“The Way of Love is the Church”
This has been a season like no other season. While we continue to make our way through the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to adapt to the loving work of protecting the most vulnerable, we are now witnessing large-scale social unrest and protests that lay before us the abiding sin of racism in our nation.
Now is the time for all who claim the faith of Jesus to renew our Baptismal identity. Now is the time to make clear that we are not our buildings, our symbols, or even our liturgies. Now is the time to be the Church that cannot so easily be co-opted or appropriated by the powerful and used to endorse or bless injustice and oppression, and to repent for the many ways we have. Now is the time for us to walk in love: to be the body of Christ standing in the public square; the body of Christ listening to the voices of the oppressed; the body of Christ walking the stony road with our brothers and sisters; the body of Christ bearing the weight of the cross of injustice; the body of Christ proclaiming in word and deed the way of love over the way of domination and death.
While we continue to wonder, wait, and prepare for when we might safely return to worship in our buildings, I pray that the Holy Spirit’s fire will kindle in our hearts a passion for being the Church Jesus calls us to be: a Church present and at prayer outside the walls of our buildings; a Church that perseveres in resisting evil and the powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God–the children of God; a Church that follows and obeys Jesus Christ as Lord.
His way of love, his faith, his justice, his life–these are not just our calling, they are our hope.
Please join me in praying The Baptismal Covenant every Friday for the month of June (BCP pgs 416-417).
