Social Sins (Mid-week Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Social Sins 

June 24, 2015

Today is the feast day commemorating the birth of St. John the Baptist, who took a common repeated Jewish ritual of purification—washing the body by immersion—and made it a symbol of turning around and coming close to God.   Today is chosen for this feast because according to St. Luke, John’s mother became pregnant with him six months before Mary conceived Jesus: today is six months before Christmas Eve. 

John preached a rigorous social ethic of justice and fairness: “the one with two coats should share with the person who has none; the one with food should do likewise… Tax collectors should not line their own pockets by extorting more than the established tax rate; … soldiers should never violently rob anyone or use false accusations to do the same thing, and should be content with their wages” (Luke 3:10-14).  Fairness and compassion were the hallmarks of John’s ethic.   Jesus was so attracted by this preaching that he asked for baptism by John. 

In reaction to last week’s murders at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, a national discussion is heating up in the country about race and what one critic calls (rightly, to my mind) our “worship of Moloch, the demon of gun violence.”   These are sins John would condemn, and we all share in them to the degree that we tolerate them in our common life. 

And so I thought of Malcolm Boyd, whose 1965 Are You Running With Me, Jesus includes the following prayer of repentance: 

God:

Take fire and burn away our guilt and our lying hypocrisies.

Take water and wash away our brothers’ and sisters’ blood which we have caused to be shed.

Take hot sunlight and dry the tears of those we have hurt, and heal their wounded souls, minds, and bodies.

Take love and root it in our hearts, so that community may grow, transforming the dry desert of our prejudices and hatreds.

Take our imperfect prayers and purify them, so that we mean what we pray and are prepared to give ourselves to you along with our words.

Amen

Grace and Peace,   Fr. Tony+