On Earth as it is in Heaven
On Earth as it is in Heaven
Beloved in Christ,
Some of you have seen this reflection that I posted on social media on Saturday morning, but, in this moment of breakneck news cycles, my own heart needs reminding and re-tethering to the truth of God's unending and immovable love each and every day.
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On Saturday morning in Minnesota, we woke up to the chilling news that two of our state legislators had been shot in their homes by someone impersonating a law enforcement officer. House Speaker emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband were both killed in the attack. The condition of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife is not fully known as of this writing.
This news comes against the backdrop in recent weeks of immigration raids being carried out by militarized law enforcement, and celebrated with cruel delight by government officials, the military being deployed in Los Angeles against U.S. citizens, to stop protests in that city, and on a day when the President of the United States has threatened to meet any protestors present at a military parade in the capitol with “heavy force.” The tensions we have lived with for many years now are boiling over to new levels. Those inclined to the kind of murderous violence that occurred in Minnesota today are surrounded by a national climate that encourages those impulses.
Human communities, from congregations to countries, always take on the energy of their leaders. That’s true regardless of how popular the leader might be. The President of the United States, and the senior members of his administration, have, for nearly six months now, led with a chaotic, intentionally provocative, and vindictive energy against perceived critics and enemies, and that is eroding the foundations of our common life and order, and empowering anyone inclined to that same vindictive violence.
As Christians, we proclaim as Lord the one who met a murderous and vindictive empire, not with retributive or self-protective violence, but with immovable love. That love, though he died for it, was not a passive resignation to evil, but a refusal to engage it on its own terms.
As followers of the Lord of immovable love, his posture in the face of the empire of his day must be ours today. We, like Jesus, cannot remain silent in the face of the multivalent attacks on basic human dignity and society we are experiencing. Many of us will participate today in protests around the state and the nation. We must continue to show up, speak up, and witness to a better way than what the American empire offers in this moment.
But we must also, like so many disciples before us, refuse to meet violence with violence, dehumanizing rhetoric with dehumanizing rhetoric. In the months and years to come, we must stand in the face of every threat, every act of violence, every cruel or threatening word, with Jesus’ immovable love, clinging to love’s power, which raised Jesus from the death empire subjected him to, until God’s full reign of peace is fully and gloriously done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Grace and Peace,
The Right Rev. Craig Loya