Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013 (15 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 17), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14).
Both our readings from the New Testament today focus on the themes of hospitality and solidarity with both neighbors and strangers.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews encourages us to “let mutual love continue,” and reminds us “not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We are also encouraged to “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” In the Gospel passage from Luke, Jesus encourages us to choose humility over arrogance, and to invite and include the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society in our community gatherings.
We should give to others and extend hospitality not only when we can expect to receive it in return, but even when we know the recipients cannot reciprocate. For in doing so, we mirror God’s love to us – God gives to us freely, despite the inability of human beings to “repay” God for the gift of our life.
And we also offer a foretaste of that kingdom to come where all people will stand equal as children of God, where we will treat one another with love and respect not out of a desire to receive anything in return, not out of an attempt to lift ourselves up, but out of a recognition that we are all brothers and sisters in the family of God. With our worldly eyes, we see inequalities, separateness, and divisions, but with kingdom eyes, we will be able to see the oneness of humanity and the equal value of every human being.
Our faith gives us the opportunity to see with kingdom eyes now; we don’t have to wait for the kingdom to come. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” As we strive to live out our faith and follow the teachings of Jesus, God will use us to bring a glimpse of that kingdom to the world here and now, on earth as it is in heaven.
Because our natural tendencies as human beings can be so contrary to kingdom values, in order to do this, we must be intentional about our behavior. We must choose to see with kingdom eyes. We must choose to offer hospitality to strangers and neighbors alike – to push against our natural inclinations to speak only to those people we already know, to invite only our friends to our parties, and instead, choose to see the stranger as a brother and a friend.
The letter to the Hebrews tells us that we should “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though [we ourselves] were being tortured.” The kingdom reality is that all Christians are one body in Christ, and when one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. The kingdom reality is that all people – Christians and non-Christians alike – are God’s children and thus part of the greater family of God. When one of us is hurting, we all hurt. But so often, we don’t even know that one of us is hurting, because we don’t know one another. We see each other with worldly eyes, as “other,” as “different,” as “stranger,” as a statistic rather than a human being, and our empathy fades. But if we take the time to get to know one another as fellow human beings, as brothers and sisters in the family of God, we begin to hurt when others hurt, to care when our brothers and sisters are in prison, or tortured, or murdered, or deported, or slandered. When we know one another, when we hear one another’s stories, we can begin to see with kingdom eyes – we can recognize one another as a brother or a sister.
Allow me to share an example of this with you from my own life. Shortly after 9/11, I heard that a Sikh man had been murdered at a gas station in Arizona. I had never heard of Sikhism, and when my religion professor explained that Sikh men wear turbans and beards as part of their religious faith and that this man had been mistaken for a “terrorist” because his shooter thought he looked like Osama bin Laden, I shook my head at what sounded like an awful situation, but it quickly faded to the back of my mind. Two years later, I happened to be at a conference where a young Sikh woman presented a collection of video footage of interviews with the relatives of this man, as well as interviews with other people who had experienced discrimination and hate crimes in the weeks and months after 9/11. As I listened to story after story of people who had been yelled at, beaten, shot, and killed simply because of the way they looked, I felt like the Apostle Paul when the scales fell from his eyes at his conversion experience (Acts 9:18). I had had no idea about what had been happening to the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the Hispanic community – really, anyone with brown skin – in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, because I didn’t know them. Our paths never crossed, and so I had never heard their stories. I had been seeing with worldly eyes rather than with kingdom eyes. I hadn’t known that my brothers and sisters were suffering.
After the screening, I introduced myself to the woman who had shown the footage, whose name was Valarie Kaur. Her goal was to take this footage, which she had collected for a project as a college student in the year after 9/11, and turn it into a feature-length documentary film. I offered to help in whatever way I could, and eventually became the film’s communications director through a second stage of production and its eventual national tour. It was my work with that film that made me so sensitive to the shootings that happened last August at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, that motivated me to buy those sympathy cards for you all to sign and to take a group of you to visit the gurdwara here in Nashville.
In the middle of the film, which we titled “Divided We Fall,” there is a scene where a college-aged Valarie and her 18-year-old turbaned cousin Sonny, who was her cameraman for the project, discuss what the turban means to them as Sikhs. When it is Valarie’s turn, she says, “I see somebody with a turban, and I say, ‘There’s a sadar, he’s a Sikh man. He’s like my uncle, he’s like my brother, he’s like my grandfather. I know him. We come from the same place. He probably speaks Punjabi. He says the same prayers that I do.” She looks down, with a pensive look on her face. Her cousin pauses, then asks, “Why are we making this documentary?” Valarie looks away thoughtfully, smiles, then looks directly into the camera and says, “So other people don’t look at the turban and see fear, hatred, something laughable, something less than human… so that other people don’t look at the turban and see an enemy where I see a brother.”
I wonder if that isn’t why Jesus asked us to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” to our luncheons and dinners – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see something laughable, something less than human – so that we wouldn’t look at them and see fear where Jesus sees a brother. So that, as we ate together, we could hear their stories, stories that would make us human to one another, stories that would allow us to see each other with kingdom eyes, as brothers and sisters in the family of God.
This is what we’re about as a church whenever we go to Church in the Yard and listen to the stories of people who are experiencing homelessness, or when we sit down at Spring Street to share a meal with our African-American neighbors, or when we visit the mosque or gurdwara and share tea with Muslims and Sikhs. We are intentionally connecting and building relationships with people we might not otherwise get to know. We are pushing back against the default mode of society that keeps us apart in separate circles of community that never touch one another. We are choosing to see one another with kingdom eyes, so that we will know when one of our brothers and sisters is suffering and remember them as if we were suffering ourselves.
Jesus says that if we show hospitality to those whom society separates from us, we will be blessed, and will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. But, as I’m sure anyone who has participated in any of the ministries I just mentioned could tell you, the blessings are also available here and now. Because as we extend hospitality to both neighbors and strangers, we discover that there are no strangers in the kingdom of God, and we are able to touch a glimpse of the kingdom, breaking in to our everyday lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
Showing posts with label homeless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homeless. Show all posts
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Jesus's encounters with so-called "would-be disciples" actually pose questions for us about the cost of discipleship
Sermon delivered Sunday, June 30, 2013 (6 Pentecost, Year C, Proper 8), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Luke 9:51-62).
In today’s Gospel from Luke, we hear a series of exchanges between Jesus and three unnamed individuals who express a desire to follow him. Traditionally, these individuals have been called “would-be disciples,” because the assumption is that they did not ultimately decide to follow Jesus, but offered excuses rather than commitments when confronted with the demands of discipleship.
But the text doesn’t actually tell us what the motivations of these individuals were – we don’t know for sure that their statements were “excuses” – and we don’t know how they responded to Jesus’s words to them.
We do hear about the response of “would-be disciples” in other parts of the Gospels, like the man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-27, Luke 18:18-27). Jesus told him that even though he had kept all the commandments, he lacked one thing – to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor and then come and follow Jesus. This story, which appears both in Mark and in Luke, does tell us about the man’s response: “When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:22). It is clear in the story that the man left, that he did not immediately leave everything to follow Jesus. But the text doesn’t tell us anything about the responses of the individuals we hear about today. Matthew’s Gospel includes an account of two of the three individuals we hear about in Luke, but it does not give us any detail about their responses either.
The fact that the writers of the Gospels did not tell us anything about the motivations of these individuals nor about how they responded to Jesus’s statements leads me to think that the significance in this passage is not in what those individuals did or didn’t do, but in the words that Jesus said to them. In including these brief exchanges between Jesus and several unnamed individuals, the Gospel writers were preserving sayings of Jesus that they felt were important to his message and that they wanted to pass on to future generations. The point was not to judge the motivations or intentions of the so-called “would-be disciples,” but to impress upon the reader or hearer of the Gospel texts the cost and demand that following Jesus would place on their own lives. The question is not, “What did those three individuals do?” but, “What will you do?” Not, “Were they ready to be committed followers of Christ?” but “Are you ready to be committed followers of Christ?”
Each of these three statements, isolated as they are as pithy one-liners, tell us something about the cost and demand of following Jesus. The first statement, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” alludes to the itinerancy of Jesus’s ministry; he traveled from place to place, always on the move as he brought his message to more and more people in the region. Contrary to some interpretations, this statement probably does not indicate that Jesus was literally “homeless,” since other passages of Scripture indicate that he had a home in Capernaum (see Matthew 4:13, Mark 2:1-2) [1], but it does indicate that following Jesus will not lend itself to a comfortable, stable life. For the earliest followers of Jesus, making a commitment to follow him meant sacrificing time at home with family for time spent on the road. In our own day, touring musicians or authors, business travelers, and deployed military personnel know the personal sacrifice that such travel requires. In the first century, being a follower of Jesus was not a job for the homebody!
In our current context, the lifestyle for most Christians has changed dramatically. No longer is it expected that we leave home or family to follow Jesus; in fact, it is often assumed that establishing a stable home and family is one of the most important things a Christian could do. In the United States, following Jesus does not even require leaving our neighborhood, since there are a plethora of churches available to meet our spiritual needs within walking or short driving distance of our homes. For most of us, becoming a follower of Jesus does not require giving up any material or interpersonal comforts in the way that it did for the first disciples. But throughout the ages, Christians have continued to hear the call to leave the comfortable and familiar and risk a life of constant movement and itinerant ministry in order to serve Christ and share the Gospel. The lives of missionaries and others who have followed this path remain for us an icon of that call to give up material stability that God may still issue to any of us today. As we consider Jesus’s response to the first individual who says he will follow Jesus wherever he goes, we must ask ourselves: If following Jesus meant that we would have nowhere to lay our heads, that we would have to give up the stability and comfort of our homes, would we be wiling to follow Jesus wherever he went?
The second statement, “Let the dead bury their own dead,” has long been a subject of discussion and debate among commentators and scholars. How is it that Jesus could be so seemingly harsh and dismissive of the grief of a man who had lost his father? Isn’t it rather unforgiving and cruel not to allow this man the time to go home and take care of the things required of him by Jewish law and custom? First, it is highly unlikely that this man would be out walking the streets if his father had just died. Traditional first-century Jewish practice was to bury someone the same day that they died, and then not leave the home for seven days during the time of prescribed mourning, called shivah. So, if this man is out walking the streets of society, his father is either not dead yet, as some commentators have suggested, or his father’s body has already been placed in the family tomb but has not undergone the secondary burial that many Jewish families practiced, which involved placing the bones of the deceased in an ossuary a year after their death and burial. This was the final step in the burial practice, and marked the official end of the mourning period for the children of the deceased. [2] If this is what the man refers to when he asks to first go and bury his father, he is asking for a delay of a certain amount of time before he comes to follow Jesus – anywhere between a few weeks to eleven months, depending on how recently his father had died.
In any case, the key request of the man is time – he is willing to follow Jesus, but not immediately – he first needs time to tend to some important family obligations that would have been respected as sacred by any devout Jew. Jesus’s refusal to grant him this time comes not out of disrespect for those traditions, but out of a sense that there is no time. Remember, the beginning of our Gospel passage today tells us that “the days [had drawn] near for Jesus to be taken up,” and “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed. If this man waits to follow him for several months or a year, it will likely be too late – Jesus will already be gone from this world. Given the urgency of the moment, even the most sacred family obligations must be neglected if this man is to join the movement. The teachings of the Apostle Paul and other early church leaders about preferring the single life over marriage came out of a similar sense that time was of the essence. They believed that Jesus’s death and resurrection had ushered in the “last days,” and that Jesus would return very soon for the final judgment of the world, so it didn’t make sense to pursue relationships and marriage – but to stay in whatever state one was in – married or single – and focus one’s attention on preparing for the immanent Second Coming.
As twenty-first century Christians, we no longer feel this urgency about the impending end of time as the earliest Christians did, and thus our understanding of what is most important in our life together has changed. We have moved out of “emergency mode” into stability. But Jesus’s response to the man who asks for time to tend to his family obligations encourages us to ask ourselves: If time was of the essence and we were in “emergency mode,” where would our deepest loyalties lie? If necessary, would we be willing to neglect even our most important family obligations in order to follow Christ?
Jesus’s third statement, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” tells us that following Jesus requires total focus and commitment. Again, the sense of urgency and lack of time explains Jesus’s rejection of the man’s request to go home and say goodbye to his family. In order to be ready to follow Christ, we must be entirely forward-looking, not caught up in the past or what our lives were like before we met him. Just as most of us could not drive forward in a straight line if we were turned around looking out of our back window, so a farmer cannot plow a straight line if he is looking behind him instead of forward. In order to do a proper job plowing the field, the farmer must be focused forward, looking ahead of him, not behind, and concentrating solely on his task in the present moment. Jesus’s words invite us to consider: Are we able to be completely focused on the task of following Christ in the present moment? Do we ever “look back” to our past in a way that hinders our ability to effectively do the work Christ has called us to do?
Jesus’s words to these three unnamed men remind us of the cost of discipleship, that following Jesus requires a willingness to choose him over all else. To those who desire to follow him, Jesus asks the same question he asked James and John when they wanted to be close to him, to sit next to him “in his glory”: “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” (Mark 10:38). In other words, “Are you sure you want to do this? It won’t be comfortable and it won’t be pretty. We’re headed to Jerusalem. The road is hard and it leads to death.”
Those of us who are indeed baptized with the baptism of Christ are baptized into his death, as the Apostle Paul said (Romans 6:3). But the good news is that we are also baptized into his Resurrection. In baptism, we are united with Christ’s very body (Galatians 3:27), so that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The high cost and demand of discipleship is possible only if we recognize that it is not our ministry, but Christ’s ministry working through us. What discipleship requires, then, is a willingness to surrender, to “let go and let God,” as the saying goes, to allow Christ to live in us and work through us, and then, when the time comes for us to make whatever sacrifice we are asked to make in our journey of faith, we can say with full confidence, “We will, with God’s help.”
[1] For more on the argument that Jesus was not “homeless,” see Dave Barnhart, “Why Jesus Wasn’t Homeless (And Why It Matters),” posted on May 13, 2013 at Ministry Matters: http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/article/entry/3933/why-jesus-wasnt-homeless-and-why-it-matters#axzz2XM2DohAv
[2] For more on secondary burial customs, see Byron R. McCane (Duke University), “‘Let the dead bury their own dead’: Secondary Burial and Matt. 8:21-22,” Harvard Theological Review 83:1 (Jan 1990), 31-43.
In today’s Gospel from Luke, we hear a series of exchanges between Jesus and three unnamed individuals who express a desire to follow him. Traditionally, these individuals have been called “would-be disciples,” because the assumption is that they did not ultimately decide to follow Jesus, but offered excuses rather than commitments when confronted with the demands of discipleship.
But the text doesn’t actually tell us what the motivations of these individuals were – we don’t know for sure that their statements were “excuses” – and we don’t know how they responded to Jesus’s words to them.
We do hear about the response of “would-be disciples” in other parts of the Gospels, like the man who asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-27, Luke 18:18-27). Jesus told him that even though he had kept all the commandments, he lacked one thing – to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor and then come and follow Jesus. This story, which appears both in Mark and in Luke, does tell us about the man’s response: “When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:22). It is clear in the story that the man left, that he did not immediately leave everything to follow Jesus. But the text doesn’t tell us anything about the responses of the individuals we hear about today. Matthew’s Gospel includes an account of two of the three individuals we hear about in Luke, but it does not give us any detail about their responses either.
The fact that the writers of the Gospels did not tell us anything about the motivations of these individuals nor about how they responded to Jesus’s statements leads me to think that the significance in this passage is not in what those individuals did or didn’t do, but in the words that Jesus said to them. In including these brief exchanges between Jesus and several unnamed individuals, the Gospel writers were preserving sayings of Jesus that they felt were important to his message and that they wanted to pass on to future generations. The point was not to judge the motivations or intentions of the so-called “would-be disciples,” but to impress upon the reader or hearer of the Gospel texts the cost and demand that following Jesus would place on their own lives. The question is not, “What did those three individuals do?” but, “What will you do?” Not, “Were they ready to be committed followers of Christ?” but “Are you ready to be committed followers of Christ?”
Each of these three statements, isolated as they are as pithy one-liners, tell us something about the cost and demand of following Jesus. The first statement, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” alludes to the itinerancy of Jesus’s ministry; he traveled from place to place, always on the move as he brought his message to more and more people in the region. Contrary to some interpretations, this statement probably does not indicate that Jesus was literally “homeless,” since other passages of Scripture indicate that he had a home in Capernaum (see Matthew 4:13, Mark 2:1-2) [1], but it does indicate that following Jesus will not lend itself to a comfortable, stable life. For the earliest followers of Jesus, making a commitment to follow him meant sacrificing time at home with family for time spent on the road. In our own day, touring musicians or authors, business travelers, and deployed military personnel know the personal sacrifice that such travel requires. In the first century, being a follower of Jesus was not a job for the homebody!
In our current context, the lifestyle for most Christians has changed dramatically. No longer is it expected that we leave home or family to follow Jesus; in fact, it is often assumed that establishing a stable home and family is one of the most important things a Christian could do. In the United States, following Jesus does not even require leaving our neighborhood, since there are a plethora of churches available to meet our spiritual needs within walking or short driving distance of our homes. For most of us, becoming a follower of Jesus does not require giving up any material or interpersonal comforts in the way that it did for the first disciples. But throughout the ages, Christians have continued to hear the call to leave the comfortable and familiar and risk a life of constant movement and itinerant ministry in order to serve Christ and share the Gospel. The lives of missionaries and others who have followed this path remain for us an icon of that call to give up material stability that God may still issue to any of us today. As we consider Jesus’s response to the first individual who says he will follow Jesus wherever he goes, we must ask ourselves: If following Jesus meant that we would have nowhere to lay our heads, that we would have to give up the stability and comfort of our homes, would we be wiling to follow Jesus wherever he went?
The second statement, “Let the dead bury their own dead,” has long been a subject of discussion and debate among commentators and scholars. How is it that Jesus could be so seemingly harsh and dismissive of the grief of a man who had lost his father? Isn’t it rather unforgiving and cruel not to allow this man the time to go home and take care of the things required of him by Jewish law and custom? First, it is highly unlikely that this man would be out walking the streets if his father had just died. Traditional first-century Jewish practice was to bury someone the same day that they died, and then not leave the home for seven days during the time of prescribed mourning, called shivah. So, if this man is out walking the streets of society, his father is either not dead yet, as some commentators have suggested, or his father’s body has already been placed in the family tomb but has not undergone the secondary burial that many Jewish families practiced, which involved placing the bones of the deceased in an ossuary a year after their death and burial. This was the final step in the burial practice, and marked the official end of the mourning period for the children of the deceased. [2] If this is what the man refers to when he asks to first go and bury his father, he is asking for a delay of a certain amount of time before he comes to follow Jesus – anywhere between a few weeks to eleven months, depending on how recently his father had died.
In any case, the key request of the man is time – he is willing to follow Jesus, but not immediately – he first needs time to tend to some important family obligations that would have been respected as sacred by any devout Jew. Jesus’s refusal to grant him this time comes not out of disrespect for those traditions, but out of a sense that there is no time. Remember, the beginning of our Gospel passage today tells us that “the days [had drawn] near for Jesus to be taken up,” and “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed. If this man waits to follow him for several months or a year, it will likely be too late – Jesus will already be gone from this world. Given the urgency of the moment, even the most sacred family obligations must be neglected if this man is to join the movement. The teachings of the Apostle Paul and other early church leaders about preferring the single life over marriage came out of a similar sense that time was of the essence. They believed that Jesus’s death and resurrection had ushered in the “last days,” and that Jesus would return very soon for the final judgment of the world, so it didn’t make sense to pursue relationships and marriage – but to stay in whatever state one was in – married or single – and focus one’s attention on preparing for the immanent Second Coming.
As twenty-first century Christians, we no longer feel this urgency about the impending end of time as the earliest Christians did, and thus our understanding of what is most important in our life together has changed. We have moved out of “emergency mode” into stability. But Jesus’s response to the man who asks for time to tend to his family obligations encourages us to ask ourselves: If time was of the essence and we were in “emergency mode,” where would our deepest loyalties lie? If necessary, would we be willing to neglect even our most important family obligations in order to follow Christ?
Jesus’s third statement, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God,” tells us that following Jesus requires total focus and commitment. Again, the sense of urgency and lack of time explains Jesus’s rejection of the man’s request to go home and say goodbye to his family. In order to be ready to follow Christ, we must be entirely forward-looking, not caught up in the past or what our lives were like before we met him. Just as most of us could not drive forward in a straight line if we were turned around looking out of our back window, so a farmer cannot plow a straight line if he is looking behind him instead of forward. In order to do a proper job plowing the field, the farmer must be focused forward, looking ahead of him, not behind, and concentrating solely on his task in the present moment. Jesus’s words invite us to consider: Are we able to be completely focused on the task of following Christ in the present moment? Do we ever “look back” to our past in a way that hinders our ability to effectively do the work Christ has called us to do?
Jesus’s words to these three unnamed men remind us of the cost of discipleship, that following Jesus requires a willingness to choose him over all else. To those who desire to follow him, Jesus asks the same question he asked James and John when they wanted to be close to him, to sit next to him “in his glory”: “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” (Mark 10:38). In other words, “Are you sure you want to do this? It won’t be comfortable and it won’t be pretty. We’re headed to Jerusalem. The road is hard and it leads to death.”
Those of us who are indeed baptized with the baptism of Christ are baptized into his death, as the Apostle Paul said (Romans 6:3). But the good news is that we are also baptized into his Resurrection. In baptism, we are united with Christ’s very body (Galatians 3:27), so that “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). The high cost and demand of discipleship is possible only if we recognize that it is not our ministry, but Christ’s ministry working through us. What discipleship requires, then, is a willingness to surrender, to “let go and let God,” as the saying goes, to allow Christ to live in us and work through us, and then, when the time comes for us to make whatever sacrifice we are asked to make in our journey of faith, we can say with full confidence, “We will, with God’s help.”
[1] For more on the argument that Jesus was not “homeless,” see Dave Barnhart, “Why Jesus Wasn’t Homeless (And Why It Matters),” posted on May 13, 2013 at Ministry Matters: http://www.ministrymatters.com/all/article/entry/3933/why-jesus-wasnt-homeless-and-why-it-matters#axzz2XM2DohAv
[2] For more on secondary burial customs, see Byron R. McCane (Duke University), “‘Let the dead bury their own dead’: Secondary Burial and Matt. 8:21-22,” Harvard Theological Review 83:1 (Jan 1990), 31-43.
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.
Friday, April 15, 2011
House of All Souls, Chattanooga
On Friday, April 15, our urban ministry class visited the House of All Souls, a permanent residence home for disabled, chronically homeless men. The house is maintained by the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, where we visited earlier in the semester, and Brother Ron Fender, Episcopal monk, is the house manager. He lives with the men at the House of All Souls.
The idea for the House of All Souls came when Brother Ron was living at St. Matthew's shelter in downtown Chattanooga. During his four years of residency there, he observed that many of the men who lived in the shelter would do well while at St. Matthew's and while in the treatment program there, but as soon as they got out of the shelter and got their own places, they'd wind up back on the streets again.
These men were used to living in community, Brother Ron observed, and an empty apartment with no furnishings, no pots and pans, no toilet paper, no basic essentials at all -- was not an answer to their needs. Sure, it might give them a roof over their heads to call their own, but as one of the men at St. Matthew's once said to Brother Ron, "A home is not four walls and a ceiling: that is a cell."
So, Brother Ron had the idea that he could start a communal living home for formerly homeless men. As a monastic, he believes strongly in the practice of living in community, but his religious order does not have a religious house where the monks live: they live all over the country in their own homes; some of them are even married. (The Brotherhood of St. Gregory, Brother Ron's order, is part of the "new monasticism," which challenged and changed traditional monastic practices such as living in cloistered communities and being celibate and single.) So why not create an intentional community living situation for these men who desperately needed community?
The Community Kitchen partnered with Rosewood Supportive Services (an organization that had built group homes for disabled and mentally ill people) to build the House of All Souls, which opened a little over a year ago, in March 2010. The house provides permanent housing for up to eight men who are disabled and have been chronically homeless. Right now, Brother Ron said, they have six men living in the house. We met one of the residents, Phillip, who is autistic and told us about how he had lived on the streets and in substandard tenement housing in downtown Chattanooga, until he "left that dump to come live here with Brother Ron," he said, with a big grin on his face.
The house has a library and a chapel upstairs, bedrooms converted into alternative use space. The library has posters of Jack Kerouac and Bobby Kennedy and Tennessee Williams on the walls, and includes sitting chairs and bunches of books and magazines. The walls of the Brandenberg Chapel (named after a homeless man who helped Brother Ron dream up the idea of the House of All Souls) are painted a deep green, and it houses an altar, two pews, an upright piano, and a lectern on which the daily lectionary readings were placed. The altar (pictured at left) was built by two members of the class of 2010 at Sewanee's School of Theology (the altar's design echoes the design of the altar in the seminary chapel), and was given to the house as the class of 2010's senior gift.
Brother Ron said that he prays the Daily Office in the chapel each day, but that the members of the house do not have any regular, corporate prayer services there. "A lot of people on the streets have been hurt badly by religion," Brother Ron said, "so they often won't come to corporate worship services. But the men do spend a lot of time in the chapel, individually."
I was very much impressed with the beauty of the home, situated in a lush, green thicket just off a main street in Chattanooga, with a nice-sized yard, a screened-in back porch, and beautiful rooms painted deep reds, cool greens, and neutral beiges. The living room was warm and cozy, and very clean and tidy. It was certainly not what I was expecting: when I'd heard that Brother Ron lived with some of the formerly homeless men from the Kitchen, I'd assumed it would be in a small, cinder-block, grungy, shelter-like environment. What a wonderful surprise to find this gorgeous house, providing a true home for these men, not just the "cell" of four walls and a ceiling.
All the same, though, Brother Ron shared with us that they have already had several men move out of the house, in the little over a year it's been in operation. Those that leave often cite "the happiness" as a reason why they can't stand to live there. One man who decided to leave told Brother Ron that Christmas has been the breaking point for him: "I just couldn't stand all that happiness," he said. Brother Ron explained how many of these men have been so bitter and angry and numb for so long that they simply do not know how to adjust to being happy.. and are afraid to give up their bitterness and anger because it seems to be so much a part of their identity. One man who Brother Ron was trying to convince to stay in the home refused, shouting at him, "I'm NOT going to be happy! You can't MAKE me be happy!!"
I was reminded of a scene from the film Peaceful Warrior, in which Dan (the main character) is struggling with his alter ego, the side of him that holds on to fear, anger, bitterness. In a dramatic visualization of the psychological drama he is undergoing, Dan is on top of a large tower, wrestling with his alter ego. Finally, the alter ego falls over the side, but is still holding on to Dan's hands.
"YOU CAN'T LET ME GO," the alter ego screams, its face contorting ghoulishly. "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO YOU ARE WITHOUT ME?!?!?"
"No," the real Dan says calmly, but lets go anyway, plunging the alter ego to its death, then wakes up, shaking and shivering and utterly disoriented. But it is the beginning of a rebirth.
It is my prayer that all those angry souls out there who do not know how to be happy could release that alter ego and begin to know their true selves, however scary or how far of a fall it may seem to be.
The idea for the House of All Souls came when Brother Ron was living at St. Matthew's shelter in downtown Chattanooga. During his four years of residency there, he observed that many of the men who lived in the shelter would do well while at St. Matthew's and while in the treatment program there, but as soon as they got out of the shelter and got their own places, they'd wind up back on the streets again.
These men were used to living in community, Brother Ron observed, and an empty apartment with no furnishings, no pots and pans, no toilet paper, no basic essentials at all -- was not an answer to their needs. Sure, it might give them a roof over their heads to call their own, but as one of the men at St. Matthew's once said to Brother Ron, "A home is not four walls and a ceiling: that is a cell."
The Community Kitchen partnered with Rosewood Supportive Services (an organization that had built group homes for disabled and mentally ill people) to build the House of All Souls, which opened a little over a year ago, in March 2010. The house provides permanent housing for up to eight men who are disabled and have been chronically homeless. Right now, Brother Ron said, they have six men living in the house. We met one of the residents, Phillip, who is autistic and told us about how he had lived on the streets and in substandard tenement housing in downtown Chattanooga, until he "left that dump to come live here with Brother Ron," he said, with a big grin on his face.
Brother Ron said that he prays the Daily Office in the chapel each day, but that the members of the house do not have any regular, corporate prayer services there. "A lot of people on the streets have been hurt badly by religion," Brother Ron said, "so they often won't come to corporate worship services. But the men do spend a lot of time in the chapel, individually."
I was very much impressed with the beauty of the home, situated in a lush, green thicket just off a main street in Chattanooga, with a nice-sized yard, a screened-in back porch, and beautiful rooms painted deep reds, cool greens, and neutral beiges. The living room was warm and cozy, and very clean and tidy. It was certainly not what I was expecting: when I'd heard that Brother Ron lived with some of the formerly homeless men from the Kitchen, I'd assumed it would be in a small, cinder-block, grungy, shelter-like environment. What a wonderful surprise to find this gorgeous house, providing a true home for these men, not just the "cell" of four walls and a ceiling.
All the same, though, Brother Ron shared with us that they have already had several men move out of the house, in the little over a year it's been in operation. Those that leave often cite "the happiness" as a reason why they can't stand to live there. One man who decided to leave told Brother Ron that Christmas has been the breaking point for him: "I just couldn't stand all that happiness," he said. Brother Ron explained how many of these men have been so bitter and angry and numb for so long that they simply do not know how to adjust to being happy.. and are afraid to give up their bitterness and anger because it seems to be so much a part of their identity. One man who Brother Ron was trying to convince to stay in the home refused, shouting at him, "I'm NOT going to be happy! You can't MAKE me be happy!!"
I was reminded of a scene from the film Peaceful Warrior, in which Dan (the main character) is struggling with his alter ego, the side of him that holds on to fear, anger, bitterness. In a dramatic visualization of the psychological drama he is undergoing, Dan is on top of a large tower, wrestling with his alter ego. Finally, the alter ego falls over the side, but is still holding on to Dan's hands.
"YOU CAN'T LET ME GO," the alter ego screams, its face contorting ghoulishly. "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO YOU ARE WITHOUT ME?!?!?"
"No," the real Dan says calmly, but lets go anyway, plunging the alter ego to its death, then wakes up, shaking and shivering and utterly disoriented. But it is the beginning of a rebirth.
It is my prayer that all those angry souls out there who do not know how to be happy could release that alter ego and begin to know their true selves, however scary or how far of a fall it may seem to be.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Church of the Holy Trinity/Church in the Yard, Nashville
The Church of the Holy Trinity is an Episcopal parish located right outside downtown Nashville, in a more industrial area and just down the street from one of the city's largest homeless shelters. It is an historic church, first established in 1849. In 1907, it was designated as "the" black Episcopal church in Nashville. Now, the church has an average Sunday attendance of about 60 people, most of them retired older African-American people from the area -- many of them former professors at the historically-black universities in the area (Fisk and Tennessee State).
But the story that drew our urban ministry class to visit Church of the Holy Trinity isn't directly connected to what the Rev. Bill Dennler, priest at Holy Trinity, refers to as the "inside congregation." It's the larger and fast-growing "outdoor congregation."
On Sundays at 2 p.m., Church of the Holy Trinity offers an outdoor Eucharist in the church yard, aptly called "Church in the Yard," followed by a community meal. The model is similar to The Outdoor Church I was a part of in Cambridge, Mass., which was a branch of Ecclesia Ministries in Boston, but Trinity's outdoor church is not officially affiliated with Ecclesia.
Trinity's outdoor church was born of a local initiative to feed the homeless started by a local chef at an upscale restaurant in Nashville. He was disturbed by the amount of waste thrown away at the restaurant each night, and wondered why those living on the streets shouldn't be able to have just as fine of a meal as the customers in his high-ticket restaurant. So, he started taking leftovers from dinner each night and creating magnificent concoctions -- soups and stews of all sorts -- and serving them in a back parking lot in downtown Nashville to homeless people.
This went on for a while, but as these things usually do, it drew attention -- and not positive attention -- from the neighbors and the city officials. Soon the officials were telling the chef he couldn't continue to serve these meals in public without a permit. And surely his motley crew of folks didn't meet with federal cleanliness guidelines!
So the priest at Church of the Holy Trinity, Bill Dennler's predecessor, volunteered to help out. "Come hold the meal on our church grounds," he told the chef. "They can't kick you off private property."
The unfortunate part of the story is that the congregation at Holy Trinity was never really consulted in the beginning phases of this partnership, so that they still do not see Church in the Yard as part of "their" ministry as the community of Holy Trinity. From what Fr. Bill Dennler described, the relationship seems to be more of a "tenant-landlord" relationship rather than a sense of ownership over the ministry as a Holy Trinity ministry. Fr. Bill hopes to change that, and says that some people from the "inside congregation" at Holy Trinity have indeed begun to become involved with the outdoor service and meal.
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| Fr. Bill (second from left) with Vanderbilt nursing students who offer foot care and clean socks to the congregants of Church in the Yard. Photo from Vanderbilt Reporter. |
The outdoor church and the outreach to the homeless is an issue near and dear to Fr. Bill's heart: he himself has been homeless, served time in prison, and is a recovering alcoholic, and is open about his past with his congregation. He has a kind of clout with the homeless population because he's "been there, done that," so to speak -- he can relate to the struggles many of them are going through with addition and other destructive behaviors.
The Church in the Yard is growing at much faster rates than the "indoor congregation." While the Sunday morning congregation either remains stable at 60 or is declining, the Sunday afternoon congregation continues to grow exponentially. When we met with Fr. Bill on March 4, he told us that they were currently seeing 100 people for the service, and another 100 people who show up just for the meal afterwards. Church in the Yard is beginning to define Holy Trinity's existence and put it "on the map," so to speak, both for the homeless people in the area and for other churches who want to help with this ministry.
Interestingly enough, Fr. Bill reported that a large number of "young people" from non-denominational churches come to volunteer and unexpectedly, seem to enjoy the Episcopal liturgy. These people are real "prayer warriors," Fr. Bill reported, spending a lot of time in one-on-one intercessory prayer with the homeless people who attend the service.
Our class returned to Holy Trinity on Sunday, March 27, to experience the worship service first-hand. I missed that session, since I am currently doing my field education on Sundays at a church near Sewanee. (I am the only student in the class who is a second-year student in the middle of field education work; the rest are all seniors who are finished with field education and one junior (first-year) student who has not yet started her field education.) However, I had already been to Church in the Yard several times, during my first year at Sewanee.
After meeting Susanna at the "Come and See" weekend at Sewanee when I came to look at the school, and realizing how much she "got it" in terms of outreach to the poor and homeless, I had been in touch with her to see if she knew of any groups in Chattanooga or Nashville that were similar to the outdoor church I'd been a part of in Cambridge. She referred me to Church in the Yard, and my husband and I had attended services there several times. I even thought about doing my field education there as a summer immersion experience, but wound up deciding to try something different -- small-town, small-church ministry -- for my field education instead.
Nevertheless, it was exciting to me to see this kind of ministry happening so close to my new home. Like with Church of the Common Ground in Atlanta, I haven't gotten up to the Church in the Yard as often as I would have liked to during my time here, but visiting a few times, and being back through the visit with our class, has affirmed my sense of calling to this kind of ministry. There's something about seeing a priest celebrate Eucharist outdoors in the midst of a crowd of homeless people that just seems to me to be a living icon of what church is really about.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
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.”
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.”
Friday, February 25, 2011
H*Art Gallery, Chattanooga
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."
"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."
Friday, February 18, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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| 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.
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| An unfortunately blurry image of the meditation room. |
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."
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| © 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."
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| A mural in the meditation room at the day shelter. |
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, February 4, 2011
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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| Ann Weeks |
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| 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.
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