Mtr Kelli Joyce

Friends in Christ,

I had initially planned to write about today’s Gospel reading - the sick are healed and forgiven! because of faith, not because they were good! - but then I saw today’s reading from Hosea. I intended to skim it and pass it by, and then I saw the verses that stopped me in my tracks: 

“Swearing, lying, and murder,
   and stealing and adultery break out;
   bloodshed follows bloodshed. 
Therefore the land mourns,
   and all who live in it languish;
together with the wild animals
   and the birds of the air,
   even the fish of the sea are perishing. 
Yet let no one contend,
   and let none accuse,
   for with you is my contention, O priest.”

This, in case you were curious, is an extremely sobering thing to read as someone in the last stretch of her priestly ordination process. “Evil multiplies in the nation, the land its people and animals suffer and die as a result... and God says the blame rightly belongs to those who ought to know God’s law best.

In a context like ours, I think that all of us “church folks” are in the role of the priest - and we have far too often failed to rightly proclaim God’s holy and loving commands to the world around us. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge,” God says in Hosea. It’s an uncomfortable indictment. Have I rejected knowledge of what God wants for and from me? I want to say “no.” I think there are places where I must, if I’m honest, say yes. I think we all must.

I want to be well-liked, and to follow the unwritten rules of the social contract about what is polite, and I don’t want to upset people in authority, or people who might be able to help me. I want to be able to pay all my bills, and I want a safe and stable and secure future for my family. There’s nothing wrong with these things, per se, as long as they take second place to being faithful to what God commands of us. But far too often I have seen it prove true that “The more they increased, the more they sinned against me; they changed their glory into shame.”

The world around us is full of greed and fear and selfishness and unkindness toward others, and the Church and her priests have been quiet for far too long. (The Church and her priests have been guilty of the exact same sins against the law of God for far too long.)

Today the word God had for me is a call to reflection and repentance. If you need that call too, I invite you to join with me. If you don’t, I ask that you would pray for me, and for the Church and its ministers and people - that we will all remember the life-giving law of God, and act on it.

In peace,
Mtr. Kelli