Yad Vashem is the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. While a difficult place to visit, the great beauty of its design is that when you arrive at the end of the walkthrough its walls and exhibits, a breathtaking vista opens to the beauty of creation: big blue sky, green grass, and a hillside filled with trees that are a remarkable reminder of God keeping God’s promises.
The high school youth experienced something similar at the Legacy Museum at the end of June in Montgomery, Alabama. While our tour of the Legacy Sites was only one of the many experiences we shared on the Civil Rights Tour, the depth and breadth of the Legacy Museum taught us that human suffering is a reality, and that it is our calling and our responsibility to be truth-tellers of our history so we can move forward with hope. In the same way that Yad Vashem opens all to God’s beauty, the Legacy Museum offers the hope of a better future for all people.
This is the vision cast by Isaiah in our reading for this weekend, which proclaims the restoration and the transformation of suffering to joy and weeping to gladness. As we stood at Montgomery Square, the final stopping place of the March from Selma to Montgomery, where 25,000 souls gathered, I have to believe that those assembled that day believed in the promised hope of God. I know it changed the hearts and minds of the 21 of us from Central whose lives were forever altered by our time in Montgomery.
See you in church,
Pastor Stephanie