Dear Saints in Santa Fe, and other far-off places:

Greetings in the name and spirit of Jesus Christ!

What crisis was it today?

Every night after my brothers and I were in bed, mom and dad would sit in the kitchen and ask that very question. The country was coming apart at the seams, and so was Pasadena. The Vietnam war was at its brutal worst, the civil rights movement was splintering following the assassination of Dr. King, Robert Kennedy was killed just a few miles from us, controversy around Angela Davis was driving people from the Presbyterian Church, Pasadena was roiled by racial strife, smog filled the San Gabriel valley so much that walking four blocks home from school left my eyes watering and my lungs wheezing, integration of the schools resulted in a mass exodus leaving behind “for sale” signs on half the houses in my neighborhood, and a major earthquake further rocked our world.

This was my world growing up. Though the details are different I find I am asking the same question my parents asked, “What is the crisis today?”  This is a head-spinning and unprecedented time for me and for many.

And for Jesus. His world was suffocating with the absolute power of Empire. Get out of line and/or stand up to it and you paid the price. A time rife with cruelty, vast disparity between the wealthy and the rest, and oppression of women and children and all those regarded as “the other.”  It was a terrible time to be alive.

So Jesus went up a mountain to pray, Luke 6 tells us. After that he came down, gathered disciples, healed the crowds person by person, and taught us how to live in a world such as this. Scholars call it his Sermon on the Plain.

I wish mom and dad were still here to tell me what they did in the crises they faced. I do know it took a toll on dad, exhausted from standing up to racism and violence and cruelty and he paid the price for doing so. Those years were hard on him, and I hardly saw him.

Perhaps mom and dad knew Jesus’ sermon on the plain by heart, or the good news in Andrew Black’s sermon last week about putting on the armor of God, the fruits of the Spirit, and prayer (if you weren’t there I recommend you go to our website and listen to it).

I do remember dad telling me I should do something else other than ministry. He had a good life, he said, but it had been hard. I didn’t listen thinking I knew better. I found out early on what dad meant. Why keep in the ministry all these years?  Long answer but I’ll keep it short here with one image.

There is an old wooden sign on the grounds of the Presbyterian Camp in Cuba where I and others from this church and my former church in Ohio have visited. Jenny and I were so moved by the words that we had a duplicate sign made to stand watch over our labyrinth:  Translated from Spanish it reads, “These may not be the best of times, but they are our times.”  Yes they are.

So what do we do in these “not the best of times”?  In crises times?  In our time?  We pray. We gather. We heal. We listen to each other. We hear the words of Jesus.

And we act upon them.

Grace and peace,

Harry