Friends,

Last Sunday, I preached about pottery, about the fact that, until it's fired, the clay is infinitely re-shapeable. Our Scripture texts spoke of God as the potter, as Jesus invited people to reshape their stories, to rewrite who they could become. These earliest Christians had to overcome broken stories defined by enslaver/enslaved relationships, as they moved toward healthy stories of respectful friendships. God can do that reshaping work with us and with our stories, if we pause to remember what stories we've been telling ourselves. You can listen to the sermon here.

Money is one thing about which we tell ourselves a lot of—mostly unconscious—stories. And as Grace Episcopal Church looks to discern who God is calling us to be in the coming years, we are going to need to be able to remember and perhaps release some of our stories about money. Read on below to connect with reflections we're inviting everyone to engage this week and next, unearthing the story of your relationship with money.

We will spend the coming weeks engaging in four practices: Remember, Release, Reimagine, and Restore.

This season will be about asking: What stories about money have we learned and told, as individuals and as a congregation? Stories of scarcity, abundance, fear, joy, misuse, regret, shame, anxiety, deserving, grace, service, generosity, freedom? What parts of those stories are we still telling ourselves? If we’re willing to unearth these stories, we could let God heal them.

This is not about telling each other how much more you should be giving or what your money story should be. We hope it will be a season of openness, curiosity and healing, remembering the best of who we are and asking God to restore us into who we are called to be.

As you work through these spiritual practices, there will be opportunities to gather and talk with others. All the details are at the link below, and I hope you’ll join us for some or all of those gatherings.

With love,
Susan+

Tags: Rev Susan, Money, stories, Remember, Healing

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

Friends,

Here is the prayer we opened our worship service with on Sunday.

God of shalom, we lift up this city and state and country.
We are awash in fear and hatred and violence, and we long for the healing and hope and justice only you can offer.
We pray for Melissa and Mark Hortman; receive them into the arms of your mercy.
We pray for John and Yvette Hoffman and their daughter, that they will be filled with the healing power of the Holy Spirit, that they may be able to recover and be raised up as signs of your love for the world.
We pray for the person who did these acts of violence, that he too will know the healing power of your justice.
We pray for all those tempted to violence, and for those who stoke the flames of hatred, that their hearts will be turned to your way of love.
And we pray for those who serve in positions of public trust in our legislature and everywhere, that in the midst of such fear, your love will give them the courage to continue in their duties with integrity and to press on with yet more courage toward your dream of love for this hurting world.
We ask all this in the name of the One whose way calls us to resilient, defiant, embodied, joyful love, even and especially in the midst of grief and destruction, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.


I hope to see you this coming Sunday, June 22, when we celebrate Campus Ministry Sunday. With a sermon from Steve Mullaney (Chaplain and Executive Director of the University Episcopal Community), we'll wonder together how our baptismal promises call us to support young adults in all kinds of life transitions.

See you in church!
Susan+

Tags: Rev Susan, Violence, Justice, Healing

By Meghan and Vicky

Vicky and Meghan are members of Grace Episcopal Church, Minneapolis, close friends, as well as mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Together they attended the racial justice and healing retreat at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, St. Paul on March 22, 2025

Vicky: For 35 years, I was an educator in the K-12 world and an adjunct professor of education at a local university. The last 12 years, as a teacher, professor, school district administrator, and education consultant, the collective focus was on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for all students. Witnessing what continues to unfold since the presidential executive orders around DEI has been devastating for all who believe the strength of our society lies in our diversity. When I read in our Sunday church bulletin about the opportunity to attend the Racial Justice and Healing Retreat, my heart leapt. "Maybe," I hoped, "I will find a source of balm for my heartbroken soul."

Meghan: In our beautifully diverse world, I've developed a deep understanding of racial and identity development and transformative justice practices through my work as an academic advisor in a college setting. I was drawn to this retreat to experience racial healing and justice from a Christian perspective and to answer the questions, "How does God view justice?" and "How are we called to respond to God's call to justice?" I also wanted to be in community with other believers who were focused on a shared mission and vision of seeking to take action to make a more equitable, inclusive world.

Vicky: What I saw and experienced at the retreat was far more than a "balm" for my troubled heart. Every moment from when I walked through the doors of Holy Trinity Church that morning to the closing eucharist at the end of the day was an immersion into the "beloved community." This phrase, "beloved community," gets a lot of use and attention, particularly in spaces focused on racial justice and immigration. But what does "beloved community" really mean?

The beloved community is a place without physical walls. Instead, it is defined by the people who gather there. It is a spiritual place where differences in theology and individual experiences fade, while at the same time, a binding together by God through the Holy Spirit resides. It is a relational space where culture and color are no longer barriers, and it's replaced by a sincere desire to know and understand each other. Finally, it is a place that stirs the individual to action, to bring this deepened awareness to our broken world, and being open to the Holy Spirit for direction and courage. That is what I experienced at the Racial Justice and Healing Retreat.

Meghan: What was most striking and profoundly meaningful to me were the experiences of encountering the Holy Spirit and using a justice-focused lens.

Through one particular Bible reading from the Book of Isaiah, I encountered the spirit in two unique ways: In connection of the spirit through the retreat group, and a personal calling to the diaconate made clear through the reading. At the beginning of the retreat, we read as a group the reading aloud. It was already clear that the spirit was "moving and shaking" by connecting us. We were asked to share a word or phrase that resonated strongly with us. Vicky and I uttered the same phrase one after the other of "your light shall rise in the darkness." At the end two people vocalized at the same time, "Then your light shall break forth like the dawn." The church space audibly reacted. As I read through this reading again later, I felt the Holy Spirit "hitting me" with a message to pursue a calling to be a deacon, which I am actively pursuing with my rector and the diocese.

Experiencing a justice-focused church service and reading Bible verses from this perspective was profoundly meaningful to me. It was the most incredible church service I had ever been a part of and using this perspective to interpret scripture "broke open" the Bible for me in a way that I had never thirsted for before. I am not a person who usually wants to "crack open" my Bible, yet this retreat left me with an electrifying need to know and encounter God more, and an escalating desire to take personal and collective action towards justice (even more than before).

Vicky: Have the politics around DEI changed? No, they have intensified. However, nothing, including the powers that be, can diminish the "beloved community." Bishop Loya said it best, through his most recent weekly letter:

"What Jesus both promises and expects of us is not to escape from it, but to keep casting into new places, in new ways, so that we can join God in drawing the whole world into the net of God's liberating life, shouting our joyful and defiant alleluia to all the forces that break down the children God so cherishes, and longs to hold."

Tags: Justice, Healing, Beloved community, DEI