Amy Grant: The Saint | Quilting in the Black Church |

Friends,

I'm on the road to the Wild Goose Festival and am enjoying traveling with our "comfortable bed on wheels" (we have 19' trailer.) Honestly the bathroom is an important component and the kitchen is nice, too.

-Liz

I want it easy

I want passover. Not the real thing, but the idea. I want to be able to mark my house, and all the bad things of the world will pass over me. I want to live in a bubble, safe from the hard things of the world.

Except of course, that I don't. I read Ursula LaGuin's book The Ones Who Walk Away from the Omelas. This is the story of a perfect place. On reaching maturity each child is introduced to the necessary ingredient for this perfection: a suffering child. Everyone is shocked, pained, by this learning, but most people learn to adapt.

But a few people cannot live with this and walk away.

Indeed one of the affects of the segregation of our society is that few of us have close relationships with people who are much poorer or a different race than we are. Few middle class people know anyone who has spent time in prison. Thus we have people who long for the "good ole days" of the fifties--when Jim Crow laws were destroying black communities. We get advice to stop buying lattes to get ahead financially--when people with full time employment cannot afford a two bedroom apartment.

I want to be clear that I'm not talking about bigots who are intentionally hateful. I am talking about the way that you and I can choose, if we want to, to simply not know what is going on for others for whom life is very hard.

And then we can attach a theology of blessedness that is based on our inability to see. A theology that we have been blessed by God, that God has passed-over us with the bad of the world. And (mostly accidentally) we start to see the poor and the suffering as, like the Egyptian slave-holders, deserving of the horrors that happen to them.

In my community we are struggling to deal with the mental health issues, and resulting violence, of one of our children. Because mental health still has a stigma, we are shocked by it's sudden presence out in the open. And we are afraid. And so our response is to find someone (the parents) to blame, and to stomp our feet and demand that the world return to the illusion of safety that we had before. We want this hard thing to pass-over us, and return us to life before.

But that is not the Passover story. The Passover story is about a suffering people being saved. It is not the people whose lives are just fine that get to mark the lintel. This story is not about those of us who are doing well trusting that God will keep the oppressed and lost from hurting us. As my seminary professor said to us in Hebrew Bible class, most of the time most of us are the Egyptians, not the Hebrews.

What is the good news to the Egyptians?

We believe in a God that loves all, we believe that all people can be redeemed, be transformed, be saved. In this story, what could have saved the Egyptians?

Certainly it starts with giving up slavery. Certainly it includes making sure that everyone in Egypt had enough to eat. What if the neighbors, so generous with the jewelry, had been generous with their solidarity, generous enough to rise up and resist the Pharaoh and his violent ways. What if the army had refused to chase after the escaping slaves?

This story is about an authoritarian government abusing part of its population. What does it take for those that are not abused (or perhaps are only less abused) to refuse to look away from the violence, to see, to care, and to act? If we can find that, we will have found the good news..

How does your congregation engage with people who are struggling? Reply to this email to let me know what's happening. ​
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Amy Grant's song The Saint (3:21).

Faith and Leadership offers a video about Quilting in the Black Church.

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