The church my wife and I attend welcomes all hungry seekers. And while the diversity in our congregation does not include samples from all the kinds and conditions of humanity, it’s a wide enough slice to leave no doubt that we are intent upon following Jesus.
Watching my worshipping siblings come forward to receive the bread and wine of the sacrament is a major highpoint in my worship experience. These are a few of the people I see…
A couple of our families are from Africa—one who fled here to escape genocide. There is an elderly mixed-race couple who were married back when their love was not allowed to show itself. By all signs, they are still very much in love. There are, of course, white families—mom, dad, and 2 or 3 kids. And single parents, and parents of kids of a different color.
There are LGBTQIA+ individuals and couples, one of them parenting a beautiful two-year-old daughter. I suspect we welcome some trans folks to the altar, but I am not sure who they are.
There’s a young woman who nearly died a few years ago from a complicated, serious illness. She made her way up the steps to the chancel this morning with the help of her walker. And there are lots of us being helped along by our canes.
There is a range of material wealth in our congregation, though we do not seem to represent the outer extremes of either wealth or poverty. Almost everyone dresses casually, and it is difficult any more to tell by dress who has money and who doesn’t.
I do not know if I am supposed to watch this human parade as it approaches our altar. I know enough about some of them to offer specific prayers for them; others get a general prayer on their way to the rail. The only one who might hear me is God, which is just fine. We are together in God’s presence because of the people here and our prayers for one another and the world.
In my church, we not only hear about God’s love in Jesus for all humankind, but we see it embodied in those with whom we worship. It’s not idealized, abstract love, but love as inclusion of each one on an equal plane within the diverse variations of humankind. Love one another—love your neighbor as yourself—even love your enemies…the original, scriptural D.E.I. program of God’s great love.
To me, my church is a foretaste of the make-up of the heavenly commonwealth which Jesus proclaimed and for which he sacrificed himself. It is just as surely a signpost pointed toward what God wills for creation itself and for our particular order of creatures within it.
There was a time, not so long ago, when I thought our nation was on a path toward becoming more the sort of home for its people as my church is for me and us. I even thought that path was getting easier.
Now we are hearing that our nation is no longer to walk that path, that we are to attempt the restoration an imagined past. Some even invoke the name of Jesus to justify returning to isolation and separation, to a past when only a chosen few will thrive. But that’s not the way to follow Jesus, not the path he is walking.
Tears came to my eyes as we sang the final hymn this morning. What is to become of the long-marginalized folks in my church who are being threatened daily by hurtful, harmful, and hateful posts and X-ecutive orders, often buttressed by hurtful, harmful, and hateful theology? Will churches like ours become flashpoints of resistance simply by virtue of the range of human beings who come together week after week to be fed by the God who loves us all? What will become of the likes of us?
