O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The collect (A collective prayer said in all Episcopal and most Anglican Churches around the world) this week is hopeful, uplifting, and an important reminder of God's never failing love for us, even in difficult times.
It also serves to gently prod us that we need God's help in everything, even loving God! Pour into our hearts such love towards you. It is reminiscent of the prayer the desire to please you does please you. We often desperately want to love God, but can't quite bring ourselves to do it on our own.
Love may have been the last thing on your minds when you read, or heard, or saw the news of the shooting in Buffalo this week. As a community that has been so focused on racial reconciliation and seeking Jesus' help in exterminating white supremacy and racism from the church, it is particularly painful to see how far we as a nation are, and to see innocent black communities suffer because of endemic racism in our society.
I know our natural instinct as people of faith is to pray when bad things happen, and we should! But what exactly should we pray for? For those who have died? Why? They are already with Jesus, they have received their reward. Instead we need to pray for ourselves. All of us. That God may pour God's love into our hearts so that we can stop turning a blind eye to the petty indignities of white supremacy and then be surprised when it takes off the mask in these acts of terror.
This didn't happen just because one man was radicalized by bad people over the internet. It happens because as a culture white america is indifferent to the continuing reality of the legacy of slavery until blood is spilled, and then we can't run fast enough to any excuse to not change how we live, work, move, or have our being.
This happened because we tolerate underfunded schools in black neighborhoods, because we ignore radical disparities in sentencing and incarceration rates, because we laugh when someone assumes the black person is the assistant, the janitor, the help, the client in a diverse group of people.
This happened because we have allowed our children and our children's children, protestants and catholics, to forget about the dream, and settle for watching someone else's nightmare. Because the bottom line really is the bottom line, and the only place that black truly matters is on a balance sheet.
In this weeks Gospel Jesus comes across a man who has dragged himself to a pool filled with healing waters, only to have everyone step over him to get in as soon as the waters are prepared. No matter how hard he tries he cannot heal because no one sees him as worth being healed. Instead, they, we, shout 'Physician heal thyself' 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' 'this is the land of opportunity' while we forget that we opportunistically took this land from someone else who was kind enough to share it.
The funny thing about this story is that Jesus doesn't help the man get in the water. He doesn't do what is expected of him. He doesn't uphold the status quo.
He just tells the man to get up and walk and sends him on his way. He repairs, restores, and heals him - not for one day, but for all time.
Now I am not Jesus, and neither are you. But we have the same opportunity - to move away from doing the same things that have gotten the same results and instead repair relationships, restore streets, and heal broken hearts.
And the only way to do that is love.
But first we have to pray. Pray God will help us to love, because this we cannot do on our own.