The long season of Sundays after Pentecost, also called Ordinary Time, feels anything but ordinary this year. The “long pause” of the pandemic has given way to a rush of civil unrest around race and racism in this country, and there is plenty of grief to go around.

LGBTQ+ Pride month usually evokes joyous celebration. But this year we’re contemplating how the progress achieved by one segment of the human family can be leveraged for the sake of another. We want to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter, in part by carrying on an internal, mostly white-people-to-white-people conversation about racism and white supremacy, the original and ongoing sins of the North American project and the North American church.

We’ll use Psalm 27 as the supporting reading every week, casting it as a Pride psalm and an anti-racist psalm, as it expresses faith in the promise of divine shelter for those who are most vulnerable in this world. “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

Singing at the end of the world as we know it. Jerusalemites exiled to Babylon in the 6th century BCE found it impossible to go on with life as usual. Their songs went silent. They swam in a swirl of sadness (“there we sat down and there we wept”) and rage (“happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us”). Psalms of lament give voice to both these feelings; both are welcome in God’s house, God’s family, God’s ear. Any church that denies or ignores the emotional/spiritual cost that is being extracted from us all is whistling in the dark.

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