by Marcia Mount Shoop
Isaiah 58:1-5
“The human family is not healed by clustering around nation or ethnic identity, but by coming together around shared values and practices that disrupt oppression, that put God at the center of the way we understand power, that do not divide, but that make space for the grief that comes from humanity’s broken trust with each other and with God.
This speaks poignantly into our historical moment–when bodies are being sorted and violated based on identity, based on abuse of power, based on false information and a loss of kinship, and with a bunch of smoke screens about the real problems that we are facing as human beings–that are driven by the structures and systems of our economy.
It’s been a risk for millennia to question the economy–to push up against the economic patterns that are conducive to the concentration of wealth among the few.
We never get a chance to grieve how this strategy of greed has ruptured us as the human family. We never get a chance to mourn how much we have lost together because of this delusion we’ve been living in around false superiority and consumption.”
Watch the full GCPC service on 9/28/25 here
(Sermon begins at 1:11)