Will Harron serves as an Emmaus Fellow at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Dorchester. On September 6, clergy and parishioners in many different denominations all across the US preached and prayed about racial reconciliation in solidarity with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Below is a excerpt from his sermon, the full version is available in audio here.
This world cries out for us to listen - and to answer. To answer - by addressing the places, the people that cry out - by healing the wounds, by groaning and sighing our own confessions and repentance, and by speaking the truth, in love, to all around us - that we are all worthy of God's love, and that we are all capable of sharing that love with those around us - just as Jesus was able to heal Jew and Greek in his time, we are called to be partners in love with those who are different from us - as a united body of Christ, addressing our love most specifically and abundantly towards the least among us - the poor, the oppressed, the ones we see every day in our neighborhoods and all around us.
That is our call to Christian love, that is God's cry to open our ears to the world's great need - To listen to those who need are calling to us, who are crying to us - and to help others to hear them also. Because it is they we are called to be with in love - those who challenge our idea of who it is to heal, how it is safe to love, what is proper to belong to. The cry of the refugee. The wails of mothers whose children were killed by police. The groaning of the hungry, here in our own communities.
To hear, truly hear and listen - to acknowledge the sacred humanity present in those voices - can only change our hearts, expand our own ability to heal, and bring us into deeper communion with the Christ present in all of us.
And it is only through listening, through acknowledging, to understanding what is happening all around us - our own complicity with it, and God's call to change, listening to the voice challenging us and hearing it in love - that we, together, in the love of Christ, can set ourselves to the work of God's beloved community.
(Click this audio link to listen to the rest of his sermon.)