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January 1, 2026
Good evening friends,
I come to you tonight as my heart breaks like I’m sure yours does, with the news of yet another murder at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, this time a peaceful protester, a 37-year-old ICU nurse. With the news out of Maine of a law-abiding correctional officer detained illegally by ICE and a general sense that things are continuing to spiral out of control—and we've been here before as a country. We need not look to other places to learn from history. We know that in our very own country, it was federal agents who participated in picking up African Americans who had been enslaved. It was federal agents who were used to pick up illegally indigenous peoples across this country. And here we are again—federal agents under the guise of wanting to make this country a safer place, is having exactly the opposite effect, and it is raising the stakes and causing us to be less safe. And as a people of faith, we need to be very clear that as followers of Jesus Christ, this is not who we are called to be, and this is not behavior we can condone.
We must make our voices clear and known, and we must call on our elected officials to make change and to make it now. We must put an end to this reign of fear and terror and seek a new way of coming together to imagine the dream that God has for us all as beloved children of God with inherent dignity worth respecting. I hope you will join our siblings of faith all over the country in making our voices known and heard by showing up in every way you can, and by praying with one another and for one another. We ask in our baptismal promises, when you fall into sin, will you repent and return to the Lord? And so, we need not keep going down this road simply because we feel committed to it. It’s not too late to turn to seek God’s forgiveness, and one another’s, to repair what has been broken, to seek and find the justice that God promises us.
We must make our voices known, and we must put an end to this reign of fear. Perfect love casts out fear, and it is that perfect love we are meant to bring to the world.
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