What does love require of us now?

Jan 21

Dear All Souls,

I am always careful about which moments in our shared public life I speak into and which I hold more quietly before God. Not every headline needs a pastoral letter. Not every crisis requires a statement. There is, I am learning more and more, wisdom in restraint, and faithfulness in silence.

But there are moments when prayer refuses to stay private.

In the wake of the recent death of Renée Good in Minneapolis, and amid the rising tensions surrounding immigration enforcement across our country, I have found that my prayers are no longer staying neatly tucked inside my own prayer book. They are pressing outward.

To be clear, I write to you not as a pundit, nor as an expert in law or policy. I am neither of those things. Rather, I write as a human being, as the descendent of immigrants, and as a priest entrusted with the care of a community that is itself made up of many stories, many fears, many hopes, many questions.

The Church has a complicated history when it comes to the stranger. At its best, the Church has been a place of welcome, care, sanctuary, and refuge. At its worst, it has helped build walls, both literal and spiritual, deciding who belongs and who does not. Both of these histories are ours. We inherit them together. And scripture does not allow us to forget this tension. Again and again, the people of God are told to remember what it was like to be a stranger, to recall vulnerability not as a theoretical concept but as a lived memory. Jesus places himself unmistakably among those who are hungry, displaced, imprisoned, and afraid. There is no faithful reading of the Gospel that avoids this truth.

And yet the Gospel also refuses simple answers. It does not flatten complexity or deny the reality of fear, responsibility, or the brokenness of human systems. Instead, it keeps returning us to a deeper and more demanding question, one we must ask again and again, especially in moments like this:

Where is Christ in this moment, and what does faithfulness look like here?

When any human life is lost through violence, we name that loss honestly. Death is not neutral. It is not merely unfortunate. It is an enemy, and it wounds the whole body. We grieve the death of those whose lives are taken. We grieve with families whose grief is now their daily companion. We refuse to make peace with death by explaining it away.

At the same time, our faith invites us to resist the temptation to collapse into partisanship or outrage as identity. Naming evil as evil does not require us to adopt the language of camps or sides or aisles. It requires clarity, courage, and a commitment to the dignity of every human being, made in the image of our Living God.

Here in Charlottesville, we know something about how national tensions land in local bodies. We know how history echoes in streets and neighborhoods. We know how death renames street. We know how fear and memory linger. This is not abstract for us. And because it is not abstract, our response cannot be either.

So we pray. Not as a substitute for action, but as the ground from which faithful action can grow. We pray for those who mourn. We pray for immigrant neighbors who are living with fear as a constant companion. We pray for those entrusted with authority, that their work might be marked by restraint, accountability, meekness, and respect for human dignity. We pray for ourselves, that we would not harden, withdraw, look away, or grow numb.

And we commit ourselves, again and again, to being the kind of church that practices attentivness, hospitality, restoration, and shalom not as sentiment, but as a way of life. A church that listens before it reacts. A church that tells the truth without cruelty. A church that holds suffering with tenderness and refuses to look away.

Comfort and hope are not opposed to truth. In fact, they depend on it. Christian hope is not optimism. It is the stubborn, practiced belief that God is still at work in the midst of grief, still calling a people into love that costs something, still drawing life out of places where death has spoken loudly.