ENGAGING OUR HISTORY AND GROWING IN FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE: A Bicentennial Reflection
For me, coming to Saint Matthew’s in 2019 represented an opportunity to explore spiritual formation across a whole parish and to engage in a new and wholistic way with the history of slavery in the Episcopal Church. Little did I know, on arriving, how these two desires would dovetail and merge almost completely, both in my ministry with you all and in my personal life of devotion and prayer.
Four years ago we started talking together about our history and how we want to relate to it. I dove into that history, allowing the stories of enslaved persons to resonate within me, in both their suffering and in their at times evident spiritual glory. I also sat with the very painful truth of just how divided Christians can be, professing faith in Jesus as God’s Word, founding this church, and finding ways to justify enslaving people at the same time. Over time, I became convinced that this history would be used by God, for all it’s pain and evidence of sin, to break open our hearts to our need for mercy and to God’s capacity to redeem past sin by making it the ground of new mission. This led to the parish wide Lent Programs in 2022 and 2023: You, Redeemed and then We, Redeemed. These programs explored our personal and parish histories, actively wondering how God could use what has gone wrong our lives, our apparent weaknesses and woundings, to inspire new mission, more love in our world. Dovetailed with these programs were the pilgrimages to Montgomery and other locations, organized by our Associate Rector The Rev. Lisa Frost Phillips and Elizabeth Hays, which led to experiences of spiritual deepening and conversion unlike anything I have ever seen in parish life.
Out of all this, look what God has done with us:
We have grown in humility as we have faced the simple fact of how divided against itself the human soul can be, our mouths professing faith in Christ and our lives professing something else. We are newly aware of how complicated we are, how prone to dishonesty with ourselves, how in need of God.
We have grown in reverence for the enslaved women and men — knowing the tragedies in their lives, yes, but also catching glimpses of their spiritual power and their closenesses to Jesus who raises up the last to be first. As an example, think of the slaves at Stagville risking imprisonment and beatings when they snuck out at night to worship Jesus together, so great was their need for devotion and sharing their faith.
We have grown in our desire to collaborate in social justice and celebrate God with an array of historically black churches. We are discovering Gospel values in such collaboration and having a lived experience of Beloved Community when divided people come together because of Jesus.
We have grown in our faith in a God who does not stand aloof from history and invites us to a similar aloofness, but who engages with us in history now to redeem what has been wrong and strengthen and grow what is right. This historically-engaged and active God, gathering and calling and inspiring a people to be his own, is precisely the Biblical God of the Hebrews and of Jesus Christ. We discover that we can co-operate with God’s working in our place in time and that our lives come into their own when we do so.
To put it succinctly: by engaging our history we have clarified our faith in the God of Jesus Christ, a God who acts in our lives, redeeming and healing. We have also enlivened our Christian hope in God’s final reconciliation of all people in the lived experience now of Beloved Community. Finally we have been enriched with Christian Love as we collaborate and celebrate life with communities from which we were formerly divided. Blessed may God be for all this growth, for all this life, for all these blessings!
The last step, a step already taken by many in the parish, results from all of the above. It’s about personal dedicated lives of daily prayer. If God does in fact call us to co-operate with God, redeeming history and building Beloved Community, and if we recognize also how prone we are to dishonesty with ourselves, to sin and inner dividedness, and as we witness in historically black churches wellsprings of faith, devotion, and joy in God’s eternal promise, then it would only be natural that we would drawn ourselves to active daily lives of prayer. We would naturally be drawn to a daily practice of laying our lives before God as they are, good and bad, knowing that God can and does act through it all. We would giving thanks for God’s protection and mercy in our daily lives. We would lean on God’s promise of eternal life well-making, and we would ask for God’s direction and inspiration for the day ahead.