Daily Devotional | Thursday, February 18

Thursday, February 18

Jeremiah 29:4-9 This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”


St. George's United Methodist Church, Philadelphia. Black lay preachers Allen and Jones drew a large community of black worshipers to the congregation. Racial tensions flared, most notably in a seating policy segregating black members into a newly constructed upstairs gallery, without notification. The next Sunday in 1787, white ushers attempted to forcibly drag a black member of the church, Absolem Jones, to a different pew. This ultimately resulted in the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination.

Christians are called to be prophetic voices to the dominant culture yet too often Christians operate within the framework of American exceptionalism or succumb to the idea that America a Christian nation. Left unchecked Christian exceptionalism becomes Christian nationalism. In Bring the War Home: the White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, historian Dr. Kathleen Belew writes: “Founded by Robert Millar in 1973, Elohim City – “City of God,” in Hebrew – consisted of some seventy-five white separatists living on a 400-acre wooded compound, mostly in trailers parked on cement slabs. Residents trained with homemade napalm, Claymore mines, grenades, assault rifles, AR-15s, and Ruger Mini-14s…Millar preached Christian Identity and separatism, and said that the wealth of the white race proved that they were God’s chosen people.”


Action step: today, with brutal honesty ask yourself is your sanctuary a Christian sanctuary or an American Christian sanctuary? Is your sanctuary a Christian sanctuary or a white Christian sanctuary? What is the history of your building? What objects and images fill its spaces? How can you as a leader not hide these but shine light on them as objects of investigation and discussion?


Prayer:

Dear God,

In the effort to dismantle racism, I understand that I struggle not merely against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities – those institutions and systems that keep racism alive by perpetuating the lie that some members of our family are inferior and others superior.

Create in me a new mind and heart that will enable me to see brothers and sisters in the faces of those divided by racial categories.

Give me the grace and strength to rid myself of racial stereotypes that oppress some in my family while providing entitlements to others.

Help me to create a nation that embraces the hopes and fears of oppressed people of color where we live, as well as those around the world.

Help me to heal your family making me one with you and empowered by your Holy Spirit.

Adapted by Debra Mooney, PhD from Pax Christi, https://www.xavier.edu/jesuitresource/online-resources/prayer-index/prayers-for-racial-justice-and-reconciliation

Daily Devotional | Wednesday, February 17

Wednesday February 17, Ash Wednesday

Isaiah 58:5–7 Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a person to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?


Strength of a Man is a painting by The Art of DionJa'Y

In Black Theology & Black Power, James Cone wrote: “The white church has not merely failed to render services to the poor but has failed miserably in being a visible manifestation to the world of God’s intention for humanity and in proclaiming the gospel to the world. It seems that the white church is not God’s redemptive agent but, rather, an agent of the old society. It fails to create an atmosphere of radical obedience to Christ. Most church fellowships are more concerned about drinking or new buildings or Sunday closing than about children who die of rat bites or men who are killed because they want to be treated like men. The society is falling apart for want of moral leadership and moral example, but the white church passes innocuously pious resolutions and waits to be congratulated.”


Action step: today, with brutal honesty as Lent 2021 commences and we are living with huge loss from the pandemic, racial strife and inequity, economic crisis, and social upheaval ask where your congregation is headed. The pressures on our denomination, Conference, and local churches are real and can feel oppressive. What is God calling us to for Lent 2021? Is there room in your life, considering all these pressures, to commit to antiracism? If not now, then when? “Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord?”


Prayer: Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Collect for Ash Wednesday, Book of Common Prayer)

Posted by Isabella Dougan

Daily Devotional | Tuesday, February 16

Tuesday, February 16

Acts 2:7-11 – Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”


Luke goes on to list a diversity of nations of origin each testifying to the universal nature of the Great Commission in Matthew 28. We in the church today often walk the razor’s edge separating patriotism from nationalism. American exceptionalism, as expressed for instance in Lee Greenwood, “[a]nd I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free” offers a view on our nation more in line with the experiences of the dominant culture. People of color, the LGBTQ+, and the disabled may recognize their reality more accurately portrayed in Nikki Giovanni’ poem BLK History Month:

If Black History Month is not
viable then wind does not
carry the seeds and drop them
on fertile ground
rain does not
dampen the land
and encourage the seeds
to root
sun does not
warm the earth
and kiss the seedlings
and tell them plain:
You’re As Good As Anybody Else
You’ve Got A Place Here, Too

Anthropologist Jonathan Marks writing for the PBS series Race – the Power of Illusion challenges us to think about the way we see people. “Here’s the paradox. The classifications that are the most arbitrary, and the least natural, seem to be the ones that matter the most to us. People could be categorized in many ways. There are short people and tall people; people with straight teeth and crooked teeth; with wiry, muscular, or chunky body builds; with freckles; with more or less body hair. These are natural differences, but they’re not very important to us. What is important? Whether you’re an American or an Iraqi. Whether you’re a Nazi, a Communist, a Democrat, or a Republican. An Oriole fan or a Yankee fan. Rich or poor. Us or them. These categories of history and of society, the categories of human invention, are far more important to our daily lives than the categories of natural variation in our species.”


Action step: today, with brutal honesty, and starting from the thesis that the arbitrary categories white, male, and English language still structurally dominate church life ask what changes, if any, to these systemic structures have happened in your congregation and where is God asking you to lead next?


Prayer: A Prayer for Challenging Racism

God,

You are the source of human dignity,

and it is in your image that we are created.

Pour out on us the spirit of love and compassion.

Enable us to reverence each person,

to reach out to anyone in need,

to value and appreciate those who differ from us,

to share the resources of our nation,

to receive the gifts offered to us

by people from other cultures.

Grant that we may always promote

the justice and acceptance

that ensures lasting peace and racial harmony.

Help us to remember that we are one world and one family.

Amen.

from the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council. Shared on July 24, 2020  by UMC Discipleship’s Praying for Change: Daily Prayers for Anti-Racism E-mail

Daily Devotional | Monday, February 15

Monday, February 15

John 1:45-46b – Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?


Mural artist Shane B. repairs his George Floyd mural in downtown Birmingham, AL, after it had been defaced.
Image from Birmingham Real-Time News.

What’s up with Nathaniel’s attitude toward Nazareth? “Because it was a No place: it is never mentioned in the Old Testament, the Jewish Talmud and Midrash, nor in any extant pagan writing.” The College Press NIV Commentary on John. Nathaniel’s reaction exemplifies a very human mistrust of the other. The idea of race, constantly evolving and re-weaponized against people of color, is rooted in our acquiesce to otherness.
“Hunky” has a simple derivation, though with arresting complications…Josephine Wtulich’s American Xenophobia and the Slav Immigrant attempts interestingly to untangle bohunk and hunky. Wtulich allows that between 1900 and 1930, bohunk came to mean not only a Bohemian–Hungarian but also a “Pole, Slovak and even an Austrian” or “any uneducated, unskilled immigrant from central and east Europe.” Thus when a Texas planter fretted that “Bohunks wanted to intermarry with whites,” and added, “Yes, they’re white but they’re not our kind of white,” it is by no means certain to whom he refers.” From Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, by historian David Roediger.


Action step: today, with brutal honesty prayerfully consider the racist epithets of your youth. While we may have managed to bury the words themselves, in powerful ways their shadow remains. The trope that asks “do you cross the street when you see a group of young black males” asks us to examine the vulgar and derogatory words directed at otherness of race, class, disability, gender, and sexuality we carried forward from youth. Ask God to cleanse you today of the remnants of cultural indoctrination to which all of us were subjective no matter where we were raised, or our own ethnic, racial, class, denominational backgrounds.


Prayer: A Prayer for One Flesh in Christ

My Lord and my God, I see you being torn apart on the cross still, as we persist in tearing the body from the spirit. You dared to penetrate the flesh of humankind with the presence of God. You took on the flesh of every human being.

Help us now, after all these years of denial, to finally embrace your incarnation, to feel, in the depths of our beings, that we are part of each other’s bodies in your body, may we clasp to ourselves the flesh of all persons, especially those whose flesh looks different from ours, whose language is strange to our ears, whose music sounds dissonant, whose sexuality offends our sensibilities. May we have the courage to hold the sick and the old to our health and our youth. Thus may we behold the glory of the Word become flesh as he dwells among us. Amen.

Paul Moore, Jr., from Race and Prayer: Collected Voices Many Dreams edited by Malcolm Boyd and Chester L. Talton (Morehouse Publishing, 2003), 141.

Daily Devotional | Sunday, February 14

Sunday, February 14

Ezekiel 36:26 – And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.


Who hasn’t wept singing these words from Dan Schutte’s Here I Am Lord “I will break their hearts of stone give them hearts for love alone…”? Can we truly claim to have receipt of a “heart of flesh” if we have merely traded one heart of stone for a newer version? We must, with vigilant hearts, examine whether we are deceiving ourselves about race as pointed out in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age Colorblindness.
“The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged. The valiant efforts to abolish slavery and Jim Crow and to achieve greater racial equality have brought about significant changes in the legal framework of American society—new “rules of the game,” so to speak. These new rules have been justified by new rhetoric, new language, and a new social consensus, while producing many of the same results. This dynamic, which legal scholar Reva Siegel has dubbed “preservation through transformation,” is the process through which white privilege is maintained, though the rules and rhetoric change.”


Action step: today, with brutal honesty examine your understanding of Methodism, have we as a denomination changed our hearts of stone or have we replaced them utilizing “preservation through transformation” into new, shiny forms of white, and frankly primarily male, privilege? What can you do about this? How can you address this within your church? How will you address this within the Conference?


Prayer: A Prayer of Lament

O God, our Divine Parent,

the truth is often uncomfortable,

disquieting, disturbing

but no less the truth.

The strife of racial tension claims another life;

someone pays the price for years of suspicion,

mistrust, separation, and hatred.

The bleak wilderness is once again our address,

where we cry with hunger and thirst

for what seems to be a false dream.

Is “liberty and justice” really for all?

You, O God, who know us so well,

we seem incapable of being comforted,

saturated with the aches and pains of

bitter language, scornful treatment, spiteful violence.

What do we do with our unresolved, unfinished, unending grief?

Where can we turn with unpalatable hurt

that pollutes our thoughts and soils our shoes?

“Anger and alleluias careen around

within us, sometimes colliding.”[1]

O God of tender compassion,

known for your steadfast love and faithfulness,

will our discomfort ever find resolution;

can’t you fix this – or inspire us to?

When we accept the phony gods of

persistent attitudes, arrogance and superiority

step up, step on, step in to quell our self-made idols.

Show us how wrong we are, how much we have lost,

how significantly more we have to learn,

how our hearts are frozen,

the kind of courage it takes to unclench our fist

and open our hand.

Confident that you hear our lament,

teach us the ways of peace, patience, hope and love

so that we may again praise you,

for the sake of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

George R. Crisp, OSL, September 17, 2020 ~ this prayer was shared on September 20, 2020  by UMC Discipleship’s Praying for Change: Daily Prayers for Anti-Racism E-mail

[1] Borrowed from Ann Weems, Psalms of Lament.

Daily Devotional | Saturday, February 13

Saturday, February 13

1 Samuel 16:6-7 – When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.” But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”


How beautiful would life be, how egalitarian would be the church, and how quickly would we adopt antiracist practice if we took to heart God’s teaching to Samuel? Ibram X. Kendi, writing in How to be an Antiracist, zeroes in on the heart of racism, which is the ease with which we generalize from an individual to a group. This generalizing upward is no accident, we were taught it overtly as well as through patterns deeply encoded in the dominant culture’s apparatuses. Kendi writes, “But generalizing the behavior of racist White individuals to all White people is as perilous as generalizing the individual faults of people of color to entire races. “He acted that way because he is Black. She acted that way because she is Asian.” We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets. An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals. “She acted that way,” we should say, “because she is racist.”


Action step: today, with brutal honesty allow yourself to examine ways in which you are programmed to think of groups not individuals. Try not to think of this as a shame exercise, we are all products of a racist structure. If we accept that racism isn’t the exception but the rule then we are free to embrace antiracism not as an accusation but as a call to redeem creation in a godly way. To look not on outward appearance but on the heart of those we meet.


Prayer:

Holy One,

In your image

You have created humankind, in great diversity.

We give thanks for the differences—

of cultures and ethnicities, of histories and life-stories, of skin colour and language and

hearts that love the world.

We watch in horror as Power desecrates Black and Brown bodies;

walks on their sacredness, kills and subjugates,

in thousands of ways, hidden and overt.

We must not stop at watching—

held back from right action by our horror or seeming powerlessness.

Grant us hearts that listen and learn;

egos that are willing to accept when our own racism is called out.

Grant us courage, to disassemble the systems,

the stories, the mythos, that privilege whiteness over all others.

Give us your Holy Spirit’s wind to call out racism in all its forms—

inside our hearts, inside the church, and in your world,

give us the strength, the wisdom and the will to root out White Fragility,

and White Supremacy, so that they would never again do harm,

never again take away, never again kill.

Help us to be anti-racist,

in all that we say, in all that we do, in all that we are.

It is time. It is well past time.

God of all creation,

bless us all with what we need, to march on.

To live this work of anti-racism.

Today.

Every day.

Always.

In Jesus’ name.

May it be.

-A prayer by the Right Rev. Richard Bott. https://www.united-church.ca/prayers/anti-racism-prayer

Daily Devotional | Friday, February 12

Friday, February 12

Matthew 7 – “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”


Vivian Malone Jones arrives to register for classes at the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium as Governor Wallace stands in the schoolhouse door. Image courtesy of the United States Library of Congress

In the New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age Colorblindness, civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander offers, unintentionally, this illustration of Jesus’ warning.

“When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and “whites only” signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, good-hearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners—and wished them well—nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation.”

Richard Allen was born a slave on Valentine’s Day in 1790 in Philadelphia, PA. He would go on to create the first independent Black denomination in the United States, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. (A.M.E.)  photo courtesy of Google Images
In 1968 the United Methodist Church was born out of a merger between the EUB and the Methodist Church itself a 1939 merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and the Methodist Protestant Church. The 1939 merger was made possible by an overt act of corporate racism, the creation of the segregated Central Jurisdiction. In 1968 the Central Jurisdiction was erased but not its stain on our history. From the moment Richard Allen left to form the AME we, like the nation, have lived with the specter of racism. The only solution to racism is antiracism.

Action step: Today, with brutal honesty pray for clarity around the racism present in our corporate DNA. Are you ready, and who in your church will join with you, in the act of dismantling racism in your church?


Prayer:

Together we will create brave space

Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”

We exist in the real world

We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.

In this space

We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,

We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,

We call each other to more truth and love

We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.

We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.

We will not be perfect.

This space will not be perfect.

It will not always be what we wish it to be

But

It will be our brave space together,

and

We will work on it side by side.

By Micky ScottBey Jones, posted on https://oppeace.org/blog/2019/11/20/an-invitation-to-brave-space/

Posted on PUMC Blog by Isabella Dougan

Daily Devotional | Tuesday, February 9

Tuesday, February 9

In Galatians 3:28 Paul insists, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.


Like our new Vice President a 2015 Pew Research Center study found that the combined population share of immigrants and their US born children stands at 26% today. Thus “is projected to rise to 36% in 2065, at least equaling previous peak levels at the turn of the 20th century”. The racial identity adopted by those “peak levels at the turn of the 20th century” are at the core of Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, by historian David Roediger. What will this one third of the US population in 2065 make of race relations? Two possible paths are described by Roediger:
“In the wake of World War I, young Stjepan Mesaroš, on his first day at a Philadelphia slaughterhouse job, noticed the torrents of abuse heaped on a black coworker. A Croatian, Mesaroš sat on a break with a Serbian radical who worked in the plant. “You soon learn something about this country,” the Serb explained. “Negroes never get a fair chance.” The exchange sparked a series of conversations that helped transform Mesaroš (renamed as Steve Nelson) into a socialist and an antiracist. But for many immigrants, caught in a world of dog-eat-dog competition, the lesson would likely have been that African Americans were decidedly among the eaten, and thus to be avoided.”
Roediger examines the creation of whiteness among the newly arrived immigrants in the early 20th c. What is the church’s role to be in shaping whether these new 21st c immigrants emerge as antiracist rather than converts to whiteness? Will the church avoid the seductive ease and pull that racial binarism provides? Or will economic forces render the 21st c church as complicit as the 20th c church was?


Action step: today, with brutal honesty explore how easily you accept the binarism of black and white. Are you committed to a binary understanding of race relations in America? What role, if any, does fear play in your acceptance of racial binarism and racial hierarchy?


Prayer:

God, give me a voice.

God of all that is, you have given me eyes to see,

and the pain is so great that I cannot bear it.

I see children whose sense of self-worth is stolen from them

before they are even old enough to go to school.

I see young men labeled as “criminal” whose crime is the color of their skin.

You have given me ears to hear.

and the cries of your children tear at my heart.

I hear victims being blamed for the crimes that have been committed against them.

I hear the gunshots and the screams of the mothers.

You have given me a sense of smell.

and I am overcome by the odor of fear.

Fear of scarcity; fear that my wealth is dependent upon someone else’s poverty.

Fear of the unknown; fear that makes it easier to embrace nostalgia than to risk change.

And yet, O God, you have also given me the gift of wonder.

You have given me eyes to see the beauty of a young artist’s mural.

You have given me ears to hear the soaring strains of music lifted in praise to you.

You have given me the smell of bread being broken as you feed us with your body.

And so I pray to you, O God, give me a voice.

Give me a voice to declare the dignity of all your people.

Give me a voice to demand justice where today there is no justice.

Give me a voice to quell the fear and to declare the truth and the depth of your love.

Lord, give me a voice that I may declare your praise. Amen.

 

Sr Abbot Elizabeth Moore, O.S.L ~ This prayer was shared on September 10, 2020  by UMC Discipleship’s Praying for Change: Daily Prayers for Anti-Racism E-mail