A potent word for this particular moment from Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colón (above). The intro is re-posted here from Sojourners.

LIKE THE AUTHOR of the First Letter of John, we are living in a time for “testing the spirits.” That is, we must discern the forms of freedom, or unfreedom, offered to us as we read the signs of our historical moment — a time in which the catastrophic is often our daily bread.

Many of us have made homes in religious traditions where we have found collective love, care, community-building, and resilience. But so much of what passes as spiritual in the United States — churches who only see their work as therapeutic, prosperity gospel proponents, white evangelical nationalists, New Age movements — is commodification by other means. John warns us against false prophets who, through quick fixes and distorted spiritual comforts, foster division and confusion in the service of lucrative self-aggrandizement.

I am an ordained minister in the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and I work as a movement chaplain in Los Angeles. I was trained as a spiritual director, and I have been doing ministry with faith-rooted activists since 2016. My work is informed by my primary training as a medical anthropologist and community researcher. I know that Jesus said that we humans are of more value than many sparrows, but I’ve found that we are a lot like them. We need refuge and sustenance. We need shelter. We need to nest somewhere. But with whom shall we do this for the short and long haul? And where shall we build our nests?

Read the rest of the article HERE.

Edgar Rivera Colón, a movement chaplain, spiritual director, and medical anthropologist, teaches health justice and the history of racism in U.S. medical institutions at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

An excerpt from an unpublished sermon of Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon at Faith + Work Firist Unitarian Church of Orange, NJ

When we attend to the tears of a grief-stricken activist, we enact the collective mourning work which transfigures into what Robert Sember names “redemptive solidarity.” The wrenching pain of mourning is the affective antechamber to the possibility of joy and collective forward motion. Our tears are the salt of history that leaven more human futures. Thus, what we at first cognize as interruptions to liberating works are the intervening enabling conditions for the materialization of our deepest desires for social and spiritual transformations. Sember alerts us to the alignment of the “poetry of feeling” and “immanent freedom”: they share a homeplace in the soul work that our times require.

By Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera Colon

“The Israeli hasbara apparatus — roughly translated as the explanatory structure for the State of Israel — works to perpetuate images of Palestinians as terrorists whose rockets deliberately kill civilians while Israeli airstrikes are conducted with “surgical precision” even if fifty or more Palestinian children are bombed “by mistake.” All of these activities are based on a biblical discourse that gives the settlers the requisite theological rationale. This Israeli settler colonial endeavor has to be seen as the last chapter of the Western settler colonial project, taking place today in the twenty-first century in Palestine. It continues to be serviced and powered by the motherland: the Anglo-Saxon world.” – Mitri Raheb, Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, the Bible.

This is a bitter and grief-stricken Christmastide. It is bathed in the blood of Palestinian children, women, men, elders, and people with disabilities. An even more revanchist form of the 1948 Nakba is being executed — and that is the proper word for it — on Palestinians by the Israeli regime and its military apparatus. Despite the faux hand-wringing noises coming from the Biden administration and the Pentagon, all sensible observers know that this is malign shadow puppet theatrics just in case a miracle happens and the International Criminal Court, going against all its previous history to date, decides to prosecute Israeli and US officials for genocide and war crimes. Let’s hope that miracle emerges. But I would not bet on it.

I find it almost impossible to convey Christmas greetings this year. I write as a minister ordained in a Black LGBTQ led fellowship of believers in a radically open and inclusive Gospel. Not the Gospel of bigotry, hatred, exclusion, and genocide which is at the core of the neo-confederate and ethnonationalist fascist movements in the ascendancy in these lands. We know these people to be the purveyors of unfreedom and political violence which grows daily in the US and throughout the world. They are our enemies. But what of Biden and his ilk? They are not much better since the economic policies that the Clinton Democrats, enacting friendly amendments to 1980s Reaganite policies, elatedly rushed to impose on this country’s working people created the material conditions for Trumpism. Of course, no one in the Democratic elites would confess to their complicity in this turn of events. That would require moral clarity and political courage. Thus, the people who actually own and run this country will stand by and watch Israel commit genocide and see it largely as a public relations problem to be managed in light of the run up to the 2024 national elections. How to manage the optics and messaging around the mass killings and expulsion of thousands of Palestinians are their only concern.

Continue reading “Christmas in the Shadow of Genocide in Gaza” →