This excerpt from my sermon last Sunday is offered for your meditation this week, and I invite your response. Contact me at cssmythe@charter.net.
In Christ,
Fr. Colville Smythe
People of faith are challenged to deepen their understanding of how God works in the world. We deepen our understanding in prayer, we do it by our engagement with others, by our importunity, our urgency, our tenacity—and especially by our compassion! Those engagements develop our understanding of how God is involved with this world he has created and, sometimes,
they change our minds.
One hundred years after the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment, some Episcopal churches in the San Gabriel Valley were still telling people of color that they weren’t welcome to worship in our churches. Today we feel quite differently: we rejoice in the racial diversity of our congregation, and we gladly welcome all who come to us, seeking God here. And yet, the violence in Charlottesville brings home to us that racism is repugnant to God and to us,
and not all minds have changed. We cannot presume that our nation is cured of racism, because it isn’t. We may be shocked to realize that we must speak up and affirm our values. Every one of us is going to have to learn to use our own voice to stand up for what we believe, and to say what is right. We are going to have to be ready to account for how our feelings and our thinking are changing, and how what we believe today brings us more in line with God’s big picture for the human family.
The lessons appointed for August 27, 2017 are here.
Read “The Lead” from Episcopal Cafe.
The recent edition of Episcopal News from the Diocese of L.A..
Articles from the national Episcopal News Service.
Recent news about Saint Edmund, Saxon King here.
To view an interactive map of Britain’s medieval castles, click here.
