Repairers of the Breach
Luke 4:14-21; Isaiah 59:1-12
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
June 12, 2022
“No more thoughts and prayers!” With each horrifying act of gun violence, the cries grow louder. Thoughts and prayers, devoid of action, are not only useless; they are hypocritical and offensive—a slap in the face of people who are grieving.
“No more thoughts and prayers!” The cry gives me pause. Thoughts and prayers—that’s what we do when we gather as a church. Thoughts and prayers—that’s my specialty as a pastor. I think a lot about what gives our lives meaning. I pray for and with the people I love. “No more thoughts and prayers.” The cry cuts deep, challenging me to ask what I am doing and why.
In much the same way, our reading from Isaiah 58 cuts deep. Isaiah hears God calling him to proclaim God’s displeasure—God’s disgust—with the people’s worship. Ouch! I spend hours every week planning worship—rituals and practices, thoughts and prayers to enable us to experience the presence of God. Do all these efforts disgust God?
I hope not. It’s not worship itself that God rails against in Isaiah; it is worship that ignores God’s call to love our neighbors through acts of compassion and justice. It is not thoughts and prayers that are the problem in our society; it is thoughts and prayers that do not inspire action. Worship and thoughts and prayers are good—I would say essential. And we are challenged, always and especially in these days, to ask ourselves whether they lead us to more faithful living.
This challenge, contemporary and ancient, provides the impetus for the Anti-Racism commitments we voted at a congregational meeting on April 24, 2021. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in June 2020, a group of community leaders, gathered by Rev. Dr. J. Anthony Lloyd of Greater Framingham Community Church, began meeting virtually. Our goal, in Rev. Lloyd’s words, was to “move the needle” toward racial justice in Framingham. It was a remarkable group—faith leaders, business owners, educators, non-profits, government officials. As months wore on, we realized how easy it would be to keep meeting and never actually accomplish anything. We challenged ourselves to go back to our various organizations and ask them to make commitments, in order to hold ourselves and each other accountable.
I brought the idea to the Justice and Love in Action Team, otherwise known as the Board of Wider Missions. The group took on the challenge, making it our own, bringing it to congregational gatherings and ultimately to a vote. We agreed that, each year, we would assess how we are doing and what our next steps might be. Members of the Justice and Love in Action team will lead us in that conversation at our congregational meeting this afternoon.
In the meantime, I will share a few of my own reflections. One commitment we made was to develop a comprehensive understanding of the layers of racism—to educate ourselves. As we have tried to do so, I have been overwhelmed by how deeply embedded racism is in our psyches, our culture, and our institutions. Isaiah’s language of “breach” rings true. For centuries, there has been breach after breach after breach, creating a chasm of racism that runs through our society. The chasm is deep and wide, with steep walls and treacherous terrain. The chasm is made deeper and wider by an economic divide that goes back to wealth built on slave labor, by a justice system that stop and frisks, incarcerates and kills people of color at a disproportionate rate, by denial of the right to vote, by unconscious assumptions and explicit efforts to hold on to power. It is, most of all, a chasm created by breach of trust.
There are bridges that have been constructed across the chasm—suspension bridges relying on careful engineering and constant tension, land bridges built up over centuries of courageous people working together–forming deep friendships, working for civil rights, awakening new awareness. The bridges are real. Still, the chasm—the breach—is daunting.
This image shapes how I approach the commitments we have made, especially the one that is closest to my heart. Edwards Church, we voted, commits to assessing and removing barriers to becoming a more racially inclusive church. I yearn for our congregation to reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of Framingham. And as I stand gazing over that deep chasm, created from centuries of breach of trust in our society, I am reminded that a friendly invitation to our neighbors, while good and important, is not enough. To become that multi-racial, genuinely diverse community we yearn to be, we need to start by restoring trust, or perhaps building trust from the ground up. In many ways, that is what we have been working toward these last few years.
One of the most important ways we build trust is by showing up for our neighbors—not swooping in to fix things as though we have all the answers, but being present, listening, caring, offering our skill and resources and privilege without having to be in control. Some of our members have been active in Community Vibes, a local grass-roots group that gathers people from different backgrounds to talk about things that matter. They are the sponsors of this Saturday’s Juneteenth Festival. Several members of our church have joined FREE—Framingham Families for Racial Equity in Education–, a group founded by parents of students of color. As we learned about the issues, we realized one contribution we could make is to speak at the public comment time at school committee meetings. Five of us have offered our two-minutes-worth, urging the committee to prioritize addressing the emotional distress, hate speech and violence plaguing our schools.
In my role as pastor, I have made it a priority to show up for those monthly Zoom meetings. In one of the meetings, the idea for Open Spirit and Jewish Family Services to create a Training Active Bystanders hub emerged. Two of the people trained to be trainers were leaders in the Equity, Diversity, and Community Engagement department of the Framingham Public Schools.
I will never forget the day I was asked by one of them to co-lead Active Bystander Training for their department. The group was mostly young people of color, who do hands-on work to make our school system one where each student can thrive. Early in the training, it became clear this group did not need to learn how to speak up when they saw harm; they do it all the time. What they needed was someone to listen to them, honor their struggles and invite them to care for themselves. Once we abandoned the curriculum, I could feel trust beginning to build.
A few weeks ago, I ended up sitting in a circle with that same group of people, listening as they patted Jeannie and processed what the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde had stirred for them. Acutely aware of the chasm dug by centuries of breach of trust, I was so honored that they dared to trust me.
Showing up. Being consistent. Listening. Caring. Offering our gifts and skills and presence without trying to control the agenda. I picture a land bridge slowly rising from deep in that chasm—growing shovel-ful by shovel-ful.
Where we put our bodies matters. How we use our resources also matters. The Justice and Love in Action team met last year with a consultant who helps groups think about how to use our resources in anti-racist ways, in ways that support racial justice, equity and community. She challenged us to pay attention both to the good work that an organization does and also to who leads the group. Who founded the organization? Who is on the board? How do their staffing patterns reflect the values they profess?
The conversation has shaped how we think about giving. At the heart of our mission giving has always been relationships—focusing on organizations that our members are already connected with and organizations with whom we can build meaningful partnerships. Expanding our giving to include more organizations founded and led by people of color means expanding our relationships. It comes back to showing up, listening, caring, and building trust.
Last fall, at a Transition Framingham Garden Tour, Mary Memmott met Safiyat Hamiss, an African-American woman who runs a small business called Tasty Harvest Kitchen Gardens. She helps people design, build, and maintain their own vegetable gardens. As Safiyat and Mary talked, an idea took shape. In previous years, Mary had worked with kids at Hoops and Homework to plant and care for the raised garden beds Grace Church had built there. She knew she didn’t have time this year. So she talked with Hoops and Homework and Pelham Recreation Center, with Open Spirit and with Safiyat. A new project was born: Open Spirit’s Nourishing Gardens Project, which supports Safiyat as she works with kids to empower them to grow their own food. Our special offering in April helped launch this new project.
A month later, in the aftermath of the racist mass shooting in the Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, Justice and Love in Action pondered how we could be in solidarity with the people of that predominantly African-American community. We learned about Buffalo Freedom Gardens Initiative, a program of Grassroots Gardens of Western New York. This initiative emerged several years ago in response to the “food desert” in that area, a problem that was highlighted when the only supermarket closed after the shooting. Buffalo Freedom Gardens provides raised beds, soil, seedlings, gardening tools and mentoring to enable people to grow their own food. This is the group we are supporting in our June special offering.
A land bridge, built of small acts of trust, is beginning to take shape in my imaginings of this daunting chasm. Maybe the bridge is more than just a way to cross the chasm. Maybe the soil we are slowly shoveling onto the bridge is rich enough to support a garden—a watered garden like the one we see on our altar scape, a watered garden like the promise of Isaiah’s poetry, a garden watered by love, that begins to repair the centuries of breach of trust. Maybe, along with our friends from Community Vibes and FFREE, from Framingham Public Schools and Jewish Family Services, from Tasty Harvest and Buffalo Freedom Gardens, we will be called repairers of the breach.
The anti-racism commitments we made last year are challenging ones, and they have spurred us to think deeply and find new ways act faithfully as a community. How do these commitments spur you to think and act? This week, I invite you to reflect on what you are doing and on what anti-racism commitments you can make. Next Sunday, Juneteenth, we will collect those commitments as part of our offering and lift them up. There will be high-tech and low-tech ways to make your offering—a link in the weekly email, and little pieces of paper to write on.
Friends, we look out at a breach, a daunting chasm of racism that tears apart our society. We look more closely and see land bridges that have arisen and are rising up, thanks to people, over the centuries, who have worked faithfully and persistently to build trust. We give thanks that we too can be repairers of the breach. Amen.