Pastor’s Corner – April 14, 2024
I want to share with you two prayers from a book I highly recommend, Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley. She wrote this book to create a safe spiritual space in the midst of ongoing national racial violence, anti-Black rhetoric in many Christian spaces, traumas from white Christian nationalism and religious homophobia. This book is a work of healing and empowerment, centering Black emotion, Black memory, and Black body; the question of what it means to be human in a world of both beauty and pain. May these prayers deepen our faith during Easter season.
God who rose,
Resurrect us. We’ve belonged to communities, workplaces, and spiritual spaces that have demanded our death far more than they ever advocated for our life. They ask us to “die to self,” the ambiguity of the command like grabbing a knife by its blade. No longer will we mirror the hand of neglect that the world uses daily. Let joy find us today. Remind us that any spirituality which is always death, never resurrection, is a farce. What liberation we taste today, may we crave in full as we refuse to wander back to the chains that once held us. May joy find us. Not a joy absent of story or sorrow, but a joy whose allegiance is to memory. A joy that is not quick to forget the agony of Good Friday or dismiss the doubt of Silent Saturday. May we remember and rise to meet hope nonetheless, knowing our liberation is whispering up at us from its empty grave. Amen.
God of shalom
Here we are dangling one another from the precipice without care or concern for our collective fate. We have lost sight of our own faces, risking our humanity in favor of supremacy. Guide us away from the edge of our undoing. Show us what it means to be people of deep and abiding reverence for the beauty and connectedness of everything everywhere. Train us out of habits of degradation and artifice–incessantly competing to be worth more, to be loved more. Remind us that we don’t need to exalt humanity over any other piece of creation in order to be worth something. Keep us from the delusion of our dominion over earth, sky, or star. We are no greater. Remind us that the dust beneath us transcends our own humble existence, and let our hardened exteriors soften in the presence of safety. May any honor we’ve withheld from one another be doubled in the presence of reparation and forgiveness. We won’t get free alone. Keep us human. Amen.
Pastor Dae