A Pastoral Message
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January 6, 2021
By Rev. Cody Sanders
Old Cambridge Baptist Church, Cambridge, MA
What we see taking place in the US Capitol this evening may be shocking, but it is not terribly surprising. We’ve watched the ingredients of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and conspiracy theories spread through social media eventuate in armed protesters entering the Michigan statehouse, the planned kidnapping of a Governor, and now the disruption of democratic processes. I am grateful to hear so many lawmakers from both parties denouncing these acts, but I am also wary of their messages that say something like, 'This is the type of thing that happens in other countries, not in the U.S.'
This does happen here. It is happening here. We’ve watched the recipe taking shape over time. So, yes, shocking to watch, but not terribly surprising to see.
This evening, I came across a quote from James Baldwin I had written down some time ago: 'The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and becomes one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours' (Nobody Knows My Name, p. 13).
The days ahead may bring some stability, we pray. But they must also be days filled with questions directed at ourselves – leading us to a confrontation of our collective life that is filled with wisdom and compassion and the courage to face the truth that this is, indeed, happening here and it is not an aberration. These questions will call us ever further into the ministry peace and justice.
Today is Epiphany – a day to welcome the coming of the emblems of global wisdom to the house of the Prince of Peace. It is a day when we also read the text of Herod’s violence against children, attempting to silence the subversive voice of Jesus from the start (Matt. 2:1-12). It is a day to face in others and in ourselves what has brought us to this place and to discern our way into the days ahead with wisdom and compassion and determined acts of hope, precarious as that hope may be. A 'melancholic hope,' even, that Joseph Winters describes as hope in 'opposition to triumphant, overconfident narratives, tropes, and images.' A hope suggesting 'that a better, less pernicious world depends partly on our heightened capacity to remember, contemplate, and be unsettled by race-inflected violence and suffering.' And a hope born of a wise and compassionate confrontation of what has brought us to this place, and what will lead us through it together.
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