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Dear Members, Friends, and Partners of the Presbytery of San José,
Eastertide greetings to you in the name of our risen and ascended Christ through the fellowship of the Holy Spirit! In a few short weeks, precisely on June 8th, we will move to the season of Pentecost. As with the move from Epiphany to Lent, from Holy Week to Eastertide, from Pentecost to Ordinary Time, from Ordinary Time to Advent, the calendrical cycle, as with the changing of climatological seasons signal for us transitions of life, of the weather, of food recipes, of thematic emphases in planning worship services and preparing sermons.
We mark daily transitions: from the rising of the sun, to the setting of the same.
I write to you from Davidson College in North Carolina where our family will witness and celebrate the graduation of our eldest son, Daniel. The “Pomp & Circumstance” this week and in this season is being repeated in school campuses all around the country. A few of us pastors were hanging out in Monterey with the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly following the recent NEAR Gathering hosted by First Presbyterian Church-Monterey, when we stumbled upon a wedding party. Weddings mark major life transitions. Funerals, like one that I co-officiated a couple months ago in New Jersey for a dear and longtime friend, mark an eternal transition for the deceased, and a transition for all those who miss the departed.
What transition do you mark and celebrate?
Parallel to some of the transitions I name above, I have grown more circumspect and prayerful in these perilous times. In such a brief period of about 115 days, we have transitioned as a nation and world with such velocity of execution and voluminous in consequence such things as these:
- The rise of nationalist (especially Christian nationalism), protectionist, isolationist, and nativist policies and parties, what former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice called “the four horsemen of the apocalypse” with respect to global politics
- Threats to academic freedom
- Threats to press freedom
- Forced removal of programs and staff positions in academia and in the federal government with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion
- Disregard to due process when it comes to the forced arrest (kidnapping) and deportation of persons who are here in the United States legally
- Sowing fear and intimidation to persons and their families who have genuine cases to seek asylum protection and refugee status
- Disregard of judicial orders by the current presidential administration
- Budgetary legislative proposals that seek, on the one hand more favorable taxation policies for the financially affluent, while at the same time reducing federal aid to low- and middle-class seniors on Medicaid and aid for college students, the same socioeconomic cohort who must further grapple with the burgeoning costs of goods and services for unnecessary tariffs that threaten the onset of a global recession
- Emboldening Russia’s aggression by gaslighting who was the initial aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war and weakening the leverage of Ukraine who are struggling to keep the hopes of a sovereign, democratic nation state alive over and against an autocratic regime
- Conflating and intentionally attributing legitimate critiques and questions of Israel’s longstanding occupation in Palestine and Gaza as somehow antisemitic, rather than seeing it as a cry for cessation of hostilities lest we stand aside as a genocide of a whole people is happening before our eyes
Some legal scholars have said we have already transitioned into a constitutional crisis in this country. Others have said, we are approaching that point, that what would signal an unambiguous arrival at a constitutional crisis would be an outright defiance of the presidential administration to ignore an explicit order of the U.S. Supreme Court.
I am approaching my one year mark as the executive presbyter of a wonderful, faithful, faith-filled presbytery. These past months of transitioning into this call as a mid-council leader has involved many orientation meetings, on-boarding sessions, executive coaching that is still on-going, and gathering with a cohort of other mid-council leaders. At a recent retreat in Seattle for those of us who are relatively new to this call, we were asked what concern or fear we had about our respective call. I shared this: I fear that we may miss the call of our generation to participate in God’s mission for transformative justice in church and society, that we may shy away from standing in the gap for the marginalized, to advocate for the disempowered, to shelter the migrant, to peacefully protest, to be “salt and light” in our communities, in the nation, and world.
What keeps me, and I pray, what keeps all of us anchored to God’s continuing call upon us as followers of Jesus is what Lamentations 3:22-24 sings to be true and trustworthy: the Lord’s steadfast love “never ceases” and the Lord’s mercies “never come to an end” but they are new and renewed everyday. I am not one who gets discouraged in reading and reflecting upon the news nor social media. Nor do I run away from the news or shut it off completely. What I see chronicled on paper pages, digital platforms, and pixelated screens are fellow human beings figuring out how to make sense of all of the stuff of life, the wild circus of power plays and power grabs, the maddening cycle of greed, war, suffering, jealousies, deception, shadows of death, and death itself.
What I see and read and blogged and re-shared and commented and “liked” and “disliked” and hashtagged (#) and emoji’d . . .are people like you and me, like the people of thousands of years ago figuring out the Pharaohs, the Caesars, the Caiphases, the Pilates, the Neros. It sounds like a Shakespearean play leaping off the stage and bringing reality right at our heart’s doorstep when, like when I lost my dear longtime friend Wilson, or when I hear of a dear friend and faculty colleague in the Philippines threatened by red-tagging and falsely accused by the powers that be in hopes of silencing him and others who would dare speak out against governmental abuse.
What I see and read and blogged is the very world for which God’s love is steadfast, for which God’s heart in Christ pulsates and beats stronger and continuously. It’s that same heart which the Spirit has placed in our hearts, to have compassion on the same chaotic world that brought Christ to the cross, that sought the stone to remain still, and which the power of the Spirit’s breath could not the world contain.
My prayer is that in the midst of the seemingly small transitions and the ones that are cataclysmic in scope, we discern and embrace the steadfast love of God, who mercies are new each morning, whose faithfulness is great. That is what enables us to keep on keeping on, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.
In Joy and Justice,
The Rev. Dr. Neal D. Presa, Executive Presbyter
(408) 763-5004 | Neal@sanjosepby.org
#CalledToCommunity
#CommittedToJustice
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