Mount Shoop notes how oblivious we are to the fact that we are not inclusive within many white churches.
I assert that this aversion and obliviousness are intimately linked to our disease with our own skin, our own bodies. Even when our doctrines, our sacred stories, and our mission statements describe our hope for and commitment to inclusion, our embodied practices and gathered communities speak of our fear of moral chaos and loss of identity. We camouflage our lack of trust in God with who we say that we are. We may unconsciously reject those who are outside the range of our comfort zones even when we believe ourselves to be hospitable to difference. When encounters with 'others' stir up subdermal fears of not being who or what we think we are, we repel them without having to say a word. Having to face the fragments of our own bodies is a deeply repulsive prospect for many of us. When someone intersects with us who embodies the jarring truth that there is contradiction, complexity, and ambiguity in human embodied existence we fear the chaos they may bring with them. Fear wounds us as the Body of Christ. It trivializes who we are and how the future becomes.
I find it important that we continue to remind ourselves that we are indeed 'simultaneously saint and sinner.' This is not to be an excuse for what we do and what we do not do when it comes to being a people who resist opening up our communities. Rather, it is a good way to start something new - to face fears - to realize that we do not have everything. There is always the need to look at the day and begin to ask who we are and what makes us who we are. When our vision of the Reign of God is a part of who we are, we are not a people who settle for the disease of the ways things are and the fear that stokes that fire. We are a people meant to constantly face our fears and begin to open door and move in and out so that more and more people will become a part of our day. The more people we entertain - even when they are so different from us we are confused - the more likely it is that we are really entertaining angels. But then, angels do scare folks.
Connection: Our future has no chance to change if we keep the doors closed and we settle for what we know and how we like to feel. The future expands when God's Spirit unsettles us. It is there that we begin to be healed.
As you lead us through the wilderness of our fears, O God, we do not know where we will end up - and that is enough to pull us back into the lives we like to create for ourselves. Lead us and guide us into new life even as we fear each step. Amen.
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