When I was young I went to church every Sunday with my mom and my sisters. It is where my faith journey began; it is where God took hold of me, although I didn’t know it then. What I knew was that church school mattered and the prayers we recited Sunday after Sunday in Morning Prayer kept me listening for the words I most especially loved. “The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him.” “O come let us sing unto the Lord; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation.” “O be joyful in the Lord all ye lands; serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song.” The Collect for Peace, The Collect for Grace, The General Thanksgiving, and The Prayer of St. Chrysostom. Now, since worshiping with the Sisters of St. Anne who host our diaconate formation weekends, I cannot hear the closing prayer, “Glory to God whose power working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine….” without hearing Sister Ana Clara’s voice.

Jeremiah 20:-13, Romans 6:1b-11, Matthew 10:24-39

One week after George Floyd’s death, I posted something on my Facebook page about an action I was taking in support of racial justice.

A childhood friend commented on my feed. “Enough!,” he wrote. At first, I thought he was expressing his frustration at the centuries old systemic racism that exists in this country. But his frustration was with me, and with those who were still talking about race a whole week after George Floyd was killed. One week in, and he had had enough. It was time to move on.

If only the past three weeks were enough to have “fixed” the systemic racism that has plagued this country for 400 years. If only the books I have read, the videos I have watched and the rallies I have attended since May 25 were all it was going to take.

Exodus 19:2-8a – Romans 5:1-8 – Matthew 9:35-10:23

Over the past week my husband and I have been working on our estate planning – we had gotten this process started back in December, so it wasn’t the coronavirus crisis that prompted us; it was just time. We’ve been reading over draft documents before they are finalized and we sit down to sign them. And when I say “reading,” I really mean “reading” – every word, out loud, both of us pausing at the end of each paragraph to ask each other, “Do you understand that? Is that what we want?” I’ve had to look up more than a few terms to make sure I knew what was being proposed.

I graduate in 3 days, on the 10th. My family was going to come up and celebrate, I was going to have a big barbeque with my friends, I was gonna go on a victory tour with my classmates at school and through town. I imagine it would have felt like graduating elementary school on steroids: we would have butterflies in our stomachs as we realized it was our last month, week, day, hour in our K-12 careers. I imagined us dancing in the halls, getting proud looks and nods from teachers and mentors, our parents in tears as they realized that those blubbering adorable babies who depended on them for love, life, and safety have become bone-headed adults, ready to charge headfirst into the real world without them.

We know how adaptable scripture has been for those who need to interpret it to serve their own purposes. We know the passages that seem to accept slavery, we know the passages that seem to compromise women’s authority, we know the passages that set the Jews against Jesus and his disciples, and we know the argument that the God of the Old Testament is an angry and jealous God.

In the months that we have been quarantined and our lives have been turned upside down and inside out, there are many who are asking, “Where is God?” It is a common assumption that where pain and suffering are present, God is absent. Remember the story of the crippled child whose parents were asked which of them had sinned to cause such an affliction in their child? When all seems right in the world, we don’t question the nearness of God or God’s love for us.