Just two Sundays ago Trinity gathered for worship in the parking lot of ACA only a few days after the video of George Floyd's death went public. It was a strange Sunday for a number of reasons, among them was me, preaching from the back of a pickup truck while standing in the rain, with many of you listening from your cars through the radio. Protests were starting to spread to other cities outside of Minneapolis. There was (and is still) a dark weight hanging over our city. At the time, the issue of race, George Floyd's killing, and what was unfolding in our cities dominated every media source in our lives. It had replaced COVID as the newsworthy issue of the day and it was frankly overwhelming. To watch a black man killed by police officers on video, popping up in twitter feeds and instagram feeds right next to the picture of the latte art and the funny video of the toddler toddling across the floor was a horror that I didn't know how to process emotionally in the moment, nor as events unfolded in our own city.

When we gathered on that Sunday, I called us to a particular kind of faithfulness in this moment and in our city. As the video brought to the surface again a history of racist evils in our country perpetrated by many white folks over several centuries, as that turned to societal rage and a storm of opinions, social expectations, and all manner of (right) calls for justice, the great temptation was and is (still) to forget that we are creatures. In the deluge of information and videos and longings (again right) for the world to be marked by justice and light, we can begin to feel the pressure to act and speak and think with the power and clarity of gods. Put down that weight. We are but creatures.

The other temptation will come as the news cycle changes and the "next thing" consumes news feeds and becomes a distraction from the pain and trouble. We are a culture that is constantly hungry for the next outrage, the next terror - the next distraction. White evangelicals have a checkered and short history of getting impassioned about these issues for a few weeks and then moving on to the "next thing" with everyone else. Racial issues, generational poverty, and the animosities that exist in our city are the kinds of challenges that will take centuries and lifetimes of faithfulness to resolve. (That's right, I said centuries.) But it is the promise of God that He is causing justice/righteousness to rain down and fill the earth. So as the sense of urgency in our culture wanes in the coming days, may our love for our neighbor in obedience to our King and God not grow cool or even cold.

I want to spell out a bit, the kinds of things I believe we should be doing right now as a church community. I mentioned some of these on May 31st, but I want to expand a bit on them here.

1. Pray. Be reminded of our collective and individual dependence on God's power and his mercy. Ask him for his wisdom and comfort both for yourself and for our neighbors and for the magistrates who govern. Ask him to bring repentance and faith. Don't do this just once - make it a habit. Too often we only pray for immediate needs and in the vein of a personal religion. We must pray eschatological prayers - prayers directed at God's stated purposes for the world in light (or darkness) of present circumstances.

2. Read your Bible. Get the bible into your blood and bones. Let it give you, in the power of the Spirit, a backbone to know and love what is true and good in the face of so much falsehood and evil. May it become the thing you bleed as we confront real life problems - not just in our personal lives but in our neighborhoods and city.

3. Gather with the church and celebrate the coming and present reign of Jesus. There are few things more important for the purposes of biblical justice and truth and righteousness and goodness than the people of God - from every identity group that the world has attempted to separate us into - gathered all across our city, even in different congregations, but united in confessing the good reign of Jesus in the midst of a world that sometimes feels like its spiraling into darkness and chaos. It is not. And one of the clearest signs of this is the regular, faithful worship of God's people throughout the streets of our city.

4. Be faithful in your immediate responsibilities. The great work of God is not a revolution, it is the growing of a garden. It begins with the cultivation of faithfulness and fruitfulness in your own life, in your home and marriage, and in relationships with your actual neighbors.

5. Mourn with your neighbors and Listen to them. Jesus commanded us to weep with those who weep. Do not be calloused to the pain and fears of our neighbors. We live and worship surrounded by people who have experienced racial animosity and structural racism. We should be aware of their stories and their pain. One of the greatest gifts of the past two weeks has been a handful of conversations with friends who have directly suffered evil and injustice on account of their skin color. To hear their stories and to sit with them in their tears as these events have brought back past memories and current fears has been a gift I haven't deserved. Go to your friends and ask them to share some of their stories if they are willing. It has been eye-opening to become increasingly aware of current bigotries in our supposedly progressive city. There are a whole lot of books to read and videos to watch about racism and the history of racial injustice in our country. Some are biblical and remarkably helpful - most, frankly aren't. But none of them compare to a few lengthy and gracious conversations I've had with actual people.

6. Find ways to serve and changes to advocate for. I've been reminded since the beginning of the COVID shutdown of how much need and generational poverty is in our backyard as a community. The west side of Denver is the kind of place where $800,000 homes are across the street from Section 8 housing. We don't have to go far to find real people to serve and pain to witness. We should want all of our neighbors to worship Jesus and we should want to find ways to practically meet the needs of our neighbors as well. This will require real relationships and friendships with your neighbors. And it will involve the mobilization of different parts of our church to serve those people.

A few months ago our elders began a discussion on how to better serve the physical needs of both those within our congregation and in the neighborhoods surrounding our congregation. The first step was the formation of our diaconate fund. Recently, a handful of representatives from each of our parishes have started meeting to both build an infrastructure for identifying needs in our church as well as in our surrounding neighborhoods and then matching those opportunities with resources and people from our church. These systems will be unfolding informally and eventually formally at Trinity over the coming weeks and months. Get involved with that process, seek out opportunities to help and identify potential opportunities for members of our church to get involved with.

Revelation ends with the image of a tree in the heart of God's city - a city that has filled the earth even now. The promise is that this tree will be for the healing of the nations. This is the promise of God and the great work of the church. We are to worship and work and tangibly love as God heals our particular nation of its terrible sickness. This sickness is sin and rebellion against God. This sickness is racial vainglory and animosity. It is a history stained with slavery. It is a present filled with secularism and secularist answers to problems that have everything to do with God. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). In other words the world will be filled up with the real, tangible knowledge of the glory of the Lord. This is the promise of God and this filling is not happening like some switch getting flipped in the future, but rather the dawn has already broken - the world is even now being filled with this glory. The great work of the people of God is to bear witness to this glory and to uncover it even now. May we be faithful in this task.