I have heard from many of you how much you appreciated Rev. Connie Simon’s sermon, From the Inside Out, last Sunday. A book group of elders that has been meeting for more than 50 years with whom I met wanted to talk about it. A group of racial justice activists praised it. More individual folks wrote to me with comments, praise, or critique than I receive most weeks. 

Connie addressed, in a more focused way than I have from the pulpit, what Process Theology suggests about how the world works and how love works in our lives.  

Perhaps the eagerness to understand, to have at least a working hypothesis about how the world works and how change can come, is a natural response to this time.  

This feels like a time “between”:  

• Political leadership of hate and divisiveness, at least the primary spokesperson for that leadership, has been replaced; but real questions remain about how much new leadership can accomplish. 
• Vaccines give us hope that this long period of distancing may eventually end, but we know that there are still months of distancing and anxiety ahead for us. 
• We are weary, “sick and tired of being sick and tired”; but we still have to wait, and the challenges have not ended. 

Many of us made vows last week about how we will move forward. It is no wonder so many of us are thinking about how the world works and how more love can be brought into the world…and into our lives. 

Process understanding tells us that creation is constant, always taking place. And that there is no pre-determined outcome. The universe is not headed to some particular City on a Hill.  

The empowering side of this is that how we show up, in every moment, matters. The argument for activism, for answering the call of love, is clear.  The complexity is that how every other person shows up matters too. As Dr. King preached, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” 

The role of our church as a center of organizing and activism is critical in a world of process. The Beloved Community toward which we aspire matters greatly and our willingness to embody that aspiration matters even more. Process theology makes this clear. 

But there are also the human truths that we name every Sunday. That we all live through loss and success, through joys and sorrows. Death and birth. Recovery and decline. Achievement and disappointment. Those personal events are part of what is “becoming” as well. Our naming of those personal truths…our holding of one another, with love and with care through them all…that also is how love works. 

“Theology” is one of those weighty terms. But the process of “becoming” is a personal, day-by-day business of living. May we all, in this time between, remember that we move toward the Beloved Community only by the choices that we make. And may we find ourselves held in the community of the church through all the truths of our living through these days. 

Blessings, 

Bill