Bayard Rustin

Art from Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints book

Kindred in Christ,

I look forward to celebrating Black History Month and beginning our new series Rooted: Rediscovering our Connection to God and All Things. Each week we will look at a different Black hero from our Christian faith and allow their witness to help us reflect on what it means to be rooted and transformed by God’s grace today.

According to John Wesley, we experience divine grace in three aspects: prevenient grace, justifying grace, and sanctifying grace. This week we will explore how prevenient grace is God’s grace at work in our lives before we are aware of it. Indeed, before we can believe or do anything regarding our faith, God is already working towards our healing and wholeness.

Prevenient grace also has societal implications. In the same way God works to heal and change us in our personal lives before we are aware, God’s grace is also working to heal and change systems that oppress, even before society has become fully aware or accepting of these needed changes.

Bayard Rustin’s activism and faith points to this aspect of God’s grace at work in society. An African American leader during the civil rights movement, Rustin helped organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. Among other things, he was a key organizer for the March on Washington. Rustin credited his Quaker faith and upbringing as the source of his nonviolent activism. Rustin was a gay man, which was illegal at the time. Due to criticism over his sexuality, he often acted as an influential adviser behind the scenes.

In the face of segregation, racism, and homophobia, Rustin once said, “We are all one. And if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.”

Prevenient grace is like this. It tells us we are all one, even before we realize it systemically. And we are given the choice to either participate with God’s grace and become as Rustin put it “Angelic troublemakers” for justice, or go against God’s grace and learn the hard way.

I look forward to exploring this and more this week.

Alongside you,

Rev. Paul Ortiz