Dear church friends,

I ask you to please set aside a few minutes to read this entire letter. Let the message settle in your heart as you prayerfully consider the request I am going to be asking each of you at the end. We need one another. But first…

Let’s all start with a deep breath. No kidding. We’re all tired. It’s been a long year.

Stop what you are doing and notice the tension you are being asked to carry every minute of every day. BIG PROBLEMS that have persisted for far longer than any of us have been alive are being dumped into our lives at a pace that can only be described as assaulting and morally injurious. 

So stop for a moment and allow yourself to receive the gift of a deep breath. 

Just one simple breath received deep in your being, a reminder that your life is animated by a loving and powerful sacred energy, known to us through the embodied presence of Jesus and present to us still in the always abiding Christ.

Breathe in. Breathe out. 

Now onto the purpose of this letter: this is an invitation to practice love and presence amongst our diverse community. We are each unique in our perspective, and our burdens are not equally distributed. My own social location affords me the privilege of quantifiably less suffering than others in our community. I ask that you please carry with you the awareness that what you can see is not all there is to see. And to remember that these dividing lines we are being told exist are of no interest to a God who has broken down the dividing walls of hostility we as humans are notorious for creating and imagining. These differences are not, in fact, inviolable dividing walls as the world tells us; on the contrary, our many and various differences make us more whole, give us a greater understanding of humanity and God's presence. And our diversity makes sure we do not become ignorant to the pain of those whose experience is different than ours. It offers us a way to more fully understand the unifying nature of Christ expressed in joy and sorrow. In all of these ways, our diversity is one of our greatest gifts when rightly understood as kinship under Christ. We are a new kind of family. Thanks be to God! 

The work of our church will always be principally a local experience, both temporally and spatially. This local focus may spill over into larger parts of culture, but our eyes are first fixed on one another, a gathered community of practice. If we cannot nurture generosity, forgiveness and empathy at home, we cannot be trusted to carry it out into the world. So let’s practice together. 

Right now parts of our communal body are in pain, crying out for recompense as old spirits of racial hatred are stoked. White nationalists are recruiting in Huntington Beach. Armed officers of the state flex their domination muscles against vulnerable bodies (often black and brown neighbors with less access to accountability), all of which is caught on video for us to watch on repeat until we are nauseous. At the same time the trial for George Floyd’s murder was televised like a reality show. And while the State has rendered its verdict, we are not permitted celebration in the face of violence rightly named and held to account. While I do not believe that cops should be able to kill with impunity, I recognize that this power over life and death is the way the Powers and Principalities operate. Who killed Jesus if not Caesar?! We are called to lament the tragedy of a culture that breeds violence both within and without these institutional structures. We are so very far from our swords being beaten into plowshares. No one wants to be living like this constantly, yet the pain is too obvious to ignore. Continue to look deeper at the parts of our world crying for healing, and hear the parts of our church family crying, too. 

A couple of weeks back we asked you to send words of comfort and kindness to our Asian American brothers and sisters who have been brutalized in the last year by renewed racial aggression. The Asian American community has been blamed by certain politicians, who decided it would be advantageous to scapegoat them for a global pandemic, inciting their followers to violence and hate. 

At the same time we have a media ecosystem that is driven by incentives that lead to harm, not wisdom. Constant violent images and videos with constant hot-takes about the meaning of such violence—all to drive ad sales served alongside your trauma. It is a sham deal, harder to escape than to name. 

So we continue to see the wounds that different parts of our communal body are asked to bear, with the awareness of the burdens of others being a feature of our daily lives. When a part of our body hurts, we all carry it by virtue of our connection to each other. Our calling is to stay present to one another even when suffering seeks to scare us off into corners of numbness and ignorance. If God is in Christ reconciling the world, then the temptation to stay separate is a denial of the deepest truth of the Gospel. We belong to one another. Or we are lost. 

This is not to say that each of us knows exactly how it feels to be singled out for reasons of race, class, or culture. But I have found the New Testament metaphor of the Church as a unified body to be helpful here. Think of a pain you might experience in your neck, a tension held deep in your muscles. Maybe you take your hand and rub your neck. This is a kind of embodied coordination to care for the whole self. Your hand is not feeling what your neck is, but they work together toward healing and comfort. It is the same with a hand laid on your chest to calm an anxious heart. Your hand is not carrying the same tension, but its resting presence can suffuse the entire body with calm. A church community is like that, each part playing a role in the coordinated care of each other. 

I will not pretend to know what to do about the persistence of fear and hatred in our world. But I do know that compassion and empathy are core to our particular church community at First Baptist Pasadena. And I have a concrete set of practices we can and should embrace for our own sanity and sanctification (the old school word for “embodied holiness”). We are creating a link in this letter for you to share prayers or words of comfort with your church body, which we will later share with the church at large. Consider how you can deepen your affection and kinship with the world by holding the pains (and joys) of your church family. For our black and brown brothers and sisters, we must come alongside and commit to labor for healing and justice. Centuries of having bodies and histories assaulted is not easily undone, but to never even have it acknowledged that the world is still brutal and full of evil spirits is a double wound, none of which is undone by one verdict from the State. For our Asian and Asian American family members, you might offer a word of support and commitment to stay present to their pain. Understand that each of us is not necessarily experiencing the same traumas, yet our unified vision is a gift to our individual blindness.  

We are wrong more than we care to acknowledge. Our tradition gives us language to understand this persistent failure. But our core story (which we call the Gospel) gives us a way to be free from the deforming affects of our persistent wrongness. God is providing another way to be in this world together. On the cross, Jesus took into his own body the devastating effects of our persistent wrongness, the death we constantly let loose in the world toward each other. Jesus undoes death at the source, embracing us even as we reject him. And he calls us to follow suit, embracing one another in love and kinship. 

Sharing a word of love, comfort and presence is only a first step in our shared journey of healing and confrontation with the Powers and Principalities that seek to undo the work of Christ. We will not discover the next steps in isolation from one another. So pull together now, seeing one another in pain and joy. You are the gift God is giving to the world. May you find ways to give your gift. Move your kindness to the places in this body that are hurting. Your gift is renewed in the giving. Such is grace. Such is love. Such is the work of this church. And for those of you who are hurting, receive this love where your wounds need tending. As you are able, consider offering your depth of understanding to others who might be suffering as well. Your wounds are like the wounds of Jesus, so may the expansive ways that you all carry pain follow in the way of our savior.

And above all may you be a people of hope. God has already defeated Death as a moral agent in the world. The dead have been raised in the body of Jesus the Christ. So while the world writhes in tombs long opened, we will commit again to be a people who practice resurrection in the most simple and intimate of ways. I love you all, and I will continue to hold you in my prayers. May you do the same for one another. 

Less without you,

Pastor John Jay

(with a special thanks to Nori Ochi, Bill Douglas, and Pastor Lindsay for their input and edits)

P.S. As a last thought, I strongly encourage you to turn down the news. You could get by with a simple review in the morning, and then live your life locally the rest of the day. This is especially true for social media like Facebook or Twitter. The “news” you find there is more properly understood as propaganda, and the best thing you can do for the preservation of your soul is to delete your accounts and subscribe to a local paper.