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 outdoor church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label outdoor church. Show all posts
Sunday, September 1, 2013
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, 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.
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.
 |
| 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, January 21, 2011
Urban Ministry
This semester, I am taking an elective course at Sewanee called "City Faith: Urban Ministry Experience." Every Friday, our class of twelve or so seminary students will travel to Chattanooga or Nashville (the closest urban centers to Sewanee) to visit urban ministry sites and to talk with people who are engaged in ministry in those places.
This class -- and the professor who teaches it, The Rev. Dr. Susanna Metz -- are a big part of why I chose Sewanee for my seminary education. I met Susanna at a community lunch during the weekend I visited Sewanee and was excited to meet someone who "gets it" in terms of ministry to the marginalized. Susanna is very involved in various ministries to homeless people in Chattanooga, and as anyone who knows me or has been reading this blog will have figured out, my calling to the priesthood emerged out of my involvement with an outdoor church for the homeless in Cambridge.
Having already done a master's degree in religion and also having studied religion as an undergraduate, I was looking for a seminary that would give me practical knowledge and skills, not just head knowledge. I was sick of sitting around TALKING about ministry; I wanted to get out there and DO something. This class is a model of that -- as Susanna said during our first class meeting of the semester (at the seminary) today, sometimes it's important to get out of the classroom and off "the Mountain" and actually SEE stuff.
One of our assignments for this class is to keep a journal of reflections on our experiences each week. I plan to use the vehicle of this blog to keep track of my reflections and to also share them with a wider audience than just myself and my class. So, stay tuned for updates and examples of wonderful ways to be "downtown church."
This class -- and the professor who teaches it, The Rev. Dr. Susanna Metz -- are a big part of why I chose Sewanee for my seminary education. I met Susanna at a community lunch during the weekend I visited Sewanee and was excited to meet someone who "gets it" in terms of ministry to the marginalized. Susanna is very involved in various ministries to homeless people in Chattanooga, and as anyone who knows me or has been reading this blog will have figured out, my calling to the priesthood emerged out of my involvement with an outdoor church for the homeless in Cambridge.
Having already done a master's degree in religion and also having studied religion as an undergraduate, I was looking for a seminary that would give me practical knowledge and skills, not just head knowledge. I was sick of sitting around TALKING about ministry; I wanted to get out there and DO something. This class is a model of that -- as Susanna said during our first class meeting of the semester (at the seminary) today, sometimes it's important to get out of the classroom and off "the Mountain" and actually SEE stuff.
One of our assignments for this class is to keep a journal of reflections on our experiences each week. I plan to use the vehicle of this blog to keep track of my reflections and to also share them with a wider audience than just myself and my class. So, stay tuned for updates and examples of wonderful ways to be "downtown church."
Sunday, February 14, 2010
An Irish woman in Cambridge
On Sunday, Nov. 20, 2005, I placed a cross necklace around the neck of an Irish woman living on the streets of Boston, and my commitment to serving the poor took an unexpected turn.
For the past nine months, I had been volunteering with The Outdoor Church of Cambridge, a spiritual community for the homeless in the Boston area, which takes the church to people who either cannot or will not enter traditional churches. Each week, we met in a large public park and held an outdoor Eucharist, followed by a community lunch, provided by the “indoor” churches of the area. We would then journey through the streets of Cambridge on foot, offering lunch and Communion to whoever looked like they might need it.
Although I had been struck by Jesus’s solidarity with the poor and marginalized from the very first time I began to read the Bible for myself during high school, it had taken many years before I was able to muster the courage to respond to Jesus’s call for his followers to do likewise.
The first time I attended the Outdoor Church, I had to bite back tears as I stood around the rickety metal push-cart that held the simple altar linen and wooden cross, while the minister 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.”
For years, I had run from my sense of calling to solidarity with the marginalized, while verses like, “If you love me, feed my sheep” (John 21:17) and “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40), rang in my head. As I stood at the Outdoor Church that day, I knew I was where God had been calling me to be for quite sometime.
But it wasn’t until nine months later, in one particular encounter with a woman on the street, that I began to suspect that there might be more in store for me than lay ministry in this field.
On the afternoon of Nov. 20, we were making our rounds through Harvard Square as usual. A woman approached us as we were speaking to one of our “regulars” and we offered her a sandwich. She was totally blown away. “You’re giving these away? For free? Are you for real?!? Why are you doing this??” Two of the other volunteers explained that we were part of an outdoor church. She still kept asking why we would do such a thing – apparently the word “church” doesn’t automatically conjure up the image of four people wandering the streets with coolers full of sandwiches, cookies, and juice.
I was reminded of 1 Peter 13:15, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” I spoke up and said to her, “Because Jesus tells us to feed those who are hungry, and to give to those who are in need. That’s why we’re doing this.” She was completely amazed, utterly thankful, said she and her husband were “starving,” and called him over to get a sandwich from us as well.
As I watched them eat, suddenly I felt drawn to give her one of the cross necklaces that was the symbol of our ministry. I approached her, explained that the necklaces were worn both by the ministers and the parishioners of our outdoor church, and said that I would love to give this one to her.
And then she did something I didn’t expect. She asked me to place the necklace around her neck for her. As I did so, something stirred deep within me. Many months later, I realized that there had been a sacramental nature to that act. I would come to feel similar stirrings when I offered a chalice to someone at the Communion rail, saying, “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.”
I cannot overestimate the significance this one encounter had on my sense of calling. Seen in the larger context of my work with the Outdoor Church, it was the catalyst that moved my lay volunteerism into a life’s vocation. While teaching me valuable lessons about coordinating grassroots ministry, my time with the Outdoor Church also solidified my sense of what it means to be the church in the world and deepened my experience of Christ’s presence in my own life.
For the past nine months, I had been volunteering with The Outdoor Church of Cambridge, a spiritual community for the homeless in the Boston area, which takes the church to people who either cannot or will not enter traditional churches. Each week, we met in a large public park and held an outdoor Eucharist, followed by a community lunch, provided by the “indoor” churches of the area. We would then journey through the streets of Cambridge on foot, offering lunch and Communion to whoever looked like they might need it.
Although I had been struck by Jesus’s solidarity with the poor and marginalized from the very first time I began to read the Bible for myself during high school, it had taken many years before I was able to muster the courage to respond to Jesus’s call for his followers to do likewise.
The first time I attended the Outdoor Church, I had to bite back tears as I stood around the rickety metal push-cart that held the simple altar linen and wooden cross, while the minister 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.”
For years, I had run from my sense of calling to solidarity with the marginalized, while verses like, “If you love me, feed my sheep” (John 21:17) and “Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40), rang in my head. As I stood at the Outdoor Church that day, I knew I was where God had been calling me to be for quite sometime.
But it wasn’t until nine months later, in one particular encounter with a woman on the street, that I began to suspect that there might be more in store for me than lay ministry in this field.
On the afternoon of Nov. 20, we were making our rounds through Harvard Square as usual. A woman approached us as we were speaking to one of our “regulars” and we offered her a sandwich. She was totally blown away. “You’re giving these away? For free? Are you for real?!? Why are you doing this??” Two of the other volunteers explained that we were part of an outdoor church. She still kept asking why we would do such a thing – apparently the word “church” doesn’t automatically conjure up the image of four people wandering the streets with coolers full of sandwiches, cookies, and juice.
I was reminded of 1 Peter 13:15, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” I spoke up and said to her, “Because Jesus tells us to feed those who are hungry, and to give to those who are in need. That’s why we’re doing this.” She was completely amazed, utterly thankful, said she and her husband were “starving,” and called him over to get a sandwich from us as well.
And then she did something I didn’t expect. She asked me to place the necklace around her neck for her. As I did so, something stirred deep within me. Many months later, I realized that there had been a sacramental nature to that act. I would come to feel similar stirrings when I offered a chalice to someone at the Communion rail, saying, “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.”
I cannot overestimate the significance this one encounter had on my sense of calling. Seen in the larger context of my work with the Outdoor Church, it was the catalyst that moved my lay volunteerism into a life’s vocation. While teaching me valuable lessons about coordinating grassroots ministry, my time with the Outdoor Church also solidified my sense of what it means to be the church in the world and deepened my experience of Christ’s presence in my own life.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Sermon - All Saints' Day
Delivered (from memory - no notes!) at "Worship @ the Welcome Table," Holy Trinity Parish (Decatur, Ga)'s alternative, Saturday night worship service.
We saw him every Sunday.
His spot was by the trashcan on the corner of Church and Brattle Streets in Harvard Square, right across the street from the Crate and Barrel. From there, he sold copies of "Spare Change News," a street newspaper on issues of poverty, produced by volunteers, and sold by homeless and formerly homeless vendors on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. From beneath his wool cap, his dark face would light up when he saw us, and we all came to expect the familiar greeting:
"Hello, family!" he would say to us as we approached him, a United Church of Christ minister, an Episcopal deacon, a Methodist seminary student, and me, just a random student of religion in graduate school who was absolutely sure that she was NOT interested in ordained ministry! (pause here for laughter ;o)
We would return Butch's greeting, "Hi Butch! How're you doing today?"
"Doin' alright, doin' alright," was always the response. His large grin was unfailing as he picked out which sandwich he'd like from the assortment we brought every week, and gladly took the clean socks that we offered, and always insisted that we all hold hands while he led us in prayer on that street corner, as busy shoppers brushed past us.
Butch was one of our many parishioners in The Outdoor Church of Cambridge, an ecumenical Christian community that takes the church to those who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.
Every Sunday for over a year while I was in grad school, I worshiped with The Outdoor Church in Cambridge Common, a large public park right outside of Harvard Square. We held an outdoor Eucharist, a liturgy that began every week with the same passage of Scripture that we just heard sung in the video:
Jesus said, "Come to me, all you that are weary
and carrying heavy burdens
And I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
For I am gentle and humble in heart;
and you will find rest for your souls;
for my yoke is easy, and my burden light."
After the Eucharist, we'd share a simple meal together, usually comprised of sandwiches, fruit, and - of course - cookies. Then we'd load up all the extra food we had into coolers, and we'd set off into Harvard Square, with sandwiches and juice and cookies, and communion. Instead of setting up a soup kitchen and waiting for the hungry to come to us, we went to them.
I began volunteering with The Outdoor Church after about a year and a half of trying to ignore this inner constant nagging that told me that Jesus would probably be much more likely to be found hanging out with Boston's homeless population than going to class with a bunch of academic intellectuals, the likes of which I was surrounding myself with in graduate school. The Jesus I met in the Gospels seemed to be more concerned with feeding the poor and reaching out to the disenfranchised than almost anything else.
The Gospel lesson for today illustrates what some theologians have called Jesus's "preferential option for the poor." In it, Jesus turns conventional wisdom on its head, and calls "blessed" precisely the opposite of the things we usually speak of as blessings. Think about it. Most people use the term "blessed" when they are describing something good that's happened to them. "I'm so blessed to have my good health," or "I'm so blessed that my children are safe." "I'm so blessed that things are going so well for me right now at work." "I'm so blessed to have this house and this money."
But Jesus doesn't say that. Jesus says, "Blessed are you when things are really NOT GOING WELL. Blessed are you when you are HUNGRY. Blessed are you when you are POOR. Blessed are you when you are MOURNING."
It's not a coincidence that we read this scripture on All Saints' Day, the day we remember all those saints of the church who have gone before us. For a saint is not, contrary to popular culture belief, a person who is perfect or lives a holy life in such a way that they never have any trouble. But a saint is one who recognizes the holiness in imperfection.
The Church hasn't always done a very good job of reminding us of this -- if you think about the icons that we have that represent the saints (pictured at right) in these sort of statue-like figures, holding out their hands in blessing, with halos, who look very much removed from who we are as living, breathing human beings that make mistakes.
But the Episcopal Dictionary of the Church defines as saint as "a holy person, a faithful Christian, one who shares life in Christ." Notice it didn't say "perfect" anywhere in there. Faithful, yes. Perfect? No.
So what does it mean to be a saint? To be holy, faithful? To be one who shares life in Christ? What does it mean to share life in Christ?
If our scriptures for today are any indication, perhaps to be a saint is to recognize the blessedness in the things that the world often devalues, avoids, or shuns.
This All Saints' Day, as I remember the saints who have gone before us, I am particularly remembering Butch. I left the Outdoor Church in 2006 when I graduated and moved away from Boston, but I've kept in touch with the ministers - Jed, the UCC minister and Pat, the Episcopal deacon. And in February of this year, I received an email from Jed with some sad news.
"Pat and I have some bad news," he wrote. "Butch died sometime two weeks ago, apparently of a heart attack. Last summer he told us he needed to be hospitalized for a few standard tests, and then disappeared."
Jed and Pat tried to visit Butch in the hospital, but to no avail. They had no contact information, they couldn't find him, the hospitals were unhelpful. They finally learned of his death from Frenchy, one of our other parishioners in The Outdoor Church who was sort of the unofficial "mother" of the Harvard Square homeless community, keeping tabs on everyone and informing us of what everyone was up to if we hadn't seen them in a while.
When I heard about Butch's death, I wished more than anything that I could have gone to his memorial service. You see, for me, Butch was one of the saints. Butch's faith was an example to me. Butch taught me a lot about looking for the best in everything and everybody. About seeing the blessings in those things I might not be inclined to see as blessings. When I think about the great cloud of witnesses, the great communion of the saints, I picture Butch there, with his arms open wide in welcome, and calling out to everyone he meets, "Hello, family."
Who are you remembering today? Who in your life has shown you what it means to be a holy person, a faithful Christian, one who shares life in Christ? Who in your life has exemplified what it means to recognize the blessedness in the things the world so often devalues?
I invite you to hold those people in your minds and hearts, and please join with me in a prayer of thanksgiving.
Gracious and holy God, we give you thanks for the great cloud of witnesses and saints that have gone before us, of the examples that they have shown us of what it means to live a holy and faithful life in service to you. Grant that we may follow their example and one day enter with them into that great communion of the saints, which worships you for all time, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever, Amen.
(From left: Rebecca (Methodist seminary student), Jed (UCC minister), Pat (Episcopal deacon), and me.
His spot was by the trashcan on the corner of Church and Brattle Streets in Harvard Square, right across the street from the Crate and Barrel. From there, he sold copies of "Spare Change News," a street newspaper on issues of poverty, produced by volunteers, and sold by homeless and formerly homeless vendors on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. From beneath his wool cap, his dark face would light up when he saw us, and we all came to expect the familiar greeting:
"Hello, family!" he would say to us as we approached him, a United Church of Christ minister, an Episcopal deacon, a Methodist seminary student, and me, just a random student of religion in graduate school who was absolutely sure that she was NOT interested in ordained ministry! (pause here for laughter ;o)
We would return Butch's greeting, "Hi Butch! How're you doing today?"
"Doin' alright, doin' alright," was always the response. His large grin was unfailing as he picked out which sandwich he'd like from the assortment we brought every week, and gladly took the clean socks that we offered, and always insisted that we all hold hands while he led us in prayer on that street corner, as busy shoppers brushed past us.
Butch was one of our many parishioners in The Outdoor Church of Cambridge, an ecumenical Christian community that takes the church to those who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.
Every Sunday for over a year while I was in grad school, I worshiped with The Outdoor Church in Cambridge Common, a large public park right outside of Harvard Square. We held an outdoor Eucharist, a liturgy that began every week with the same passage of Scripture that we just heard sung in the video:
Jesus said, "Come to me, all you that are weary
and carrying heavy burdens
And I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
For I am gentle and humble in heart;
and you will find rest for your souls;
for my yoke is easy, and my burden light."
After the Eucharist, we'd share a simple meal together, usually comprised of sandwiches, fruit, and - of course - cookies. Then we'd load up all the extra food we had into coolers, and we'd set off into Harvard Square, with sandwiches and juice and cookies, and communion. Instead of setting up a soup kitchen and waiting for the hungry to come to us, we went to them.
I began volunteering with The Outdoor Church after about a year and a half of trying to ignore this inner constant nagging that told me that Jesus would probably be much more likely to be found hanging out with Boston's homeless population than going to class with a bunch of academic intellectuals, the likes of which I was surrounding myself with in graduate school. The Jesus I met in the Gospels seemed to be more concerned with feeding the poor and reaching out to the disenfranchised than almost anything else.
The Gospel lesson for today illustrates what some theologians have called Jesus's "preferential option for the poor." In it, Jesus turns conventional wisdom on its head, and calls "blessed" precisely the opposite of the things we usually speak of as blessings. Think about it. Most people use the term "blessed" when they are describing something good that's happened to them. "I'm so blessed to have my good health," or "I'm so blessed that my children are safe." "I'm so blessed that things are going so well for me right now at work." "I'm so blessed to have this house and this money."
But Jesus doesn't say that. Jesus says, "Blessed are you when things are really NOT GOING WELL. Blessed are you when you are HUNGRY. Blessed are you when you are POOR. Blessed are you when you are MOURNING."
It's not a coincidence that we read this scripture on All Saints' Day, the day we remember all those saints of the church who have gone before us. For a saint is not, contrary to popular culture belief, a person who is perfect or lives a holy life in such a way that they never have any trouble. But a saint is one who recognizes the holiness in imperfection.
But the Episcopal Dictionary of the Church defines as saint as "a holy person, a faithful Christian, one who shares life in Christ." Notice it didn't say "perfect" anywhere in there. Faithful, yes. Perfect? No.
So what does it mean to be a saint? To be holy, faithful? To be one who shares life in Christ? What does it mean to share life in Christ?
If our scriptures for today are any indication, perhaps to be a saint is to recognize the blessedness in the things that the world often devalues, avoids, or shuns.
This All Saints' Day, as I remember the saints who have gone before us, I am particularly remembering Butch. I left the Outdoor Church in 2006 when I graduated and moved away from Boston, but I've kept in touch with the ministers - Jed, the UCC minister and Pat, the Episcopal deacon. And in February of this year, I received an email from Jed with some sad news.
"Pat and I have some bad news," he wrote. "Butch died sometime two weeks ago, apparently of a heart attack. Last summer he told us he needed to be hospitalized for a few standard tests, and then disappeared."
Jed and Pat tried to visit Butch in the hospital, but to no avail. They had no contact information, they couldn't find him, the hospitals were unhelpful. They finally learned of his death from Frenchy, one of our other parishioners in The Outdoor Church who was sort of the unofficial "mother" of the Harvard Square homeless community, keeping tabs on everyone and informing us of what everyone was up to if we hadn't seen them in a while.
When I heard about Butch's death, I wished more than anything that I could have gone to his memorial service. You see, for me, Butch was one of the saints. Butch's faith was an example to me. Butch taught me a lot about looking for the best in everything and everybody. About seeing the blessings in those things I might not be inclined to see as blessings. When I think about the great cloud of witnesses, the great communion of the saints, I picture Butch there, with his arms open wide in welcome, and calling out to everyone he meets, "Hello, family."
Who are you remembering today? Who in your life has shown you what it means to be a holy person, a faithful Christian, one who shares life in Christ? Who in your life has exemplified what it means to recognize the blessedness in the things the world so often devalues?
I invite you to hold those people in your minds and hearts, and please join with me in a prayer of thanksgiving.
Gracious and holy God, we give you thanks for the great cloud of witnesses and saints that have gone before us, of the examples that they have shown us of what it means to live a holy and faithful life in service to you. Grant that we may follow their example and one day enter with them into that great communion of the saints, which worships you for all time, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever, Amen.
(From left: Rebecca (Methodist seminary student), Jed (UCC minister), Pat (Episcopal deacon), and me.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Sermon - Calling (no connection to Lectionary readings)
This sermon was delivered at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Bellevue, Nebraska as my 'farewell' sermon to them after serving for nine months as an intern in their parish through the Resurrection House program in Omaha.
A friend asked me the other day, "What does it feel like to have a calling?"
As I come to the end of nine months spent reflecting on that very question, I wanted to share with you my own understanding of calling and how I have experienced that in my life.
Frederick Beuchener, an American Presbyterian minister and one of the most prominent theologians of our day, has written that one's calling is found "where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." The wisdom in this statement is that finding one's calling is not just a personal quest, not just a matter of making ourselves happy. It is a matter of finding where our gifts and talents might best be put to use in the world to benefit others. God does not call us to sit at home on the sofa watching television -- even if we find "deep gladness" in that. God calls us to address the "world's deep needs," and Buechener says we have found our vocation when we find that the thing that brings us great gladness and joy is also addressing one of those deep needs of the world.
Now, this is a nice thought, and perhaps for some people it might ring true. But my own experience of calling has not always been so pleasant. Oftentimes what I perceive to be a call from God comes to me quite apart from any sense of "deep gladness" in doing something, and instead comes as a mandate, a sense that I MUST do something, often accompanied by a sense of urgency.
For two years now, I have been involved in work with people who are homeless, first through an outdoor church community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for the past 9 months, through Siena Francis House, which many of you know is a shelter and residential drug and alcohol recovery program in downtown Omaha. This is work to which I have felt deeply called, but it was not a nice, warm fuzzy call, a call in which "my deep gladness met the world's deep need." I didn't reach out to care for the homeless because I WANTED to or because I felt JOY in doing so, I did so because I felt that I HAD to, that I MUST.
My experience of calling has been less about Beuchner's idea of finding my "deep gladness" in doing work that also happens to address the world's needs and more about a discomforting, unsettling encounter with God that shakes up my world and prods me to step out of my comfort zone. Singer/songwriter Susan Werner gives voice to this experience perfectly in a song called "Did Trouble Me," from her recent album, The Gospel Truth. Just a sampling of the lyrics: "When I closed my eyes so I would not see, my Lord did trouble me. When I let things stand that should not be, my Lord did trouble me. When I held myself away and apart, my Lord did trouble me. And the tears of my brother did move my heart, my Lord did trouble me." The chorus of the song describes how exactly God does this troubling: "Did trouble me, with a word or a sign, with the ringing of the bell in the back of my mind. Did trouble me, did stir my soul, for to make me human, to make me whole."
This perfectly illustrates "what it feels like to have a calling" to me -- it feels like God "troubling me" to become a more whole and human person through recognizing the humanity in others, rather than allowing me to "close my eyes" or "hold myself away and apart" from my fellow human being and their joys and sufferings. This call has not always been about feeling any "deep gladness," but about a struggle -- a struggle "to make me human, to make me whole," a struggle against my own selfishness to live out the radical love of God for all people as exemplified by Jesus in the Gospel texts.
For me, knowing WHAT the call is is not difficult. In fact, the basis of our calling as Christians is actually quite similar no matter who we are. The source of our call is the life and example of Jesus as set forth in scripture. As I read and study about the way Jesus lived his life -- reaching out with compassion precisely to those people that the wider society said were sinful, unworthy or unclean -- I know how I should be living my life. That inner nagging is loud and clear, and often takes the form of various scripture passages ringing in the back of my mind -- "If you love me, feed my sheep." "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Whatever you did to one of the least of these, you did it to me." Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian, put it well when he wrote, "The matter is simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly."
The difficult part is NOT in knowing what God requires of us, what God expects of us. The difficult part is deciding whether or not I am going to say "yes" to God's call or ignore it and continue along my own path. And the question, then, becomes not "what is God calling me to do?" but "where and how is God calling me to live out that call?"
In my own life, this has meant a question about whether or not my response to God's call necessarily involves ordained ministry. Over the past nine months, I have made a point of talking one-on-one with as many ordained people as possible, to hear their own stories of how they figured out that they were called to this ministry. I sat down with them and asked them, essentially the same question my friend asked me a few weeks ago: "What does it feel like to have a calling?" And on some level they all gave me the same answer -- they spoke of this sense of necessity, of feeling that they HAD to do this. In fact, the advice they all gave me was fairly similar as well -- don't go into this line of work unless you really feel that you HAVE to do it. This advice was far from a denigration of the ministry, but an acknowledgment that the ministry is not something to be rushed into, not something to do for the power or the status or even the pretty vestments.
When I first set off on this journey, as I left Boston to spend a year thinking about the possibility of ordination, the minister at the outdoor church where I volunteered, who was a dear mentor to me, sat me down and told me that the process of discernment for the ministry was tricky. "We are ALL called to ministry," he told me, "the trick is to figure out whether you primarily see yourself as a minister or you primarily see yourself as something else."
At the time, I wasn't quite sure what he meant, but as I reflect back on it a year later, I now understand. And interestingly enough, it was my volunteer work at Siena Francis House that really brought this home to me. Because of my strong sense of calling to work with the homeless, I had thought that perhaps this was an indication that I was called to a career working in this arena, potentially in social service work. But this year, I found that volunteering in a largely secular shelter context did not feel as deeply fulfilling and meaningful to me as my work with the Outdoor Church had been. I realized that I feel called not just to help others, not just to reach out to those on the margins, but to do so in an explicitly ministerial context, to call people into the kind of relationship and community with one another that I feel is possible only through the bonds of faith, in God's name, appealing to a higher standard than human potential can ever reach on its own. I realized that I DO see myself as a minister. Not as a volunteer, not as a social services worker, but as a minister.
I am not yet sure whether I feel that I HAVE to be ordained, but I do know that this is the first vocation that I have explored where I feel truly at home. I have explored several other possible careers -- journalism, teaching, research or non-profit work -- and while I enjoyed doing all of those things and was generally happy with my work, it seemed there was something missing, that something wasn't quite right. And after spending nine months immersed in the life and work of a parish, it just seems to fit. It feels like I've finally found a round hole for my round peg after trying to make it fit into a bunch of square holes.
If I am called to ordination, I am not yet sure to which form of ministry I am called -- does my sense of urgency about reaching out to the world outside the walls of the church lead me to the diaconate, or does that urgency coupled with my deep reverence for the Eucharist and for the sacramental elements and rituals in the church, as well as a strong desire to sustain and deepen the bonds of the community inside the walls of the church lead me to the priesthood? I would appreciate your continued prayers for my ongoing process of discernment as I leave Omaha for Atlanta, Georgia in a few weeks, where I will continue doing work for the documentary film I've been working with and do some part-time work for my dad's website company. I hope to find a church community there that will eventually sponsor me for the formal discernment process for ordination in the diocese of Atlanta.
Although a number of things are not yet clear to me in my future path, I am confident that God will continue to guide and direct me as I journey. I am reminded of the famous prayer by Thomas Merton: "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does indeed please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right path although I may know nothing about it."
Thank you, beyond words, for all you have done for me this year to support me in the discernment process and in realizing and affirming my fledgling sense of calling to the ministry. I pray that the Spirit would continue to be your guide as you journey with the future interns in this parish to help them answer their own calls, however "troubling" or full of "deep gladness" they may be.
In the name of the One whose Spirit is at work within us "to make us human, to make us whole," Amen.
A friend asked me the other day, "What does it feel like to have a calling?"
As I come to the end of nine months spent reflecting on that very question, I wanted to share with you my own understanding of calling and how I have experienced that in my life.
Frederick Beuchener, an American Presbyterian minister and one of the most prominent theologians of our day, has written that one's calling is found "where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." The wisdom in this statement is that finding one's calling is not just a personal quest, not just a matter of making ourselves happy. It is a matter of finding where our gifts and talents might best be put to use in the world to benefit others. God does not call us to sit at home on the sofa watching television -- even if we find "deep gladness" in that. God calls us to address the "world's deep needs," and Buechener says we have found our vocation when we find that the thing that brings us great gladness and joy is also addressing one of those deep needs of the world.
Now, this is a nice thought, and perhaps for some people it might ring true. But my own experience of calling has not always been so pleasant. Oftentimes what I perceive to be a call from God comes to me quite apart from any sense of "deep gladness" in doing something, and instead comes as a mandate, a sense that I MUST do something, often accompanied by a sense of urgency.
For two years now, I have been involved in work with people who are homeless, first through an outdoor church community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for the past 9 months, through Siena Francis House, which many of you know is a shelter and residential drug and alcohol recovery program in downtown Omaha. This is work to which I have felt deeply called, but it was not a nice, warm fuzzy call, a call in which "my deep gladness met the world's deep need." I didn't reach out to care for the homeless because I WANTED to or because I felt JOY in doing so, I did so because I felt that I HAD to, that I MUST.
My experience of calling has been less about Beuchner's idea of finding my "deep gladness" in doing work that also happens to address the world's needs and more about a discomforting, unsettling encounter with God that shakes up my world and prods me to step out of my comfort zone. Singer/songwriter Susan Werner gives voice to this experience perfectly in a song called "Did Trouble Me," from her recent album, The Gospel Truth. Just a sampling of the lyrics: "When I closed my eyes so I would not see, my Lord did trouble me. When I let things stand that should not be, my Lord did trouble me. When I held myself away and apart, my Lord did trouble me. And the tears of my brother did move my heart, my Lord did trouble me." The chorus of the song describes how exactly God does this troubling: "Did trouble me, with a word or a sign, with the ringing of the bell in the back of my mind. Did trouble me, did stir my soul, for to make me human, to make me whole."
This perfectly illustrates "what it feels like to have a calling" to me -- it feels like God "troubling me" to become a more whole and human person through recognizing the humanity in others, rather than allowing me to "close my eyes" or "hold myself away and apart" from my fellow human being and their joys and sufferings. This call has not always been about feeling any "deep gladness," but about a struggle -- a struggle "to make me human, to make me whole," a struggle against my own selfishness to live out the radical love of God for all people as exemplified by Jesus in the Gospel texts.
For me, knowing WHAT the call is is not difficult. In fact, the basis of our calling as Christians is actually quite similar no matter who we are. The source of our call is the life and example of Jesus as set forth in scripture. As I read and study about the way Jesus lived his life -- reaching out with compassion precisely to those people that the wider society said were sinful, unworthy or unclean -- I know how I should be living my life. That inner nagging is loud and clear, and often takes the form of various scripture passages ringing in the back of my mind -- "If you love me, feed my sheep." "Love your neighbor as yourself." "Whatever you did to one of the least of these, you did it to me." Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian, put it well when he wrote, "The matter is simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly."
The difficult part is NOT in knowing what God requires of us, what God expects of us. The difficult part is deciding whether or not I am going to say "yes" to God's call or ignore it and continue along my own path. And the question, then, becomes not "what is God calling me to do?" but "where and how is God calling me to live out that call?"
In my own life, this has meant a question about whether or not my response to God's call necessarily involves ordained ministry. Over the past nine months, I have made a point of talking one-on-one with as many ordained people as possible, to hear their own stories of how they figured out that they were called to this ministry. I sat down with them and asked them, essentially the same question my friend asked me a few weeks ago: "What does it feel like to have a calling?" And on some level they all gave me the same answer -- they spoke of this sense of necessity, of feeling that they HAD to do this. In fact, the advice they all gave me was fairly similar as well -- don't go into this line of work unless you really feel that you HAVE to do it. This advice was far from a denigration of the ministry, but an acknowledgment that the ministry is not something to be rushed into, not something to do for the power or the status or even the pretty vestments.
When I first set off on this journey, as I left Boston to spend a year thinking about the possibility of ordination, the minister at the outdoor church where I volunteered, who was a dear mentor to me, sat me down and told me that the process of discernment for the ministry was tricky. "We are ALL called to ministry," he told me, "the trick is to figure out whether you primarily see yourself as a minister or you primarily see yourself as something else."
At the time, I wasn't quite sure what he meant, but as I reflect back on it a year later, I now understand. And interestingly enough, it was my volunteer work at Siena Francis House that really brought this home to me. Because of my strong sense of calling to work with the homeless, I had thought that perhaps this was an indication that I was called to a career working in this arena, potentially in social service work. But this year, I found that volunteering in a largely secular shelter context did not feel as deeply fulfilling and meaningful to me as my work with the Outdoor Church had been. I realized that I feel called not just to help others, not just to reach out to those on the margins, but to do so in an explicitly ministerial context, to call people into the kind of relationship and community with one another that I feel is possible only through the bonds of faith, in God's name, appealing to a higher standard than human potential can ever reach on its own. I realized that I DO see myself as a minister. Not as a volunteer, not as a social services worker, but as a minister.
I am not yet sure whether I feel that I HAVE to be ordained, but I do know that this is the first vocation that I have explored where I feel truly at home. I have explored several other possible careers -- journalism, teaching, research or non-profit work -- and while I enjoyed doing all of those things and was generally happy with my work, it seemed there was something missing, that something wasn't quite right. And after spending nine months immersed in the life and work of a parish, it just seems to fit. It feels like I've finally found a round hole for my round peg after trying to make it fit into a bunch of square holes.
If I am called to ordination, I am not yet sure to which form of ministry I am called -- does my sense of urgency about reaching out to the world outside the walls of the church lead me to the diaconate, or does that urgency coupled with my deep reverence for the Eucharist and for the sacramental elements and rituals in the church, as well as a strong desire to sustain and deepen the bonds of the community inside the walls of the church lead me to the priesthood? I would appreciate your continued prayers for my ongoing process of discernment as I leave Omaha for Atlanta, Georgia in a few weeks, where I will continue doing work for the documentary film I've been working with and do some part-time work for my dad's website company. I hope to find a church community there that will eventually sponsor me for the formal discernment process for ordination in the diocese of Atlanta.
Although a number of things are not yet clear to me in my future path, I am confident that God will continue to guide and direct me as I journey. I am reminded of the famous prayer by Thomas Merton: "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does indeed please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right path although I may know nothing about it."
Thank you, beyond words, for all you have done for me this year to support me in the discernment process and in realizing and affirming my fledgling sense of calling to the ministry. I pray that the Spirit would continue to be your guide as you journey with the future interns in this parish to help them answer their own calls, however "troubling" or full of "deep gladness" they may be.
In the name of the One whose Spirit is at work within us "to make us human, to make us whole," Amen.
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