Greetings, beloved in Christ. I hope that you’re well on this day. In Church life, we have entered the season of Pentecost. In our Godly Play curriculum in the Episcopal Church, Pentecost is referred to as a green and growing season. This season invites us to grow in our faith, to deepen our spiritual roots. In light of that, we here in the Episcopal Church of Colorado, this past week, held a Becoming Beloved Community Summit. People from across the Episcopal Church in Colorado, together with the Reverend Canon Stephanie Spellers, gathered together to pray and to think, and to strategize about how we live out our calling to seek and serve Christ in all persons.
There were people gathered at the summit who were advocates for immigrant and refugee rights. There were folks who were interested in how we repent and repair broken relationships, both with our indigenous siblings who inhabited this land before any of us got here, and with those who were brought to this land to be enslaved. We talked about how it is God’s desire that all of the diversity in God’s creation is loved and appreciated, and that we truly seek and serve Christ in all persons and love our neighbor as ourselves. Loving neighbor means more than simply saying, I love you, I see you, I care about you. Though those are important first steps, loving neighbor is about seeing to the needs of those around us, seeing the suffering, calling out oppression, advocating for justice. That is what beloved community is all about.
It’s about opening ourselves to hearing hard truths. It’s about confession, and it’s about working to build a better tomorrow. I hope that you and your community, or as an individual or in your congregation, will take the opportunity this weekend to celebrate Juneteenth. Juneteenth is the celebration that we celebrate here in the west of the emancipation of those who are enslaved. They did not find out about the Emancipation Proclamation until sometime in the teens of June, and so Juneteenth is a celebratory day. It’s a day about emancipation. It’s about an opportunity to work at becoming beloved community. I hope that you will celebrate it, and I wish you blessings.