Stumbling Block

Mark 9:38-50

September 27, 2015

Am I a stumbling block?
Have I been a stumbling block.

Whenever I read this scripture I ask myself that.

The answer comes back to me that I guess I have at times.

Probably not on purpose, but there have

probably been times when we’ve all

done the wrong thing at the wrong time

and bent someone’s b

burgeoning faith too far.

We haven’t been a good example of kindness, patience,

understanding or forgiveness.

There are some times 

that individuals can be

stumbling blocks, 

and there are sometimes that

whole churches can be that for people.

In this story from the gospel,

The disciples are doing something that Jesus

sees as a stumbling block for people.

They see someone who is casting out demons,

doing the work of Jesus, but they don’t seem

to have the proper authorization in the eyes of the disciples.

They haven’t been certified or licensed or approved by committee

or something, so the disciples are wagging their fingers at

this person, John is actually pleased with himself

and he’s bragging to Jesus about telling him to stop.

These disciples are displaying a trait of religions –

which has plagued us since the beginning of time –

and very much plagues the Christian Church,

Competition and in fighting.

 These people are, to the disciples admission,

doing the work that the disciples should be doing,

but they don’t like it because it’s being done

by someone they don’t want it to be done by.

We do the same thing today,

One group of Christian doesn’t like the style of other groups,

the feel, the message, the emphasis,

they don’t come from the right lineage or

don’t’ follow the right authority.

They don’t share the right doctrine or practices

so we complain, contrast, put up barriers,

call names and insult.

There was a large Lutheran church in the next town

to the one I was working at who

had been funding a food pantry for the area

and sending volunteers.

They’d been doing it for several years.

But then, the word got out to some people

in the congregation and the pastor that the people

actually running the pantry were Mormon.

The pastor of the Lutheran Church pulled

out their funding and their congregation’s involvement.

They didn’t want to be seen supporting a Mormon institution.

  

Now, don’t get me wrong, there might be good

reasons why we would set ourselves apart from others.

Some of our brothers and sisters in the faith

are downright hateful and brutal with their words and actions.

And we shouldn’t just sit by and pretend it’s not happening..

But sometimes we fall into the trap of arguing minutia

that most outsiders don’t understand.

Sometimes we are arguing over how many angels

can dance on the head of a pin

and to the world outside the deeply churched,

it looks petty, it looks pointless, and frankly it looks unchristian.

I know when we all talk about ELCA Lutherans,

and Missouri Synod Lutherans and Wisconsin and NALC

and all the other Lutherans and we do it with disdain or scorn

people outside this whole Lutheran thing scratch their heads

and think, aren’t you all Lutheran?

Why can’t you get along with each other?

We come by it all honestly though.

Christians have been putting these barriers up

between us and others right from the beginning.

We instantly seem  to have forgotten Jesus statement here:

“Whoever is not against us is for us.”

And in the first centuries of the church

the rule of the Christian church

seems to have turned that statement into

“whoever does not agree with us exactly is dead to us.”

The circle that Jesus makes for our love and acceptance

of other people here in this gospel is wide.

Jesus includes anyone who would just give you a cup of water.

Anyone who acts with kindness and welcome.
Jesus keeps opening his arms and he keeps trying to open ours.

But we always seem to keep trying to close ours.

Now in some ways the Christian church seems to be making progress. 

It was great to see the Pope this week

sharing the stage with people of other faiths at the 9-11 memorial,

being a conduit for peace between nations

and talking about world interests instead of

just catholic or Christian interests.

But at the same time,

Christians seem to be taking steps backwards these days.

The vitriol that We’ve heard from other Christians about Muslims--

our brothers and sisters through Abraham and Sarah-- is scary.

And the hate that some Christians have for immigrants

even those who share our faith - is frightening and disheartening.

And it does put stumbling blocks on people’s faith

when Christians speak and act in hate, when we make divisions between ourselves, when compete with one another.

When we do what the disciples do.

We lose our saltiness. We lose what makes us Christians.

When people cite what has made them fall away from the church

it’s often fighting and anger that’s cited.

Either fighting inside the individual congregation or between churches or denominations. If we’re supposed to love all people

how is it we can’t even love each other?

The people seem hypocritical and the

ideal of loving one another seems impossible.

I realize that even when I point out how some Christians

hatred towards those that are different in this sermon,

I’m aware that I’m making a distinction,

not just between my actions and another’s actions,

I’m putting up a wall of division.

I’m closing my circle up.

  

Someone said,

 "Every time you draw a line between who's

in and who's out, you'll find Jesus on the other side."

The world can live by the motto that

whoever is not with us is against us

The world can exclude and put up barriers.

But Jesus said, “whoever is not against us is with us.”

Jesus default is welcome, union, cooperation.

Jesus opens with the belief that we can work together.

We can even love our enemy, or those who are not with us.

We pray for those who persecute us.

When we are Christian we make a choice to follow Jesus ways

 and not the world’s.

And as followers of Jesus, we need to maintain our saltiness.

our unique quality and flavor.

When people see and hear about Christians,

they should think of welcome, union, and cooperation too.

Jesus ways are not always easy.

Of course, we struggle with people.

Like the disciples,

We struggle with those that we see doing things

in Jesus name that don’t reflect the Jesus that we understand.

But we trust in the one who welcomes all.

We follow the one who opened his arms to all creation on the cross.

Who brings new life to old things.

Who removes every stumbling block.

And the best way to follow Jesus ways in

the practical sense is to do what James tells

us in today’s part of his letter.

Pray for one another and pray for those who we would exclude.

It’s hard to hate people that we pray for.

  

Let’s pray.

God we ask you to help us to grow

in faith toward you and love toward one another.

Today, we especially pray for those people who we struggle with.
Those people of faith that we disagree with.

Who have different beliefs than us.

Who share the same beliefs but carry them out in a different way.

Help us to understand them and love each other

instead of creating more divisions between us.

Help us to flavor the world with your love and understanding.

Help us not to be a stumbling block for others.

Help us to be at peace with one another.

Happy Losers

Mark 9:30-37

September 20, 2015

The disciples are arguing about

who is the greatest.

We don’t know exactly the content of the argument,

Street Children, New Delhi, India

maybe it was about who cured the most evil spirits,

who did Jesus like the best, who did he pick first.

In the Gospel of Mark, mostly

the disciples have nothing to brag about.

They’re not models of courage or wisdom.

Even here it says they didn’t understand what Jesus

was talking about and they were afraid to ask.

But still they feel the need to compete with one another.

Human beings are a competitive lot.

It’s in our nature, dna, it orders our society,

our lives, our days, our politics.

To be the greatest, the most successful, richest, smartest

world’s greatest bowler, world’s greatest dad,

the next American Idol, the gold medal winner,

 whatever it is, there’s something about winning and humans.

We’ve seen stories this week of a high school

football player cracking another player in the head

with a helmet and two others tackling a referee.

It seem sometimes like winning is the only thing,

at any cost, even if the cost is your integrity.

But Jesus tells his competitive disciples that for God,

if you want to be first, you should be last of all. Servant of all.

The way to win is to lose. To come in last.

 Church people have heard this

and somehow we’ve made humility into a  competition in itself.

There was a story around my home church,

Communion was only once a quarter and people were told they

had to be right with God before they took communion.

So on that one Sunday every three months,

church ladies would go up to the rail and

make a big show about refusing communion.

To show people that they didn’t think they were good enough.

They were competing  to see who could be first at being humble.

That’s not what Jesus meant. So what does Jesus mean?

Jesus gives a little clarifier when he takes a child

and he says “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me”

It almost seems unrelated in a way.

But that’s because of the way that we understand children now.

We love children, we value children just because they’re children.

Of course some people don’t, but the prevalent view of society today

is that children should be valued just because they’re small

and vulnerable and can’t take care of themselves.

But in the first century, children weren’t valued.

They were actually treated with disdain, annoyance, even hatred.

And often by their own parents.

Producing children was, of course, encouraged.

They represented the future—they would carry on the family name,

provide for their aging parents, and produce the next generation.

But actually having children was a liability.

Especially small children.

For the first 4 or 5 years,

They couldn’t help out much

and they were another mouth to feed.

And if they got sick, like children do, then forget it.

Abandoning children,

giving them away, or even killing them

was a fairly common practice.

This actually was a reality up until the 1800’s

Think of how fairy tales like Snow White and Hansel and Gretel start out.

In ancient Rome, they estimate that 20-40% of children were abandoned.

more were actually killed by their parents without many repercussions.

More died as a result of an accident meaning they weren’t being watched.

Children were seen as a burden and

Treating children nicely was seen as a weakness especially for men.

And if you Welcomed a child you could end up being responsible for them.
Feeding them, clothing them, caring for them, watching them.

And what they could give back couldn’t be counted.

What a child gave couldn’t be counted as an advancement

to anyone’s status or lot or station in life.

Especially if it wasn’t your child.

Welcoming a child was a burden, a liability.

Welcoming a child, cost the welcomer.

So when Jesus said,

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me”

it meant something very different than we would understand it now.

And what Jesus meant was that

following God’s way comes at a cost.

But that cost is a gain in God’s eyes.

So Welcoming children does not

have the same stigma that it did then,

But there are plenty of other people

who’s welcome could cost us.

And I guess who would cost you

depends on the people that you find yourself around,

your peer group.

 Would it cost you to welcome an illegal immigrant

or refugee, or a person of a different color,

or a poor person, or a rich person,

or a democrat or a republican,

or an atheist or a fundamentalist Christian,

What would cost you?
That’s who we should be welcoming.

Like I said before, if our relationship

with Jesus isn’t bringing us around people

we’re uncomfortable with, then we’re not doing it right.

Jesus says, if you want to be great in God’s Kingdom.

don’t worry about the status of yourself,

worry about the status of someone else.

Give your status away to them.

When it comes to God’s kingdom,

Having all the money in the world is no good

unless it can go to help someone else.

Having all the power in the world is of no use

unless it can be used to give someone else power.

Having all the food in the world can’t fill you

as long as someone else is hungry.

No use getting to the top of the ladder

unless everyone is up the ladder before you.

Ghandi, who often understood Christianity better than Christians said,

"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members."

In this world, serving God comes at a loss.

Whoever wants to be first of all must be last of all and servant of all.

  

Serving and caring for others costs.

It costs us our money and our time and our hearts.

Welcoming those that are unwelcome by the rest of the world

can cost us too: our status, our friends,

and it can even challenge our own values.

When we think of other people before ourselves

even our own stubborn ideologies can be lost.

When our compassion overwhelms our sense of

competition and our need for status,

that is a win for God.

In this world, serving God comes at a loss.

But there are also great gains that can’t be easily counted.

I think I’ve told this story before, but it’s good enough to tell it again.

There was high school softball game

in Indianapolis  about five years ago.

Roncalli Catholic School  played Marshall Community.

Roncalli was a private, upper class Catholic School.

Marshall Community was a very poor inner city school.

Roncalli was a great team.

They had a perfect record.

They had won every game for two and half years.

Marshall Community didn’t have a lot of sports for girls,

so they started a softball team.

This was Marshall’s first game.

They had never played a game of softball before together.

They showed up to the game with little equipment,

no players who’d ever played together before

and a coach who had never coached a team before.

After an inning and a half, Roncalli was destroying Marshall.

Marshall pitchers had already walked nine batters.

It was obvious they didn’t know what they were doing.

Roncalli could've won that game with no problem

gone home with a victory and put another game under their belts

and kept their perfect record.

That's when Roncalli did something crazy.

It offered to forfeit the game.

They counted this game as a loss.

And they spent the  hours they would have played

teaching the Marshall girls how to play softball.

They showed them how to put their gear on,

how to hit, how to catch, how to run the bases,

and the coach taught the coach about coaching.

And the Marshall girls ate it up.

The Roncalli team lost their perfect three year record.

But those girls got something else in return.

What it was is hard to put a value on,

it’s hard to count as a benefit to their status.

It’s even hard to put into words.

But their loss was a gain for God and for them.

It’s like a high school softball team touched

this mystery of God.

To be first, be last.

The paradox is

We get more when we give away more.

And I’m not talking about how the prosperity preachers tell

you it will happen, that if you give some of your money

to the church, more money will suddenly come to you.

It doesn’t work that way I’m sorry to say,

and nothing in the bible says that it does.

But when we trust God,

when our compassion overcomes our need to win,

then we get something that’s more

valuable and priceless than all the riches of the world.

The last will be first.

May all of us here know that experience.

May all of us get to touch that mystery of God’s kingdom in this lifetime.

May the people of Gethsemane know the joy of being last.

Taming the Tongue

James 3:1-12

September 13, 2015

Sticks and stones may break my bones

but names will never hurt me.

We’ve all heard that phrase.

It’s a childhood defense against playground bullies

that try to use words and taunts to hurt other kids.

I always thought that it might have

given someone the inclination to use

sticks and stones next, but still

the idea was that verbal harm wasn’t

as bad as physical harm.

James doesn’t believe all that though.

James, the writer of our epistle

feels that words can do plenty of harm.

We don’t know exactly who James is

he’s possibly the brother of Jesus

who was the bishop of Jerusalem.

James just identifies himself as a follower

of Jesus and he’s writing to early Christians

mostly giving advice on how to behave

as Christian communities.

He’s particularly interested in the actions of

Christians matching the beliefs that they claim

and this part of his letter,

he’s talking about talking.

He says what we know to be true,

the words that we speak to each other

do hurt - sometimes badly.

Many people that have been in abusive

situations say that the emotional and verbal

abuse are actually harder to get over than the physical.

  

James is specifically talking about talking

in communities and groups.

When we’re in a group of familiar people

words can get passed around fairly quickly.

As a pastor,

I will often hear things from more than one person

in church and I will recognize a particular turn of phrase

in everyone’s telling of that story.

For instance, someone in my previous church

left the one of the men’s groups angrily and

the leader described it to the senior pastor by saying

that “he just took his toys and went home.”

And then whenever anyone asked me

about it, I would say, well, I heard he’s not

participating in that group any more.

And they would say, “well, I heard he just

took up his toys and went home.”

Aha, you’ve been talking to Charlie

or someone else that’s been talking to Charlie.

Now that in itself isn’t bad, it could be very endearing

sometimes to see the paths of friendships and confidences,

in a church, but good and harmless words can spread quickly

And bad and harmful words can spread quickly too.

And in my experience, the bad words spread quicker.

James calls the tongue a fire.

And we’ve all seen how words can spread like

The Gossips, Norman Rockwell, 1948

fire destroying everything in its path.

The tongue can destroy a community when

it’s used to spread gossip.

Now sometimes we gossip in a sense because

we have concern for another person,

they are ill or suffering and we want to check in with how they’re doing.

But sometimes we just talk about other people

to entertain ourselves and impress other people.

We share confidences, secrets, or our bad impressions about people

that can harm trust and damage a person’s reputation.

The tongue can also be used to criticize,

to spread cynicism and self doubt.

We say things like, “That will never work.”

Or “Good luck with that.”

And if we say that enough, we all start to believe it.

And sometimes communities can be defeated by talk

like that before they’ve ever tried anything

And the tongue can also be used to spread fear and panic

we’ve seen this lately with a particular politician

who wants to lay every bad thing

in this country at the feet of immigrants.
That kind of talk might gather some crowds at rallies

but it also incites hatred and fear and sometimes

violence which we’ve already seen.

  

And of course, we all at times just say mean

and hurtful things to one another.

Either intentionally or unintentionally.

We criticize, call people names, we yell, we insult,

and usually we do it with the people we love the most.

  

Words are powerful things.

All of the greatest movements of this world

have started with words – good and bad.

Whether the words were “blessed are the peace makers”

or they were Martin Luther’s 95 theses hung on a door.

Whether it was Hitler’s first public speech in 1921

in which he said that there was only

two choices for the German nation:

victory for the Aryans

or victory for the Jews.

Or it was “I have a dream that my four little children

will one day live in a nation where they

will not be judged by the color of their skin

but by the content of their character.”

Words aren’t just merely words.

Words have changed the course of history.

But James says that our words

don’t just effect the hearers of the words,

he also says that they also effect the people that speak them.

What our tongues do, so the rest of us does.

He uses the image of a horse,

the bridal in its mouth guides the whole horse.

Or an udder on a ship.

The words that we speak reflect us

but they also reinforce us and manipulate us.

What we say can change our thoughts and behavior.

Positive words change us positively

and negative words change us negatively.

Our tongues guide the rest of us.

  

We are what we speak, and we always

have a choice we can use our words to

tear things down or we can use them to build things up.

Our words can hurt or they can heal.

All of us have made mistakes with our words,

Every single one of us have said things that we wish we hadn’t.

I’m a terrible offender.

My tongue often works before my brain has had time

to register and filter and think and consider.

We’ve all said things which have hurt others:

loved ones, strangers, friends and acquaintances

We’ve all torn someone else down

either inadvertently or on purpose or somewhere in between.

Thankfully one of the more useful

words we have been given is “I’m sorry.”

Mistakes and apologies and forgiveness

are one of God’s best tools for helping us grow.

In the beginning was the word

and the word was with God

and the word was God.

God is words. God said let there be light and there was.

The understanding of God and God’s people

and all the things of God come to us through words.

God cares what words we use with one another and the world.

Our tongues are a gift from God.

They can be used to bless God for that gift

and to bless one another too.

Let’s pray. God, we thank you for words.

Help us to use them to build others up, support them and help them follow you. 

Forgive us for those times when we have used our tongues to harm others. 

Help our words reflect your love and grace.

Racism

Mark 7:24-37

September 6, 2015

Before we even get to know a person, we make a lot of

assumptions about them based on lots of outward cues.

How they look, what they’re wearing,

how they talk, who they talk with.

And we often will make decisions

about people based on these superficial cues.

We call this prejudice or bias

especially when it’s based on racial differences.

In his letter, James is telling his congregation

not to act on their prejudices 

about class in church.

Apparently, people in Christian churches were treating

those people that looked rich better than

those that looked poor.

They would give a good 

seat to a rich person

and tell a poor person 

that they could stand in the back,

or sit on the floor.

They were using their bias about people to

dictate who they welcomed and who they didn’t.
Most churches today could learn from this letter.

Even Jesus in the gospel today acted on his bias.

A woman comes to Jesus and asks

him to heal her daughter who is sick.

Jesus looks at the visual cues and

maybe hears her voice and her way of dress

and identifies her as a Syrophonecian woman,

that means she was a gentile, a non-Jewish person.

Even though she needed help,

Jesus tells her that he was only sent to Jewish people not to gentiles.

He is telling her that he won’t help her.

Jesus makes a decision based on his bias.

At least that’s what he does at first.

  

We make decisions all the time based on

our prejudices whether or not we know it or admit it.

Everyone does it. Most of us do it quite often.

Now some people act on their prejudices,

some people justify them,

some people are even proud of their prejudices,

but most of us work to overcome

our prejudices and not act on them.

But still sometimes we do it without thinking,

or realizing that we’re doing it.

We put people in categories based on

our perceptions about them

and where we see them fitting in our

preconceived notions.

A lot of our preconceived notions in this country.

are based on race, the color of people’s skin, and people’s culture.

Some prejudices are based on sexuality,

some on class, some just on superficial appearances,

like clothing or beards or tattoos or what car a person drives.

Some of these decisions that we make

based on these judgments are individual.

Like which checker we go to in a grocery store,

or who we talk to at a party,

who we become friends with,

Whether we lock our car doors at an intersection,

whether we cross to the other side of the street.

Sometimes these prejudices actually turn into

groups organized around their prejudices

like the KKK, or the Westboro Baptist church

or anti-immigration groups

which the Southern Poverty law center say

have popped up at alarming rates in the last 20 years.

  

But sometimes decisions which are based on prejudices and bias

are not solely individual choices.

Sometimes these pre-conceived notions

about whole groups of people become

part of the decisions that are made by

companies, organizations, cities, neighborhoods,

governments, even churches.

This is systemic bias, or racism, and it effects

really important things in people’s lives:

things like who can get a bank loan,

who will be able to purchase a house in a certain neighborhood

who can vote and how easily

who is most likely be pulled over for traffic violations

and who will be arrested and incarcerated for a crime.

These are not just individual decisions

made by one person and their prejudice

these are systems that have developed over time

because of many people’s prejudice.

Even people who don’t hold a particular prejudice

can end up carrying out these decisions.

Some of us benefit unknowingly by these systems

and some of us are penalized by them.

Most often, people who are part of the

group that are in power benefit,

and the people who are part of the other groups

are penalized.

And whether we act on our personal

prejudices or not, We are still part of these systems of judgment.

In this country, we are all part of systems of racism.

Racism is a combination power, privilege and prejudice

All forms of systematized prejudice and racism effect us

in one way or another.

But the people who belong to the group in power

have the option not to notice it when it happens.

That is part of the privilege of white people in this country:

we don’t have to notice.

But there is a lot not to notice.

In this country, racism has caused the destruction

of most native American cultures,

It has allowed the enslavement of Africans for hundreds of years

and the segregation of African Americans,

It caused the holocaust of millions of Jewish people in Europe.

It allows for an disproportional number of people of color

to be incarcerated in this country.

And recently this summer, and very specifically,

the racism that is still prevalent and acceptable in this country,

caused a mentally disturbed young man

to go into regular bible study at a black church in South Carolina

and open-fire killing eight people.

If we are going to continue to turn away from racism,

our head is just going to twist off.

We may not have made any of these choices,

but we are part of their system, all of us: black, white, brown. All of us.

Racism is sometimes about individual choice,

but it’s also a kind of machinery, it forces people to choose

what they say they wouldn’t choose, it pushes us to act in ways that we

may not consciously choose to under other circumstances.

And in my eyes, that is the definition of evil.

That is the devil at work in our society, eating it away.

Dividing God’s creation and people.

And the devil depends on good people turning their heads away.

Bishop Eaton, the presiding bishop of the ELCA

has asked that the churches of the ELCA

join other churches around America

this weekend to confess and repent

and pray and to commit ourselves to end racism.

The ELCA sees racism as a sin.

Both the individual prejudice that we can control in ourselves

and the systemic racism that we seem to have less control over.

The systemic problems seem so huge

that the task to end it seems impossible.

Those are the kind of things that we need pray for the power of God.

But, as Christians, Jesus has also given us tools

and guidance to deal with the issue of prejudice, bias, and racism.

First, Jesus himself confronted

the systems of this world that benefited

the privileged and hurt the oppressed

and vulnerable. He confronted the Pharisees,

the Romans, all systems that rewarded the privileged

and punished the oppressed.

Jesus on the cross in itself is a comment

on the ongoing punishment of the oppressed.

Second, as baptized children of God,

we are all sisters and brothers together.
All of one family, no matter what color or class we are.

We don’t always act like it, but it is an ideal

that the love of Jesus Christ leads us to.

Being one in Christ means that we are specifically called

to talk with, and hear from, listen, come in contact with,

work together with, and love people that we

don’t feel comfortable with.

If our relationship with Jesus is not bringing

us in contact people that we struggle with,

then we’re doing it wrong.

Even when we don’t understand someone’s actions.

We can work to understand their pain.

Seeing Christ in the other with an open heart

helps us to understand, and even to change.

And Jesus, in our Gospel today, is our example for that.

Jesus talked to this Syrophonecian woman

and he initially rejected her plea for help.

Whether he sincerely acting on his own bias,

or he was just voicing the bias of his disciples,

he told her no at first.

But he still listened to her.

He heard her response, her insistence, her cries, her pleading.

He felt compassion for her pain and saw

that it was the same pain he had seen in others.

He really heard her.

And from that he changed the course

of his whole ministry, of our ministry the entire system.

It was opened up to gentiles, non Jewish people,

The whole world.

Listening to people can really make a difference.

And third, one other thing that we see in

today’s gospel story that is not insignificant:

Christ is our healer.

Even when we bring the impossible to Christ,

we can trust that there will be hope, healing, and new life.

Christ can heal this woman’s daughter,

this man’s hearing and speech,

and if we’re honest with ourselves and lay this at Christ’s feet

we can trust that Christ will heal this world’s prejudice and racism.

Jesus is about forgiveness and new life.

God doesn’t keep account of who we were,

it’s all about what we have become.

And there is always time for us to

listen, to open our ears and hearts,

to  understand, and to grow.

Now, let us confess to God.

     Gracious God, we thank you for making one 

human family of all the people of the earth and for creating all the

wonderful diversity of cultures.

But we confess that we have not loved all that you have made.

Our prejudices have separated us, our biases have hurt others

intentionally and unintentionally.

Forgive our sins, known and unknown.
Forgive us when we have been apathetic

in the face of racial intolerance and bigotry,

both overt and subtle, public and private.

Forgive us when we have been

blind to the destruction caused by racial injustice.

Forgive us for the arrogance and hatred that infect our hearts.

From the bondage of racism that denies

the humanity of every human being

and the prejudices within us

that deny the dignity of those who are oppressed,

Lord set us free.

From the bondage of racism

that damages communities,

threatens families, and takes lives.

Christ set us free.

From bondage of racism that causes us to remain silent 

and indifferent in the face of other people’s pain.

That makes us call for a false peace over righteous justice.

Lord set us free.

Heal your people and heal this country from the racism

that has formed it, maligned it, and harmed it,

and has taken us on paths of death and intolerance

Let us pray:

Gracious and forgiving God,

Break down the walls that separate us.

Help us, your people, find unity in our differences.

Help us to become your beloved community.

Empower us to speak for justice and truth

help us to deal with one another without hatred or bitterness,

Help us to work through our struggles and confusion to accomplish your purposes.

As we worship you, knit us into a people -
a seamless garment of many colors.
And may we celebrate our unity, made whole in our diversity.

God, who is rich in mercy,

loves us even when we were dead in sin,

and made us alive together with Christ. 

By grace you have been saved.

In the name of +Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven.

May almighty God strengthen you with power

through the Holy Spirit,

that Christ may live in your hearts through faith.
Amen.