 St Alban’s Episcopal Church Bolivar, Missouri Wednesday, December 7, 2022 The Presiding Bishop and the Senator  The Rt Rev. Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church with The Rev. Dr Raphael Warnock, pastor and senator from Georgia. Presbyterian professor of New Testament, my friend, Dr Margaret Aymer Oget quipped today: “What can you do with a seminary degree? Senator comes to mind…” And Union Theological Seminary, posted this: “Union congratulates Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock on his victory in the Georgia Senate election. His steadfast commitments to faith, justice and love are inspirational and profound. We are so proud to call him an alum” Notice that order: “faith, justice and love.” It is his faith that motivates and forms his passion for social justice . His faith is dep and abiding, and he speaks about it often. It’s the same thing that animates our Presiding bishop, and that animated the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose pulpit Dr Warnock holds now. He will continue to be senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta while he serves his role as senator for the next six years.  Anyone who wants to reflect on the ways in which good Christians can help redeem the word, “Christian” would do well to read this – or listen to the audible version. The New York Times posted, “Sparkling…a narrative of an extraordinary life, from impoverished beginnings in Savannah to his arrival on Capitol Hill. Along the way he reflects with considerable candor and insight the meaning and importance of faith, truth-telling and political and social redemption.” Whether we hold any office at all, or aspire to do so, each of us does in fact live out some version of the Christian story, and how we do it does affect others. Right now in our country, “Christian” and “evangelical” have come to be identified with right-wing, regressive and often racist political policies, and even with persons who have no actual connection to any Church at all. It’s up to us to insist by our very lives that Jesus and the prophets before him held the opposite perspective: claiming that God welcomes the outcast, the poor, the immigrant, widows and orphans, those who have no power, the unnaturally generous and the passionately loving. |
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