A People Set Free

Easter Greetings!

My kids and I love to play Monopoly on lazy summer evenings in Maine. After years of play, my kids delight in dominating me in this property acquisition game. Soon enough I am hemmed in by monopolies with hotels on every side. At that moment I pray to ‘Go Directly to Jail’ for a moment of respite.

While cooling my heels in Monopoly jail last summer, I found myself wondering, “What if a man in a tuxedo and top hat rang my doorbell one day and delivered to me a ‘get out of jail free’ card? How would I live my life from that moment on?”

On Easter we get a very real ‘get out of jail free’ card. The risen Christ delivers to us the good news that we are set free from sin, fear, and death and invited into a new life of grace, hope, and love. How will we live our lives, having received that good news?

Free from the fear of death, we can live boldly and take risks in the service of Jesus Christ. His way, his truth, and his life are vindicated and embraced eternally by God in the resurrection, so that we can live his way, his truth, and his life with him now!

As a people set free, let us serve Christ in righting wrongs, healing relationships, reconciling historic grievances, crossing divides, and sacrificing for the sake of the most vulnerable. As a people set free, let us serve Christ by giving ourselves to spiritual transformation through prayer, study, worship, service, and by exchanging harmful habits for ones that give life.

The risen Christ is our way out of bondage and into a freedom that sets the world free; a freedom that desires only the flourishing of all God’s creatures.

Happy Easter,

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

A Peek into the March Vestry Retreat

On Saturday, March 16 your vestry gathered for our annual vestry retreat. The focus of the retreat was advancing our Becoming Beloved Community strategic framework through reflection, conversation, clarification, and delegation. By following this link you can view the full notes generated at the retreat in a format that follows the major headings of the Becoming Beloved Community strategic framework:
1. Institution: Leadership and Practice

• Training/orienting parish leaders with lens of racial healing
• Process for recruiting, hiring, and retaining persons of color to senior staff positions

2. Education: Many Points of Entry

• BBC conversation starter
• BBC basic workshop in fall 2019

3. Public Witness: Rapid, appropriate response informed by and in partnership with people of color.

• Community Engagement creates racial justice/witness process
• Add rapid response/witness to ongoing work with POWER

In the morning, we worked with a wonderful consultant named Anthony Moore who helped our leadership reflect on the meaning of diversity of inclusion for St. Martin’s. We emerged from that session with a strong sense that difference enriches our community and requires a commitment to education and growth to allow differences to feel welcomed and to flourish in the church.

A repeated theme was that we need to welcome, respect, and attend to the experience of each person simply because that experience or perspective is their own. We also need to encourage an atmosphere of mutual support and learning so we can try, fail, and succeed together and endure in community through the inevitable mistakes that come with growth. As Barb Ballenger often reminds me, having set off on the path of racial healing we will be all the more accountable and more acutely aware when we fall short. Prayer, mutual support, forgiveness, and endurance will be crucial to the path forward.
In the afternoon, our agenda focused on points 1 and 3 of the strategic framework. First we established clear definitions of racism, bigotry, and implicit bias. Then we created a list of qualities and skills to guide a future training program for parish leaders. We brainstormed factors we should consider in designing a process to recruit, hire, and retain people of color in senior staff positions at the church. We reflected deeply on authority and trust and how racism disrupts and distorts relationships by spreading distrust and diminishing authority. I reflected on how much unearned authority and trust I receive simply because I am white, straight, and male and how different it would be for a person of color in my position.

We finished a very productive day by delegating work on point three, public witness, to the community engagement committee. The vestry laid down broad-brush recommendations and the committee will design a public witness policy and procedure to present to the vestry at a later date. This work will dovetail nicely with the work we did in parish forum last Sunday. We will bring the results of this committee work to the parish for conversation and endorsement, hopefully by annual meeting on Sunday, June 9.

I could not be more proud of our vestry for such sincere, brave, and open engagement with a challenging and promising agenda that will shape the future of this parish. The vestry and all of our members have the power to shape the environment of this place toward the flourishing of each member in his or her blessed uniqueness! St. Martin’s has made an intentional choice to face our legacy of racism and to turn toward God’s path of racial justice, cultural humility, and racial healing. May God bless us on this journey.

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

Here's that link again for our retreat full minutes.

The Right Use of Moral Vision and Power

"The church is called to be engaged — to lend voice, moral authority, resources, and organized effort — to resist evil and to reorder our common life in ways that protect the most vulnerable and enhance human dignity for all people."  

- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel from his blog post on gerrymandering

That is what I believe. What do you believe? Bring that belief to forum this Sunday as we explore the ways our church could be or should be involved in advocacy in the public square.

As a church we have a moral vision. As a church we have power. Most people agree immediately with the first statement and then become hesitant when it comes to the second. As an organized body we have people power, financial power, and spiritual power. Ideally, all three work together to shape our life together into the Body of Christ, and our surrounding community into a place of justice, peace, and flourishing approximating the vision of God for God’s world.

Peter Singer - professor of moral philosophy at Princeton University - uses “the drowning man test” to make us reflect on our power and responsibility. If you are hiking along a lake and you come across a man drowning in the water and you have the ability to swim or at least use your cell phone and yet you do nothing to help him, we would all agree that you are morally blameworthy if he is injured or dies. To observe distress and danger and to do nothing, even when you have the capability - i.e. the power - is to sin by omission, and to incur guilt.

As a church, we have power, a moral vision, and accountability before our God. Learning to exercise our voice and vision in faithful, appropriate action is certainly a learning curve. I would rather risk it than to not have an answer for God when I am asked why my brothers and sisters suffered and I did nothing.

Blessings,

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Rector

Parish Forum on Sunday, March 31:

Clarifying St. Martin’s Community Engagement Causes - Part 2

Led by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel and the Community Engagement committee
This week the Rev. Kerbel resumes his discussion on the work done by the community engagement committee and the parish to clarify our causes. Jarrett will review the causes named but this time we’ll dig a little deeper. This week we will gauge the range of comfort levels the congregation has to advocate for these causes. What do you think the church should advocate for? Should we limit ourselves to church discussions and/or participate with others? Are you willing to write a letter, lobby an elected official, run for office, march for the cause, get arrested, or like or share a Facebook post? These are a few sample questions that we’ll act on and discuss at this forum. Wear comfy shoes as we walk around the parish hall to find out how willing we are to move for our causes.