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In her sermon, “Prophets for a New Day,” the late Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon writes that from time to time, we have to take a “spiritual inventory;” i.e., we must review what we are doing and if what we are doing is the will of God.
In his 1992 book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, the late legal scholar Derrick Bell, the first tenured professor at Harvard Law School who gave up his position to protest that institution’s hiring practices, presents an intriguing story.
In our walk with God, we will fall; we will be embarrassed, but if, as Heschel says, “embarrassment is the beginning of faith,” then perhaps we can and will handle our embarrassments with a feeling of hope and purpose.
At the end of the day, maybe it is loving God enough to love ourselves which will ultimately put the Empire in its place, by taking away its arrogant assumption that it is greater than our God.
In the aftermath of the shooting in Las Vegas, we are hearing, again, the words “our thoughts and prayers are with you.”
We are being bombarded by storms, both physical and political, that are ripping us from our berths of comfort and familiarity and thrusting us into a space of mystery and the unknown.
God’s boots within us has brought us to this day, and God’s boots within us will be there the next time we find ourselves in the middle of a restless and angry sea.
Walking the “Bridge of Sighs” pushes our fears out of us; while they are inside of us, they kill us and steal our capacity to trust God and see how God works, even and especially in times of dark and tumultuous times.
The challenge for us all is to not only ask for doors to be open but to ask for the strength and genuine faith it will take to walk through once we see the open door in front of us.
We might be troubled…but only if we forget that dawn is the coldest part of any day, but that as the day goes on, the sun takes over.
