Dear Friends of Harvard-Epworth,

On Sunday morning during worship we will remember the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., the drum major for justice, the champion of peace, civil rights, and economic equity.

Then, on Monday, we will witness what Sojourner’s editor Adam Russel Taylor called a “juxtaposition . . hard to ignore.” The nation will honor Dr. King with a national holiday.  And the same day we will witness the second oath of office taken by a man who seems to embody the diametric opposite of King’s legacy.  I pray that the President-elect’s second term will show more affinity to the ideals of the Gospel and to Dr. King’s vision of Beloved Community, his recent language about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” does not leave me optimistic.

But still I am hopeful.

God’s people have been in places like this before, and we can learn from Scripture how we might be called to respond in our own time. History may not repeat itself, but as psychoanalyst Theodor Reik observed, “It rhymes.”

587 BCE was a most traumatic year in Jerusalem’s history. Babylon destroyed the city and God’s Temple and much of the population sent into exile. But, miraculously, a half-century later, the exiles returned, tasked with figuring out what had gone wrong, and how to start again.  A priest/scribe named Ezra was appointed by the Persian king to lead the building project. He also decided that the former exiles’ new start was to begin with a national, religious, and racial cleansing. A wall was built.  Jewish men who had married foreign wives were ordered to divorce them and disown their children, and send them back to Babylon. Families were separated.  The chauvinism and anti-foreign sentiment is all very painful to modern readers to hear (take a look at Ezra 9 for a bitter example) but it was the dominant voice of those in power in Jerusalem for a time.

But it was not the only voice. Alternative voices– voices of love, justice and inclusion were also crying out at this time.  The prophet we call Second Isaiah shared an alternative vision for Jerusalem, not as a walled-in fortress of ethnic purity, but as a “Light to the Nations,” showing by its justice, mercy, and righteousness how people can live in right relationship with God, each other and the earth.  A brave author penned the Book of Jonah as a subtle, humorous, yet pointed critique of Ezra’s policies, and another wrote the Book of Ruth, where the titular heroine is a Moabite, Israel & Judah’s historic enemy. These were minority voices, but they better reflected God’s will and way than the dominant voice of fear and isolation.

As modern people of faith, we can learn from these ancient texts about how to live, speak, and witness as an inclusive, welcoming, justice-seeking people, even when it feels our voices are in the minority.

That is where my hope comes from.

I invite you to come and explore these minority voices of inclusion at the  Wednesday Night Study and Spirit Class at 7:00 pm.  On January 29 we’ll look at the Book of Ruth.  On February 12, we’ll explore the Book of Jonah.  (details and Zoom link below)

And perhaps we’ll learn from these ancient voices of justice how to find our own voice for just such a time as this.

Shalom, Salaam, Peace,

Pastor Mitch