Words of Faith: How will we be agents of God’s justice?

Pastor's chapel time at pre-school with 4 year olds as I am reading a story about love ("I Love You the Purplest"):

(hand waving) "Pastor Joanne! Pastor Joanne!" yes? "do you know that you have a hole in your shoe?"

Well, yes (sigh.)

(hand waving) "Pastor Joanne! Pastor Joanne!" yes? "how do babies get out of their mothers' bellies? Do they come out of their mouths like throw up?"

I love that these kids are so comfortable with me (well, sometimes I wish they weren’t quite so comfortable…) as we learn together.

My most frequent refrain with them, and with the children of our congregation, is, “There’s nothing you can do to make God love you more, and there’s nothing you can do to make God love you less.” I deeply believe that statement in my head, even though it is difficult to believe it in my heart, at times. Hard to believe about myself, but if I’m being honest, really hard to believe it about some other people.

But believe it, I do. We are all God’s creation, and God loves that which God has created. We are all children of God and part of God’s family. Just like human families, there are people who sometimes forget their identity with their family, and sometimes don’t act as if they are loved, or part of a family, but that doesn’t make them less so. As a matter of fact, I think that disconnection from family- whether by death or by choice, is one of the saddest conditions of life.

For Christians, our identity as children of God is confirmed in our baptism. For those of us who participate in infant baptism, the rite is one where God claims the child as God’s own, even as the parents relinquish whatever “ownership” they might claim. Although my tradition doesn’t christen (we say that ships are christened, babies are baptized,) we do gladly affirm their given names, declaring that they are children of God, and that their last name becomes “Christian,” as they are welcomed into the family of Christ.

Although there are a lot of folks these days seeming to declare who is in and who is outside the circle of God’s love, that is not our role. It is God’s alone, and God affirms it to us. I saw the movie Moonlight this week- such a quiet, powerful movie… and there was a question about calling people names. Juan, the father figure, said to Chiron, “You get to decide what people call you.” You get to decide who and what you are. In that conversation, he offered affirmation to Chiron that God had made him who he was… black, gay… and while that would not be an easy road, he should not be ashamed to be on that road.

There is nothing you can do to make God love you more. There is nothing you can do to make God love you less.

And understanding that to be true can lead us to self-acceptance, and loving ourselves as God loves us, which leads us to that difficult place of loving our neighbors as ourselves.

Once we realize that we are children of God, we have ot acknowledge that so is everyone else. It is easy to say. But how does that get lived out?

We live in a country that appears to have a bias against Muslims, but I believe in what a meme I saw this week says, “if you can tell the difference between Christianity and the Ku Klux Klan, you can tell the difference between Muslims and ISIS.” We live in a country where there is an historic bias against people of color. We live in a country where there is bias against LGBT people, and some of those biases are being legislated.

My own experience as a clergywoman, where I experienced a lot of bias (especially early on,) forced me to look at my own biases against other people.

How will we be agents of God’s justice so that people won’t be afraid to live in their own skins, whether Chiron, the black gay man in Moonlight? How do we affirm for other people that there is nothing they can do to make God love them more, and nothing they can do to make God love them less?

How will we be agents of God’s justice demanding that barriers to the worth and dignity of all people be brought down so that all might know God’s love?

The challenge of our Lenten journey at Grace, and I invite you to join us, is to move in the direction of bringing the Good News of God’s love… to all God’s children.

This story was originally published March 22, 2017 at 7:48 PM with the headline "Words of Faith: How will we be agents of God’s justice?."