Homily delivered at the monthly healing service at St. Paul's Franklin.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5).
As we gather today in this service of healing, we remember that we are not alone in our pain and our struggles. God himself in Christ has experienced the gut-wrenching pain of a violent death on the cross, and has experienced what it is like to wrestle with the dread of pain and suffering. The night before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “My Father, if it possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want” (Matt. 26:39). Although the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as calmly accepting his fate, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all describe Jesus struggling in anguish the night before his death, wishing that things could be otherwise. His prayer gives voice to a universal human cry: “Dear God, please save me!” – from pain, from suffering, and from death.
But pain, suffering, and death are unavoidable in this world: even Jesus did not get to bypass them in this life. And Jesus never promises his followers that their lives will be easy and painless; in fact, he warns them that following him may bring more pain and suffering into their lives, from a human perspective. But the consolation that we have through Christ that the Apostle Paul writes about is the knowledge that pain, suffering, and death do not have the final word. Although Jesus’s prayer to have the cup of suffering removed from him was not answered, the suffering and death that he endured did not defeat and destroy him. “On the third day, he rose again,” (Nicene Creed) and “rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole creation new” (Eucharistic Prayer D, BCP 374).
God has answered that universal human cry to “save us” from pain, from suffering, and from death. As believers in Christ, through our baptism we have been united with Christ in his death – and in his sufferings – but also in his resurrection. As Paul writes in Romans 6, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
The ultimate healing of humanity has already occurred in the transformation and transfiguration of mortal flesh into the eternal life of the Resurrection in Jesus Christ – and through our baptism we already begin to participate in that transformed life, the full flourishing of which we await at Christ’s Second Coming and the Resurrection of all. This hope for full participation in the Resurrected life is why we can say in our burial service, “Even at the grave we make our song, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” The consolation we have in Christ is not one that denies the anguish of suffering, but looks for its transformation into the life-giving power of the Resurrection.
“For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ” (2 Cor. 1:5). “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5).
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Sunday, September 9, 2012
A call to be in community with "the poor"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 9, 2012, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.
When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.
But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”
Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?
James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.
Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.
Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.
Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.
It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”
The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.
And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.
The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.
Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.
The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.
When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.
But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”
Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?
James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.
Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.
Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.
Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.
It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”
The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.
And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.
The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.
Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.
The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.
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