Hope as we run the race

 

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Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

St. Alban’s, Simsbury, CT 

Morning Prayer via Zoom

November 8, 2020

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13

May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

When I was in preschool my mom ran a marathon. It was a big deal. She had taken up running in adulthood and had done small races here and there. But nothing close to this length. She trained for months in advance. My dad, brother, and I went along to be there at the finish line, of course. It turned out that we were not the only ones who came to support my mom that day. 

One of her dear friends, Martha, who had never run more than a mile in her life, had a surprise in store. She planned to join my mom at Mile 25 and run the final mile with my mom. It was a beautiful gesture, and my mom was incredibly honored and surprised to see her. Particularly since it turned out Martha had miscalculated where to join my mom, and she met her at Mile 21. Not Mile 25. She had planned to run with my mom for a mile. She ended up running with my mom for five miles. They kept each other going and my mom met her goal of finishing in under four hours. 

I don’t know about you all, but I feel like Martha this week. The map is mixed up and the finish line is much further away than I thought it was. It is not just that it took (or in some races is still taking) a long time to count votes and decide races. I realized this week that I naively thought we were more united as a country. I thought our map would be different. 

No matter how we may individually be feeling about the results of the recent election. No matter how you do the analysis. No matter how you do the math. The conclusion is clear; our country is strongly divided about the best path forward. In the face of this division, I find myself grieving, because the pain and the fear are so evident. Because I have not done enough. We have not done enough. 

I grieve because the road ahead is longer and more challenging than what I was wishing for in my optimism and my privilege. I grieve because I naively thought it would be easier than this. I thought somehow we could more quickly realize God’s kingdom. That our good intentions were enough to set us up to become the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about. 

Like most things in life, it turns out that the situation is more complicated. And it turns out that change cannot just be something we hope happens out there. It has to be in here too. In fact it has to start here, in our own hearts and minds, in our houses and our communities. 

It is easy to put the blame or responsibility out there. To hear the story of my mom’s friend and say, “Well, too bad she didn’t plan better. I would have double checked the map and not made that mistake.” It is easy to look at our Gospel lesson about the foolish bridesmaids and say, “How silly were they? Don’t they know that they should have planned ahead?” Really. Just a little planning and everyone would have had lamps for the night. It is so simple. 

Or so it seems. So we might wish. But the work of healing, of reconciliation, of caring for those in need, of being agents of transformation in the world, the work of building up God’s kingdom is not simple or easy.

I would imagine I am not the only one who is grieving this week, and while there may be some differences in what we are grieving, I think it would be fair to say that we are all grieving because the state of the world is not as we would like it to be. We would like the pandemic to end. We grieve for those who have died, for those who are suffering now. We grieve for those who have lost jobs and who are on the brink of (or already experiencing) homelessness. We grieve for those who do not have enough to eat. We grieve for the ways that systemic racism has divided us and caused long lasting harm. We grieve for the fact that the bodies of so many on the margins, of those who do not share my heritage, my class, my privilege, those bodies, have been sacrificed. We grieve that we do not seem to be able to talk in a civil and compassionate way across difference. The list goes on. The chasms seem so enormous. 

But then I turn to our text from Thessalonians that reminds us not to grieve as though we have no hope. Ah yes. I needed that reminder. Actually, I think there are two important facts for us here in this text. First, that it is okay to grieve. When loss happens, whether that is the loss of a person, a relationship, or just a dream that did not come to fruition, we need to grieve. We need to acknowledge the depth of our pain, the ache we feel. Something is missing. We cannot ignore or gloss over that fact. It is okay. Our grief is a sign of who and what matters to us. We do not grieve over something unimportant and superfluous. We grieve over the loss of that which gives our life meaning. 

Second, our text from Thessalonians reminds us that we have hope. Indeed we do. We have a beautiful hope, a hope founded in faith. A hope that is not contingent on news headlines or on our own actions. A hope that stands at the heart of our tradition. A belief that God is always at work in the world. Even in the midst of our deepest, darkest moments of fear and sadness. God is at work bringing about new life, new possibility. It is the story at the heart of our Scriptures, at the heart of our faith. God’s healing, transforming, reconciling love is stronger than anything in this world, even death. 

Sometimes the hope can be hard to see, hard to find, and it is there. Always. May you glimpse it in the midst of daily life. In the warmth of the sunshine, even as the weather turns cooler. In the splendor of creation. In reading or hearing something that offers you a new insight or a new perspective. In a conversation with a dear friend. In smiles. In laughter. In the tenacity and joy of children. In all the ways that we are adapting and staying connected even in the midst of all the current challenges. 

Oh, my friends, there is much to grieve these days. Be gentle with yourselves in this time. Be gentle with each other. Ground yourself in faith. We have hope. A deep and real hope. A hope that speaks of the depth and breadth of God’s love. A love that we can make manifest, a kingdom we can help build, through our words and our actions each and every day. AMEN. 

Juneteenth, Ida Wells, and Adelaide Case

Rev. Molly F. James, PhD

DFMS Noonday Prayer via Zoom 

Adelaide Case, June 19, 2020

May God’s Word be spoken. May God’s Word be heard. May that point us to the living Word who is Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

On the recommendation of her fourth grade teacher, we got Katherine a book called “The book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience.” It was created by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. It is stories of women from all around the world who have been gutsy and done remarkable things. It arrived yesterday. I was looking at last night. Katherine looked over my shoulder and said, “Will you read about Ida B. Wells, she’s a favorite?” And so I did. I read about Ida’s refusal to give into the organizers desire for a segregated Women’s March in 1913. I read about her work as a journalist to tell the stories of the lynchings of friends and strangers. Of her work to help found the NAACP. Of her efforts to ensure that the voices of women and of black people were heard. 

I guarantee that when I was nine years old I did not know who Ida B. Wells was. It gives me great hope that Katherine already did and wanted to learn more. She is growing up with a more accurate and full understanding of our complicated American history. I had childhood books about women who did great things, but they were largely or exclusively about white women. Ida wasn’t there. 

I have been thinking about that contrast of Katherine’s and my childhood books on this day, this day that is Juneteenth and a day we honor Adelaide Case, the first woman to teach at an Episcopal Seminary. It is a day we celebrate the end of chattel slavery in the United States. We celebrate that the good news of the emancipation proclamation finally reached the state of Texas. And it is a day we honor the importance of education in our tradition. 

But these two celebrations also highlight the failures and shortcomings of our institutional system. Here we are 155 years after the end of the Civil War, after the end of slavery was finally realized in all the States, and the vision of equality that was celebrated on that day has not been realized. Ida Wells marched in 1913, over 100 years ago for women’s equality. It took seven more years for women to get the vote, and even longer, decades in some places, for women of color to get the right to vote. And we know that getting the right vote and actually being able to exercise that right are not the same thing. To this day, 100 years after women got the right to vote, there are still problems with voter suppression, often based on race or age. Adelaide Case became a seminary professor in 1941, almost 80 years ago. And if you look at the current landscape of theological education, the faculty is still overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly white. The dreams of Juneteenth, the dreams of Ida Wells, the dreams of Adelaide Case, have not been realized. We still have work to do - we who hold positions of power and privilege have work to do. We who are white have our own internal work to do. Our own education, our own transformation, our own personal unlearning of the structures of white supremacy. AND we have work to do as leaders and those who sit at the tables of power to change our systems and our structures. 

I have hope for the future, because I am watching my children grow up with a different mindset. I have hope because they are learning things now that I didn’t learn until I was an adult. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. often reminded the world that the arc of history bends toward justice. On this historic day, when we see how much work there is still to do, 155 years later, that bend can seem very slow indeed. But then I look at my children, and I think that it is possible for that arc to bend further, and faster, because the generations coming up behind us are strong, resilient, and motivated. They are going to push us, and inspire us all, into a more just and more beautiful future. AMEN.