Loading...I am a part of an ecumenical planning committee working on organizing prayer vigils at ICE detention centers.
Yesterday, I participated in a vigil right here in Pewee Valley in response to the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon by ICE agents.
My decisions to participate in these programs and events are not something I chose to do without significant discernment through prayer, conversation, and recognition of my self-identified introversion and dislike of being jostled in crowds.
Over the course of many years and what feels like continued behavior against “others:” people who look or believe or behave differently than what is familiar to me and to others, I have changed. I have listened, read, pilgrimed to historic sites, learned, and have become more aware of how my decisions and actions are reflected by my commitment to God and my vocation as an Episcopal priest.
I know that I have, perhaps, cared too much about what people might think if I advocate for or against what appears to be a partisan ideology. I strive to pay attention to people in the grey areas, those places in between the opposites the media and political leaders bombard us with, considering myself to be someone who resides there, in the grey, looking at the bigger, broader picture, too. I want to listen to people with differing opinions than my own, even if I strongly disagree, because by doing so, I have an opportunity to better understand where they come from, what has influenced their decisions, and how they recognize their own responsibility as a human.
But what has probably been the most influential reason I am beginning to take a stand on things that I feel require me to do so is found in our Baptismal Covenant. It is in truly listening to the questions we are asked and responding honestly, “I will, with God’s help.”
I think I’ve changed, with God’s help, to become someone who deeply feels and responds to injustice and inequity internally. As injustice and inequity seem to grow, I’m recognizing that I need to not just feel deeply, I need to act in ways that reflect my faith, which I profess through the Baptismal Covenant. I need to act in ways that reflect my understanding of what it means to be a Jesus Follower—not just someone who sits on the sidelines and watches.
Now, this is not easy for me. I’m an introvert; a writer; a thinker; a teacher; and someone who comes from very conservative, vocal thinkers. To stand on the sidewalk adjacent to LaGrange Road yesterday was a real stretch. To be on the planning team to develop vigils outside Kentucky prisons holding ICE detainees creates anxiety within me. To be appointed to the Racial Healing Commission for our diocese requires me to be an active part of helping others recognize what history has shown to be emotional, spiritual, and physical harm particularly toward people deemed inhuman and unworthy of dignity, and to figure out how to help all of us heal from historical atrocities.
But when I take my baptismal promises and my ordination promises seriously, I must go outside my comfort to make a difference in how I understand my own complicity and ignorance toward people who live in ways I do not.
And while it seems like everything I’ve learned comes from something negative, be it historical or current events, and there is a sense that nothing can or will change, and that people are against everything…I truly believe that even though I feel the pain and concern, I am looking at it all with a lens of LOVE.
We get to choose, you know. To focus on what’s wrong, or to figure out how to follow Jesus and turn what feels wrong, or problematic, 180 degrees and find what’s right. And not simply look for what’s right, but to be an active participant in what is right.
When we choose LOVE over hate, when our protest signs are about the Advent themes of HOPE, PEACE, JOY, LOVE, and LIGHT, or of KINDNESS, GENTLENESS, FORGIVENESS, we are helping others see what we believe God has desired from the beginning of time: that we LOVE God and LOVE one another.
Each time we recite the Baptismal Covenant, we are promising, yet again, to turn our hearts around from what is keeping us from that love and refocusing on all the ways Jesus showed us how to LOVE.
In today’s Gospel the thing that jumped out at me was Jesus’s urgent request to John to baptize him. Not because he needed to repent, not because he had separated from God, but because through his baptism, at least in this gospel from Matthew, others would hear the proclamation from God that this is God’s son.
Jesus led by example all his life, and here, on this day, he led by example once again, showing that baptism is the way to righteousness, to committing our lives to God.
From this day forward, everything Jesus does is to show the people then, and now, what it means to live with God at the center of their lives by resisting evil, proclaiming the Good News, seeking and serving all that God has created, loving our neighbors, striving for justice and peace, and respecting the dignity of every human being.
Our baptismal covenant reflects the ways Jesus showered the people with God’s love. By protecting the marginalized—the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor; by healing those who were thrown away from community; by expressing the value of each person by eating, talking, spending time with them; by brushing off comments made by his followers to stop taking risks.
We are called in our Baptismal Covenant to take risks. To go outside our comfort and to become present with the lost, the fearful, the lonely, and the lowly, feeding the hungry with good things, and in all these actions, to resist evil and go do the work of the Gospel anyway.
It seems we are at an inflection point in our society that is designed to divide rather than unite. AND. We are given a call to action each time we respond, “I will with God’s help,” listening for God’s guidance through the Holy Spirit, and discerning the ways in which we can act that express the depth of God’s love for all God has created.
Our faith calls us, at all times, to behave with righteousness—not righteous indignation, but the righteousness that comes with following all the examples of Jesus that teach us what love looks like.
I’m learning with you how to not just think about what that means, hoping that I am following Jesus’s examples. I’m realizing that I just might be clinging to my introvert personality, my discomfort in crowds, my fears, instead of acting in ways that more broadly show the world that God is love, and that sometimes I have to show that LOVE in ways that make me uncomfortable.
In today’s Gospel, it was Jesus’s urgency that caught my attention. Perhaps that urgency was my own personal message to move, to act now, and not fear what others may think.
Maybe, in reading this story this time around, we can all face our discomfort and do and be more to express God’s love. Maybe, in renewing our baptismal covenant today, we will find something there we can focus on, to change, to show others what loving God and loving others looks like. Maybe, today is the day we have needed to choose to live love anew.
Because in a world where it seems like we are required to be against something, we desperately need something to be FOR. Let’s be for LOVE.
Will you join me in praying today’s Collect again? It’s on the second page of the leaflet. Let us pray:
Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him to be your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, One God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
