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February 19th, 2025
Dear Friends,
On January 21st 2025 the Rt. Rev. Marianne Edgar Buddee, Episcopal Bishop of Washington D.C. offered an impassioned sermon at a national prayer service asking the newly inaugurated president to show mercy to those who may be impacted by his administration’s policies. The sermon was simple and profound. Her words drawing from the pages of scripture, specifically what some may call in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus’s inaugural sermon.
The gospel writer has chronicled the birth and baptism, temptation and rejection, healings and teachings. In Chapter Six, Jesus is followed by the crowds who were sick, in pain, and hungry. People for whom knew not only the pain of their physical bodies, but the pain of being rejected and despised by political forces, cultural norms, and religious communities. Jesus gathers them on seaside mountain and proclaims the dreams of a God whose blessing of beloved community reaches far beyond the saccharine stereotypes of “blessing” offered by this world.
I confess that Jesus blessing of mercy for the people gathered that day has always felt the “squishiest” for me. A word dripping with sentimentality and pity. My reaction does not surprise me. Growing up in a predominately white, upper-class Presbyterian Church, I was taught that it was those “less fortunate” who were the focus of mercy. Mission trips into “urban communities” far from my own, reinforced racist ideologies that it was my calling as a Christian to show “mercy” to those who clearly were in need of it the most. Except mercy doesn’t come from “othering” or offering saccharine pity. It comes from doing the work of examining the power and privilege, and the ways I have learned about a person’s “value” (and my own) based on their race, education, socio-economic status, physical abilities, gender and sexual orientation.
Mercy, most commonly translated from the Hebrew hessed or the Greek eleos, is grounded in the self- giving unconditional love that God has for all of God’s people. A love that sees us for all of who we are. Who sees the sufferings, struggles, laments, joy and all the possibilities of who God dreams we can be.
We are living through a time when the Bible is often distorted by people in power to incite fear and hatred. It takes an incredible amount of courage to know the dream of God’s love for our own lives and mirroring that love with all those we encounter in our day to day lives.
Presbytery of Detroit, it is our calling to not only deeply know God’s love for our lives, but to be mercy givers in an unmerciful world. In honor of Black History month, I share the poem “Wade in the Water” from the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner, Tracy K. Smith. She echoes Jesus’ blessing of mercy through encountering and listening to a stranger with love, even when the act of love is a difficult one, burdened with the pain of history.
May we embody God’s mercy.
Rev. Dr. Melissa Lynn Allison, Stated Clerk
Wade in the Water
for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters
by Tracy K. Smith
One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said. She didn’t
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache
Rolled over in my chest,
Like in a room where the drapes
Have been swept back. I love you,
I love you, as she continued
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every
Handclap, every stomp.
I love you in the rusted iron
Chains someone was made
To drag until love let them be
Unclasped and left empty
In the center of the ring.
I love you in the water
Where they pretended to wade,
Singing that old blood-deep song
That dragged us to those banks
And cast us in. I love you,
The angles of it scraping at
Each throat, shouldering past
The swirling dust motes
In those beams of light
That whatever we now knew
We could let ourselves feel, knew
To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—
O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—
O Miraculous Many Gone—
O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—
Is this love the trouble you promised?
From Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K. Smith.
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