Justice Matters, friends.

Beloved:


I pray the snowy, frigid day finds you hands to work and hearts to God as the Quakers say.  My backyard is never more beautiful than when all those dirty tennis balls, bare spots, and mole mounds are blanketed in a half-foot of snow.  How perfectly does that bright-white coverlet conceal the truth about that fall yard clean-up I never finished. Not a poor analogy for a Martin Luther King Day reflection.
 
I told myself it was because of bedtime that I couldn’t watch it all, but that is not the truth of it. The film hurt my heart too much to watch all in one sitting.  I Am Not Your Negro envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, a radical narration about race in America, using the writer’s original words.  Alongside a flood of archival pictures and video, the film draws upon Baldwin’s notes on the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. to explore the current racial narrative in America.  You can watch it here:   http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/i-am-not-your-negro/.  


I share it with you as part of the new year’s plan which I introduced in Sunday’s sermon:  a plan to integrate biblical justice into the fabric of our life together.  Our text was John 2:1-11.  Here is a brief cut from the sermon text:

Justice Matters, friends.  It must – if we are to be the church that Jesus' mother prophesied in Luke, chapter 1.

Thy kingdom come, He Himself taught us to pray, on earth as it is heaven.  This kingdom of God which Mary described is the heart of biblical justice.  The kingdom of God is where God’s people take seriously God’s plainly stated preference for the poor, the stranger, the refugee, the dispossessed, the prisoner, the oppressed.

The kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven is also where God’s people take seriously God's plainly stated promise that from us who have been given so much, much is expected.

Biblical justice is lived out in three-way partnership between God, humanity, and the non-human Creation.  God and the non-human Creation have kept their part of this covenant, while humanity's record is  . . .  spotty – having risen to great heights now and then, but mostly doing too little too late.

Because at the end of the day, the work of justice is hard.  It take lots of time and energy, time and energy that those of us with time and energy to spare might otherwise spend feathering our own nests or binge-watching Netflix.

If being church matters, and I know that it does to you, then my hope, prayer, and intention is that 2018 will be the year in which justice matters to us more than it ever has before.

The year we take bigger steps in:

• our understanding of biblical justice;
• our identity as a people committed to biblical justice;
• our activity in the work of biblical justice in our own time and place.

These three are the takeaways:  understanding, identity and activity.  We will work with them all year in Bible study, sermon, worship, special programs, and service.  I pray you’ll begin the internal work now of opening your spirit and the spirit of our life together to what God has to show us in the ways of justice.  
~ peace & prayers, pastor annette

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