Please join us and other Pasadena congregations for a candle light protest Sunday night (May 31) at 7:00 PM at Pasadena City Hall. Bring a candle (we will be lighting candles) and a mask. We will be practicing social distancing. It is not recommended to bring children. The link for the Facebook invite can be found here.

Amid the events in Minnesota around the killing of George Floyd and in Georgia with Ahmaud Arbery, and with so many others, we continue to pray and mourn with the voices calling for justice. We mourn, knowing that this is only a flicker of the racial injustice that pervades America—the shadow of death within which we walk—and we pray for God’s healing within us and within our communities. We continue to listen, to seek to be guided in justice.

May we all stand with our neighbors in their distress. May we listen to them and understand. May we walk together through the valley, where violence abounds and justice seems absent. May we cry out together for life in the face of the forces of death. Though violence pervades powers and institutions—state violence and police brutality—and violence traverses our own souls, imprinting distorted pictures of our fellow human beings in our hearts, may the living God—indeed, the God of Life—bring those caught in the valley up out of death’s shadow, send out the prisoner in freedom, bring us all into true justness.

And those of us who must confess, and many of us must, standing at our mountain tops, our towers, looking down easily into that valley, may we confess, repent, and listen. We confess the blindness that has formed us; we confess our own darkness; we confess our need for sight and healing. We pray: God, our God of life, forgive us and heal us, but also help us truly sit and understand. Deliver us from our oppression and oppressing, that we might find true peace together, a peace that only comes when we are all set right, a peace that is only known in your mercy and justness. This is our lament and hope before God.

God, lift up our valleys—may there be no more shadow of death hovering over your people—and bring down our lofty mountains, that we might celebrate together in your kin-dom, a place where black and brown lives matter.