Crossing to the Other Side

Dear Friends,

Our Gospel reading for this Sunday is a very familiar one to most of us: “The Calming of the Storm.” In it, Jesus and his disciples get caught in a storm on the sea of Galilee while Jesus sleeps. Finally, the fearful disciples wake him, and he performs a miracle that calms the seas. ‘Oh, ye of little faith,” he tells them.

But the part of the story that we don’t often recall is how it begins, with Jesus standing at the sea shore, saying to his disciples, “Let’s go across to the other side.” For you and me, that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for the disciples, it would have been a source of tension. The “other side of the sea” represented gentile land, hostile territory, people who were presumed underserving of the love Jesus offered. Setting sail for this “community of others” meant detaching from the familiar and leaning in to everything that felt strange and foreign.

Over the past 10 years, St. John’s and St. Peter’s, two Episcopal churches that had been “other” to each other for nearly a century, have been steadily and faithfully closing the distance between each other. It began with honest conversation, true listening, prayer, worship, song, and table fellowship. This Saturday, we will continue this process as we celebrate Juneteenth in solidarity with one another. Worshiping, praying, telling the truth, marching, and singing while we recognize and embrace the image of God in one another.

According to Emmanuel Levinas, we know God - the sacred - when we encounter the face of the other. People are responsible for each other, face to face. The face of the other demands us to do more and be more for the ones who are not us. Through the face of the other, God invites us into a binding community of love.*

Whether or not you are able to join us this Saturday, I invite you to take some time in the days ahead to prayerfully consider who or what is “the other” to you. What has kept you at a distance, and how might God be calling you to lean into, encounter, and embrace someone or something on “the other side?” What might you need in order to travel the distance?

You just may discover that the “other side" isn’t so strange or foreign, after all.

In Christ,

Amelie+