This was Vicar Morgan’s last sermon as +KINDRED’s Pastoral Intern. She has been among us for a year now, preaching, teaching, and worshipping with our community, and we will miss her deeply. We give thanks for her ministry among us and for all that is to come as she awaits and assignment and first call!

The text for this sermon was Micah 6:1-8. It is a word from the Prophet Micah calling for justice and reform in the face of inequity and injustice.

This wasn’t at all what I expected my last Sunday among +KINDRED to look like. After a year of worship, and beach days, and house church, and bread baking - a year of cultivating bold community, working towards justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly together with our God - after all that, I’d hoped to be gathered together one last time in our Sanctuary. Around the tables that have carried our hopes and our hurts, our laughter and our tears, the tables that fostered relationships around the bold promise of God’s love found in the Bread and Cup that sustains us through all things.

This wasn’t at all what any of us expected our life together as +KINDRED to look like, no matter how much we claim our quirkiness and thrive in our identity as a rag tag bunch just trying to live out the Gospel in our little corner of the world. These times have shifted the way we do things and the way our ministry looks, but we still hold true to who we are as a community of Christ followers committed to loving one another and showing up for each other and those in our wider communities

And that’s one of my favorite things about this community is the way we show up - even when it’s hard and we’re not sure exactly how everything will work out, we show up and we offer what we have with love and faith. We show up to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly together with our God.

At the beginning of the pandemic, waaaayyy back in March, our leaders met tirelessly over Zoom and communicated through emails and phone calls and text messages to find a way forward as a community in the face of COVID.

Our community coordinator, Shannon, worked to find volunteers for transitioning our community meal into a Grab + Go operation. People like Nanette, Diane, Meredith, and Leah cooked delicious, nutritious meals week after week, with a deep sense of love for neighbor and a commitment to care for our wider community as regular sources of social services closed their doors out of concern for safety amidst the rapid spread of COVID.

People like Angie and Cat volunteered every week for FIVE. WEEKS. IN. A. ROW. to make sure there were enough hands on deck to get meals assembled and passed out to folks who needed them. Nanette and Shannon doubled down and made masks - SO. MANY. MASKS. - so that our volunteers and the members of +KINDRED we offered meals and blessings to on Sunday afternoons could be safer.

Countless others continued tithing to +KINDRED in the face of economic uncertainty, and others increased their monthly giving to continue supporting the ministry and work of +KINDRED.

People showed up in all the ways that they could, with faith and love. +KINDRED showed up to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly together with our God.

The Prophet Micah knew a thing or two about showing up in the face of difficulty and injustice. Our Sacred Story today is smack dab in the middle of one of Micah’s Oracles of Judgement against the rulers of Israel and Judah who in the midst of brewing turmoil and a significant economic shift were disregarding the cries of their people who suffered. Wealth that had been invested in the land led to the growth of MASSIVE estates while smaller holdings collapsed, unable to keep up. The rich were getting richer at the expense of small peasant farmers, and the leaders of these nations, the politicians, the business owners, and the priests were turning away from the cries of injustice and counting their pocketbooks.

Micah speaks for the LORD and demands that the rulers of Israel and Judah confess the ways in which they have fallen short of the commandments of the TORAH to love the LORD thy God above all else - above money, power, wealth, above it all.

Micah calls on the people to confess what they have done and the ways they have placed other idols in the place of God and neglected God’s people along the way.

The rulers and leaders begin to panic, asking what it is they can do to appease God, offering sacrifices and grant gifts, and Micah is quick to remind them that God wants none of their performative repentance. Micah reminds them that all God asks of God’s people is to act justly, love kindness, and to walk humbly with the LORD their God.

White people, and white Christians especially have heard this call over the last days and weeks. The call to confess the sin of our white supremacy and work to dismantle the layers of racism that live deep within us and manifest in our everyday actions, even when we THINK we’ve somehow escaped it. Pastor Ashley wrote powerful words after the march in downtown houston this past Tuesday asking the bold question: “How can we readily confess “I am a sinner” even when we don’t feel like we actively pursue sin because we understand it as a condition beyond just an act. But revile at the confession “I am racist” in the face of systemic racism as the condition we are steeped in even if you don’t feel like you act on it…”

She then reminds us that: “The grace of God emboldens us to confess both without fear of being declared bad or irredeemable and [in a way that] opens up space for transformation.”

We are called to confess the ways in which we have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God, and that includes the ways we have actively and passively perpetuated the sins of racism and white supremacy.

This is hard work and we might feel tempted to make grand gestures in attempt to make up for the ways we know we have been complicit in racism, and for the ways that we don’t know yet. We might be tempted towards performative actions with no real impact other than feeding our ego and appeasing our guilt, but just as Micah reminded the priests and leaders of Israel and Judah, what is ACTUALLY required is that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with the LORD together.

We do justice by doing the hard work of recognizing the ways we’ve fallen short and played into the hand of white supremacy and racism.

We love kindness when we listen to and believe Black Indigenous and other People Of Color when they tell us about their experiences of us and others as racist.

We walk humbly when we white people show up and shut up at events and direct actions led by Black Indigenous and other People of Color, and listen over the sound of our white fragility.

We do justice by supporting Black owned businesses, artists, creators, and activists with actual money.

We love kindness by following the leadership of Black activists and doing what they tell us is needed, not what we think is necessary.

We walk humbly by committing to having hard conversations with ourselves and our loved ones, even when it feels like we’re getting no where.

We show up in these and so many other ways for our siblings in Christ, because that is what the LORD requires of us.

People of +KINDRED, I have seen you show up in so many different ways for the work of Ministry that we get to be a part of together and we must commit ourselves to continuing to show up and re-commit ourselves to being actively anti-racist, because we cannot continue to proclaim the Christian faith if we are not actively committed to dismantling the systems of racism and white supremacy that are antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We are in a reckoning moment, facing our own oracle of judgement, but the prophet Micah always followed their oracles of judgement with a word of hope, and that remains true for us.

The word of hope is that we don’t do this work alone. Our community of faith emboldens and reminds us that as we do this work of unlearning and dismantling white supremacy and racism we do so together.

We lean into the words of the prophet Micah working together to: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God together.

+KINDRED, as I leave you after a full year of rich ministry together, I give thanks for all of the ways we have worked to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly together with our God. It has been a privilege and an honor to learn from you all, worship with you all, and love one another as community together.

Though these times are different and harder in ways that none of us could have imagined, I rejoice in the community that has remained in this way - digitally, and via cards, graduation gifts, text messages, and even today in a parade of decorated cars this afternoon in front of the church celebrating my last Sunday as the Vicar of +KINDRED Montrose.

You, dear people of God are so beloved, and I will miss you all so much.

I pray and trust that you will continue in the work I have had the privilege of being a part of for the last year, and I will carry you with me for all of my days. +KINDRED Montrose, the weird little dinner church in the queerest part of Houston will forever be a part of my life and ministry, and to that I say: AMEN.

A Farewell Sermon: Do Justice, Love Kindness, Walk Humbly