A follow up to our message from 2nd Sunday by Renée Notkin
Recently I’ve been ruminating on the title of Eugene Peterson’s 1980 book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. (I highly recommend this timeless book). How do we stay the course and keep in step with Jesus in this time of grief and uncertainty as we pray for a new day of justice? I am convinced that prayer is vital to keeping our eyes on Jesus and living as people who believe it can “be on earth as it is in heaven.”
Dr. Rev. William Barber, co-founder of the Poor People’s Campaign states: “To be a person of faith is to be ever at protest against injustice” as he echoes Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.”
By his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus protests against injustice to break down the walls of hostility, that we as humans erect, and becomes our peace to restore a new humanity.
As the Wednesday Evening Conversation group has been studying together The Acts of the Apostles (and I would add, the Holy Spirit), this verse has become foundational for me: Acts 1:12, “(they) were constantly devoting themselves to prayer” while they waited in Jerusalem as Jesus invited them to wait. The disciples (and this includes the women) will act but they begin with a devotion to prayer.
Prayer is a form of protest as we pray to our Lord in humility, repentance, despair, and hope to guide us into a new way of being. Our prayers join the choruses of voices that go before us to say “NO,” to that which destroys and dehumanizes and discards and “YES” to God’s Kingdom of life, restoration and reconciliation.
You may be asking, in this time of pandemic, as your heart is grieving over the realities of racial and socioeconomic injustice that still permeates our nation, what can I do? Please do not hear this as a trite answer….You can pray. And, in your prayers, listen to where God is guiding you to act.
This summer we want to become even more a community that prays. We are posting prayers on our webpage. We are providing multiple opportunities to pray together throughout the week and there will be more coming. Some of us are gathering to pray at CHOP (Cap Hill Occuppied Protest) and while we protest; others of us pray from our homes. We want to know how we can pray for you. What helps you pray? We want to know.
As we continue to grieve, repent and seek to act counterculturally to that which destroys and dehumanizes, Jesus invites us to confess, to face ourselves -- our racism, our prejudice, our biases, and our fears that prevent us from seeing people through Jesus’ love. In Matthew 8, as we watch Jesus heal three people who would be viewed on the outskirts of society, we are given a vision to live in a new way that defies systems of oppression and to embrace a just way of living as Jesus showed, as Jesus lived and Jesus gave his life for. This same Jesus Christ, our Advocate, now empowers us to walk in his steps by his Spirit. This same Jesus Christ invites us to pray for the bonds of injustice to be broken and for God’s Spirit to bring healing between people.
This same Jesus Christ invites you to trust he has already said “YES” to you. Jesus invites you to be in dialogue with him. And then, Jesus invites you on a journey to say “yes” to one another and to join with him in reaching across walls of injustice, barriers of hate, and systems that divide us. To love one another as Jesus loved.