This week as much spectacle was made of my faith I am reminded that my faith is not a faith of peace. It is not a faith of niceness or goodness. It is not a faith of law and order.
Jesus came to fulfill the law and move us beyond rules and regulations to relationships.
Jesus himself incited violence in the temple in the face of the powerful oppressing others. While he called for his disciples to not attack the soldiers who came to arrest him, the peace Jesus offers is not about calm or quiet. His peace is about rightness and justice and a world made whole. Jesus did not call his followers to be nice or to be good. He calls us to love, to seek justice, to live so that we honor creation, we love our neighbor fully, we welcome the stranger and the alien with radical hospitality, and we give up our own power and privilege so that others might have life.
As a result of this example of what it means to be a person of faith we’ve been doing work around how our faith intersects with race for a little while now. Several years ago we at the Parish read the book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and The Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas. For me it was a life changing work. Late last year our book group read So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. This week our folks at Snack Church worked with a reading from How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi. Reading is just one way to listen to Black voices and begin to be challenged in our own privilege and power. We as a community are participating in protests, making donations to groups like Don’t Shoot Portland
We are working to live into the disruptive, justice oriented, abundant love that Jesus modeled. We won’t be using our faith to further oppression, to call people to be nice, or to erect more barriers of exclusion. We have a long way to go in this work, but we are here for it and we will keep the faith.
-Eilidh
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