Musings from Bp Miller 8/11/25

“I came to fling fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.” Luke 12:49

This month, readings from the Gospel (Luke) have been filled with prophetic urgency. This sense of urgency also pervades in headlines and social media posts.

My thoughts turn to the recently concluded ELCA Churchwide Assembly that met under the theme, “For the Life of the World,” in the sweltering heat of Phoenix, Arizona. This assembly took actions that will affect the future of our church as it also addressed some crucial issues in the world. We elected a new presiding bishop and secretary to lead the ELCA for the next six years, amended the Constitution, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions of the ELCA, and we adopted recommendations on memorials from synods. For much of the assembly I sensed urgency for our church to act, for ourselves and for the life of the world.

Perhaps the most significant action of this assembly was to adopt a memorial calling for this church to advocate for peace in the Holy Land. The memorial calls out the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as genocidal in nature and calls for the ELCA, its members, congregations, synods and churchwide units to advocate for human rights and a just peace for Palestinians and Israelis by supporting policies that end the occupation, especially for an end to the mass killing in Gaza, and to ask our governmental leaders to do the same. It lifts up our partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL), the World Council of Churches, and others who work on the ground to bring about peace.

We heard from the Rev. Imad Haddad, bishop-elect of the ELCJHL, and Rabbi Jacobs or the Jewish Reform Movement, each of whom shared their personal reflections on the current situation in the Holy Land and the effects, real and potential, of the assembly’s words and actions on their communities. We were made aware of how difficult the work of peacemaking can be amid antisemitic, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim attitudes in the world. [“Do you think that I came to give peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.”] Our church’s stand against the actions of the Israeli government’s military and “settler” actions in Gaza and the West Bank puts our prior commitment to resist antisemitism into question among our Jewish partners and call for us to redouble our efforts against anti-Jewish attitudes within the church and our neighborhoods.

As the assembly debated the memorial, I remembered encounters with members of the ELCJHL as I visited the Holy Land with bishops and others from the ELCA. We heard, over and over, about the strain put upon the Christian communities living under occupation: So many have already left the land, fleeing violence and oppression; and for those who remain, the thought of leaving is never far from their minds. And yet, these same communities continue to work for peace, engaging in education and dialog with and among their neighbors. My prayer during the assembly was that God would thwart those who wish to enact violence upon the peacemakers in their midst.

Scripture this month calls us to prophetic witness for the life of the world. We are given a vision of a world ordered according to God’s will and called to act on that vision as it acts upon us. It is not enough to say we have faith: God wants action. It is for this that Christ has died; that we might live according to the working of the Spirit within us; our sins forgiven, our lives reconciled to God and to one another, and made free to live into the life God grants to all creation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“Blessed are those servants whom the master finds alert.” Being alert means having our eyes open to the great need of the world and our will turned toward satisfying that need. It is not a personal salvation that we seek but the salvation of the cosmos accomplished and realized in Jesus. On account of the one whose coming proclaims “Peace on Earth,” we must work for peace.