July 16, 2014
Dear Friends,
In the "Stories" section of today's Open Gates (www.mercerdaily.org) you will find the story of the Reverend Charles Moore, the 79-year old Methodist minister who self-immolated and died late in June. His motivation was his intense and lifelong feeling that our nation and his denomination as well have never adequately come to terms with the terrible heritage of slavery and racism that we all share.
Our first temptation - which likely explains why this very unusual event in the USA was so little reported - is to proclaim Reverend Moore crazy from afar and leave it at that. But think of this. For this very particular reason, and out of a profound sense of our corporate refusal to address it, this husband, father, grandfather and pastor ended his life. At the very least this act must call you and I to some measure of serious consideration.
For me, the issues that pained Charles Moore so deeply - a pain that at last took outward expression in the agony that was his at the end - are issues of exclusion, of insisting that the humanly-concocted divisions among us are of greater import than the divine call to unity. A present-day expression of the same, as I see it, is the spectacle of citizens of our nation nose-to-nose near the southern border confronting one another. A number of those people are proclaiming with their own bodies and voices that the borders humans determined in history are more fundamental than the humanity our children share with the thousands of Latin American children who have arrived at that border alone. Do we dare to think that assertion through deeply? The memory of an immolated minister of the Gospel calls us to engage in that hard work together.
In Christ,
John+
The Very Reverend Canon John P. McGinty
Dean, George Mercer Jr. Memorial School of Theology
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