God, thank you for blessing the world

Dear Sisters and Brothers,
My mother’s favorite son is Bruce, my older brother.

If I begin with this very wrong assumption, it distorts everything I believe about both my mother and my brother. The truth is, my mother deeply loves each of her six children. We all share a common DNA heritage.

My mother is not content that we children all love her. She longs for, prays for, yearns for us to respect and love and care for each other.

I often think of the heartbreak of Adam and Eve. Cain murdered his brother, Abel. It must have grieved the parents to the core of their being to lose a son by the hand of another son.

God must grieve that we, sons and daughters, commit such violence against one another. God must weep because we children, all of a common DNA, can’t get along.

There have been so many misrepresentations of God. But God keeps trying to teach us how to live. In Jesus, God was magnificently incarnated and magnani-mously grace-filled. Jesus clearly demonstrated how God embraces and loves and claims all of us, regardless of nationality, as precious children. Jesus showed us how to include all God’s children.

My prayer is not, “God bless America,” but “God, thank you for blessing the world. May we bless you by blessing – seeking to understand, love, forgive, respect, and embrace — all our brothers and sisters, even those most lost and farthest from you.”

This understanding is just one beginning point for us to seek reconciliation for God’s global family. God is not content until all of his children are at peace with each other. God has no favorites, not even Americans. God is not provincial. So let us love one another, for as John tells us, “love is of God.”

You are all in my prayers during these days of anguish and stress. The words of the hymn writer belong to us right now: We share each other’s woes, each other’s burden bear, and often for each other flows the sympathizing tear.

Grace and peace,
Ray W. Chamberlain Jr.
Resident Bishop

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