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Beloved
in Christ,
Last summer,
a bike trip with my daughter through Iowa coincided with a brutal
heat wave. At one point, we found ourselves in the middle of a long
stretch between towns, running low on water. There was only one way
for us to get out of the heat and find water, to keep going. We
eventually reached our destination, exhausted, hot, and full of
complaint. Then, we found an ice cream place, ordered water and the
largest root beer floats they could make, and consumed them greedily
in the glorious air conditioning. It was spiritually transcendent,
and made the hot trip back much, much easier.
In the
Old Testament reading for this Sunday, God’s people are also in the
middle of a long and hot journey in the desert wilderness. There is
no water, they cry out in complaint to Moses, who turns around and
cries out in complaint to God. God directs him to strike a rock with
his staff, and water inconceivably comes running out, no doubt as
sweet as our root beer floats in Iowa.
The
world feels every bit a hot and parched
wilderness right now. The most powerful in our nation and the world
are recklessly enforcing a narrow vision at home, and now in the
already embattled Middle East, as bombs wreak death and destruction
through the region with little sense of how or when it will all end,
and the potential for widening violence alarmingly high.
In such
a moment, we are called to stand in the long biblical tradition of
lament, and cry out to God for justice, for peace, and for healing.
The only way we can get out of the heat and find water is to keep
going, seeking with our whole being the living water that God alone
can offer. And then, fortified by that water, we are to pedal through
the world with the same elated energy as my daughter and I did on our
root beer fueled return trip through Iowa’s scorching cornfields. We
are to pedal calling on our elected leaders to end the state
sanctioned campaigns of violence, around the world, and in our own
streets. We are to pedal in calling for accountability for those who
recklessly disregard the basic constitutional rule of law. We are to
pedal by doing every small thing we can do in front of us with the
greatest imaginable love.
Make no
mistake, beloved, the God we meet around the altar each
and every week can provide the sweetest water out of the
hardest surfaces, and the most impossible circumstances. May our life
together always be about joining God in striking every hard,
calcified, and brittle barrier, until the healing medicine of love
flows unstoppably over the whole parched and painful creation.
Grace
and Peace,
The
Right Reverend Craig Loya
Bishop
X
Episcopal
Church in Minnesota
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