A baby, a NICU, a chaplain, and a half-marathon

Every day, thousands of babies are born too soon, too small and often very sick. I got a first-hand view of this last summer as a chaplain in the Maternity Center at Providence Alaska Medical Center. For all the healthy babies born each day, there were a few whose first destination was not mommy's arms, but the newborn intensive care unit (NICU). One of those babies was Elena Rankin, born during the first few weeks of my internship in mid-June at 23 weeks gestation.

I'm running my first half-marathon in Nashville on April 30 in honor of Elena. And I'm raising money for the March of Dimes to help support the thousands of other families who will spend their first few months with their child in a NICU.

My fundraising goal is $2,300, in honor of Elena's age when she was born (23 weeks). (You'll see a status bar on the right-hand side of my blog logging my progress towards that goal.) I'm asking my supporters to make a donation of at least $23 in honor of Elena and the thousands of babies like her in NICUs right now. Your gift will support March of Dimes research and programs that help moms have full-term pregnancies and babies begin healthy lives. And it will be used to bring comfort and information to families with a baby in newborn intensive care.

Click here to go to my fundraising page and make a donation.


ELENA'S STORY

Elena's parents, Scott and Christina, have given me permission to share her story with you.

Elena is Scott and Christina's first child. When I first met them, Christina had been admitted to the pre-natal unit at Providence for complications with her pregnancy. She was pregnant with identical twins, but after only a few days in the hospital she lost Elena's sister, Sonja. The doctors did everything they could to keep Elena in the womb as long as possible, but just a little over a week later, she delivered Elena at 23 weeks. (In non-"mommy-speak," that's almost 6 months gestation. Christina's due date was mid-October, but she gave birth in mid-June.) Elena weighed just over a pound when she was born.

Elena the day after her birth

When I first saw Elena in the NICU, she was barely bigger than my hand, and her skin was red and translucent, like pictures I'd seen of fetuses in utero. She was in an incubator and had wires connected all over her body. I watched in awe as she lay there and sort of shuddered as she tried to breathe, with the help of the respirator that covered most of her face. (One of the biggest complications for premature babies is that their lungs have not yet fully developed, so breathing is an issue.)

Elena at 5 days, under the lights in the incubator 

For perspective: Elena's hand beside her father's wedding band

Over the next 10 weeks, I watched a beautiful drama play out in that corner of the hospital. Elena's whole "care team" -- the tireless NICU nurses, the doctors, and my fellow chaplains -- surrounded her and her family with love and support. Elena had her ups and downs; days when she was doing great and days when she'd stop breathing or have a heart "episode." But through it all, the support from the Providence staff was palpable, and I was honored to be a part of that team.

Elena's first family photo with her parents, 8 days after her birth

I followed Elena's family throughout the summer, listening as her parents rode the roller coaster of never knowing what they would find each day when they entered the NICU. I watched them struggle with deciding to go back to work part-time, so they'd be able to take family leave when she actually came home. I watched them come into the NICU, scrubbing down for the requisite two minutes, from elbow to fingers, every morning before work and every afternoon after work. I celebrated with them when Elena gained a pound or when her breathing levels were higher, and I listened when they grieved over the loss of all the "would have beens."

One Sunday afternoon I ran into Christina in the NICU after what had been a particularly rough day: that day was originally supposed to have been her baby shower. NICU moms deal not only with not being able to bring their babies home, but with losing all the joys and celebrations of a "normal" pregnancy. Instead of sitting in a room full of her friends and relatives cooing over her adorable baby gifts and beaming over her impending twin girls' arrival, she was sitting in a sterile hospital room, rubbing one daughter's back through the small opening in the side of the incubator, having just said goodbye to the other daughter at her memorial service.

I developed a long-term relationship with the Rankins over the summer. They were some of the most dedicated parents in the NICU, faithfully visiting, holding, and singing songs and hymns to Elena every day. Being first-time parents, Christina commented to me once that they realized they didn't know a lot of children's songs to sing to her. "We just keep singing 'Jesus Loves Me' and 'Amazing Grace' over and over," she said, somewhat sheepishly. I smiled. "Not bad songs for her to learn from the very beginning of life," I said. Scott and Christina's love for their child was a living icon of Christ's love.

Elena as she looked in late August, at the end of my internship

When I left at the end of the summer, I asked the family if they would be willing to let me continue to follow Elena's progress from afar. They agreed, and I watched via her online Care Page as she grew and progressed over the next few months until finally, in October, just a few days before her original due date, she got to go home! My heart leapt when I signed on to the page that day and saw the report that Elena was discharged, after 116 days in the NICU. It was hard to believe this was the same baby I had watched quiver in the incubator in late June.

Elena in late September, just a few weeks before she went home

Elena is now off all monitors and oxygen and and weighs over 13 pounds! She was recently featured on an Anchorage radio station's Radio-thon to benefit the Children's Miracle Network at Providence Children's Hospital. And in December, she starred in her church's Christmas play as baby Jesus (with mom and dad co-starring as Mary and Joseph)!

The Rankins as The Holy Family

I am truly in awe of the miracle that is this child's life. Please join me in giving thanks and praise to God for her survival and for the blessings she has brought to this family.

And, if you feel so moved, please give to support me in my run in honor of Elena and in support of all families who face similar stories.

Thank you for helping me give all babies a healthy start!

Elena in mid-January, at 7 months

Special thanks to the Rankins for their openness in allowing me to share their story, and for providing the pictures of Elena.

Live simply, that others may simply live

Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Parish, Decatur, Ga., on Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011 (the 28th anniversary of my baptism), the Eighth Sunday of Epiphany, Year A. (Matthew 6:24-34).


She stands in the upstairs, attic-loft of the shelter, giving a tour to one of her newest volunteers.

“And this is where we keep the extra coats,” she says, pointing to a motley assortment of puffy parkas stuffed tightly into cardboard boxes and shoved into a room behind the walls made of chained-link fence. “Here we have sheets... we’re down to only a few sets, but we’ll get more in soon,” she says confidently.

She moves further down the central hallway, pointing out the holding places where supplies are kept for the guests of this shelter.

“Where do you get your donations?” the new volunteer asks. “How do you know you’ll be getting more sheets soon?”

“Oh, they’ll come,” the shelter employee says with a smile. “One of the things I’ve learned through working here is that God will provide for whatever we need. We like to have butter for the guests every night at dinner, out on the tables. But if we run out, ok, we just go ahead without butter for a few nights. And inevitably, some butter will be donated within a few days or a week. When we need butter, the universe sends us butter.”

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.”

Have you ever been in a place where you weren’t quite sure where the money was going to come from to pay that electric bill? Or when you didn’t know how or when you’d get your next meal? If you have, then you know something about trusting God. I mean, really trusting God. Not just saying you trust God because it sounds nice and looks good to your church friends but then doing everything within your power to guarantee you will be able to provide for your own needs, thank you very much, God. I’m talking about really being dependent on other people for your very survival – as the disciples of Jesus were when he sent them out, instructing them to take nothing with them – “no, purse, no bag, no sandals” (Luke 10:4) – but to depend entirely on the generosity of those to whom they ministered.

Folks who live on the street know about being dependent on others, and the ones who aren’t completely numb and cynical usually know something about trusting God. In fact, I’d dare to say that they know quite a bit more about trusting God than folks who have only trusted God as a matter of personal piety, who have never had to trust God as a matter of life and death. Ask the folks down at the Church of the Common Ground about trusting God, and you’ll likely get an earful.

Of course, despite our illusions that we are able to provide for our own needs, we are -- all of us -- dependent on one another for survival. As one of the collects for Compline says, “grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil.” And we are ultimately dependent on God for our very being. Still, knowing all that intellectually isn’t the same as living with it in your everyday reality.

Perhaps this is why Jesus encourages us to give up our possessions and speaks of the poor as “blessed.” Perhaps it’s why he says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Our savings accounts, our IRAs, our insurance policies – all set up to ensure our financial security, to protect us and to maintain our standard of living – actually prevent us from experiencing our utter dependence on God and fool us into thinking we can care for ourselves. They are hindrances to our relationship with God.

We store up treasures for ourselves on earth because we believe that it will give us peace of mind. “If only I had more money, I wouldn’t have to worry so much,” we think to ourselves. But the irony of it all is that the more we have, the more we worry about losing it. Monastics take a vow of poverty out of the recognition of this dynamic that Jesus so poignantly illustrates throughout his teachings: the less we have, the less we have to worry about, the less we have to distract us from our relationship with God and from giving ourselves over completely to him. There is freedom in having less. It frees our souls to trust more and opens us to deeper spiritual growth.

But don’t get me wrong – my point is not to romanticize extreme poverty or to downplay the very real hardships and traumas that people in such circumstances face. I’m sure those same folks on the street who would affirm that they have learned to trust God through losing everything would also balk at any suggestion that their poverty – and by extension, the extreme wealth of others – is all part of God’s plan and is for their own good. This smacks of the kind of twisted theology that keeps the oppressed oppressed in the name of spiritual growth. “You may have hardships now, but your reward is great in heaven,” the church has told slaves, and women in abusive relationships, and gay and lesbian people – which has had the effect of justifying the status quo and denying their full membership in the body of Christ and their full flourishing as human beings.

I don’t believe that kind of acceptance of society’s injustices was what Jesus was talking about when he pointed out that having less frees us to be more open to God. I don’t think that was an invitation to endorse or turn a blind eye the horrendous conditions of those in extreme poverty because such conditions are “good for them” and will bring them “closer to God.” No, if that’s what we get out of reading the Gospel, I think we’re entirely missing the point.

Jesus doesn’t just call “the poor,” or those who have less, “blessed” and stop there. No, he calls “the rich,” or those who have more, to give up what they do have in order to experience some of the freedom of having less and to connect more deeply with God. But giving up possessions to address a personal spiritual need has the effect – whether intended or unintended – of meeting a larger, societal need as well.

Think about it. In a world of limited resources, how much we consume has a direct effect on others around us. If we choose to give up some of our possessions, we not only open ourselves more to God, we also leave more available for others to have. By eating less, buying less, using less energy, we allow others to benefit from the generosity of God and distribute it more equally amongst God’s people. Living more simply helps bring about the kingdom of God both within us and around us.

No, I don’t think that the Gospel endorses the status quo of our class system by holding up the blessedness of the poor or by pointing out that we may need to have less in order to really learn how to trust God. Rather, I believe that if we truly follow Jesus, we will find ourselves significantly rearranging that system.

Jesus calls us all to live more simply and thus to experience the freedom of knowing our dependence on God. But as those of us with more choose intentionally to live more simply, we may find that we are able to meet the needs of those in extreme poverty. As a saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi goes, we should “live simply, that others may simply live.”

Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said, “strive first for the kingdom of God... and all these things will be given to you as well.”

H*Art Gallery, Chattanooga

Today our urban ministry class visited two locations in Chattanooga, Planet Altered and the H*Art Gallery. Planet Altered is a self-defined "community creative arts center" that offers a fair-trade gift shop, an art gallery, and a community space room dedicated to art classes and, on Saturday afternoons, a non-traditional, non-denominational, artistically-guided Christian worship service. The H*Art Gallery is a gallery that exhibits art created by homeless people.

The H*Art Gallery (and that asterisk should really be a little heart symbol in the title, but I can't figure out how to make that symbol on my computer!) is just two doors down from Planet Altered, and we visited there after we were finished with our visit with Linda. The gallery is devoted exclusively to exhibiting art created by people who are homeless. Some of the people who work with the gallery offer an art class on Fridays at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, and there they look for particular talent in the art of the guests and invite those who exhibit particular artistic talent to exhibit their work at the H*Art Gallery.

Exhibiting their work at the H*Art Gallery gives the artists a chance to sell their work; all pieces on exhibit at any given time are for sale to the public. When the H*Art Gallery sells a painting, 60 percent of the proceeds go directly to the artist, 30 percent goes to the gallery, and 10 percent goes to a charity of the artist's choosing. I thought this was a particularly powerful model -- that even when the artists are living on the street and themselves may be the beneficiaries of charities, they still give 10 percent (a tithe) of the money from the sale of their art to a charity.

So how do people living on the streets manage to find the time or space to create art, much less afford the materials required to produce it? In addition to art classes like the ones held at the Community Kitchen, the H*Art Gallery opens its space to artists on Wednesdays and Thursdays, giving them a space to work and materials and supplies they can use in creating their art.

The gallery also holds fundraising dinners in the gallery space five or six times a year. They get a local chef to donate his or her time, and use the small but state-of-the-art kitchen in the back to create extravagant, $75 per plate kind of meals. The guests at the dinner are seated at nice tables with white table cloths and candles right in the middle of the gallery, which allows them to view and appreciate the art all while giving back to the gallery and to the homeless people it benefits.

In addition to being a gallery space, the H*Art Gallery is also available for event rentals in Chattanooga -- so people can hold receptions or bridal showers or any number of other private events here (and use the kitchen in the back!) for a small fee, which raises money for the gallery and raises awareness about the issues of homelessness and brings the beauty of their art to a wider audience. What a brilliant idea.

The H*Art Gallery embodies what our professor Susanna Metz wrote about in a recent article on sacred space in the city for a publication called "Tuesday Morning," a resource for clergy:

"Finally it seems we’re beginning to understand that all of us—every human being—regardless of our station in life, have a God-given yearning for beauty. Our creativity makes us whole. Being able to indulge ourselves in what we love, what we consider beautiful, helps us find our wholeness."

Planet Altered, Chattanooga

Today our urban ministry class visited two locations in Chattanooga, Planet Altered and the H*Art Gallery. Planet Altered is a self-defined "community creative arts center" that offers a fair-trade gift shop, an art gallery, and a community space room dedicated to art classes and, on Saturday afternoons, a non-traditional, non-denominational, artistically-guided Christian worship service. The H*Art Gallery is a gallery that exhibits art created by homeless people.

At Planet Altered, we met with founder Linda Sines, who said she felt led by God to establish this space for art and worship in the middle of Chattanooga. Although the driving force behind her establishment of the center is her Christian faith, she told us that most of the community doesn't even know that the center is Christian-based -- intentionally. Her goal is to reach out to "non-traditional" church-goers, and so she keeps the overt Christian imagery and language to a minimum -- billing herself instead as a "community center." The back room hosts art workshops and a program called Cafe Grants, a community gathering and soup dinner where artists are given an opportunity to talk about their art (painting, singing, etc) to an audience of 35 people from the community who each pay $10 for the evening, and the community votes on which artist to give the $350 from the evening to. Planet Altered hosts these gatherings once a month for five months (from October to February). But on Saturday afternoons, it hosts a worship service.

The fair-trade store in the front of Planet Altered.

But as Linda will tell you, the worship doesn't look like your traditional church service. The main focus of the service is creating "worship art," communal art projects that the gathered community works on together. There are some readings from the Bible, but no set liturgy, and no music.

"We don't use music," Linda explained, "because people tend to think of music as 'doing the worship' for them. They go and hear a beautiful choir sing some music in a church, and they think that's worship. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see what else could do the worship."

Linda talking to members of our class in the "back room" space.

She showed us examples of some of the art they'd created in worship: three mask-like faces hanging above the coffee makers, painted in brilliant colors, that had been created the Sunday after Katrina, as a meditation on the passage from 1 Kings 19 when Elijah encounters God at Mt. Horeb (God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the "still, small voice" -- or, more accurately translated, the "sound of sheer silence."). Or the rose created from coffee filters, emerging from a charred, burnt heart. (The group didn't believe the rose was truly made of coffee filters until I got up and looked closely at it and reported back that indeed, it was made of coffee filters.)

Linda kept using words like "experiment" and "facilitate" to describe the way she led worship, and I watched the faces of my seminary colleagues grow somewhat puzzled.

"But, so, do you have, like, a liturgy?" someone asked, trying to figure out how someone could possibly lead worship without a set structure and ritual.

"No," Linda said. "It's different every week. There's always the component of scripture reading, and an art project, and some kind of interaction with the community, and sharing of how God is moving in everyone's lives. But I don't plan the worship, per se. Sometimes I show up and I'm not sure what's going to happen. I think we get so caught up with planning in churches sometimes that we don't leave room for the Holy Spirit to do its work."

I looked around and noted blank or hesitant looks from many of my colleagues.

"So how do people know about the service?" someone else asked. Linda explained that it was largely by word of mouth, and that she did not advertise or list the service in any newspapers.

"But... why wouldn't you want to advertise? Why wouldn't you want people to know what you're doing? How are people going to know about it?" someone asked, looking consternated.

"God brings people here as they need to find it," Linda said. "We're not about trying to promote ourselves, but just about seeing where the Holy Spirit guides us."

Art supplies storage above the large sink in the "back room."

Finally someone asked the elephant-in-the-room question: what the heck was this lady's religious background or affiliation? (She surely wasn't Episcopalian, seemed to be the underlying assumption.)

Linda told us that she was raised by missionary parents, in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but that she considers herself a non-denominational Christian and she doesn't like the "arrogance" that is often manifested between different denominations.

I could almost hear a collective "hmmm" from the gathered group of future Episcopal priests. At a coffee shop later, some of my colleagues said that what Linda was doing was great for a sort of alternative space like she had, but it would "never work for Sunday morning."

I wonder about that, though. Why wouldn't it? Just because "we've always done it" this other way? Maybe it would work for Sunday morning for some people -- for people who aren't going to the traditional Sunday morning services we continue to have as an homage to the past?

Our class will be going back to Planet Altered later in the term to actually experience one of Linda's Saturday worship experiences. Unfortunately, that's the day I'll be running my half-marathon in Nashville, so I'll miss the group's reactions to whatever they experience. I'm hoping I'll be able to go back on another Saturday to experience it myself.

Hearing Linda talk reminded me of my experience with a Monday night interfaith devotional gathering hosted by a group of local Baha'is in Decatur, Ga. That gathering was an intentional sacred space where there was no agenda, but an open time of sharing scripture, song, and story from our various traditions. In many ways, it felt more holy and Spirit-filled than anything I'd experienced in an Episcopal liturgy -- with the exception of maybe a few moments at St. James's in Cambridge (my first Episcopal parish). I was reminded of how much I appreciate these kind of alternative spaces for worship and how boring and stifling I can find traditional, repetitive liturgy (in fact, it was for that reason that I left the Lutheran Church in which I was raised -- much of the worship there felt like empty ritual to me). Although I do feel a certain sense of "at home-ness" in the Episcopal Church, this experience of encountering someone doing something different and some of the obvious uncomfortability or uncertainty of my (future) priestly colleagues reminded me of just how "not at home" I can feel in this tradition as well.

*Disclaimer: All "quotations" of people in this blog post are re-created after the fact from my (rusty) memory and are not meant to be taken literally as the EXACT words these people spoke. And my apologies to any of my colleagues whose expressions I may have misread during this class... this reflection may be more about my projections than anything else!

Chattanooga Community Kitchen

Today our urban ministry class visited the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, by far the most inspirational place we've been yet (to me). We met with Jens Christensen, assistant director at the kitchen, and with Brother Ron Fender, an Episcopal monk in the Brotherhood of St. Gregory whose primary role at the shelter is to wash homeless people's feet.

Entrance to the Chattanooga Community Kitchen

When our van-load of six or seven students arrived at the kitchen, our professor, the Rev. Susanna Metz, who had driven a few other students in her own car, had already arrived. Her bumper-sticker-covered sedan was parallel parked next to the entrance to the kitchen, and she was standing on the street greeting folks from the shelter with hugs and smiles. It was clear she was a familiar presence in these parts.

We all gathered in front of the kitchen and went inside to the lobby. A middle-aged African-American man sat behind the desk, looking suspiciously at this crowd of clean, well-dressed folks who had wandered in. "We're here for a meeting with Jens," Susanna explained. "Oh, Jens, ok," he answered. "He's around somewhere," he commented, and we continued to wait.

Just to the left of the lobby was the main kitchen area. Although the Chattanooga Community Kitchen has become much more than just a feeding program, here was the center, the heart of what this place had been about from its founding: feeding people. Looming over the rows of tables and chairs was a beautiful mural, depicting Jesus with his arms outstretched in front of a city-scape including a variety of people in brilliant, bright colors. It reminded me of the mural in the parish hall at St. James Cambridge, my first Episcopal parish in the Boston area: there, a mural of Jesus feeding the five thousand took center stage, with Jesus breaking the bread in the center, just as in this picture, and hundreds of people of all different races and colors surrounding him in the background.

Eventually, Jens came out to meet us. He was a young, outdoorsy-looking man who looked like he'd spend most of his time hiking or reading poetry, not running a community kitchen for homeless people. He began to tell us the history of the Kitchen: founded in 1982 by seven different churches (two of them Episcopal), that banded together to address the needs that they were seeing in the community. Now the board of the Kitchen includes not just churches but synagogues and even a Satya Sai Baba group (a Hindu sect), "We don't talk about religion, we talk about helping people," Jens said of how the groups work together. "We can come to an agreement about helping people even if we don't agree on why we're helping them."

The Kitchen began as a group of volunteering going out to give sack lunches to people on the streets, and in 1985 they got a building and began to house their feeding program in one central location. Now, the Kitchen includes not just a meals program but a day shelter, a free health care clinic, substance abuse programs, a thrift store, social worker services, and a transitional family housing unit that can house up to 10 families at a time. 181,000 meals were served last year (2010), and the health clinic sees 4,000-5,000 unique individuals each year. There are an estimated 600 to 700 homeless people each night in Chattanooga, Jens told us.

An unfortunately blurry image of the meditation room.

The day shelter area was opened in 2008 and is a space where people with nowhere else to go can spend time during the day. Most shelters require that guests leave by something like 5 or 6 a.m., so people without jobs are left with no where to go until the shelters open again at 6 p.m. or so. The day shelter area provides a place where people can play cards or chess or checkers, use the public computers for job-hunting or online classes, or just sit. There is also a meditation room, a quiet room with dimmed lighting where people can go for quiet and stillness. I was amazed at the luxury of this beautiful space within the midst of a shelter -- and indeed, the day shelter area itself was the cleanest, brightest, most inviting shelter space I'd ever been in -- a far cry from the hardly-better-than-a-basement concrete underside of a building where the Peachtree-Pine shelter in Atlanta was housed, or the somewhat grungy and dark day shelter space of Siena Francis House in Omaha.

As Jens gave us the tour, he told us about how the shelter had intentionally built this space to be of the same standards one would expect for any public space. "When we went to renovate the space, the staff said to ourselves, 'This needs to be a space that we'd feel comfortable using ourselves.'"

"That's what I'M talkin' about!" a short African-American man in jeans and a raggy t-shirt piped up from the back of our group. A guest at the shelter, he'd joined our group in the lobby and asked Jens if he could tag along for our tour. He interjected occasionally with his own perspective on things.

Jens smiled. "Really," he said, "the bathrooms here were pretty disgusting. They weren't of a quality that any of us on staff would be willing to use. So we decided, you know, when we remodeled, that everything would have to be of the highest quality."

The man in the back of the group nodded vigorously and proudly. 

Just one example of that commitment to high quality service for their guests is the foot washing room. The foot washing program at the Community Kitchen was started by Br. Ron Fender, a monk in the Episcopal order of the Brotherhood of St. Gregory. As Jens told the story, "One day we got a hand-written letter from some man up in the Northeast. 'I want to live with the homeless, make minimum-wage, and wash people's feet,' it said. The director of the shelter threw it on the desk dismissively, figuring it was from some crazy nutcase." (Read more about the story in this article from the Chattanooga Free Times Press.)

But Brother Ron showed up anyway, and however much of a crazy nutcase he was, he made himself at home at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, which now touts him as one of their most beloved assets. He washes and cares for the feet of homeless people -- feet that are often tired from miles and miles of walking and from standing all day long. But this is no makeshift, bucket-and-rag foot washing. Although it arose from humble beginnings, the value of the footwashing -- tender, non-threatening human touch it provides to the guests and the ability to diagnose certain illnesses, like gangrene and diabetes -- drew attention, and eventually led to the donation of salon-quality pedicure chairs for the room (pictured at right). Now, in addition to Brother Ron's ministerial presence, nurses and podiatrists volunteer their time to help in this aspect of the Kitchen's ministry.

This entry is already ridiculously long, but the amount of work that the Community Kitchen does in downtown Chattanooga is simply staggering. Even to briefly mention each type of outreach ministry would take much longer than I've spent here. In addition to the services previously mentioned, the Kitchen also has a medical respite facility, where people who are homeless can go after being discharged from the hospital to continue to recover. (Often people are discharged with orders of "bed rest," but how exactly is one to find this "bed rest" if one does not have a home, much less a bed where they can rest on a consistent basis?) Unfortunately, the medical respite area is currently closed (as of Feb. 2010) due to a lack of ability to pay volunteer nurses to monitor the hall. 

The Kitchen also has a recycling program, which has been operating since the 1990s, before the city provided curbside recycling. The recycling program provides job training for people connected with the day shelter and the kitchen. Our professor Susanna collects recyclables at the seminary and drives them down to Chattanooga every month to donate to the Community Kitchen's recycling program. (When we showed up today, she had a bag of plastic bottles in hand.)

At the end of our time at the Community Kitchen, we sat down for a brief conversation with Brother Ron (pictured below). Someone asked him how he could keep doing it, keep giving of himself in this way, keep putting himself in harm's way in this ministry. (He'd just told us stories of having guns pointed at his head and of breaking up violent fist-fights outside the Kitchen.) They asked if he was afraid.

"You know, I gave up fear," Brother Ron said, matter-of-factly. "I think that's part of living into the vows." 

© Chattanooga Free Times Press.

He spoke eloquently of the value of continuing to show up, week after week, even when people betray you or hurt you or don't seem to be making any changes or improvements to their lives. 

"But we can't abandon them," he said. "I think we've gotta keep being there. That's what the Gospel is all about. God doesn't abandon us. So I keep coming back."

A mural in the meditation room at the day shelter.

Waiting

Sermon preached at Morning Prayer (Friday, Feb. 18, 6 Epiphany, Year One) in the Chapel of the Apostles, the seminary chapel at Sewanee.

I assume that that concluding statement from 1 Timothy, “Do not ordain anyone hastily,” was especially poignant to this crowd of seminarians.

The Episcopal Church certainly seems to have gotten that one right! We don’t take anyone’s claim to a call from God at face value. No, we test it and investigate it and analyze it and then we make them wait... and wait ... and study ....and spend a summer dealing with the existential angst of patients in a hospital... and wait some more... and study... and take some tests... and wait... and go before various committees... and wait... and wait. No, it could not be said of us that we ordain anyone hastily!

And despite the frustrations and difficulties that this process can bring, it is a wise and good thing that our church has heeded the words of Scripture and does not ordain anyone hastily. There is wisdom in the church’s tradition and in the vetting process for the ordained ministry. In fact, a similar vetting process used to be required of anyone who wanted to join the church at all, not just those who wanted to be ordained. The ancient practice of catechizing adult converts to the faith, who would become “candidates for baptism” only after an extensive process (as we eventually become candidates for holy orders), ensured that those joining the church were seriously committed to Jesus Christ and to serving him in and with their lives. Perhaps we would be wise not to baptize hastily any more than we ordain hastily.

Waiting can be a good and holy spiritual discipline. Scripture is full of exhortations to “wait on the Lord,” for God’s deliverance and mercy in the midst of trouble. As Christians, while “we remember Jesus’s death” and “proclaim his resurrection,” we are also perpetually “awaiting his coming in glory,” as Eucharistic Prayer B says. Whole seasons of the church year, like Advent and Lent, are devoted to intentional waiting.

Waiting is a forgotten virtue in our modern culture, so focused on instant gratification. Why wait for months for a letter from a loved one when you can text message them and get a response within seconds? Why take the time to prepare a rich, wholesome meal for family and friends when you can get one at the push of a button at your local fast food restaurant? But even within our fast-paced culture, we still value most those things that come at the expense of a significant investment of our time and energy: that promotion that required that we work extra hard, the friendship that was built on years of shared experiences and hardships. Anthropologists have observed that across cultures, people value more what costs them more. Instead of catering to the quick-fix culture, we as the church should be about the business of stressing the value of waiting, of not getting what we want immediately, of putting things off for the sake of spiritual growth.

And we seminarians should be thankful for this opportunity to experience a holy waiting, as we muddle our way through the three years of “liminal” space in seminary. The good news about waiting is that it is something we can actually DO. Some of you might disagree – you might be more of a Tom Petty-ite, affirming that “the waiting is the hardest part.” But think about it. You don’t actually have to DO anything to wait. You can just sit there. Surely it’s easier to “wait for the Lord” than to “love your neighbor as yourself” or to “sell all you have and give it to the poor?” In any case, we have no choice about waiting – unlike the more action-oriented commandments, waiting is forced upon us. We can and do wait, whether we like it or not. It’s not actually hard to wait; the hard part is to wait with a good attitude, with a posture of faith and trust in God.

Some of you may have heard a saying that is popular with people of many faiths who have a meditation or silent prayer practice: “Don’t just do something, sit there!” This inversion of the traditional saying draws our attention to the importance of being over doing, and the value of waiting in stillness and silence before the Divine Mystery.

Oh, but I know, I know. There is so much to be done. You need to find a place to live this summer during CPE. And there’s so much paperwork to be done before scholarship applications are due and commissions on ministry meet this spring. And what if you haven’t found a job come graduation time?

Just remember – there’s a reason we don’t ordain anyone hastily. And the next time you find yourself feeling pressure to do, do, do... don’t just do something, sit there.

Sermon: Theological Education Sunday

Text of a sermon given Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Dalton, Ga. I was invited to preach by St. Mark's interim rector, Fr. Reed Freeman, who along with his wife Nancy, established the Freeman Award for Merit at the School of Theology at Sewanee, which I was awarded this past fall.

Today, if you didn’t know it already, is Theological Education Sunday. In 1997, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church established the first Sunday in February as a day to encourage parishes to give at least a small portion of their budgets to supporting theological education. I stand before you as Exhibit A: a real, live seminarian!

Since your rector has informed me that you currently have a member in the discernment process about to head off to seminary next year, I assume that at least some of you know well about the process of forming new clergy. You know about discernment. You know about sending folks to seminary. But some parishes don’t. If your parish hasn’t supported a seminarian a while, or if you don’t live in a town near a seminary, you’re likely never to come across this strange breed of person: the seminarian. And you’re likely to get the impression that priests sort of fall from the sky, manna-like, a perfectly-formed creation of God in heaven.

So that’s why they trot us out once a year to talk, real person to real person, with the people in the pews – or as my husband affectionately refers to himself and other laity, the “pewsters.”

So. Hello, pewsters. I’m Tracy, the seminarian. I’d like to talk with you this morning about how I found my way to seminary and about why I think theological education is so important for the future of the church.

I never expected to become an Episcopal priest. I was raised in the Lutheran Church, but I saw much of what happened there as empty ritual. After a “conversion experience” at a Baptist youth rally in late high school, I left the Lutherans for non-denominational evangelical churches, drawn in by people who seemed really passionate about what they believed. I soon found that some of my views on women’s leadership and on God’s presence in religions other than Christianity were not welcome there, and I eventually found my way to an Episcopal Church while pursuing a graduate degree in world religions and interfaith dialogue in the Boston area. At the time, I’d assumed I’d become a religion reporter for a newspaper or a documentary filmmaker – I wanted to help educate the public about religions. Little did I know, God had other plans.

Ever since my high school “conversion experience,” I had been struck by the many calls to care for the poor that I found in Scripture. Passages like the one we read from Isaiah 58 this morning began to haunt me. “Is not this the fast that I choose:
 to loose the bonds of injustice... to share your bread with the hungry,
 and bring the homeless poor into your house?” Or Micah 6:8, which we heard in the lectionary last Sunday: “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” Or John 21:17: “If you love me, feed my sheep.” Or Matthew 25:40: “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me.” Passages like these rang in my head as I walked, eyes down, past the many homeless people on the streets of Cambridge, as I rushed to class or to the store.

After being tormented by this Scriptural soundtrack in my head for over a year, I finally responded to the proddings – or shall we say HARASSMENT – of the Spirit. I began to volunteer with an outdoor church in Cambridge for people who either would not or could not enter traditional churches. Most of our parishioners were people who lived on the streets.

The first time I attended the Outdoor Church, I bit back tears as I stood with several homeless people and two ministers in the middle of a public park, gathered in a circle around the rickety metal push-cart that held the simple altar linen and wooden cross, while the minister stretched out his hands and recited these words as part of the Eucharistic prayer: “Out of your desire to draw us into your infinite love, 
Jesus was born into the human family 
and remained with people who were outcast.” As the priest at my parish in the Boston area had said of this gathering, “It really felt like CHURCH.”

At that moment, I knew I was where God had been calling me to be for some time. For the next year and a half, I tredged several miles down to Harvard Square, rain or shine – or snow! – and worshipped with the Outdoor Church in Cambridge Common. We would then journey through the streets of Cambridge on foot, offering lunch and Communion to anyone who looked like they might need it.

After doing some writing about my experience with the Outdoor Church, some of my mentors began to suggest that I might have a call to ordained ministry. Several years of discernment and several geographical moves later, I found myself in seminary at Sewanee.

In seminary, I got a chance to examine more closely many of those Scriptural passages that led me to my involvement with the Outdoor Church, and sparked my call to ordained ministry. I learned, for instance, that the author of Matthew’s gospel is not actually referring to the poor and outcast when he says, “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me.” Instead, this is a sectarian statement that claims that people will be sent into “paradise” or “everlasting torment” at the end of time based on how they have treated Christians – and in particular, Matthew’s community and how THEY thought people should be Christian, which was to continue to follow Jewish practices like the Sabbath and keeping the ritual food laws -- as we heard in this morning's reading from Matthew -- "I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it." The Greek phrase translated as “the least of these” in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is actually probably more accurately rendered “these little ones,” and is a phrase used to refer to Jesus’s disciples in the Gospel of Mathew.

I also learned that some of the wonderful injunctions to care for the poor in the Old Testament, like this morning’s reading from Isaiah 58, were couched within what I found to be a rather problematic theology. After learning the historical context in which Isaiah 58 was written, I realized that the message of this passage is not just that God prefers ethical and just behavior to going through the motions of empty ritual – that I could get on board with – but that the destruction of Jerusalem and Israel’s defeat by the Babylonian Empire was actually God’s PUNISHMENT on the Israelites for not living in such a manner. If we were to translate this into our own day, it would be something like, “Care for the poor, or I’ll send another country to destroy the United States in a massive war. Thus says the Lord.”

Now, recovering the ancient meaning of the text doesn’t mean we have to stop there in terms of our own understanding of and relationship with the text. The task of biblical studies is determining what the text meant in its own day; the task of theology is determining what it means for us today.

Do we believe, as the ancient Israelites did, that God punishes nations for their behavior by wreaking national disasters and military conquest upon them? Some Christians do. You may remember that shortly after 9/11, Jerry Falwell said that gays and lesbians and feminists “helped this happen” by making God angry at America. Or that Pat Robertson claimed that the earthquake in Haiti last January was God’s punishment on that country for making a pact with the devil. Most Episcopalians I know were horrified by these statements, but they’re actually not too far off from the way the ancient Israelites would have understood and interpreted God’s agency in the world.

Or do we believe that God will judge the people of the world at the end of time based on how they have treated us? Not whether the most vulnerable among us have been cared for, or even whether they are Christians or not, but whether they have given Christians special treatment?

If we don’t want to affirm this kind of theology and what it says about God’s nature, what does that mean for the way we read Scripture? Is there a way to affirm the call to ethical and just societies that Isaiah 58 presents without believing that God will send terrorist attacks and earthquakes upon us if we mess up? Can we continue to read Matthew 25 as a calling to care for the poor, even though that wasn’t what the author of that text meant to say?

These are the questions we wrestle with in seminary, and they are of ultimate concern for the future of the church. How we read Scripture matters. How our clergy read Scripture matters. The consequences of misuse of sacred texts can be immense, as any cursory glance at Christian history will show: slavery, the Crusades, the Inquisition, you know the story. It’s not something most of us are proud of. But it’s a very real part of our tradition and history as Christians, and I believe it’s crucial that our future clergy are educated in such a way that we become self-aware enough not to repeat it.

And although studying Scripture critically can uncover some unsettling things about how the church has moved away from the original meaning of some of the texts, in some ways it can actually be liberating or helpful to us in our ministry. For example, had I known what I know now about Matthew 25, I would have had an answer for the homeless man in Cambridge who had seen this verse posted on the outside of a shelter where he’d stayed and asked me, “What does that mean, the LEAST of these?” His tone of voice made it clear that he wasn’t at all flattered at being considered “least” of anything, and that if such a mindset were motivating the people who ran the shelter, it came across to him as derogatory and patronizing.

And this is why theological education is so important. Our understanding of and interpretation of Scripture has a direct, personal effect on the people with whom we serve and minister. We need our priests to be educated and intelligent interpreters of Scripture. But seminary is much more than biblical studies and theology – we also study church history, liturgy, ethics, and get practical experience through field education placements at nearby parishes, with opportunities to reflect on our experiences with our peers.

When you financially support theological education, you’re not just helping one man or woman and their family pay to go to seminary. You’re supporting the future of our church and the impact it will have on the wider world. You’re supporting all those folks on the street who are wondering if God considers them “less than” people with more money when they see Matthew 25 posted on the walls of their shelter.

Now, “Theological Education Sunday” was established to promote financial support of those studying for ordained ministry. But I personally believe that “theological education” shouldn’t be just about clergy. One of the reasons I’m proud to be at Sewanee is that it is the home of the Education for Ministry program, better known as EfM, which seeks to educate all Christians in the basics of the faith – biblical studies, church history, and theology – in a four-year program offered in parishes across the country. EfM believes that all Christians – that means all of you! – are ordained to ministry by virtue of their baptism. Although it’s certainly important to support seminary education for clergy, I’d also like to encourage us on Theological Education Sunday to think about how we are educating the laity in their faith. How are we giving them opportunities to discern THEIR callings, to live our THEIR ministries? EfM is a wonderful program, but it requires a “tuition” fee of several hundred dollars as well. How do we make quality Christian formation and theological education accessible to every member of the church?

But let’s get back to Isaiah. What does all this high-falutin’ talk about seminary education have to do with Isaiah’s message of bringing justice to the poor? Wouldn’t our money be better spent helping a homeless person get an apartment than supporting some already-privileged person to go off and sit in the luxury of a university setting for three years getting a graduate-level degree?

Maybe it doesn’t have to be an “either/or” scenario. The best of our seminaries are about training people how to respond to Isaiah’s call for justice for the poor. I’m currently taking a class at Sewanee that involves traveling to Chattanooga once a week to visit various urban ministries and outreach programs and to learn very practical lessons about effective ways to organize people in responding to God’s call for justice for the poor. Supporting theological education is supporting the poor, in that it provides educated and adept clergy who will be able to answer that call to justice and motivate others to do the same.

And if it didn’t cost anything to go to seminary, maybe some of those “homeless poor” who feel a call to ministry could be my classmates.

St. Paul's Chattanooga

Today our urban ministry class visited St. Paul's Episcopal Church, a "corporate" or "resource"-sized parish in downtown Chattanooga. We met with the Rev. Ann Weeks, resident deacon at St. Paul's, to learn about all the outreach programs St. Paul's has in the community.

Ann Weeks

Deacon Ann is a model example of what a deacon should be: an ordained leader, set apart to "a special ministry of servanthood... [to] the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely." (Ordination of a Deacon, Book of Common Prayer, p. 543). Deacons are called "to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world"(BCP 543). It is said that deacons are to have "one foot in the church and one foot in the world," and Deacon Ann models this very well. She is always out in the community, serving on boards, scouting out what events and activities the rector of St. Paul's should attend and then passing that information along to him. Many years of living and working in Chattanooga before she became a deacon in retirement have given her an extensive network of connections in the Chattanooga area from which she can now draw on in her ministry. (Read an article here about Ann's transition from interior design work to diaconal ministry.)

St. Paul's nave (main worship space)

Deacon Ann also spends her time coordinating various outreach and other ministry programs at St. Paul's. She is very clear, however, that her role is not to do all these programs and tasks, but to equip and motivate others to do them. "I don't take jobs away from the laity," she said. "It's not about me doing it all, it's about empowering the laity to take leadership roles in their ministry."

Deacon Ann gave us an overview of the various outreach programs that St. Paul's sponsors, most notably, the St. Catherine's shelter, which is housed in the basement of St. Paul's. St. Catherine's provides a place to stay for homeless women and children. The space, which consists of a common room with kitchenette and a large, shared sleeping room with twin-sized dorm-like beds, used to be used as the youth room/lounge for the youth program at St. Paul's, but when the need for a women's shelter became apparent, the youth gladly gave up their hip hang-out space to provide shelter to people who desperately needed it.

Labyrinth in the courtyard at St. Paul's

St. Paul's also participates in the Interfaith Hospitality Network (IHN), in which houses of worship open up their parish halls or other common space to house homeless people for a week at a time. IHN provides transportation to and from the housing sites and places of employment. St. Paul's also supports Metropolitan Ministries, where we visited last week, and the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, where we will visit next week.

In addition to its outreach to the poor, St. Paul's provides other community services like an art gallery (which we were able to tour), and a public concert series through their endowed music program.

Visiting St. Paul's was a good reminder of the incredible good work that large, wealthy, endowed parishes can do, serving as a resource center for the entire community.