Happenings Lead Article from June 24, 2025

FROM YOUR RECTOR

I was reminded while writing the sermon about Enmegahbowh and doing the research about his life, how the government has been in the business of breaking promises since the beginning of this country’s creation. On paper we have processes and promises that give the citizenry great power, but in the end, if the people decide to remain silent, those rights slowly dissipate and go away.

Could the government, after it decided the Indigenous population were all savages, be convinced they were wrong? Could the men who signed into law ideas such as the Indian Removal Act forcing the Native Americans further west been shown a different way to govern? What does it take to see a clearly human shaped and formed person as a savage who is not at all human?

Our country offers great freedoms and amazing rights, but we have also found ways to oppress and keep silent vast segments of our society. Women, Black people, Indigenous peoples of all sorts, Irish, Hispanic and so many other people who come seeking the promised freedom this country offers.

While it is important to have laws and norms that govern our behavior and patterns of living, the idea that Jesus laid out in front of us, the idea of loving your neighbor, seems to have been forgotten and shoved completely to the side when it comes to living in our country. What happened to the idea that Paul Wellstone often advocated, “We all do better when we all do better.”?

It is truly heartbreaking to look at the amazing story of Enmegabowh, the work and ministry he accomplished. But then to know that he died grieving and alone in the end. His wife, his children all dead, his ministry broken, and reshaped as the world evolved around him. Despair filled his heart as he watched the reservations his people were confined to grow more violent and smaller and filled with alcohol. I imagine he was quietly buried with no fanfare.

We live in difficult times, and much of what we do might seem like it is as impotent as a mosquito in a windstorm. We feel overwhelmed by the news that assaults our senses each and every day. Deportations, bombings, political assassinations, social media, it all makes us feel numb, and we start to normalize these realities as if there is nothing we can do. But we can speak. We can see, we can remember what the idealism of both our countries' founding documents promised and the declaration of love that Jesus offered in the Gospels.

I am not promising resolution or respite, but I am offering a reminder that even as we are filled with despair, even as people seek to bend and break us, even as love seems to flee from the ever present threat of fear, we stand together. I said a few weeks ago in a sermon about our work in the lifeboats that we have embarked in from the sinking SS Episcopalian, “And so, with courage and compassion, with memory and imagination, we begin. Not because we know exactly where we’re going, but because we know who we’re going with.”

We are the right people, at the right time to do the work that is set before us. And we are not alone, we are standing shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand with our God. We have not been abandoned, we have not been left behind. You are the exact right person to change the world. I believe that, and I am here to walk with you during this difficult, challenging and amazing time.