Dear People of St. James’,
I have been searching for words to write to you today, and it’s been a little difficult to focus and to put something beautiful together. However, I know that I want to say something about gratitude for your faithfulness to each other and something about where we stand today.
I will start with gratitude. Great is your faithfulness to each other! This week, we were able to continue to check in with parishioners, our neighbors through Welcome Table, and the congregations surrounding us. Many of you were following up with each other, and that is so good. Welcome Table continued to deliver food and diapers in even greater numbers than usual in order to help catch up with needs. Our Trinity Center team for this Sunday is ready to go and serve our neighbors facing housing insecurity downtown. This coming week, Child, Inc.’s Head Start program will return to our campus to an undamaged facility.
Your faithfulness to each other was not only evident in the ways you got on the phone or on the road to reach out. It was evident in the ways you continued to come together online and as we restarted in person worship to be with each other in prayer and learning together. This week, we kicked off a Wednesday night Lenten Series in which we are listening to the voices of Black women mystics. We could not have chosen a better time to do this listening to the voices of those whose courage in making deep inner journeys is matched by their courage in making outer journeys to break down the barriers of systemic oppression. Mysticism energizes and orients us for the work of resistance to oppression because it offers a healing and hopeful vision grounded in relationship with God and it recenters us in relationship to each other and creation. Listening to the voices of mystics supports us in our listening to those suffering with us in the human journey when we think we can bear the suffering and pain of grief no longer. Come, listen with us, and keep praying together!
Today, not all is well with us. Some in our communities continue to be without water after the storm; many more face a ruinous loss of wages coupled with elevated utilities bills. Our wounds as communities and individuals are open and need tending. Most of us are worn out, stressed out, and out of sorts. And yet, we at St. James’ are a faithful and resilient people, called by God in Christ to give of ourselves in different ways at different moments.
This might just be a moment when you need to open your hands to receive. We come to the table acknowledging that we are limited human beings with real needs for nourishment, consolation, and belonging. Your opening of your hands to receive may be a great gift to another who needs to give or who needs permission to open their own clenched fists and to seek for themselves some critical something. When we say, “wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are welcome at this table,” we speak with the conviction that the healing of the Christ’s body that happens when we are together happens because each of us is offering “our selves, our souls and bodies,” wounded and broken as they are, to the work of Love. You do not have to feel strong or happy or hopeful or like you have anything at all to give to come to this table. You are just beloved. Come, rest, receive, and become new. This is where we will find the great depth of our resilience and our surprising capacity to reach out to our neighbors.
May the Spirit of God be poured out to overflowing in our hearts and in our communities so that we might find ourselves to be a people not alone, but walking the way of love together.
Rev. Eileen
