Sermon delivered Sunday, March 13, 2016 (Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year C), at St. Cuthbert’s Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA (where I am serving as long-term supply priest).
(John 12:1-8)
As we close down the season of Lent and prepare to move into Holy Week next week, our Gospel passage today gets us ready for that transition. The story we hear today is set six days before the Passover, and so we’re hearing it approximately the same amount of time ahead of Holy Week as it took place before the events of the actual Holy Week. Jesus is having dinner at the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus of Bethany, and Mary pours a jar of expensive oil on Jesus’s feet and wipes them with her hair. Judas protests that this use of the oil was wasteful and that Mary was not being a good steward of her wealth; “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” he asks?
Interestingly enough, the story of the anointing of Jesus is one of the few stories that appears in all four of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all have slightly different accounts of the story; the woman is not always the same, nor is the person who objects, but the core elements of the story – that it took place at a dinner in someone’s home, that a woman poured expensive oil over Jesus and someone protested that that was an extravagant and wasteful act – are consistent across all four accounts. In all of the Gospels except for Luke, Jesus’s response to those who criticize the woman is some variation of:
“Leave her alone. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
This famous one-liner is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted sayings of Jesus. Throughout the centuries, Christians who wanted to justify neglect of the poor and extravagant, lavish displays of wealth in the church would turn to this passage as a biblical basis for the use of solid silver chalices and vestments adorned with rare and precious jewels, and enormous marble churches with gold-gilded ornamentation. To anyone who would protest that perhaps this spending was a bit excessive and maybe more good could have been done with that money in the community to help those in need, well, you know, Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” and that woman in the Bible poured out that jar of oil on Jesus that would have been worth an average laborer’s entire yearly salary, so as long as you’re spending lavish amounts of money to express your love for Jesus, it’s all ok.
Sometimes I think Jesus looks down on us and just shakes his head, going, “Seriously?” Like, “that’s where you went with that?” And I’m probably not too far off in my imagination, since Jesus did a lot of shaking his head at the disciples while he was with them on earth, expressing in many ways some version of this sentiment: “You’ve been spending time with me for HOW LONG and you STILL don’t get it??”
Somehow I don’t think Jesus was making known his desire for lavish, expensive gifts in his defense of the woman’s actions in this story. I personally think Jesus could care about less where we worship him and what we wear when we worship him and what kind of objects we use to worship of him. His defense of the woman was not about condoning extravagant displays of wealth. It was about encouraging us to cherish the sacred moments in our lives.
Jesus tells the woman’s critics that she has anointed his body for burial. That’s the key aspect of this story – Jesus’s death is near. “She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial,” he says in John’s version of the story that we heard today. This woman, despite her seemingly wasteful use of money, “gets it.” While the disciples are quibbling about finances and expenses, not really aware of the gravity of the situation and the preciousness of every last moment they have with Jesus, this woman realizes her time with him is limited. She realizes that Jesus’s days are numbered and she wants to give him the best send-off she can. So instead of waiting until he is dead to anoint his body with oil, as was the custom, she chooses to do this for him while he is still alive. How many times have you sat at a funeral reception and wished the deceased could have heard all the wonderful things that are being said about him or her? So often we wait to honor people until they are dead, but this woman wants to honor Jesus while he is still with her. She wants to express her love for him before it’s too late.
I am reminded of a TED Talk I watched recently by Janine di Giovanni, a journalist who reports from war zones around the world. In her talk, she mentions that in 2004, after the birth of her son, her foreign editor sent her back to Iraq to continue her coverage of the war there when her son was just four months old. She says she was crying on the plane because of how difficult it was to leave her son, and an Iraqi politician who knew she had recently had a child said to her, "What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with [your son]?" And she said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004, which was the beginning of an incredibly bloody time in Iraq, and she felt a sense of responsibility to bear witness to the atrocities and bring the stories of those people who were suffering to the world, as she had done in places like Sarajevo and Rwanda years before. "I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it," she said. And the politician said to her, "Go home. Because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war."
There will always be another war. This is what I think Jesus meant when he said “the poor you will always have with you.” He meant what the politician meant when he encouraged the reporter to go spend time with her son. By saying that, he didn’t mean that the suffering and death in his country wasn’t important, or that the stories of his people didn’t need to be told. He didn’t mean that on a cosmic level it would be ok to neglect their stories and the stories of countless others who suffer. What he meant was, there is an endless amount of suffering in the world. You can’t capture it all and see it all and fix it all. You can only do your part, and right now your part is to focus on this beautiful miracle that has been given to you, this new life which, in a few blinks of an eye, will be a full-grown, independent man.
When Jesus said, “the poor you will always have with you,” he didn’t mean that helping the poor was unimportant, or that it was ok to spend lavish amounts of money on worship instead of giving to those in need. Jesus was one of a long line of prophets in the Jewish tradition who called the people to care people in poverty, who taught that you can judge a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. But this particular saying of Jesus actually has very little to do with people in poverty and has everything to do with recognizing the preciousness of each moment you have with the important people in your lives, whether that be God himself in the form of Jesus for the disciples in the first century, or whoever mediates God’s presence to you in your life today.
For me, this Lent has brought news of the deaths of several beloved parishioners from former parishes I have served. From Atlanta to Nashville, the stories of their deaths have come to me across the miles, and I am reminded of the most basic truth behind Jesus’s comment in today’s Gospel reading: “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
You will not always have me. Our days with our loved ones are limited, so spend time with the ones you love before they are gone. Don’t miss a precious, irreplaceable moment focusing on something that will still be there for you to take care of later.
This truth is perhaps hardest to hear when the limitations of our time and money force us to make impossible choices – to choose between visiting a sick child of a parishioner in the hospital or going to our own child’s soccer game – to choose between paying the hospital bill for our parents’ stay or to make that annual donation to our favorite nonprofit, a donation we know provides the bulk of their operating expenses – to choose between spending time with our dearest friend in a time of crisis or giving an educational presentation about the very topic our friend is struggling with, to a large audience where we have the potential of touching thousands of lives. Whatever your deepest calling is, the thing that gives your life meaning and which you feel God has uniquely gifted you to address, whatever work you do that has the potential to bring hope and healing to many people – put that in the place of “the poor” in Jesus’s statement:
“__________ you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
There will always be another ________. What is that for you? What is that thing that you do, even if noble and important and sacred and holy, that threatens to blind you to the times God chooses to show up right in front of you?
Jesus’s point, I think, is that even if you are doing good work, like caring for the poor, if you are doing it in such a way that you miss the precious, beautiful moments life has to offer you – the incarnational moments, the times when God is in your midst – and do not stop and celebrate or acknowledge them appropriately, then you miss the point just as much as if all you do is praise God and neglect to care for the poor. We must do both – acknowledge and marvel in God’s presence and go out to do the hard work he calls us to do. Each of us has a tendency to err toward one extreme or the other. The key is finding a balance, that Anglican via media, the middle way, between the two extremes.
“You will not always have me.”
Our time with those we love is precious. Our experience of God’s presence in our midst is often fleeting and temporary. Don’t let anything keep you from reveling in those moments and soaking them up. Like Mary anointing Jesus before his burial, pour out lavish amounts of thanksgiving and praise whenever you encounter God in your life. Remind yourself: “There will always be another war. There will always be another societal ill to address. There will always be poor among us. But there will not always be this.” – and cherish it while you can.
Showing posts with label poor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poor. Show all posts
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Parable of the Dishonest Manager: An Opportunity to Admit We Don't Understand
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 22, 2013 (18th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 20C), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN, on Luke 16:1-13.
Our passage from Luke’s Gospel today presents us with one of Jesus’s more difficult parables, in which Jesus seems to encourage cheating and dishonesty. The parable is a story about a manager who “cooks the books,” so to speak, adjusting the amounts due from his boss’s debtors so as to give them a break and ingratiate himself with them so they will owe him a favor once he’s lost his job as a result of his corrupt dealings. As we listen to the story, we’re expecting a traditional outcome: the bad guy gets told what-for by the boss and faces the consequences of his actions. We’re probably expecting to hear about some weeping and gnashing of teeth.
But instead, the boss praises the manager for this behavior! And then Jesus summarizes his message with a strange piece of advice: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
What?? “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”
That doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know, the Jesus who consistently warns us about the dangers of our riches becoming an idol, who says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven and tells us we must give up all our possessions to become his disciple. And just a few verses after this strange bit of advice, he warns us that no slave can serve two masters, that we cannot serve both God and wealth.
So what does this saying mean? Why does Jesus tell us to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”
Well, first of all, it bears saying that this parable has been confusing to the church since its earliest days. Everyone from the early church fathers like Augustine and Jerome through the 16th century Reformers like Luther and Calvin and on to modern-day scholars like John Dominic Crossan and Amy-Jill Levine has attempted to understand and explain it, and there are a variety of different interpretations.
Some say that the “master” in the parable represents God, while others say the “master” represents this world and wordly pursuits. Some say the “children of light” refers to the disciples of Jesus, while others say it is a reference to the Pharisees. One interpreter even suggested that the unjust manager represents Jesus himself, who goes against the typical rules of this world and turns things upside down, stepping in to cancel the debts owed to the master as Jesus cancelled the debts of our sin on the cross. [1]
Some try to make sense of why the manager was praised by suggesting that perhaps the master was really the one who was unjust, a rich tyrant who was oppressing all his tenants, and so the “dishonest” manager was actually the “good guy” by freeing the tenants from the debts they owed this unjust master. In this interpretation, the manager is a sort of “Robin Hood” figure, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Some say that perhaps the master commended the manager because the manager actually had done the master a favor: he made the master look good and generous by cancelling a portion of the debts owed by his debtors, and perhaps the master would have been glad to collect anything, even a partial amount, on the debts that were owed him from people who had accumulated such large amounts of debt.
A fairly common interpretation across the centuries is that because the master commends the manager for acting “shrewdly,” what is praiseworthy about the manager is not his dishonest dealings, but his shrewdness, his cleverness, his creativity. Even though he has essentially stolen from his master, his master commends him out of a sense of resignation – like, “Well, this guy really took me to the cleaners, but hey – you’ve got to hand it to him for his ingenuity!” The lesson for us is that we should be as shrewd and clever in figuring out a way to assure a good eternal future for ourselves as this guy was in securing a good future for himself in this world.
Many interpreters have linked this passage with the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, where Jesus tells us that at the final judgment we will be rewarded based on how we have treated “the least of these,” and with Jesus’s many sayings about the last being first and the first being last in the kingdom of heaven. So, when Jesus says to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome us into the eternal homes,” the “they” he is referring to is the poor. Those who interpret the parable this way point out that even though Jesus says “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” he also acknowledges that such wealth will not last – various translations have “when it is gone” or “when you fail,” showing that the goal of Jesus’s statement is not for us to put our trust in riches, but to point out that what will last is what we have done with our riches. If we “make friends” with the poor – even through unjust dealings – then the poor will be in a place to advocate for us in heaven when we arrive, saying, yes, these people offered drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry. Those who had been “last” in this world having been made “first,” they will be in a place of power in the next world and will be able to welcome us in if we have done right by them in this world.
One issue with that interpretation is that it still does not explain why we should make friends with the poor by means of dishonest wealth – couldn’t we do the same thing with honest wealth, with “clean” money rather than “dirty” money? And it’s also not clear that the debtors that the manager assists in this parable really were “the poor.” Given the fact that they had such large amounts of debt, they were probably also fairly rich farmers, so that forgiving their debts would hardly be an example of Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but more like Robin Hood taking from the king and giving to the aristocrats. And it doesn’t deal with the fact that, however much the manager’s cooking of the books may have helped the master’s debtors, the manager was ultimately acting out of self-interest – a strange thing to hold up as an example, given how important right intentions are in other places in the scriptures.
At least one interpreter has suggested that the key to this puzzling parable is to read Jesus’s words sarcastically. [2] It is worth remembering that we do not have any indications of tone of voice in the scriptures, and we all know how much difference tone of voice can make in our understanding of any given statement! For instance, a few weeks ago when we read the Gospel passage where Jesus tells his followers they must hate father and mother, wife and children – basically everyone except Jesus himself – and then Father Bob got up during the announcements and told you all he hated you, everyone laughed because we could tell by his tone of voice and facial expression that he was joking. But imagine if you just read somewhere that the rector told the congregation he hated them! With no tone of voice or context, such a statement could be easily misunderstood! And that’s what some interpreters suggest has happened to this statement from Jesus. Most interpreters have tended to read this statement “straight” – that is, at face value, as genuinely expressing what Jesus meant to say. But what if he was being sarcastic?
“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” Sure, go ahead and try that. Use your dirty money to strike deals for yourselves. Look out for number one and make sure someone always owes you something. But what good will those friends be to you when that money is gone? Will they be there to welcome you into the eternal homes? In the words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that working for you?”
Of course, we really have no way to know for sure whether Jesus was being sarcastic or not. (Perhaps this is one area where the oral tradition would have been more helpful than the written Scriptures!) And all of these interpretations have some point or another that doesn’t quite “fit” or make sense.
I thought there might be something to this parable that we Christians were missing because of some cultural blinders, so I turned to the Jewish Annotated New Testament, a collection of commentary on the Christian scriptures from the perspective of Jewish scholars and rabbis, of which Amy-Jill Levine is a primary editor. After a few notes connecting some of the Greek words used in this parable to similar words elsewhere in the New Testament and a few brief comments about the differing opinions as to who the “lord” and “master” represent in the parable, that resource summed things up with this helpful piece of insight: “This parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking that if A-J Levine can’t even figure this one out, it’s probably time for me to throw in the towel!
But then that got me to thinking. Perhaps there’s a lesson for us in the fact that this parable “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” There is a tendency for us as human beings to want to be able to explain things – it’s the impulse that drives both scientific discovery and our religious pursuits. We want to know God and understand the universe, and we like anything that makes us feel like we’re succeeding in that regard. We like the parables that are easy to understand because they give us a sense that we have things figured out, that we can summarize the mind of God with a nice little story about the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, where the message is, “we screw up, God forgives us, and we all live happily ever after.” Those stories make us feel good and safe, and rightly so. But parables like this one, that “defy any fully satisfactory explanation,” remind us that we cannot wrap God up in a nice little box and place him on a shelf next to the other subjects we’ve mastered, like arithmetic and spelling. In a sense, God himself “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.”
So these confusing parables remind us, then, that we do not fully understand God. They are reminders of our limitations, and an opportunity for us to admit that we don’t know, that we don’t understand. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, students are often given koans to work on by their teachers. A koan is a kind of parable, but often more like an unanswerable riddle. A famous one that you may have heard before is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” They are meant to boggle the mind, to circumvent linear, rational thought, and to encourage the student to open her mind to a nonrational, intuitive response to the question – or simply to “be” in a state of unknowing, and to be comfortable with that.
I believe that Jesus often chose to answer people’s questions with parables rather than direct answers as a way to encourage a similar kind of response – stop trying to explain it all and figure it all out. See if you can get the sense of the point I’m trying to make from the gist of this story. Or maybe just take a step back and remember that God is God and you are not – and you don’t have to figure it all out.
So what did Jesus mean when he said we should make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth? The collective wisdom of the church throughout the centuries is: we don’t know. And perhaps that’s a pretty healthy response for us to have sometimes when speaking about the mind of God.
[1] Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. Summarized in outline form on GoBibleStudy.com, “The Hardest Parable: The Unjust Steward” (9.22.10), http://www.gobiblestudy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Parables_Grace_Capon_Unjust-Steward_Luke-16-1-131.pdf
[2] See Donald R. Fletcher, “The Riddle of the Unjust Steward: Is Irony the Key?” Journal of Biblical Literature, 1963, p. 15-30 (esp. pages 27-29). And some comments in this thread at Christianity Stack Exchange: http://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/2220/what-is-the-parable-of-the-shrewd-manager-about
Our passage from Luke’s Gospel today presents us with one of Jesus’s more difficult parables, in which Jesus seems to encourage cheating and dishonesty. The parable is a story about a manager who “cooks the books,” so to speak, adjusting the amounts due from his boss’s debtors so as to give them a break and ingratiate himself with them so they will owe him a favor once he’s lost his job as a result of his corrupt dealings. As we listen to the story, we’re expecting a traditional outcome: the bad guy gets told what-for by the boss and faces the consequences of his actions. We’re probably expecting to hear about some weeping and gnashing of teeth.
But instead, the boss praises the manager for this behavior! And then Jesus summarizes his message with a strange piece of advice: “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.”
What?? “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”
That doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know, the Jesus who consistently warns us about the dangers of our riches becoming an idol, who says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven and tells us we must give up all our possessions to become his disciple. And just a few verses after this strange bit of advice, he warns us that no slave can serve two masters, that we cannot serve both God and wealth.
So what does this saying mean? Why does Jesus tell us to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth?”
Well, first of all, it bears saying that this parable has been confusing to the church since its earliest days. Everyone from the early church fathers like Augustine and Jerome through the 16th century Reformers like Luther and Calvin and on to modern-day scholars like John Dominic Crossan and Amy-Jill Levine has attempted to understand and explain it, and there are a variety of different interpretations.
Some say that the “master” in the parable represents God, while others say the “master” represents this world and wordly pursuits. Some say the “children of light” refers to the disciples of Jesus, while others say it is a reference to the Pharisees. One interpreter even suggested that the unjust manager represents Jesus himself, who goes against the typical rules of this world and turns things upside down, stepping in to cancel the debts owed to the master as Jesus cancelled the debts of our sin on the cross. [1]
Some try to make sense of why the manager was praised by suggesting that perhaps the master was really the one who was unjust, a rich tyrant who was oppressing all his tenants, and so the “dishonest” manager was actually the “good guy” by freeing the tenants from the debts they owed this unjust master. In this interpretation, the manager is a sort of “Robin Hood” figure, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Some say that perhaps the master commended the manager because the manager actually had done the master a favor: he made the master look good and generous by cancelling a portion of the debts owed by his debtors, and perhaps the master would have been glad to collect anything, even a partial amount, on the debts that were owed him from people who had accumulated such large amounts of debt.
A fairly common interpretation across the centuries is that because the master commends the manager for acting “shrewdly,” what is praiseworthy about the manager is not his dishonest dealings, but his shrewdness, his cleverness, his creativity. Even though he has essentially stolen from his master, his master commends him out of a sense of resignation – like, “Well, this guy really took me to the cleaners, but hey – you’ve got to hand it to him for his ingenuity!” The lesson for us is that we should be as shrewd and clever in figuring out a way to assure a good eternal future for ourselves as this guy was in securing a good future for himself in this world.
Many interpreters have linked this passage with the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, where Jesus tells us that at the final judgment we will be rewarded based on how we have treated “the least of these,” and with Jesus’s many sayings about the last being first and the first being last in the kingdom of heaven. So, when Jesus says to “make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome us into the eternal homes,” the “they” he is referring to is the poor. Those who interpret the parable this way point out that even though Jesus says “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth,” he also acknowledges that such wealth will not last – various translations have “when it is gone” or “when you fail,” showing that the goal of Jesus’s statement is not for us to put our trust in riches, but to point out that what will last is what we have done with our riches. If we “make friends” with the poor – even through unjust dealings – then the poor will be in a place to advocate for us in heaven when we arrive, saying, yes, these people offered drink to the thirsty and food to the hungry. Those who had been “last” in this world having been made “first,” they will be in a place of power in the next world and will be able to welcome us in if we have done right by them in this world.
One issue with that interpretation is that it still does not explain why we should make friends with the poor by means of dishonest wealth – couldn’t we do the same thing with honest wealth, with “clean” money rather than “dirty” money? And it’s also not clear that the debtors that the manager assists in this parable really were “the poor.” Given the fact that they had such large amounts of debt, they were probably also fairly rich farmers, so that forgiving their debts would hardly be an example of Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but more like Robin Hood taking from the king and giving to the aristocrats. And it doesn’t deal with the fact that, however much the manager’s cooking of the books may have helped the master’s debtors, the manager was ultimately acting out of self-interest – a strange thing to hold up as an example, given how important right intentions are in other places in the scriptures.
At least one interpreter has suggested that the key to this puzzling parable is to read Jesus’s words sarcastically. [2] It is worth remembering that we do not have any indications of tone of voice in the scriptures, and we all know how much difference tone of voice can make in our understanding of any given statement! For instance, a few weeks ago when we read the Gospel passage where Jesus tells his followers they must hate father and mother, wife and children – basically everyone except Jesus himself – and then Father Bob got up during the announcements and told you all he hated you, everyone laughed because we could tell by his tone of voice and facial expression that he was joking. But imagine if you just read somewhere that the rector told the congregation he hated them! With no tone of voice or context, such a statement could be easily misunderstood! And that’s what some interpreters suggest has happened to this statement from Jesus. Most interpreters have tended to read this statement “straight” – that is, at face value, as genuinely expressing what Jesus meant to say. But what if he was being sarcastic?
“Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth, so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” Sure, go ahead and try that. Use your dirty money to strike deals for yourselves. Look out for number one and make sure someone always owes you something. But what good will those friends be to you when that money is gone? Will they be there to welcome you into the eternal homes? In the words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that working for you?”
Of course, we really have no way to know for sure whether Jesus was being sarcastic or not. (Perhaps this is one area where the oral tradition would have been more helpful than the written Scriptures!) And all of these interpretations have some point or another that doesn’t quite “fit” or make sense.
I thought there might be something to this parable that we Christians were missing because of some cultural blinders, so I turned to the Jewish Annotated New Testament, a collection of commentary on the Christian scriptures from the perspective of Jewish scholars and rabbis, of which Amy-Jill Levine is a primary editor. After a few notes connecting some of the Greek words used in this parable to similar words elsewhere in the New Testament and a few brief comments about the differing opinions as to who the “lord” and “master” represent in the parable, that resource summed things up with this helpful piece of insight: “This parable defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking that if A-J Levine can’t even figure this one out, it’s probably time for me to throw in the towel!
But then that got me to thinking. Perhaps there’s a lesson for us in the fact that this parable “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.” There is a tendency for us as human beings to want to be able to explain things – it’s the impulse that drives both scientific discovery and our religious pursuits. We want to know God and understand the universe, and we like anything that makes us feel like we’re succeeding in that regard. We like the parables that are easy to understand because they give us a sense that we have things figured out, that we can summarize the mind of God with a nice little story about the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son, where the message is, “we screw up, God forgives us, and we all live happily ever after.” Those stories make us feel good and safe, and rightly so. But parables like this one, that “defy any fully satisfactory explanation,” remind us that we cannot wrap God up in a nice little box and place him on a shelf next to the other subjects we’ve mastered, like arithmetic and spelling. In a sense, God himself “defies any fully satisfactory explanation.”
So these confusing parables remind us, then, that we do not fully understand God. They are reminders of our limitations, and an opportunity for us to admit that we don’t know, that we don’t understand. In the Zen Buddhist tradition, students are often given koans to work on by their teachers. A koan is a kind of parable, but often more like an unanswerable riddle. A famous one that you may have heard before is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” They are meant to boggle the mind, to circumvent linear, rational thought, and to encourage the student to open her mind to a nonrational, intuitive response to the question – or simply to “be” in a state of unknowing, and to be comfortable with that.
I believe that Jesus often chose to answer people’s questions with parables rather than direct answers as a way to encourage a similar kind of response – stop trying to explain it all and figure it all out. See if you can get the sense of the point I’m trying to make from the gist of this story. Or maybe just take a step back and remember that God is God and you are not – and you don’t have to figure it all out.
So what did Jesus mean when he said we should make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth? The collective wisdom of the church throughout the centuries is: we don’t know. And perhaps that’s a pretty healthy response for us to have sometimes when speaking about the mind of God.
[1] Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. Summarized in outline form on GoBibleStudy.com, “The Hardest Parable: The Unjust Steward” (9.22.10), http://www.gobiblestudy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Parables_Grace_Capon_Unjust-Steward_Luke-16-1-131.pdf
[2] See Donald R. Fletcher, “The Riddle of the Unjust Steward: Is Irony the Key?” Journal of Biblical Literature, 1963, p. 15-30 (esp. pages 27-29). And some comments in this thread at Christianity Stack Exchange: http://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/2220/what-is-the-parable-of-the-shrewd-manager-about
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Seeing with "kingdom eyes"
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.
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.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
A call to be in community with "the poor"
Sermon delivered Sunday, Sept. 9, 2012, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Franklin, Tenn.
When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.
But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”
Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?
James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.
Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.
Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.
Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.
It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”
The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.
And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.
The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.
Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.
The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.
When I was about 16 years old, I started reading the Bible for the first time. Sure, I’d grown up in church – my parents took my sister and me to the local Lutheran church every Sunday – and I’d heard scripture passages read out loud in the service every week, but until I was 16, I don’t think I’d ever actually opened a Bible. When I “got saved” at a youth rally sponsored by a friend’s Southern Baptist church, I came home with a pamphlet of materials about how to nurture my new life in Christ that instructed me to read and study various scripture passages. So I asked my mother, “Um, do you have, like, a Bible I could borrow?” She gave me a small, pocket-sized paperback copy she’d been given in a Sunday School class years ago, and I began to explore, reading voraciously through the New Testament.
But as I read, I began to get a bit uneasy, because the picture I began to get of Jesus didn’t match up very closely with what I’d seen and experienced in church. I noticed that Jesus had spent his ministry being with people considered to be on the margins of his society, but I didn’t see many Christians around me doing similar things in our society. Sure, I had learned through church that being a Christian had something to do with “being a good person” and “helping the less fortunate,” but donating our used clothes to the area thrift store and taking some canned goods to the food pantry didn’t seem to be the same as what I saw Jesus doing in the stories in the Bible: actually being with people – ministering to their needs, yes, but more significantly, being with them, knowing them, loving them. I had never actually met a single person who had benefitted from any of the items my family or church had donated over the years. “The poor” were not part of our church; they were somewhere “out there,” and certainly not “one of us.”
Our passage from the letter of James this morning (James 2:1-17) is about what happens when “the poor” actually show up in church, when they don’t stay safely “out there,” hidden behind the back doors of distribution centers or in alleys beside shelters. It’s about what happens when “the poor” cease to be an abstract statistic and become real people in our midst. It’s about what happens when a person who is exhausted from spending his days sleeping on park benches in the blazing sun because it is too dangerous to sleep at night shuffles in to church and sits down in the back pew. How do those who claim to believe in and follow “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” respond? Do they clutch their purses a little closer? Wrap their arms protectively around their children? Edge uncomfortably away?
James’s words about the sin of partiality and favoritism in the church ring just as true today as they did in the first and second centuries. There seems to be something innate in human societies that leads them to favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” Despite the fact that Jesus spent his ministry caring for and being with those on the margins of society, and despite the centuries-old Jewish tradition of God’s favor and care for the poor that we heard echoed in our passage from Proverbs this morning, the earliest churches – just like churches today – became stratified and segregated according to socioeconomic status. And even in the churches that were or are socioeconomically diverse, those with the most money often wield the most power and command the most respect. Churches might give lip service to Jesus’s teachings about the impossibility of serving God and money (Matthew 6:24) and the teachings in 1 Timothy about the love of money being the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10), but in practice the person “with gold rings and in fine clothes” is often treated better than the “poor person in dirty clothes,” just as the letter of James describes.
Encountering these scriptures for the first time at age 16 and observing some of these dynamics in the churches around me began to open my heart to a deep sense of call to ministry with those on the margins of society, but it wasn’t until nearly 10 years later, while I was living in the Boston area for graduate school, that I began to act on that sense of call.
Through the Episcopal church I was attending at the time, I heard about an outdoor worship service for homeless people in Cambridge, called simply, “The Outdoor Church.” It was an offshoot of a larger gathering in downtown Boston called “common cathedral” that had been started by an Episcopal priest about 10 years before. The rector at my parish went down once a month to the Outdoor Church to help with the service and to share in fellowship with the community there. I remember being in a Christian formation class on a Monday after one of his Sundays at the Outdoor Church and being captivated by his descriptions of his experiences there the previous day. “It really felt like church,” he said.
Not too long after that, I began volunteering weekly with the Outdoor Church. My priest’s words resonated deeply with my own experience: it did indeed “feel like church,” like what I imagined the church was supposed to be. I felt I had finally found a community whose way of life seemed to mirror what Jesus did in the Gospels: being with those on the margins of society, offering them not just care for their physical needs (which we did in the form of sandwiches and socks and jackets), but a sense of belonging and community.
It was through my encounters with the people in that community that I learned how damaging the unspoken concern with appearances in churches can be. Many churches will never have to deal with the hypothetical issue the letter of James presents because no “poor person in dirty clothes” would feel comfortable even walking through the doors of their church. Many people on the streets think they are not “presentable” enough or “worthy” enough to attend church. They worry about how they look or how they smell, and fear of rejection keeps them far from the doors of any church. Simply saying “our church welcomes all people” is not enough to counteract unspoken cultural norms that dictate that people arrive for church clean and nicely dressed, nor does it outweigh the palpable uncomfortable vibe that homeless people can often sense from people in traditional churches if they show up for a regular Sunday service. Communities like the Outdoor Church – and our own Church in the Yard [C.I.T.Y.] here in Nashville – attempt to respond to this dynamic by taking the church to people where they are, on the streets, instead of waiting for “them” to come to “us.” The United Church of Christ minister I worked with at the Outdoor Church used to say that our mission was to “take the church to people who either cannot or will not reach it on their own.”
The Outdoor Church really “felt like church,” I think, because it was a gathering where people were accepted just as they were, where there were no acts of favoritism or preference shown to those who had money over those who did not. It was a community where there were no pressures or expectations to look or act a certain way, but where all people were seen and treated as beloved children of God.
And in that community of faith and belonging, people’s bodily needs were met as well. After Eucharist, we served a meal – just like they do at Church in the Yard. We did not simply say to our brothers and sisters who lack daily food, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” but we shared a meal with them and helped them find snow boots or jackets when they needed them.
The faith in that community was not the “faith by itself” with no works that James criticizes, but a lively and robust faith manifested in the actions of the members of the community toward one another. The selfless giving and works of faith flowed not just from the people making the sandwiches and donating the jackets, but from our homeless parishioners as well. Our street friends would often make small monetary donations to the Outdoor Church, or give back to us in other ways. I remember a small Latino man in Harvard Square with whom we shared sandwiches every week as he sold his handiwork as a street vendor. Although he spoke almost no English, one of our volunteers was fluent in Spanish and was able to translate for us. His situation was dismal: he had somehow managed to come to the U.S. without the proper paperwork, traveling with friends or relatives and not understanding the legal situation he was getting himself into. He had expected to be able to return to his family in Latin America, but now realized he was unable to leave or to get a job due to his undocumented status, so for the time being he was hand-making beaded items and selling them on the street. Those items were the only source of income he had, but one week he presented to each of us ministers a small, hand-made dreamcatcher, decorated with feathers and beads. “Because you help me,” he said to us in English. I have kept it by my bedside ever since.
Churches whose focus is on the so-called “social gospel” – feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and other “acts of mercy” – often are criticized by so-called “evangelical” Christians for neglecting to “share the Gospel” with those whose physical needs they meet. “Social Gospel” Christians like this passage from James that argues that “faith without works is dead,” while evangelicals prefer Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
This tension between faith and works and what role “sharing our faith” should play in our outreach work is a constant point of contention between Christians on different ends of this spectrum. A fellow student in one of my religion classes at Furman University once said during a class discussion of the life and work of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa that “if you feed the poor but don’t tell them about Jesus, it’s like a slap in the face.” I remember thinking that I believed the exact opposite – that the “slap in the face” would be to tell people about Jesus but not provide for their basic needs. But reflecting on this tension now, I don’t think that either extreme is the authentic Christian way. Neither the street corner preacher handing out tracts or the food pantry handing out canned goods is fully living out the Christian call to be in community with the poor. Both approaches require little interaction between the “ministers” and the people they say they are trying to reach. The problem comes largely when we think of “the poor” as an abstract group that we need to do something to rather than fellow human beings and fellow people of faith we need to be in relationship with. We think we need to “give to the poor,” never considering that they have much to give to us. We think we need to “share the Gospel” with others, never considering that the people with whom we aim to share our faith might already know quite a bit about God and be able to teach us something about faith.
The kind of church the letter of James is calling us to be is one where we engage in the mutuality of community, not the inequality of donor and receiver. We are to come together across classes as one body in Christ, and to share with each other whatever we have to share – be it money or faith or skills or knowledge – because everyone has something to contribute to the body of Christ. It is out of that foundation – of recognizing our equality in the eyes of God and the unique contribution of each person to the church and the world – that we move toward providing for one another’s needs in the way that James describes. When we know one another, we won’t be able to not care about the plight of our neighbor, because we will be to each other not abstract statistics or problems to be solved, but brothers and sisters in Christ.
Friday, April 15, 2011
House of All Souls, Chattanooga
On Friday, April 15, our urban ministry class visited the House of All Souls, a permanent residence home for disabled, chronically homeless men. The house is maintained by the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, where we visited earlier in the semester, and Brother Ron Fender, Episcopal monk, is the house manager. He lives with the men at the House of All Souls.
The idea for the House of All Souls came when Brother Ron was living at St. Matthew's shelter in downtown Chattanooga. During his four years of residency there, he observed that many of the men who lived in the shelter would do well while at St. Matthew's and while in the treatment program there, but as soon as they got out of the shelter and got their own places, they'd wind up back on the streets again.
These men were used to living in community, Brother Ron observed, and an empty apartment with no furnishings, no pots and pans, no toilet paper, no basic essentials at all -- was not an answer to their needs. Sure, it might give them a roof over their heads to call their own, but as one of the men at St. Matthew's once said to Brother Ron, "A home is not four walls and a ceiling: that is a cell."
So, Brother Ron had the idea that he could start a communal living home for formerly homeless men. As a monastic, he believes strongly in the practice of living in community, but his religious order does not have a religious house where the monks live: they live all over the country in their own homes; some of them are even married. (The Brotherhood of St. Gregory, Brother Ron's order, is part of the "new monasticism," which challenged and changed traditional monastic practices such as living in cloistered communities and being celibate and single.) So why not create an intentional community living situation for these men who desperately needed community?
The Community Kitchen partnered with Rosewood Supportive Services (an organization that had built group homes for disabled and mentally ill people) to build the House of All Souls, which opened a little over a year ago, in March 2010. The house provides permanent housing for up to eight men who are disabled and have been chronically homeless. Right now, Brother Ron said, they have six men living in the house. We met one of the residents, Phillip, who is autistic and told us about how he had lived on the streets and in substandard tenement housing in downtown Chattanooga, until he "left that dump to come live here with Brother Ron," he said, with a big grin on his face.
The house has a library and a chapel upstairs, bedrooms converted into alternative use space. The library has posters of Jack Kerouac and Bobby Kennedy and Tennessee Williams on the walls, and includes sitting chairs and bunches of books and magazines. The walls of the Brandenberg Chapel (named after a homeless man who helped Brother Ron dream up the idea of the House of All Souls) are painted a deep green, and it houses an altar, two pews, an upright piano, and a lectern on which the daily lectionary readings were placed. The altar (pictured at left) was built by two members of the class of 2010 at Sewanee's School of Theology (the altar's design echoes the design of the altar in the seminary chapel), and was given to the house as the class of 2010's senior gift.
Brother Ron said that he prays the Daily Office in the chapel each day, but that the members of the house do not have any regular, corporate prayer services there. "A lot of people on the streets have been hurt badly by religion," Brother Ron said, "so they often won't come to corporate worship services. But the men do spend a lot of time in the chapel, individually."
I was very much impressed with the beauty of the home, situated in a lush, green thicket just off a main street in Chattanooga, with a nice-sized yard, a screened-in back porch, and beautiful rooms painted deep reds, cool greens, and neutral beiges. The living room was warm and cozy, and very clean and tidy. It was certainly not what I was expecting: when I'd heard that Brother Ron lived with some of the formerly homeless men from the Kitchen, I'd assumed it would be in a small, cinder-block, grungy, shelter-like environment. What a wonderful surprise to find this gorgeous house, providing a true home for these men, not just the "cell" of four walls and a ceiling.
All the same, though, Brother Ron shared with us that they have already had several men move out of the house, in the little over a year it's been in operation. Those that leave often cite "the happiness" as a reason why they can't stand to live there. One man who decided to leave told Brother Ron that Christmas has been the breaking point for him: "I just couldn't stand all that happiness," he said. Brother Ron explained how many of these men have been so bitter and angry and numb for so long that they simply do not know how to adjust to being happy.. and are afraid to give up their bitterness and anger because it seems to be so much a part of their identity. One man who Brother Ron was trying to convince to stay in the home refused, shouting at him, "I'm NOT going to be happy! You can't MAKE me be happy!!"
I was reminded of a scene from the film Peaceful Warrior, in which Dan (the main character) is struggling with his alter ego, the side of him that holds on to fear, anger, bitterness. In a dramatic visualization of the psychological drama he is undergoing, Dan is on top of a large tower, wrestling with his alter ego. Finally, the alter ego falls over the side, but is still holding on to Dan's hands.
"YOU CAN'T LET ME GO," the alter ego screams, its face contorting ghoulishly. "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO YOU ARE WITHOUT ME?!?!?"
"No," the real Dan says calmly, but lets go anyway, plunging the alter ego to its death, then wakes up, shaking and shivering and utterly disoriented. But it is the beginning of a rebirth.
It is my prayer that all those angry souls out there who do not know how to be happy could release that alter ego and begin to know their true selves, however scary or how far of a fall it may seem to be.
The idea for the House of All Souls came when Brother Ron was living at St. Matthew's shelter in downtown Chattanooga. During his four years of residency there, he observed that many of the men who lived in the shelter would do well while at St. Matthew's and while in the treatment program there, but as soon as they got out of the shelter and got their own places, they'd wind up back on the streets again.
These men were used to living in community, Brother Ron observed, and an empty apartment with no furnishings, no pots and pans, no toilet paper, no basic essentials at all -- was not an answer to their needs. Sure, it might give them a roof over their heads to call their own, but as one of the men at St. Matthew's once said to Brother Ron, "A home is not four walls and a ceiling: that is a cell."
The Community Kitchen partnered with Rosewood Supportive Services (an organization that had built group homes for disabled and mentally ill people) to build the House of All Souls, which opened a little over a year ago, in March 2010. The house provides permanent housing for up to eight men who are disabled and have been chronically homeless. Right now, Brother Ron said, they have six men living in the house. We met one of the residents, Phillip, who is autistic and told us about how he had lived on the streets and in substandard tenement housing in downtown Chattanooga, until he "left that dump to come live here with Brother Ron," he said, with a big grin on his face.
Brother Ron said that he prays the Daily Office in the chapel each day, but that the members of the house do not have any regular, corporate prayer services there. "A lot of people on the streets have been hurt badly by religion," Brother Ron said, "so they often won't come to corporate worship services. But the men do spend a lot of time in the chapel, individually."
I was very much impressed with the beauty of the home, situated in a lush, green thicket just off a main street in Chattanooga, with a nice-sized yard, a screened-in back porch, and beautiful rooms painted deep reds, cool greens, and neutral beiges. The living room was warm and cozy, and very clean and tidy. It was certainly not what I was expecting: when I'd heard that Brother Ron lived with some of the formerly homeless men from the Kitchen, I'd assumed it would be in a small, cinder-block, grungy, shelter-like environment. What a wonderful surprise to find this gorgeous house, providing a true home for these men, not just the "cell" of four walls and a ceiling.
All the same, though, Brother Ron shared with us that they have already had several men move out of the house, in the little over a year it's been in operation. Those that leave often cite "the happiness" as a reason why they can't stand to live there. One man who decided to leave told Brother Ron that Christmas has been the breaking point for him: "I just couldn't stand all that happiness," he said. Brother Ron explained how many of these men have been so bitter and angry and numb for so long that they simply do not know how to adjust to being happy.. and are afraid to give up their bitterness and anger because it seems to be so much a part of their identity. One man who Brother Ron was trying to convince to stay in the home refused, shouting at him, "I'm NOT going to be happy! You can't MAKE me be happy!!"
I was reminded of a scene from the film Peaceful Warrior, in which Dan (the main character) is struggling with his alter ego, the side of him that holds on to fear, anger, bitterness. In a dramatic visualization of the psychological drama he is undergoing, Dan is on top of a large tower, wrestling with his alter ego. Finally, the alter ego falls over the side, but is still holding on to Dan's hands.
"YOU CAN'T LET ME GO," the alter ego screams, its face contorting ghoulishly. "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO YOU ARE WITHOUT ME?!?!?"
"No," the real Dan says calmly, but lets go anyway, plunging the alter ego to its death, then wakes up, shaking and shivering and utterly disoriented. But it is the beginning of a rebirth.
It is my prayer that all those angry souls out there who do not know how to be happy could release that alter ego and begin to know their true selves, however scary or how far of a fall it may seem to be.
Friday, March 4, 2011
St. Luke's Community House, Nashville
On Friday, March 4, our urban ministry class visited two locations in Nashville, Church of the Holy Trinity and St. Luke's Community House.
The St. Luke's Community House is an Episcopal community center in West Nashville that provides meals, a food pantry, a place for individuals to meet with social workers and case managers, a day camp, scouting troops, income tax assistance, English classes for immigrants, and much, much more. The place is essentially a one-stop shop for community needs in this low-income area, and has been part of this community since 1913, and physically located in the same area since 1920.
The Community House was founded in 1913 by a group of women who were all members of the Episcopal women's order Daughters of the King, from different parishes in the diocese. The original need was to provide a place for women and children to stay and receive meals and medical attention while visiting men incarcerated in the nearby prison. Today it has blossomed into so much more, but the one constant service that has been provided by St. Luke's since its inception in 1913 is childcare. St. Luke's now houses a state-of-the-art preschool that is an official United Way preschool center and uses the "Read to Succeed" curriculum that is standard in United Way preschools to get the children ready to enter kindergarten in the area public schools.
On March 4, our class met with St. Luke's Executive Director Brian Diller, who gave us an overview of the center's programs. He told us that the preschool is particularly important in this neighborhood: the zip code where St. Luke's is located -- 37209 -- has a 40 percent high school drop-out rate, and the two lowest-performing high schools in the state are located in that area. The extra attention and quality education that the children at St. Luke's receive before they ever even enter the public school systems helps to increase their chances of success once they get there.
Brian told us that 46 percent of the children in the preschool come from "very diverse backgrounds," by which I assume he meant either immigrant or recent immigrant families. He listed Vietnamese, Mexican, Latin American, and Eastern European (Croatian) as some of the ethnic backgrounds of the students at the preschool. Vietnamese are a particularly large population at St. Luke's; West Nashville is an center of Vietnamese refugee resettlement. The Vietnamese population is so large in this area that the library at St. Luke's preschool provides books in Vietnamese in addition to English and Spanish.
But the majority of our time with Brian was spent talking about the flood in Nashville last May (2010). Still recent history for the people of this neighborhood, which was one of the hardest hit in the flood, the memories were clearly fresh and poignant for Brian, who told story after story about how the community came together in the wake of the flood to provide for the needs of the neighborhood. As I listened to Brian, I was reminded of stories of disaster relief in New York post-9/11, or in New Orleans post-Katrina. The story of the community coming together in the midst of crisis was the same here as it was in those other places. St. Luke's itself was turned into a triage center for six weeks or so after the flood, and a local restaurant donated three meals a day for weeks at no charge to guests at the center. Because St. Luke's was such a well-known name in the community, it was a natural central gathering place for people to come to in the midst of a tragedy. It was a real testimony to the benefits of building long-term, proactive relationships with a community so that the structures needed for crisis response are in place when they are needed.
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| The food pantry at St. Luke's |
On March 4, our class met with St. Luke's Executive Director Brian Diller, who gave us an overview of the center's programs. He told us that the preschool is particularly important in this neighborhood: the zip code where St. Luke's is located -- 37209 -- has a 40 percent high school drop-out rate, and the two lowest-performing high schools in the state are located in that area. The extra attention and quality education that the children at St. Luke's receive before they ever even enter the public school systems helps to increase their chances of success once they get there.
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| A St. Luke's staff member gives our class a tour of the preschool. |
Brian told us that 46 percent of the children in the preschool come from "very diverse backgrounds," by which I assume he meant either immigrant or recent immigrant families. He listed Vietnamese, Mexican, Latin American, and Eastern European (Croatian) as some of the ethnic backgrounds of the students at the preschool. Vietnamese are a particularly large population at St. Luke's; West Nashville is an center of Vietnamese refugee resettlement. The Vietnamese population is so large in this area that the library at St. Luke's preschool provides books in Vietnamese in addition to English and Spanish.
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| Bumper sticker seen on a car in St. Luke's parking lot |
Church of the Holy Trinity/Church in the Yard, Nashville
The Church of the Holy Trinity is an Episcopal parish located right outside downtown Nashville, in a more industrial area and just down the street from one of the city's largest homeless shelters. It is an historic church, first established in 1849. In 1907, it was designated as "the" black Episcopal church in Nashville. Now, the church has an average Sunday attendance of about 60 people, most of them retired older African-American people from the area -- many of them former professors at the historically-black universities in the area (Fisk and Tennessee State).
But the story that drew our urban ministry class to visit Church of the Holy Trinity isn't directly connected to what the Rev. Bill Dennler, priest at Holy Trinity, refers to as the "inside congregation." It's the larger and fast-growing "outdoor congregation."
On Sundays at 2 p.m., Church of the Holy Trinity offers an outdoor Eucharist in the church yard, aptly called "Church in the Yard," followed by a community meal. The model is similar to The Outdoor Church I was a part of in Cambridge, Mass., which was a branch of Ecclesia Ministries in Boston, but Trinity's outdoor church is not officially affiliated with Ecclesia.
Trinity's outdoor church was born of a local initiative to feed the homeless started by a local chef at an upscale restaurant in Nashville. He was disturbed by the amount of waste thrown away at the restaurant each night, and wondered why those living on the streets shouldn't be able to have just as fine of a meal as the customers in his high-ticket restaurant. So, he started taking leftovers from dinner each night and creating magnificent concoctions -- soups and stews of all sorts -- and serving them in a back parking lot in downtown Nashville to homeless people.
This went on for a while, but as these things usually do, it drew attention -- and not positive attention -- from the neighbors and the city officials. Soon the officials were telling the chef he couldn't continue to serve these meals in public without a permit. And surely his motley crew of folks didn't meet with federal cleanliness guidelines!
So the priest at Church of the Holy Trinity, Bill Dennler's predecessor, volunteered to help out. "Come hold the meal on our church grounds," he told the chef. "They can't kick you off private property."
The unfortunate part of the story is that the congregation at Holy Trinity was never really consulted in the beginning phases of this partnership, so that they still do not see Church in the Yard as part of "their" ministry as the community of Holy Trinity. From what Fr. Bill Dennler described, the relationship seems to be more of a "tenant-landlord" relationship rather than a sense of ownership over the ministry as a Holy Trinity ministry. Fr. Bill hopes to change that, and says that some people from the "inside congregation" at Holy Trinity have indeed begun to become involved with the outdoor service and meal.
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| Fr. Bill (second from left) with Vanderbilt nursing students who offer foot care and clean socks to the congregants of Church in the Yard. Photo from Vanderbilt Reporter. |
The outdoor church and the outreach to the homeless is an issue near and dear to Fr. Bill's heart: he himself has been homeless, served time in prison, and is a recovering alcoholic, and is open about his past with his congregation. He has a kind of clout with the homeless population because he's "been there, done that," so to speak -- he can relate to the struggles many of them are going through with addition and other destructive behaviors.
The Church in the Yard is growing at much faster rates than the "indoor congregation." While the Sunday morning congregation either remains stable at 60 or is declining, the Sunday afternoon congregation continues to grow exponentially. When we met with Fr. Bill on March 4, he told us that they were currently seeing 100 people for the service, and another 100 people who show up just for the meal afterwards. Church in the Yard is beginning to define Holy Trinity's existence and put it "on the map," so to speak, both for the homeless people in the area and for other churches who want to help with this ministry.
Interestingly enough, Fr. Bill reported that a large number of "young people" from non-denominational churches come to volunteer and unexpectedly, seem to enjoy the Episcopal liturgy. These people are real "prayer warriors," Fr. Bill reported, spending a lot of time in one-on-one intercessory prayer with the homeless people who attend the service.
Our class returned to Holy Trinity on Sunday, March 27, to experience the worship service first-hand. I missed that session, since I am currently doing my field education on Sundays at a church near Sewanee. (I am the only student in the class who is a second-year student in the middle of field education work; the rest are all seniors who are finished with field education and one junior (first-year) student who has not yet started her field education.) However, I had already been to Church in the Yard several times, during my first year at Sewanee.
After meeting Susanna at the "Come and See" weekend at Sewanee when I came to look at the school, and realizing how much she "got it" in terms of outreach to the poor and homeless, I had been in touch with her to see if she knew of any groups in Chattanooga or Nashville that were similar to the outdoor church I'd been a part of in Cambridge. She referred me to Church in the Yard, and my husband and I had attended services there several times. I even thought about doing my field education there as a summer immersion experience, but wound up deciding to try something different -- small-town, small-church ministry -- for my field education instead.
Nevertheless, it was exciting to me to see this kind of ministry happening so close to my new home. Like with Church of the Common Ground in Atlanta, I haven't gotten up to the Church in the Yard as often as I would have liked to during my time here, but visiting a few times, and being back through the visit with our class, has affirmed my sense of calling to this kind of ministry. There's something about seeing a priest celebrate Eucharist outdoors in the midst of a crowd of homeless people that just seems to me to be a living icon of what church is really about.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Live simply, that others may simply live
Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Parish, Decatur, Ga., on Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011 (the 28th anniversary of my baptism), the Eighth Sunday of Epiphany, Year A. (Matthew 6:24-34).
She stands in the upstairs, attic-loft of the shelter, giving a tour to one of her newest volunteers.
“And this is where we keep the extra coats,” she says, pointing to a motley assortment of puffy parkas stuffed tightly into cardboard boxes and shoved into a room behind the walls made of chained-link fence. “Here we have sheets... we’re down to only a few sets, but we’ll get more in soon,” she says confidently.
She moves further down the central hallway, pointing out the holding places where supplies are kept for the guests of this shelter.
“Where do you get your donations?” the new volunteer asks. “How do you know you’ll be getting more sheets soon?”
“Oh, they’ll come,” the shelter employee says with a smile. “One of the things I’ve learned through working here is that God will provide for whatever we need. We like to have butter for the guests every night at dinner, out on the tables. But if we run out, ok, we just go ahead without butter for a few nights. And inevitably, some butter will be donated within a few days or a week. When we need butter, the universe sends us butter.”
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.”
Have you ever been in a place where you weren’t quite sure where the money was going to come from to pay that electric bill? Or when you didn’t know how or when you’d get your next meal? If you have, then you know something about trusting God. I mean, really trusting God. Not just saying you trust God because it sounds nice and looks good to your church friends but then doing everything within your power to guarantee you will be able to provide for your own needs, thank you very much, God. I’m talking about really being dependent on other people for your very survival – as the disciples of Jesus were when he sent them out, instructing them to take nothing with them – “no, purse, no bag, no sandals” (Luke 10:4) – but to depend entirely on the generosity of those to whom they ministered.
Folks who live on the street know about being dependent on others, and the ones who aren’t completely numb and cynical usually know something about trusting God. In fact, I’d dare to say that they know quite a bit more about trusting God than folks who have only trusted God as a matter of personal piety, who have never had to trust God as a matter of life and death. Ask the folks down at the Church of the Common Ground about trusting God, and you’ll likely get an earful.
Of course, despite our illusions that we are able to provide for our own needs, we are -- all of us -- dependent on one another for survival. As one of the collects for Compline says, “grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil.” And we are ultimately dependent on God for our very being. Still, knowing all that intellectually isn’t the same as living with it in your everyday reality.
Perhaps this is why Jesus encourages us to give up our possessions and speaks of the poor as “blessed.” Perhaps it’s why he says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Our savings accounts, our IRAs, our insurance policies – all set up to ensure our financial security, to protect us and to maintain our standard of living – actually prevent us from experiencing our utter dependence on God and fool us into thinking we can care for ourselves. They are hindrances to our relationship with God.
We store up treasures for ourselves on earth because we believe that it will give us peace of mind. “If only I had more money, I wouldn’t have to worry so much,” we think to ourselves. But the irony of it all is that the more we have, the more we worry about losing it. Monastics take a vow of poverty out of the recognition of this dynamic that Jesus so poignantly illustrates throughout his teachings: the less we have, the less we have to worry about, the less we have to distract us from our relationship with God and from giving ourselves over completely to him. There is freedom in having less. It frees our souls to trust more and opens us to deeper spiritual growth.
But don’t get me wrong – my point is not to romanticize extreme poverty or to downplay the very real hardships and traumas that people in such circumstances face. I’m sure those same folks on the street who would affirm that they have learned to trust God through losing everything would also balk at any suggestion that their poverty – and by extension, the extreme wealth of others – is all part of God’s plan and is for their own good. This smacks of the kind of twisted theology that keeps the oppressed oppressed in the name of spiritual growth. “You may have hardships now, but your reward is great in heaven,” the church has told slaves, and women in abusive relationships, and gay and lesbian people – which has had the effect of justifying the status quo and denying their full membership in the body of Christ and their full flourishing as human beings.
I don’t believe that kind of acceptance of society’s injustices was what Jesus was talking about when he pointed out that having less frees us to be more open to God. I don’t think that was an invitation to endorse or turn a blind eye the horrendous conditions of those in extreme poverty because such conditions are “good for them” and will bring them “closer to God.” No, if that’s what we get out of reading the Gospel, I think we’re entirely missing the point.
Jesus doesn’t just call “the poor,” or those who have less, “blessed” and stop there. No, he calls “the rich,” or those who have more, to give up what they do have in order to experience some of the freedom of having less and to connect more deeply with God. But giving up possessions to address a personal spiritual need has the effect – whether intended or unintended – of meeting a larger, societal need as well.
Think about it. In a world of limited resources, how much we consume has a direct effect on others around us. If we choose to give up some of our possessions, we not only open ourselves more to God, we also leave more available for others to have. By eating less, buying less, using less energy, we allow others to benefit from the generosity of God and distribute it more equally amongst God’s people. Living more simply helps bring about the kingdom of God both within us and around us.
No, I don’t think that the Gospel endorses the status quo of our class system by holding up the blessedness of the poor or by pointing out that we may need to have less in order to really learn how to trust God. Rather, I believe that if we truly follow Jesus, we will find ourselves significantly rearranging that system.
Jesus calls us all to live more simply and thus to experience the freedom of knowing our dependence on God. But as those of us with more choose intentionally to live more simply, we may find that we are able to meet the needs of those in extreme poverty. As a saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi goes, we should “live simply, that others may simply live.”
Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said, “strive first for the kingdom of God... and all these things will be given to you as well.”
She stands in the upstairs, attic-loft of the shelter, giving a tour to one of her newest volunteers.
“And this is where we keep the extra coats,” she says, pointing to a motley assortment of puffy parkas stuffed tightly into cardboard boxes and shoved into a room behind the walls made of chained-link fence. “Here we have sheets... we’re down to only a few sets, but we’ll get more in soon,” she says confidently.
She moves further down the central hallway, pointing out the holding places where supplies are kept for the guests of this shelter.
“Where do you get your donations?” the new volunteer asks. “How do you know you’ll be getting more sheets soon?”
“Oh, they’ll come,” the shelter employee says with a smile. “One of the things I’ve learned through working here is that God will provide for whatever we need. We like to have butter for the guests every night at dinner, out on the tables. But if we run out, ok, we just go ahead without butter for a few nights. And inevitably, some butter will be donated within a few days or a week. When we need butter, the universe sends us butter.”
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.”
Have you ever been in a place where you weren’t quite sure where the money was going to come from to pay that electric bill? Or when you didn’t know how or when you’d get your next meal? If you have, then you know something about trusting God. I mean, really trusting God. Not just saying you trust God because it sounds nice and looks good to your church friends but then doing everything within your power to guarantee you will be able to provide for your own needs, thank you very much, God. I’m talking about really being dependent on other people for your very survival – as the disciples of Jesus were when he sent them out, instructing them to take nothing with them – “no, purse, no bag, no sandals” (Luke 10:4) – but to depend entirely on the generosity of those to whom they ministered.
Folks who live on the street know about being dependent on others, and the ones who aren’t completely numb and cynical usually know something about trusting God. In fact, I’d dare to say that they know quite a bit more about trusting God than folks who have only trusted God as a matter of personal piety, who have never had to trust God as a matter of life and death. Ask the folks down at the Church of the Common Ground about trusting God, and you’ll likely get an earful.
Of course, despite our illusions that we are able to provide for our own needs, we are -- all of us -- dependent on one another for survival. As one of the collects for Compline says, “grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil.” And we are ultimately dependent on God for our very being. Still, knowing all that intellectually isn’t the same as living with it in your everyday reality.
Perhaps this is why Jesus encourages us to give up our possessions and speaks of the poor as “blessed.” Perhaps it’s why he says it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Our savings accounts, our IRAs, our insurance policies – all set up to ensure our financial security, to protect us and to maintain our standard of living – actually prevent us from experiencing our utter dependence on God and fool us into thinking we can care for ourselves. They are hindrances to our relationship with God.
We store up treasures for ourselves on earth because we believe that it will give us peace of mind. “If only I had more money, I wouldn’t have to worry so much,” we think to ourselves. But the irony of it all is that the more we have, the more we worry about losing it. Monastics take a vow of poverty out of the recognition of this dynamic that Jesus so poignantly illustrates throughout his teachings: the less we have, the less we have to worry about, the less we have to distract us from our relationship with God and from giving ourselves over completely to him. There is freedom in having less. It frees our souls to trust more and opens us to deeper spiritual growth.
But don’t get me wrong – my point is not to romanticize extreme poverty or to downplay the very real hardships and traumas that people in such circumstances face. I’m sure those same folks on the street who would affirm that they have learned to trust God through losing everything would also balk at any suggestion that their poverty – and by extension, the extreme wealth of others – is all part of God’s plan and is for their own good. This smacks of the kind of twisted theology that keeps the oppressed oppressed in the name of spiritual growth. “You may have hardships now, but your reward is great in heaven,” the church has told slaves, and women in abusive relationships, and gay and lesbian people – which has had the effect of justifying the status quo and denying their full membership in the body of Christ and their full flourishing as human beings.
I don’t believe that kind of acceptance of society’s injustices was what Jesus was talking about when he pointed out that having less frees us to be more open to God. I don’t think that was an invitation to endorse or turn a blind eye the horrendous conditions of those in extreme poverty because such conditions are “good for them” and will bring them “closer to God.” No, if that’s what we get out of reading the Gospel, I think we’re entirely missing the point.
Jesus doesn’t just call “the poor,” or those who have less, “blessed” and stop there. No, he calls “the rich,” or those who have more, to give up what they do have in order to experience some of the freedom of having less and to connect more deeply with God. But giving up possessions to address a personal spiritual need has the effect – whether intended or unintended – of meeting a larger, societal need as well.
Think about it. In a world of limited resources, how much we consume has a direct effect on others around us. If we choose to give up some of our possessions, we not only open ourselves more to God, we also leave more available for others to have. By eating less, buying less, using less energy, we allow others to benefit from the generosity of God and distribute it more equally amongst God’s people. Living more simply helps bring about the kingdom of God both within us and around us.
No, I don’t think that the Gospel endorses the status quo of our class system by holding up the blessedness of the poor or by pointing out that we may need to have less in order to really learn how to trust God. Rather, I believe that if we truly follow Jesus, we will find ourselves significantly rearranging that system.
Jesus calls us all to live more simply and thus to experience the freedom of knowing our dependence on God. But as those of us with more choose intentionally to live more simply, we may find that we are able to meet the needs of those in extreme poverty. As a saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi goes, we should “live simply, that others may simply live.”
Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said, “strive first for the kingdom of God... and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Friday, February 18, 2011
Chattanooga Community Kitchen
Today our urban ministry class visited the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, by far the most inspirational place we've been yet (to me). We met with Jens Christensen, assistant director at the kitchen, and with Brother Ron Fender, an Episcopal monk in the Brotherhood of St. Gregory whose primary role at the shelter is to wash homeless people's feet.
When our van-load of six or seven students arrived at the kitchen, our professor, the Rev. Susanna Metz, who had driven a few other students in her own car, had already arrived. Her bumper-sticker-covered sedan was parallel parked next to the entrance to the kitchen, and she was standing on the street greeting folks from the shelter with hugs and smiles. It was clear she was a familiar presence in these parts.
We all gathered in front of the kitchen and went inside to the lobby. A middle-aged African-American man sat behind the desk, looking suspiciously at this crowd of clean, well-dressed folks who had wandered in. "We're here for a meeting with Jens," Susanna explained. "Oh, Jens, ok," he answered. "He's around somewhere," he commented, and we continued to wait.
Just to the left of the lobby was the main kitchen area. Although the Chattanooga Community Kitchen has become much more than just a feeding program, here was the center, the heart of what this place had been about from its founding: feeding people. Looming over the rows of tables and chairs was a beautiful mural, depicting Jesus with his arms outstretched in front of a city-scape including a variety of people in brilliant, bright colors. It reminded me of the mural in the parish hall at St. James Cambridge, my first Episcopal parish in the Boston area: there, a mural of Jesus feeding the five thousand took center stage, with Jesus breaking the bread in the center, just as in this picture, and hundreds of people of all different races and colors surrounding him in the background.
The day shelter area was opened in 2008 and is a space where people with nowhere else to go can spend time during the day. Most shelters require that guests leave by something like 5 or 6 a.m., so people without jobs are left with no where to go until the shelters open again at 6 p.m. or so. The day shelter area provides a place where people can play cards or chess or checkers, use the public computers for job-hunting or online classes, or just sit. There is also a meditation room, a quiet room with dimmed lighting where people can go for quiet and stillness. I was amazed at the luxury of this beautiful space within the midst of a shelter -- and indeed, the day shelter area itself was the cleanest, brightest, most inviting shelter space I'd ever been in -- a far cry from the hardly-better-than-a-basement concrete underside of a building where the Peachtree-Pine shelter in Atlanta was housed, or the somewhat grungy and dark day shelter space of Siena Francis House in Omaha.
But Brother Ron showed up anyway, and however much of a crazy nutcase he was, he made himself at home at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, which now touts him as one of their most beloved assets. He washes and cares for the feet of homeless people -- feet that are often tired from miles and miles of walking and from standing all day long. But this is no makeshift, bucket-and-rag foot washing. Although it arose from humble beginnings, the value of the footwashing -- tender, non-threatening human touch it provides to the guests and the ability to diagnose certain illnesses, like gangrene and diabetes -- drew attention, and eventually led to the donation of salon-quality pedicure chairs for the room (pictured at right). Now, in addition to Brother Ron's ministerial presence, nurses and podiatrists volunteer their time to help in this aspect of the Kitchen's ministry.
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| Entrance to the Chattanooga Community Kitchen |
When our van-load of six or seven students arrived at the kitchen, our professor, the Rev. Susanna Metz, who had driven a few other students in her own car, had already arrived. Her bumper-sticker-covered sedan was parallel parked next to the entrance to the kitchen, and she was standing on the street greeting folks from the shelter with hugs and smiles. It was clear she was a familiar presence in these parts.
We all gathered in front of the kitchen and went inside to the lobby. A middle-aged African-American man sat behind the desk, looking suspiciously at this crowd of clean, well-dressed folks who had wandered in. "We're here for a meeting with Jens," Susanna explained. "Oh, Jens, ok," he answered. "He's around somewhere," he commented, and we continued to wait.
Just to the left of the lobby was the main kitchen area. Although the Chattanooga Community Kitchen has become much more than just a feeding program, here was the center, the heart of what this place had been about from its founding: feeding people. Looming over the rows of tables and chairs was a beautiful mural, depicting Jesus with his arms outstretched in front of a city-scape including a variety of people in brilliant, bright colors. It reminded me of the mural in the parish hall at St. James Cambridge, my first Episcopal parish in the Boston area: there, a mural of Jesus feeding the five thousand took center stage, with Jesus breaking the bread in the center, just as in this picture, and hundreds of people of all different races and colors surrounding him in the background.
Eventually, Jens came out to meet us. He was a young, outdoorsy-looking man who looked like he'd spend most of his time hiking or reading poetry, not running a community kitchen for homeless people. He began to tell us the history of the Kitchen: founded in 1982 by seven different churches (two of them Episcopal), that banded together to address the needs that they were seeing in the community. Now the board of the Kitchen includes not just churches but synagogues and even a Satya Sai Baba group (a Hindu sect), "We don't talk about religion, we talk about helping people," Jens said of how the groups work together. "We can come to an agreement about helping people even if we don't agree on why we're helping them."
The Kitchen began as a group of volunteering going out to give sack lunches to people on the streets, and in 1985 they got a building and began to house their feeding program in one central location. Now, the Kitchen includes not just a meals program but a day shelter, a free health care clinic, substance abuse programs, a thrift store, social worker services, and a transitional family housing unit that can house up to 10 families at a time. 181,000 meals were served last year (2010), and the health clinic sees 4,000-5,000 unique individuals each year. There are an estimated 600 to 700 homeless people each night in Chattanooga, Jens told us.
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| An unfortunately blurry image of the meditation room. |
As Jens gave us the tour, he told us about how the shelter had intentionally built this space to be of the same standards one would expect for any public space. "When we went to renovate the space, the staff said to ourselves, 'This needs to be a space that we'd feel comfortable using ourselves.'"
"That's what I'M talkin' about!" a short African-American man in jeans and a raggy t-shirt piped up from the back of our group. A guest at the shelter, he'd joined our group in the lobby and asked Jens if he could tag along for our tour. He interjected occasionally with his own perspective on things.
Jens smiled. "Really," he said, "the bathrooms here were pretty disgusting. They weren't of a quality that any of us on staff would be willing to use. So we decided, you know, when we remodeled, that everything would have to be of the highest quality."
The man in the back of the group nodded vigorously and proudly.
Just one example of that commitment to high quality service for their guests is the foot washing room. The foot washing program at the Community Kitchen was started by Br. Ron Fender, a monk in the Episcopal order of the Brotherhood of St. Gregory. As Jens told the story, "One day we got a hand-written letter from some man up in the Northeast. 'I want to live with the homeless, make minimum-wage, and wash people's feet,' it said. The director of the shelter threw it on the desk dismissively, figuring it was from some crazy nutcase." (Read more about the story in this article from the Chattanooga Free Times Press.)
But Brother Ron showed up anyway, and however much of a crazy nutcase he was, he made himself at home at the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, which now touts him as one of their most beloved assets. He washes and cares for the feet of homeless people -- feet that are often tired from miles and miles of walking and from standing all day long. But this is no makeshift, bucket-and-rag foot washing. Although it arose from humble beginnings, the value of the footwashing -- tender, non-threatening human touch it provides to the guests and the ability to diagnose certain illnesses, like gangrene and diabetes -- drew attention, and eventually led to the donation of salon-quality pedicure chairs for the room (pictured at right). Now, in addition to Brother Ron's ministerial presence, nurses and podiatrists volunteer their time to help in this aspect of the Kitchen's ministry.This entry is already ridiculously long, but the amount of work that the Community Kitchen does in downtown Chattanooga is simply staggering. Even to briefly mention each type of outreach ministry would take much longer than I've spent here. In addition to the services previously mentioned, the Kitchen also has a medical respite facility, where people who are homeless can go after being discharged from the hospital to continue to recover. (Often people are discharged with orders of "bed rest," but how exactly is one to find this "bed rest" if one does not have a home, much less a bed where they can rest on a consistent basis?) Unfortunately, the medical respite area is currently closed (as of Feb. 2010) due to a lack of ability to pay volunteer nurses to monitor the hall.
The Kitchen also has a recycling program, which has been operating since the 1990s, before the city provided curbside recycling. The recycling program provides job training for people connected with the day shelter and the kitchen. Our professor Susanna collects recyclables at the seminary and drives them down to Chattanooga every month to donate to the Community Kitchen's recycling program. (When we showed up today, she had a bag of plastic bottles in hand.)
At the end of our time at the Community Kitchen, we sat down for a brief conversation with Brother Ron (pictured below). Someone asked him how he could keep doing it, keep giving of himself in this way, keep putting himself in harm's way in this ministry. (He'd just told us stories of having guns pointed at his head and of breaking up violent fist-fights outside the Kitchen.) They asked if he was afraid.
"You know, I gave up fear," Brother Ron said, matter-of-factly. "I think that's part of living into the vows."
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| © Chattanooga Free Times Press. |
He spoke eloquently of the value of continuing to show up, week after week, even when people betray you or hurt you or don't seem to be making any changes or improvements to their lives.
"But we can't abandon them," he said. "I think we've gotta keep being there. That's what the Gospel is all about. God doesn't abandon us. So I keep coming back."
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| A mural in the meditation room at the day shelter. |
Friday, February 4, 2011
St. Paul's Chattanooga
Today our urban ministry class visited St. Paul's Episcopal Church, a "corporate" or "resource"-sized parish in downtown Chattanooga. We met with the Rev. Ann Weeks, resident deacon at St. Paul's, to learn about all the outreach programs St. Paul's has in the community.
Deacon Ann is a model example of what a deacon should be: an ordained leader, set apart to "a special ministry of servanthood... [to] the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely." (Ordination of a Deacon, Book of Common Prayer, p. 543). Deacons are called "to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world"(BCP 543). It is said that deacons are to have "one foot in the church and one foot in the world," and Deacon Ann models this very well. She is always out in the community, serving on boards, scouting out what events and activities the rector of St. Paul's should attend and then passing that information along to him. Many years of living and working in Chattanooga before she became a deacon in retirement have given her an extensive network of connections in the Chattanooga area from which she can now draw on in her ministry. (Read an article here about Ann's transition from interior design work to diaconal ministry.)
Deacon Ann also spends her time coordinating various outreach and other ministry programs at St. Paul's. She is very clear, however, that her role is not to do all these programs and tasks, but to equip and motivate others to do them. "I don't take jobs away from the laity," she said. "It's not about me doing it all, it's about empowering the laity to take leadership roles in their ministry."
Deacon Ann gave us an overview of the various outreach programs that St. Paul's sponsors, most notably, the St. Catherine's shelter, which is housed in the basement of St. Paul's. St. Catherine's provides a place to stay for homeless women and children. The space, which consists of a common room with kitchenette and a large, shared sleeping room with twin-sized dorm-like beds, used to be used as the youth room/lounge for the youth program at St. Paul's, but when the need for a women's shelter became apparent, the youth gladly gave up their hip hang-out space to provide shelter to people who desperately needed it.
St. Paul's also participates in the Interfaith Hospitality Network (IHN), in which houses of worship open up their parish halls or other common space to house homeless people for a week at a time. IHN provides transportation to and from the housing sites and places of employment. St. Paul's also supports Metropolitan Ministries, where we visited last week, and the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, where we will visit next week.
In addition to its outreach to the poor, St. Paul's provides other community services like an art gallery (which we were able to tour), and a public concert series through their endowed music program.
Visiting St. Paul's was a good reminder of the incredible good work that large, wealthy, endowed parishes can do, serving as a resource center for the entire community.
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| Ann Weeks |
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| St. Paul's nave (main worship space) |
Deacon Ann also spends her time coordinating various outreach and other ministry programs at St. Paul's. She is very clear, however, that her role is not to do all these programs and tasks, but to equip and motivate others to do them. "I don't take jobs away from the laity," she said. "It's not about me doing it all, it's about empowering the laity to take leadership roles in their ministry."
Deacon Ann gave us an overview of the various outreach programs that St. Paul's sponsors, most notably, the St. Catherine's shelter, which is housed in the basement of St. Paul's. St. Catherine's provides a place to stay for homeless women and children. The space, which consists of a common room with kitchenette and a large, shared sleeping room with twin-sized dorm-like beds, used to be used as the youth room/lounge for the youth program at St. Paul's, but when the need for a women's shelter became apparent, the youth gladly gave up their hip hang-out space to provide shelter to people who desperately needed it.
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| Labyrinth in the courtyard at St. Paul's |
St. Paul's also participates in the Interfaith Hospitality Network (IHN), in which houses of worship open up their parish halls or other common space to house homeless people for a week at a time. IHN provides transportation to and from the housing sites and places of employment. St. Paul's also supports Metropolitan Ministries, where we visited last week, and the Chattanooga Community Kitchen, where we will visit next week.
In addition to its outreach to the poor, St. Paul's provides other community services like an art gallery (which we were able to tour), and a public concert series through their endowed music program.
Visiting St. Paul's was a good reminder of the incredible good work that large, wealthy, endowed parishes can do, serving as a resource center for the entire community.
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