Our Beloved Community (Copy)
“What might it mean to know, deep within you, that there are whole peoples who are treated as lesser?”
Every Sunday I hope you hear from me that you are a Beloved Child of God. I thought it was always disempowering and not true to the deeper tradition to name us as “sinners” who were in need of forgiveness. While repentance is an important spiritual practice, I don’t think that’s where we begin. That’s why I have always bent away from the Reformed Tradition practice of Prayer of Repentance, followed by an Assurance of Pardon, and then we sing the Gloria Patri as a way of praising God for pardoning worms like us. I think we begin with the idea that we are made in the image of God, the imago dei. That is found in Genesis 2:27 and in Wisdom Literature in the Apocrypha, Wisdom 2:23 (For God created humankind to be immortal, and made humankind to be an image of God’s own eternity. The righteous, because they are made in the image of God, can rest in the full hope of eternal life.) You can hear in that powerful Scripture from Wisdom a question about what endures or what is of value. Is it wealth, power, or fame? Or is it righteousness, jus<ce, and equity? My prayer is that we all begin worship, from age 2 to 92, with that understanding firmly planted in our consciousness. We are made as Beloved Children of God, as part of God’s Beloved Community, to do justice, righteousness, and equity. The prophecy tradition in the Bible switches out “equity” with “steadfast love.” Creation stories define us. They tell us who we are at our core. They also tell us who everybody else is. That is why I have made going to Benton Harbor at 3:00 p.m. a spiritual practice I hope I can keep. I may miss November 14th to celebrate the installation of Rev. Nevenzel in Baroda but I plan to be there as long as they need me. I want to affirm that the people of Benton Harbor are Beloved Children of God. The amazing thing about such efforts is that God is already there seeking to restore the preciousness of Benton Harbor. What I did was small this past week. But, hopefully, I can be faithful. Hopefully. I am also thinking about that as Thanksgiving approaches. I was reminded time after time by my Native sisters and brothers, sisters and cousins, that Thanksgiving may be a time together with family, but most often it was a remembrance of trauma for Native people. Our faithful daughter, in remembering that Native people are also Beloved Children of God, had us drive to Standing Rock one Thanksgiving. We became Water Protectors. It was wet. It was cold. It was glorious.
What does it mean to peacefully pray in a wide circle, with barricades in front of you and surveillance drones circling overhead? How easily I was affirmed as belonging to a wider community of Elders and Saints that day! How easily I was affirmed as belonging as a Beloved Child of Creator as I gripped the hand of my daughter on one side and a stranger on the other to pray together. We should also listen to the creation stories of other peoples to critique and learn both the power of our own story and its limits. The Potawatomi creation story has the land and food brought forth for humankind only by animals (namely, a muskrat) diving into the water to provide soil and roots. Thus, humankind flourishes as a result of animal sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins who are a part of our Beloved Community.
What might it mean to know, every day, that you are a Beloved Child of God? What might it mean to know, deep within you, that there are whole peoples who are treated as lesser? What might it mean to know, as we consider the limits of our own creation story, that the Beloved Community is far larger than we ever imagined?
