Mtr Taylor Devine

Dear friend,

The news of the tragedies in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton last week have shaken me as I am sure they have, you. I find the news cycle soul-crushing in general, but these events heighten the sense that we have big problems.

In the tragic deaths of innocent people of all ages, we see the idol of power, paired with the demon of racism, making for toxic surroundings in so much of our common life. The tragedies of the past week hold up a mirror to a system we find ourselves in. On a normal day it is easier to say, "I am nice to my neighbors, I am kind to my colleagues, no matter where they come from or what they look like, regardless of whether or not their experience is like my own." But during a week like last week, the mirror is held up again. Somehow in crisis we are more apt to name the demon. In crisis we are more honest with ourselves about our addiction to power, our desire for control over and against. Sadly, as we become numb to gun violence, and the news cycle passes onto the next thing, the mirror fades as well. We return to “those people” thinking - the kind of people who could perpetrate such a tragedy, the kind of people who shouldn’t have been in place a, b or c.

The details in the Acts of the Apostles add a little levity to Morning Prayer, on Wednesday Acts is about Paul arguing publicly - for two years! Today it reports about Paul being yelled at for two hours by an angry mob. What Jesus was up to and what Paul followed through on had loud consequences, calling into question whole systems. Systems of idol worship, and in the Gospel, demons that required the power of Jesus to be removed. The same human problems, idols, demons that affected Paul and the people of his time continue to affect us, continue to have life or death consequences today. And the example we have for the antidote to this is a Savior whose power is made perfect in weakness. How can we teach this to our families? How can we reject a toxic form of power, masculinity, of my way or the highway? Staying woke with all the right knowledge, as it were, will in the end exhaust you. However, being in relationship that changes your understanding of how the world works, will spend you. A different, life-giving kind of exhaustion.

In light of all of the writing that has been done over the past week about the nature of these shootings as an outburst of white supremacy, you may be wondering how to talk about that, a demon that has come to our awareness. I would recommend highly a book called So You Want To Talk About Race, it is a primer and an invitation to take seriously the legacy of race that infiltrates every corner of our common life in America. We must stay awake, yes: awake to our neighbors who are scared, awake to our neighbors whose way of coping with fear is violence and abuse of power. We must name the demons and idols in ourselves and in our communities. In the pattern of the way that Jesus' power was present in his life on earth, the Church is called to be the Body of Christ, and this series of problems we have, these life and death threats to our common life, we will find, are not God-sized problems. The God in Christ to whom we have access through our fellowship and sacraments is bigger than the ways we abuse one another. Let us allow that God-sized love, the love beyond our ability to comprehend, to rend our hearts and push us into relationship that transforms.

In Christ,
Taylor