We are a Christian community practicing discipleship as we worship, learn and serve.
Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace. - Martin Luther
This Sunday, February 19th, CtK's Adult Forum will continue conversation around our calling to confront racism and celebrate diversity in culture and ethnicity. So far the conversations have been engaging and thought-provoking.
If you're planning to participate, here are a few links which will help you get ready:
Bishop Eaton’s statement on the shooting in Charleston
June 18, 2015
It has been a long season of disquiet in our country. From Ferguson to Baltimore, simmering racial tensions have boiled over into violence. But this … the fatal shooting of nine African Americans in a church is a stark, raw manifestation of the sin that is racism. The church was desecrated. The people of that congregation were desecrated.
The aspiration voiced in the Pledge of Allegiance that we are “one nation under God” was desecrated.
Mother Emanuel AME’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was a graduate of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, as was the Rev. Daniel Simmons, associate pastor at Mother Emanuel. The suspected shooter is a member of an ELCA congregation. All of a sudden and for all of us, this is an intensely personal tragedy. One of our own is alleged to have shot and killed two who adopted us as their own.
We might say that this was an isolated act by a deeply disturbed man. But we know that is not the whole truth. It is not an isolated event. And even if the shooter was unstable, the framework upon which he built his vision of race is not. Racism is a fact in American culture. Denial and avoidance of this fact are deadly. The Rev. Mr. Pinckney leaves a wife and children. The other eight victims leave grieving families. The family of the suspected killer and two congregations are broken. When will this end?
The nine dead in Charleston are not the first innocent victims killed by violence. Our only hope rests in the innocent One, who was violently executed on Good Friday. Emmanuel, God with us, carried our grief and sorrow – the grief and sorrow of Mother Emanuel AME church – and he was wounded for our transgressions – the deadly sin of racism.
I urge all of us to spend a day in repentance and mourning. And then we need to get to work. Each of us and all of us need to examine ourselves, our church and our communities. We need to be honest about the reality of racism within us and around us. We need to talk and we need to listen, but we also need to act. No stereotype or racial slur is justified. Speak out against inequity. Look with newly opened eyes at the many subtle and overt ways that we and our communities see people of color as being of less worth. Above all pray – for insight, for forgiveness, for courage.
Kyrie Eleison.
The Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton Presiding Bishop Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
Every other Friday morning, I meet with a small group of folks (all women, currently, but there's no reason it must stay that way) at Clark's Fork, here in Bozeman. Most of us order some kind of breakfast, and I think everyone has coffee or tea. We tend not to arrive all at once - a 7:00am start time means we trickle in.
While we gather, we check in on each other's lives, and sometimes jump start conversation of the chapter or two we've read for the morning's discussion. More often than not, once everyone is there we turn to "highs and lows" before we dig in to formal discussion of the text: we go around the table and each person shares a high point and low point of her life since we last met. And I've noticed a change in our lows over recent months: while they are still sometimes quite personal, it's no longer an anomaly for someone's lows to consist largely of what she's heard on the news - natural disasters, political machinations, wars and the violence of extremist groups, racially motivated hatred. It's all a lot. Maybe even too much, sometimes.
Our tendency to be "plugged in" most of the time probably doesn't help. This morning one of my friends said that she didn't listen to the radio on her way to small group, so that she wouldn't start the day depressed by the news. And I wonder if a general sense of powerlessness, and of not understanding those who think about and experience life so differently from how we do, contributes, too.
In order to learn from someone with a radically different life experience and history, and to have some likely tough conversations about race and faith (and their interweaving in American history), the Friday morning small group is going to read The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone. YOU are invited to join the conversation. The first conversation, on the introduction and first chapter, will be Friday, April 10th, at 7:00am at Clark's Fork.
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