On Friday evening at 7:30 pm, our church hosts a “Vigil of Remembrance and Hope.” As Americans, and as Christians, we still believe in what is best in humankind. We look for goodness in one another and our neighbors. We know that we can stand on the side of justice and we can answer Jesus’ call to be peacemakers. For everything there is a season. This is the season to respond.

Painfully, we are reminded that some immigrants came enslaved. The Emancipation Proclamation did not eradicate bigotry. The Civil Rights Act did not remove prejudice. Sanctioned violence against people of color, especially black men, is real. And this week our country erupted. Crisis upon crisis upon crisis is tearing us down. We watch and pray while America bleeds. We cannot look away from the division and suffering that torment our land and people.

In the hymn that Jennie Bryan sang so beautifully on Sunday morning, we hear the refrain: Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear that music ringing. It finds an echo in my soul. How can I keep from singing?+ Through all the tumult and strife, can you hear a song in your soul? Is there a deep current of love to sustain you and give you hope and courage? We will listen and pray, and we will ask for God’s mercy and help.

+from My Life Flows On, music and text by Robert Lowry

We invite you to join us May 5 at 1:00pm via Zoom to discuss The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates. New members and friends are welcome! Following the discussion of The Water Dancer, we will begin Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. Please contact Pastor Joanna if you are interested, for the Zoom link.
Reviews on Amazon:
1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • From the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.

“This potent book about America’s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.”—San Francisco Chronicle

NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • Vanity Fair • Esquire • Good 16Housekeeping • Paste • Town & Country • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal

“Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary.”—Entertainment Weekly

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

This discussion, led by Associate Pastor Joanna Hipp, will focus on Chapter 7 & . Even if you have not attended the discussion group, we hope you can come. We will meet in the Children’s Room.