Dear Friends:

I write to you in the wake of another difficult week for our country. News of brutal shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, increases in coronavirus breakouts, growing economic uncertainty and the daily crossfire of a polarized presidential campaign weigh heavily on our hearts. On Wednesday night, during our evening discussion of the book, The Color of Compromise, The Truth of the American Church’s complicity in Racism, we wrestled with the hard truths that lie at the root of the injustices that our country has not been able to overcome, and we yearned to know what it is the we can do to finally make a difference, even as we are silenced by the daunting task.

“If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says in our gospel passage for this week, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Some crosses are made of what we take on; some crosses are made of what we let go. Always, the cross that Christ invites us to is the place where our desires and Christ’s desires find their place of meeting, and all that distracts us from that falls away.

Where is this place in your own life? I think this is an important question for each of us to ask ourselves as we attempt to discern how it is that we are to be a part of the changes that will lead to justice and peace for all people, the vow we make in our Baptismal Covenant. How do you and I discern what we will hold onto, what we will claim and fight for, and what we will release? How does this choosing, this discerning, draw us closer to God and one another, and to what God is imagining for the healing of our world?

The answers to these questions may be close at hand, but they may also take time to live into. Each of us will come to our answer in our own time, and you will be in my prayers. In the meantime, I offer you this blessing, written by poet and pastor Jan Richardson:

Blessing in the Shape of a Cross

Press this blessing into your palms—

right, left—

and you will see how it leaves its mark,

how it imprints itself into your skin,

how the lines of it meet and cross

as if signaling you to the treasure

that has been in your grasp all along.

Except that these riches you will count

not by what you hold but by what you release,

by what you lose, by what falls from

your open hands.

In Christ

Amelie+