This has been an intense January and it is not over yet. From the shifting of political power in this inflamed nation,  burning houses in California, freezing roads in Michigan, to the fears of God’s precious children who see their immigration status threatened, their genders mocked, their economic lives ignored. In the midst of it all, we still stop to remember the Christian witness of Martin Luther King Jr, his timeless words and also his sacrifice, in systems of evil where words were as easily weaponized back then as they are today.

At times like this I go deeper with God, resisting my own temptation to ask for a few new words with which to speak my own truth to the people who already agree with me. Instead I dare to ask what gift the Church has to bring, as imperfect as we are and as imperfect as we have always been.

Earlier in January, as the cruel California fires were burning, I was in freezing cold Chicago teaching a weeklong January intensive course on the History, Polity and Theology of the  United Church Christ at Chicago Theological Seminary. Nowadays, almost all teaching at CTS happens online. Our class was the exception to the rule, meeting in person, in a classroom, all day for five days. For my enrolled students, whose street addresses ranged from East Coast Massachusetts to West Coast Washington, that week was their first time “on campus,” their first time inside the beautiful building that was imaginatively designed for a future hybrid learning world that was about to come sooner than the architects predicted when the 2011 cornerstone was laid, in a pandemic we didn’t see coming.

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