Friends,

On Sunday morning, some of you heard an NPR Weekend Edition piece that included interviews with clergy serving near Annunciation. I was honored to be interviewed. You can listen to it here.

Last Sunday's sermon focused on the text from the prophet Isaiah -- and on God's bewilderment, in Isaiah's words: “My people have committed two evils – they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” I spoke about the ways our culture, like Isaiah's society, has traded in the wild, living God for the small, broken gods. The idol of personal safety and personal wealth instead of God's dream of a society based in equity and care. You can watch the sermon here.

After twenty-five years of school shootings, our country's inability to make progress in mental health care, common-sense gun policy feels not just tragic nor like a mere failure of will. It feels insane. Like a collective choice not to make progress on mass shootings. How long, O Lord?

I feel bewildered. I know so many of you do too. Why have we traded in our sacred spaces - schools and churches and neighborhood streets - for pop-up war zones?

As we send our kids back to schools that regularly have to do lockdown drills, as we metabolize this latest violation, as we try to care for our neighbors, I hope you will be exquisitely gentle with yourselves and each other.

And I hope you will take to heart the words I shared from Bishop Loya on Sunday:
"Now is the time for us to show up looking, sounding, and acting like the real Jesus in the world. Now is the time for us to remember that the stakes of the gospel are high, and that following Jesus asks something big of each of us. Now is the time to remember that the Eucharistic communities we serve are not nice gatherings offering maudlin spiritual comfort, but are in the business of subverting the world’s violence with God’s irresistible love."

Some of you have already shared ways you're showing up for healing and peace. (Members of Grace have gone to the memorial site at Annunciation with peace flags—in the photo at the top of this article—and offered bagpipe music there!)

How are you taking action to show up looking, sounding, and acting like the real Jesus in the world? I'd love to share your responses in my email next week. Your small steps will be courage for someone else to take their own.

With love and bewilderment,
Susan+

Tags: Violence, Healing, Rev Susan