Love Speech

There is a disturbance in the force. People dying. Gun violence. So much talk about hate and hate speech and hate-inspired action. 

I drove to church this morning feeling heavy. I would need to climb into the pulpit on a Sunday morning following another Saturday shooting. Two of them, actually. We would be sharing prayer and peace and Holy Communion, blessing and sending a young woman off to college, and then gathering for a meal and discussion around the work we've been doing together which is coming to a close. The work I do with congregations in pastoral transition looks at who they've become and who they are becoming, and the kinds of leadership needs they need to manifest the vision they have for their communal life. 

I arrived at church and moved through my preparation time. There was a conversational Spanish class going on in the chapel. People gathering to learn how to speak with neighbors who might come to the church but not speak the language. The idea took form in our council meeting a few months ago when one of our leaders lamented a hospitality gathering the month before and not being able to speak with the father and son who walked in to join us for a meal. Shortly afterward, four of our members got together and created the class. Ten people regularly attend. They've produced a help sheet with phrases people in church might like to be able to say to welcome and bless and share the peace with someone who is Spanish-speaking. I've noticed the papers disappearing off the table and have made more copies.

Our church is in the most diverse zip code in the city of Philadelphia and in the state of Pennsylvania. The neighborhood is a vibrant community of current immigrants and German immigrants who came in the last mass wave of immigration to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  At that time, people spoke against European immigrants when they came en masse much the way some people today disparage immigrant populations. 

Some of the same people whose families found a welcome here are speaking against those who now seek refuge, freedom, prosperity -- a new life here.

I did not preach what I had prepared this week in anticipation of today's service. Instead I began --  "I look out into this congregation and see all of you -- who look so different from each other, all the different skin colors and cultures and languages and ancestries, and I feel so blessed to serve in a community that is so diverse. But others might look out upon this congregation and not see the beauty that I see. The richness. Might not feel as blessed as I do."

We talked frankly about what is going on, how powerless we feel, how powerful we actually are, and what might be possible when we step more fully into the situations we'd rather turn away from. We talked about the ways that the most outrageous behaviors of Christians are the ones that get noticed and talked about and how we in mainstream Christianity need to be more visible with compassion and peacemaking.

How our love speech has to be louder than the hate speech. 

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.