of humanity in the reign of our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from Thou, Dear God: Prayers that Open Hearts and Spirits(edited by Lewis V. Baldwin, Beacon Press, 2012).posted on https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/prayers-martin-luther-king-jr.