Dear Friends,
We sit amidst the turmoil of all the pain erupting in our nation and world. We sit with the staggering number of deaths to the Coronavirus (as of today 109,000), and even while, thankfully, the growth in the U.S. is slowing, the number of deaths are increasing in the Southern Hemisphere. Our unemployment claims rose by another 1.9 million this past week. And, of course, we are watching thousands of largely peaceful protesters take to the streets of our cities in raging response to the tragic and senseless deaths of George Floyd, Ahmed Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. Our heads are spinning; our hearts are breaking; and, our souls are weary. We cry, “How long, O Lord?” And, God responds to us saying, “How long will you resist my command to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with me?”
We have work to do— hard work around facing our own racism and white privilege. We have hard work to do facing the system that keeps white supremacy in place at the expense of brown and black lives. Montview Church has a history of being a community that faces hard questions and engages in difficult conversations. Most importantly, we find inspiration in this church’s history of taking action where justice is needed. We need to commit to hard work again. We ask you to please engage books, articles, films and studies on the issue of racism and find places to look honestly at yourself and your role in the system. Throughout the summer and fall, we will have opportunities to do so together. We know it’s overwhelming to know where to begin. This Race Resource page has been set up to give you ideas. We will add resources as they come to us. This is a kairos time, a time pregnant with possibility for transformation. God never stops offering us moments to choose what kind of people we want to be and how we will choose to live with our neighbors. These choices will require us to muster once more the moral courage to do the hard work required of us.
May God grant us all strength for the living of these days,
Clover and Ian, Co-Pastors
Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church
A scripture reading for these days from the Book of Habakkuk. Habakkuk was a prophet during another time in history of violent disruption as the city of Jerusalem was destroyed as part of the Babylonian Exile.
Book of Habakkuk 1: 1-4, 12-13
1 2 O Lord, how long shall we cry for help, and you not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?
3 Why do you make us see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before us; strife and contention arise.
4 So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous—therefore judgment is perverted.
12 Are you not from of old, O Lord my God, my Holy One? You shall not die. O Lord, O Rock, you have marked injustice for judgment.
13 Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing; so why do you look on the treacherous, and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?
Prayer
Oh God, our hearts so are heavy. So many lives have been lost - to illness, to hatred, to injustice, to fear. We have much to mourn and great is our lament.
We name our grief for the more than 100,000 lives lost in the pandemic.
We name our grief and our anger for the history of killing black and brown bodies in our country.
We name our grief and our anger and our despair for our country, so divided by those who would sacrifice lives for political gain.
And so we come together, to share our lament and seek your guidance.
We come together to ask you to -
Open our eyes to see the suffering of all our sisters and brothers,
Open our ears to hear those who cry out,
Open our hearts to acknowledge and share our own pain and the pain of others
And in the power of your Holy Spirit, let us know the truth, let us tell the truth, and let the truth set us free from all bondage and blindness.
Lord, we confess our sin before you now; our personal sin, our collective sin, our national sin:
For the ways we are complicit in perpetuating racism, forgive us.
For the times we have kept silent, forgive us.
For the ways our own prosperity has blinded us to the needs of others, forgive us.
For the times we have capitulated to our fears, forgive us.
For the ways we have ignored what did not impact us personally, forgive us.
For the seeds of hatred and cruelty that have taken hold in our country like weeds; and our inability to find the will and the way to uproot them, forgive us.
Forgive us, O God, and may Christ Jesus, who faced the darkness of death and despair, give us courage.
May Christ Jesus, who said upon rising from the grave, “Peace be with you,” bring his peace to our hearts.
May Christ Jesus, who chose the way of love in a violent world, show us the way forward.
Lord, have mercy;
Christ, have mercy;
Lord, have mercy.
Amen.