Hope for the New Year!

Christmas presents to us an opportunity afresh to be born within the Good News - that God entered the world as a baby to reset what has been broken. Upside-down divine logic sends God to live and die as one of God's own creations in order to save and redeem them. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus's first act of public ministry is to proclaim that his mission is to "bring good news to the poor, proclaim liberty to the captive, sight to the blind, release those imprisoned, and proclaim the time of God's favor." This time of God's favor, a year of jubilee, was not something Jesus made up but was a known concept to the hearers of Jesus's teaching. The idea of a jubilee year comes from Leviticus, a Hebrew Bible book of laws and regulations. At the end of seven seven-year cycles (7x7=49), the fiftieth year is proclaimed to be the year the slaves are sent home again to their families, captured properties turned over to their original owners, and all debts forgiven. Jubilee makes space for all of us to experience life-giving renewal in our ordinary, day-to-day lives.

I am so longing for a jubilee year. I long for our world to moved to act against injustice in any form. I long for those I love and care for who are imprisoned (literally and metaphorically) to be free. For many of my millennial peers who are ensnared by mountains of debt and for end-of-career age people unable to retire because of debt, I long for debt to not be the measure by which we are forced to order our days. I know I'm not alone in these longings. I hear many in our congregation express specific anxieties and general worries about the future.

Metropolitan Community Churches is entering the fiftieth year of ministry as a denomination, and I pray that as a church body rooted in the values of salvation, community, and Christian social action that we take seriously what jubilee might mean for us. This Sunday's sermon will discuss our shared history and explore what jubilee might mean for us as individuals and church community. I pray we can join together to proclaim next year as the year of the Lord's favor and feel the security and hope that Christmas assures us.

Blessings,

Tori Jameson

Reflections on September 11

September eleventh, sixteen years ago, was the first day I can recall where I could see and feel everything I thought about life shift. I was in tenth grade, in a civics class, when the first tower was hit and I watched the rest unfold live on CNN. 

On Monday, I spoke with a group of students from Ferguson Middle about that day, and what they thought had changed about life in this country since. They honed in on security and, speaking from their life experiences in the last three years, the tendency of police to escalate existing tensions into violence. 

The conversation continued like this: That terrible day exposed the racism and fear that already was present in our nation. Then, in the name of fighting terrorism at home, this newly unfettered racism fed suspicion and profiling of persons with brown and black skin, and doubly so persons with covered hair and long beards. Further influenced by real fear, some liberties were given over to the siren song of increased security. Therefore, guided to find terror at home and empowered to root it out of local schools and in our neighborhoods, we found what we were taught we ought to seek. And if this state of fear hasn't discovered much in the way of backyard terror training camps, it has - in the last decade and half - found targets in black young men with pockets of skittles or walking a few too many steps off the sidewalk and in protesters who raise questions about the state. 

That's where the conversation ended for the kids - and many in our church community, workplaces and neighborhoods - because of the experience of being marked simply by the skin they walk around in and the neighborhoods their houses occupy. 

At the time I write this, the city sits on edge, waiting for release of the Stockley verdict. No matter what the outcome is, activists of many stripes are preparing for action and the state is preparing a response. 

Restoration, our theme in September, does not mean in this context a return to a Mayberry-esque unity under the banner of patriotism, but rather a renewal of the gospel call that God is for all of us. The kin-dom of God is a kin-dom grounded in God's inclusive love that excludes no one. 

Inclusive love is grounded not in inaction but an active pursuit of a community where everyone, and especially those whose experiences inform a sense of marginalization, has a safe place to belong, grow and be loved. May restoration, a return to following the movement of Spirit, guide you this week into doing the work of enacting inclusive love, be that in voice in the streets or in a choir, painting rocks or other artistic means, in your home over a shared meal, and the myriad other ways you are being called to live out this gospel.