One of the ads I so like is from a sponsor of the PBS Nightly News.  It is from an old alma mater, California State University Long Beach.  Filmed at a graduation ceremony, students come processing by a row of huge block letters proclaiming, “Go Beach.”  As students exit the ceremony in their black academic gowns and mortarboards, one exuberant young woman does a twirl on one foot as she’s passing the camera.  Her face is radiant, all aglow.  Her gown broadly swirling with the movement.  The motto then flashes across the screen: “N0 BARRIERS.”  You just have to know that this young lady is off to an expansive future.  No barriers, indeed!

Except, you have to study and keep your GPA up.  That pesky little detail.  For screw-ups, I discovered, that was a major barrier.  However, after a couple of years in the Army as a medic, I had finally figured how to overcome that one, final impediment, and finally completed my degree at Cal State LA.

But I still tear up when I see that promo.  NO BARRIERS and that wonderful, young woman.  So much excitement ahead for her.

That’s the message of Pentecost.  With the Spirit busting loose.  With quiet reverence.  Today we celebrate the birthday of the church.

We Episcopalians have always been chary of too much exuberance in worship.  It is not our way.

I remember back in high school my girlfriend Barbara had been asked by her close friend, to attend Glenda’s church one Sunday afternoon.  As boyfriend and protector, I was conscripted to accompany her.  I didn’t know much about the Foursquare Church, only that their worship was more enthusiastic than that of the staid Presbyterian church Barbara and I attended.

To say “more enthusiastic” was an understatement.  People were standing and murmuring, “Yes Jesus, Yes, Jesus.”  Some were in the aisles loudly testifying or speaking in tongues.

Was I ever out of my comfort zone!  If this was the rush of the Spirit – I’m sorry, but I’ll take the alternating Sunday.  “When’s this over?” I whispered in Barbara’s ear.

Mercifully, there was some sort of intermission and it was announced that the main service was over.  We quietly slid out the side door.

It has been said that it is through our imagination that the Spirit has the best chance of getting ahold of us.  Through a moment of inspiration.

Lately, I’ve had a couple of hymns that have accompanied me through my days as they weave in and out of various moments. 

I’m fond of saying that if you don’t have a song in your heart on waking, your day’s already in trouble.  I believe it.

Brian Doyle in A Book of Uncommon Prayer, writes: 

“Because you know and I know that a song can save your life.  We know that and we don’t say it much, but it’s true.  When you are dark and despairing a song comes and makes you weep as you think yes yes yes.”[1]

The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe bore up the spirits of those in that great struggle to preserve our union and end slavery.

Work songs kept gandy dancers in sync as they hammered in time to straighten the rails of this nation.  Lifted their spirits and helped pass the toil of the day.

Union songs forged bonds of solidarity among those struggling for labor justice.

And when President Obama broke into “Amazing Grace” in his rich baritone at the close of his eulogy for The Rev. Clementa Pinckney, killed in yet another mass shooting at a Charleston church – that hymn alone redeemed the day.

To paraphrase Brian’s closing:  If today, if haunted by a song that slid out of the radio, or out of memory, and lit up your heart, we pray in thanks that there are such fraught wild holy moments as this.  And so:  amen.

These songs bind us together.  That is the message of Pentecost.  It reunites where the Tower of Babel separated – each speaking a language the other didn’t understand.

Keri L. Day, Princeton professor of Constructive Theology and Ethics, reflects on why, as a young girl, she so loved the telling of the story in the Book of Acts. “’And they were gathered together in one accord.’ That line communicated what was held as sacred within our community: our togetherness, our unbreakable bond of living with and loving each other. We were in one accord. The joy of community was the gift of the Spirit.”[2]

“Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?  And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?  Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia.   Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene and visitors from Rome, both Jews and Proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”[3]

This is the miracle of unity, of understanding.

Now, if your wont is to stand in the aisle and shout, to each their own.  But the authentic miracle of Pentecost will lead you from that aisle into the city to include the poor and the dissolute.  Into the cancer ward and onto the union picket line.  Otherwise, what you thought to be a long-distance call was only a local.  As close as your own ego.

My dearly departed friend George Regas frequently told the story of a man in an Episcopal Church who, in the middle of the sermon shouted out, “Amen.  Amen.”  Folks looked around to see who was causing the commotion, but soon didn’t pay him any further mind.  A little while later he stood up and loudly encouraged the priest, shouting, “Preach it, brother.  Preach it.”  At which point an usher stepped beside him, and whispered, urging him to be quiet.  After the third outburst, the usher admonished him more sternly that he’d have to restrain himself, to which the man responded that he couldn’t help it.  He had the Spirit.  “Well, you certainly didn’t get it here,” scolded the usher.

In our own, quiet way, we Episcopalians pray, “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire.”

And within the fertile recesses of imagination and of the heart — yes, even the “Frozen Chosen” are moved to deeds of service and sacrifice.

It was, in fact the Rector of All Saints Church, Pasadena, who went to the assembly point at the Santa Anita Race Track, where Japanese citizens were rounded up to be sent off to far-away concentration camps.  This was in 1942, that their priest, Frank Scott, stood in front of trains to protest the removal of Japanese-Americans, American citizens, for God’s sake, hauled off to internment camps during World War II.

Not different in kind from what the Nazis were doing in Germany.  And all quite legal, to be sure.  There was a government order.

This, in a day when proper Episcopal priests from a well-to-do, prominent Pasadena parish did not do such unseemly things.  Moved by the Holy Spirit, that’s exactly what Fr. Frank did!  Moved by the Spirit, he was.

These were all Americans – we are all Americans.  No barriers, No separation.  We are one in the Spirit.  That’s what Fr. Frank stood for.

The Spirit in service of unity brings courageous acts of aid on behalf of others.  This about the one and true Spirit, not pious bliz-blaz. Or religious hype.  Some might call it heroism.

Greater love hath no one than to lay down her life for another.  That’s what Amerie Jo Garza did in her last moments, calling 911 in an attempt to save her classmates who were still alive as a shooter sprayed her classroom with automatic fire from a high-powered weapon of war.  On May 24^th just days away from when Amarie anticipated beginning her summer vacation.

“On Tuesday, the Girl Scouts announced that they posthumously awarded her one of its highest honors for risking, and ultimately giving, her life to save others.”[4]

“The organization gave 10-year-old Garza the Bronze Cross, which is awarded ‘for saving or attempting to save life at the risk of the Girl Scout’s own life.’” [5]

This “spunky” little girl, so full of life taken from us too soon.  And how shall we honor her memory?  What is asked of us, the living?

As consciousness slipped and darkness enfolded her, I wonder what song, if any, might have slipped into her fading awareness, what song might have escorted her home to God. 

I’m willing to bet that the song which greeted her arrival had to have been “For All the Saints, Who from Their Labors Rest.” 

No Barriers, Amerie Jo Garza.  No Barriers.   Amen.

---

[1] Brian Doyle, A Book of Uncommon Prayer (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2014, 58.

[2] Keri L. Day, “We Need a Pentecost,” Christian Century, May 3, 2018.

[3] Acts 2:7-11, NRSV.

[4] Li Cohen, “Girl Scouts Posthumously Award Amarie Jo Garza for Doing ‘All She Could’ to Save Classmates, Teachers During Uvalde Shooting,’ CBS News, June 1, 2022.

[5] Ibid.

June 5, 2022, Day of Pentecost

“No Barriers”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Genesis 11:1-9; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Acts 2:1-21;
John 14:8-17

This tumultuous week-that-was began inauspiciously.  I opened the computer e-mail on Sunday evening to check it there were any pressing demands on my time, my money or my brain power.  What I found was not some scam from a Nigerian prince with millions of looted wealth wanting to stash it in my bank account.  No not that tired, old ruse – but the person or persons generating this scam were ensconced in Ireland.  This was a ruse by Irish leprechauns. 

Details could be had by clicking on a tab labeled: “Remittance Advice.”  Regards.  Yeah, regards, sucker if you click on that.  The great sucking sound you hear won’t be the American jobs being siphoned off to Mexico that Ross Perot feared.  No, it will be your hard-earned cash being vacuumed out of your bank account, along with your data and passwords being slurped out of your computer.

As the week progressed, it turned disastrous.  We all discovered to our horror, the tragic events of another mass school shooting — a far more deadly scam, that of the NRA and the gun lobby.  Abetted by their willing political accomplices who prostitute themselves for the almighty campaign dollar.

This was pronounced the work of a “loner.”  FALSE!  This young man had plenty of accomplices – the self-serving idiots who mouth the idiocy: “It’s not guns that kill people.  It’s people who kill people.”  It’s politicians who put guns as a higher priority than our children.  And those who vote for them.  No, this murderer was NOT a loner.  There were others.

These are the fifty Republicans who, in lock-step with Mitch McConnell, have blocked even the most tepid sensible gun safety laws.  Throw in a batch of corrupt Democrats on the payroll of this death machinery, and nothing gets done. 

Today, to a person, these esteemed representatives even blocked a bill to address domestic terrorism.  Have another shot and pass the ammunition (oops, poor choice of words).  Gotta support your local, neighborhood terrorist.  He’s one of us.

Columbine, Las Vegas, Tree of Life Synagogue, Sandy Hook, El Paso, Buffalo — The list goes on over the decades until we have become inured to the carnage.  We’re numbed out.  I never again want to hear some inane, insipid words about “thoughts and prayers.”  That’s just a bunch of pious bull – simpering NRA apologetics.

After each mass shooting, especially in schools, the cry goes up, “Surely they will do something now.”  Authorities couldn’t even manage to send in police on the scene, gathered in the school hallway outside the besieged classrooms – within earshot of those desperate 911 pleas from students in those classrooms.  

“There are still eight of us alive.  Please send in the police now!”  Nothing.  Nothing, as their classmates were gunned down and the classroom floor was awash in blood.  As the survivors bled out.  Over an hour and…Nothing.

We are scolded for raising this as a policy issue.  For heaven’s sake we shouldn’t politicize this tragedy.  Folks, it’s politics that brought us this tragedy.  The NRA and their accomplices have already politicized this issue.  To deadly effect. 

If you consider other nations demographically similar to ours – we don’t see Canadians massacring one another wholesale on a weekly basis.  We don’t see this level of violence in virtually any advanced European nation.  NOT ALL OF THEM ADDED UP TOGETHER!

This doesn’t have to be.

Folks, WE ARE NOT WITHOUT RESOURCES TO ACT.  We celebrate one of the signal events in the Christian Story.  No not Memorial Day, though we know that’s upon us by all the mattress sales – 40 percent off, lay away financing.  Free delivery, and we’ll take away your old one.  FREE!  All major credit cards accepted.  Open till 9:00 tonight.  Almost the same ad copy gun stores are using this weekend.

No, not that holiday.  This Sunday we celebrate Ascension Day.  It is as if LOVE exploded and has been let loose throughout the world.  Jesus, as a physical presence, is taken from us that the Risen Christ might seep into every nook and cranny.  Into every heart and mind.  Empowering compassion, giving courage – yes, political courage, to do the right thing by our kids.  By ourselves.

In groups of the Christ-infected followers, spontaneous works of mercy and daring acts of sacrifice and resistance erupt.  It is in such a group at Ephesus that St. Paul finds hope and joyful fellowship.  Not just potlucks, but actual, daring works of mercy and solidarity.

That is the work of the spirit of the living Christ, the reality that transcends the historical Jesus.  He’s gone, but Spirit-empowered, the church is launched.

As Luke tells the story, “Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands he blessed them.  While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.  And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy…”

Now, don’t get caught up in the strange particulars of this story.  It’s how folks remembered the events fifty or so years later.  It’s how folks told of such marvelous and incomprehensible events.  The bottom line is:  He’s gone.  But he’s not.

Why are you still staring up into the clouds?  THERE’S WORK TO DO.

He’s no longer with us, but let loose in the cosmos – blessing, empowering, comforting, encouraging those who gather in his name.  He’s present in your hands and heart.  In your minds and in your billfolds.  Wherever you gather around his altar to remember him.

Paul finds such a group of the Christ-infected in Ephesus.  He, himself, will travel throughout much of the Roman empire forming other such fellowships.

“I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers.” 

“I have heard of your faith.”  Not only heard, but seen. 

As I witnessed clumps and knots of grieving families comforting one another this evening, all that remains is the faith that, in love, somehow, we will get through this together.  That is Christ let loose in the valley of the deep shadow of death.  Faith giving strength to hold one another up, to grieve, to pray together.

After the 2020 election, with Dr. Fauci no longer muzzled and under wraps, no longer under the censorious scowl of the Former Guy, we talked about “free-range Fauci.”   Fauci let loose.  Well, what we now celebrate on Ascension Sunday is “free-range Jesus.”  The reality of Love unleashed upon creation, down through the ages, present most especially in hearts and imaginations of those who love him.

We had barely finished burying the victims of Buffalo when the catastrophe of Uvalde was upon us.  One of stories from the Buffalo funerals captured my heart – that of “Mayor Kat,” Katherine Massey who was laid to rest only a Tuesday ago.

Mayor Kat was not prone to sit by idly and bemoan the state of affairs.  Sick and tired of the overgrown lot on her street – state property, she had had it with excuses and inaction.

So, she sent a letter to the governor on letterhead of the “Cherry Street Block Club,” which did result in action.  The lot was quickly cleaned up.  Now, Massey was the only one who knew who wrote that letter.  It was her own invention.  And that invented club consisted of one sole member – her.

It was that sort of fearless activism which was her hallmark.  Her congressman noted at her funeral, “She was the mayor in every neighborhood that she lived in.”  Katherine Massey was one of ten shoppers taken from the Buffalo community by another teenage boy with an assault rifle.

She was an outrageously creative activist.  To raise health awareness among students in her local neighborhood school, she showed up in a broccoli costume which she accessorized with leopard gloves and sunglasses to perform a rap song she wrote.  She was the hit at the school’s assembly.[1]  It was probably enough to have even gotten “W” to eat his broccoli.

“She considered herself a single parent with 35,000 adopted children attending Buffalo’s public schools.”[2]

She fulminated, through letters to the editor, against an escalating culture of gun violence in her city.  That is the sense of mission and strength Mayor Kat drew from her family of faith at Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church. 

Now, the whole world has heard of her faith and the faith of her community in Christ.

Mayor Kat was a splinter of that glory, a manifestation of the flesh and blood risen Jesus.  Free Range, indeed.  She is an incarnation of that Ascended Love, a Holy Busybody, God bless her.

As we mourn our losses, hold one another up, might we continue to take strength in the living Christ in our midst.   The Christ in the faces of one another as we gather around this table in his precious memory.  Not for solace only, but for strength.  The strength that nurtured and empowered Mayor Kat.  The strength that will get us all through this horrible week. Yes, we have heard of your faith.

“In our Eucharistic meal we are pulled into immense love and joy for such constant and unearned grace…that explains the joyous character with which we celebrate this meal.”[3]

That is what sustains me — to see the love in the faces of those who weekly gather here at the altar of Christ.  Your faithfulness continues to give me hope.  Yes, I have seen and heard of the faith of the saints gathered here in this northern outpost of Christ in San Bernardino.  For us all at St. Francis, I say, “Thanks be to God.”  Amen.

---

[1] “Buffalo says Goodbye to ‘Mayor Kat,’” Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, May 24, 2022.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Richard Rohr, Yes and No: Daily Meditations (Cincinnati, Ohio:  Franciscan Media, 2013), 228.

May 29, 2022, Ascension Sunday

“I Have Heard of Your Faith”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:15-23;
Luke 24:44-53

On any given day one’s prospects can change radically.  Any day can be the one that makes all the difference for the rest of one’s life. 

Dinah Washington sang it so well:

“What a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours
Brought the sun and the flowers
Where there used to be rain”[1]

“What a difference a day makes” rose to the top of the pop charts in 1959 and won Dinah Washington, with her rich, silky rendition, a Grammy.  Its popularity testifies to that truism, a day, any day, can make a difference – possibly, a huge difference.

A monster asteroid can ruin your entire day.  Ask the dinosaurs.  A recent discovery seems to have revealed the exact day they began their extinction.[2]  Paleontologists in North Dakota have found the remains of a dinosaur leg that has been preserved almost perfectly intact, even with mummified skin attached. This along with a jumble of other life buried in the wall of water and mud that swept across the shore of their habitat, burying all in an instant.

Scientists believe that it was killed by a massive tsunami on the day the asteroid struck Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.  In an instant a mile-high tsunami rushed outwards roiling planetary oceans.  This wave swept up the inland sea that once divided the American continent, , sweeping away all in its path.  All within minutes of the impact.

Much of the impact crater along with the asteroid itself was vaporized and began to fall back to the earth as small glass spherules.  “Those fish with the spherules in their gills, they’re an absolute calling card for the asteroid.”[3]

Chemical analyses of several of the spherules intombed in amber bear the same signature of the rock native to Chicxulub and the asteroid itself.  All this in a twenty-four-hour day.  A terrible, horrible, no good very bad day for planet earth.

Winds as if from a blast furnace charred forest land and thick clouds covered much of the planet for a decade or two, killing off most plant life.  Sulphureous gasses and rain absorbed by the oceans killed much of the sea life.  The few remaining dinosaurs had nothing to eat and their demise was assured within days.  At that point the dinner bell for T. Rex and other carnivores was un-rung.  They, too, starved.  What a difference a day makes, indeed. 

But in the aftermath, little burrowing and hibernating mammals and other small creatures survived the cataclysm.  Seeds and spores of previous plant life soon germinated and within a century life found a way back.

We saw that scenario playout after Mount St. Helens erupted.  Another horrific day.  But a day in which all that had looked like the landscape of the moon was within years renewed in a carpet of green.  In the twinkling of an eye as far as geological time goes.  God works wonders to preform.

In the twinkling of the mind’s eye comes the revelation of a new creation.  No, nothing to do with dead fish and dinosaurs or asteroids.  The writer has a very different reality in mind – a day that will make an entirely new difference.

“I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.  And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

For John the Revelator, what, indeed, a difference a day made as he was translated to a seventh heaven to behold the mind of God.

Meanwhile, for us lowly mortals, we plod along, subject to time and chance.  While we have no control over what extraterrestrial bodies may be careening towards earth, in some matters we have a choice.  However, all is being made new even when we’re not in control.  Asteroids are beyond my pay grade.

Don’t discount chance and opportunity.  One day our youngest son got on the internet machine and arranged a date with a wonderful, young woman.  And soon we will be headed off to meet our future in-laws.  She is that beautiful object of our son’s heart of which Dinah Washington croons:

My yesterday was blue, dear
Today I’m a part of you, dear
My lonely nights are through, dear
Since you said you were mine

Yeah, they are smitten and we delight in the joy they have in one another.  What a difference a day makes!  A new heaven and a new earth.  Gift of God.

Lately, events in Ukraine have caused my mind to dwell on things Russian.  One of the books I read as a young fellow after having discovered the pleasures of good literature was Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. 

Written in 1962, it was an extraordinary publishing event in the Soviet Union, revealing the massive injustices of Josef Stalin.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had spent time in the Soviet chain of Gulags in Siberia at hard labor himself.  In this novel, he writes of one innocent prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, sentenced to hard labor as a spy for having been captured by the Germans in WW II.

This short novel unfolds in the span of one single day of this prisoner, one day of a ten-year sentence.  Though set in a labor camp, the work ends on a hopeful note.  In that given day, he has secured sufficient food to sustain life.  He has kept his integrity in his labor.  He has acted as a decent human being to his fellow prisoners, and he has said his prayers to God.  The narrator ends the story, noting that Shukhov has lived one of the 3,653 days of his sentence.

What a difference a day makes – in the life of this fictional character, who could be a stand-in for “Everyman.”  And while we would not readily equate the terrors of one of Stalin’s gulags with “a new heaven and a new earth,” yet even in those dire circumstances was the possibility of a life lived with integrity.

Such a life is the unfolding of Solzhenitsyn’s spirituality, which grew out of the heart, not out of church dogma.  Though the spirituality of the Old Believer’s Russian Orthodox tradition permeates his writings, his is a deeper version.  One said to being born out of the “belly of the whale” during those years of imprisonment in Siberia.  As is any true spirituality born, out of our own life experiences.  And any twenty-four-hour day can make all the difference.

Here is the encapsulation of Solzhenitsyn’s belief “…the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay within the heart.”[4]

“Your soul, which formerly was dry now ripens from suffering.  And even if you haven’t come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.  Those close to you in spirit surround you in slavery. And how many of us come to realize:  It is particularly in slavery that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine friendship…”[5]

What a difference a day can make in the belly of the whale, in a Soviet gulag prison camp.  Even the unfolding of a “New Heaven and a New Earth.”  Maybe Ivan’s Twenty-four little hours didn’t bring the sun and the flowers but it brought the choice to be a decent human being.  As they do to us all.  Gift of God.

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities,” the wise, old Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry counsels the young Harry Potter at a moment of self-doubt.  A difference that any single moment of a day can make.

Community is a blessing we can choose, and what a difference that day made in the lives of those who gathered daily to prepare meals for those on the street. 

Peter, in Acts chose to sup with the uncircumcised and it made all the difference for the church. 

One day, for Amy Frykholm, Bill didn’t show up at the church, so “we went to find him.”[6]  His absence made all the difference for a small church fellowship.

“’How are you related to this man?’ the EMT asked me as he put Bill in the back of the ambulance. I climbed in after them. There was no good answer. Friend? Not really. Colleague? Coworker? He was more than an acquaintance. ‘He . . . we work together I finally said.’

“Bill was the front-walk shoveler, meat-loaf maker, coffee brewer, Saturday night grumpster-in-chief at my church. Every time I arrived at the church, he was busy doing something. He filled the steam-table pans for our community meal. He made sure the stairs were clear of snow. He helped install the handicap ramp. He cleaned the bathroom.

“When I first met him, he showed me how to light the stove for the community meal, smelling like stale beer and unwashed clothes. He knew where everything was stored. He complained about everyone and everything—about the people who stood too long next to the coffee machine, who left their cigarette butts on the front porch, who loitered in the hallway, who talked too much, or who were so quiet they must be crazy.

“One spring, one of our regular guests at the meal died of liver failure. Kenny’s belly was swollen, and he lost his mind, screaming with terrible tremors, as if accumulated ghosts were tormenting him. He vomited and had diarrhea until he was unable to eat at all. His ordeal went on for weeks, and at last he died.

“After that, Bill seemed more withdrawn as he went about his tasks. Then one day, he disappeared. He did not come to the meal. We arrived at church to find the snow had not been shoveled. We didn’t know where he had gone

“After a few days, George could stand it no longer, so he went to look for Bill. He searched every apartment, knocked on every door, until he found Bill, barely conscious in the back of a trailer where he had gone to drink himself to death. As far as I could tell, his reasoning was something like, ‘I don’t want to die like Kenny.  If it is too hard to stop drinking, and liver poisoning is too slow, I am just going to kill myself quickly.’

Bill was taken to the hospital and proved to be a most uncompliant and difficult patient.  One night, delirious, he pulled out all his IV lines, monitors and catheter.  The next morning Amy and some friends gathered at Bill’s bed, taking turns holding a hand, shedding a tear or two. Amy continues:

“We sat around Bill as we waited for the urologist to come to fix Bill’s catheter. We talked to him through the sedation. “I want to go home,” he said.

“Bill, these machines are keeping you alive. Staying here is keeping you alive.”

“There was a pause. Finally, I said, ‘Bill, do you want to go home to die?’

“’No,’ he said. ’I want a Pepsi.’

“As we waited for a doctor to speak with us, there was plenty of time to contemplate

“Bill and I shared labor and days. We shared space and coffee mugs. Who is this man to you? He makes coffee for me. Pretty good coffee, too. Somehow, over the space of years, our relation had become a given. The days had been like stitches—some well made, some poorly made—but they had created a mantle that we would now have to assume. I belonged to Bill. Bill belonged to me. And now, I—we—were going to make a decision that only family members typically make. We were going to do this without labels or prescribed roles.

“We spent the day contemplating the Bill we had known, who he was, what he loved, and what he wanted from life. As we talked about “our” Bill, we also gradually saw that he belonged to something bigger, something greater than us. We wordlessly came to act as if we knew that he was going into that something, and it was our job to walk him to the door. We did not claim to know what was on the other side. We had no shared language, took no comfort, told ourselves no stories.

“One word kept coming up for Bill: home. At first, we thought he meant his apartment. We talked about perhaps transporting him there, caring for him there. But gradually, the word took another meaning, one that claimed a place we both knew and did not know. The only way that we could move forward was to believe and to act as if this other place, this home, was love.

“We stood around his bed. ‘The Broncos are going to be in the Super Bowl,’ someone in our group said.

“’Good,’ Bill grunted.

“’Bill,’ I said. ‘We are working on bringing you home.’

“’Good,’ he said again.

We each held his hand. The staff told us later that he was peaceful that night.  We started making arrangements with hospice the next morning, but the nurse on duty called early in the afternoon.

“’He is leaving fast,’ she said.  By the time George arrived, [Bill] was gone.

Bill and his church family, in one brief, precious day, entered a New Heaven and a New Earth.  What a difference a day makes when marinated in Gospel Goodness.  A New Heaven and A New Earth, without fanfare and with little note.  Except to those blessed to live it.  Amen.

---

[1] Originally written in Spanish by Maria Grever, a Mexican songwriter in 1939, Stanley Adams adapted it in English, 1934.

[2] Dave Kindy, “Discoveries Shed New Light on the Day the Dinosaurs Died,” Washington Post, May 9, 2022.  The PBS program is available on NOVA, “Dinosaur Apocalypse.”

[3] Ibid.

[4] A. Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders, p. 77.  From Donald Roy, “Solzhenitsyn’s Religious Teaching,” Christendom Media, Vol. 4, No. 7.

[5] Roy, op. cit.

[6] Amy Frykholm, “A Stitched-Together Community, Christian Century, February 28, 2018.

May 15, 2022, Easter 5

“What A Difference a Day Makes”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6;
John 13:31-35

At some point my brother and I learned what most young fellows inevitably learn.  You can’t fool Mom.  The lady has eyes in the back of her head.  She had her ways of finding out just about any mischief we had gotten into.  She knew when we were just thinking about it.

As Homer tells Bart in an episode of “The Simpsons,” “You Can’t Fool Your Mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.” She’s on to you.  Don’t even think about it!

At my first church in downtown Los Angeles, the Pico-Union community, it was a pretty tough neighborhood.  We were at the intersection of the territories of three gangs.  The student turnover in Tenth Street Elementary School was over fifty percent each year.  Not just the students – teachers wanted out of there as soon as possible.  The place was a shambles of years of deferred, piled up maintenance.  The student’s restrooms should have been red-tagged by the health department.  Unfit for human habitation. 

Our youth were continually in danger of gang recruitment.  Especially vulnerable girls.  One of our programs for girls in the early evenings was a cooking class taught by a grandma.  This wise, old Latina had two missions.  Ostensibly, it was to teach our neighborhood girls some of the skills they were not learning at home.  The second, and more important, was to provide some guidance, to mentor these girls as they grew up:  stay away from gangs and the fast girls; don’t let some boy get his hands in your pants and get you pregnant.  Have some self-regard; study hard – YOU actually could go to college or learn a skill to support yourself when you grow up.  The college girls who staffed our programs were great role models for what a young girl could become.  So, stay in school!  There is scholarship money just waiting for you if you are willing to put in the effort.  Follow your dream: a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, a writer?  Follow the dream.  That’s what this abuela said.

Women have been learning this lesson through many years of heartbreak.  Ella Fitzgerald in her “Blues in the Night” – has that haunting refrain, “My Mama Done Tol’ Me.” 

Her adaptation of this Johnny Mercer hit went down as a warning about shiftless men: 

“My mama done told me when I was in pig tails
My mama done told me,
A man’s gonna sweet-talk ya, and give you the big eyes
But when that sweet talkin’ is done
A man is a two-face, a worrisome thing
Who’ll leave ya to sing the blues in the night”

If you hitch your future to some no-account man, you’ll be singing the blues for many a night.  And you’ll be going nowhere.  That’s the priceless wisdom from mothers that too many young girls are not heeding.  Listen to that wise, old Latina!  Listen to your mom.  Listen to your teacher.

Unfortunately, too many of our mothers are so besieged by their own problems and family baggage that they’re unable to exercise maternal instincts and wisdom.  In one of my congregations, one fellow was bringing up his two daughters as a single dad.  Their mother had been in and out of rehab for alcoholism and that finally ended the marriage.  To boot, the court had taken away all her parental rights.  This is not an isolated story.  I was always amazed that the girls had come out of this so well.

But if the desire is there, it’s never too late to achieve sobriety, to heal.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus is portrayed as the Good Shepherd. 

“My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.  No one will snatch them out of my hand.  The Father and I are one.”[1]

If ever we have Good Shepherds in our day, they are our mothers.  They give you life in many ways.  Their wisdom is life abundant.   Good shepherds of meaning and purpose.  Life does not begin at conception and end at birth as many in the Party of Sedition and Greed would have it.

As much as I have learned kindness, generosity, manners and decorum – it was the result of Mom’s teaching and example.  To the degree that I have failed in these graces, that can’t be laid at her doorstep.  Women down through the ages have been responsible for what little civilization we have.  That’s my belief.  They urge us to heed our “better angels.”

We are blessed to have a stalwart supporter for women’s dignity and achievement in our family on my maternal grandmother’s side – Julia Ward Howe.  Grandma comes for a long line of Howes, including the British general William Howe, who benefited the American Revolution by allowing George Washington to slip through his fingers three times.  Wasn’t he sacked or something?

 Here’s where I’m going with Julia Ward Howe.  She wrote the first Mother’s Day proclamation in 1870, long before it was made a national holiday.  You know her for her famous hymn of the Civil War, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  Long before the Hallmark folks turned the day into a monster money-making opportunity to sell sappy poems on outrageously overpriced cards.  Though, there was a beneficial spinoff for the Post Office.  Got stamps?

Today’s commercialized celebration of candy, flowers, gift certificates, and lavish meals at restaurants bears little resemblance to Julia’s original idea. There is nothing wrong with all that hoo-ha.  Whatever makes Mom feel appreciated.  But here, for the record’s sake, is the proclamation she wrote in 1870, which explains, in her own impassioned words, the goals of the original holiday.

Ward’s proclamation was a call to mothers to not raise up sons to be slaughtered in war.  Her proclamation has bite to it.  Nothing sappy here

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each learning after his own time, the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Julia today would urge all women and the men who support them to get up off the couch, turn off the sit-com, and get out in the streets.  She was one of the early Women’s Suffragists.  She constantly pushed women to seize their full economic and political potential.

In 1907, Anna Jarvis, of Philadelphia, began the campaign to have Mother’s Day officially recognized, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson did this, proclaiming it a national holiday and a “public expression of our love and reverence for all mothers.”

And while we’re talking about women’s empowerment, my wife came in with this gem for Mother’s Day.  Fitting, given the recent leak from the Supremes.

“He who has no uterus should shut up.”  Fallopians 5:2.

So, mothers, women, and all who admire and support them, here’s some Mother’s Day suggestions worthy of that original 1870 proclamation.

Arise, all women who have hearts.   Let us work together to reinstate the Expanded Child Tax Credit, passed early on in the Biden administration.[2] 

This program cut child poverty by 25%.  At $3000 per child, this was a lifesaver for many families.

Critics said the money would be wasted on booze, drugs, fast cars and wild women.  NOT THE CASE!  Over 90% of those families living below poverty spent the money on such necessities as utility bills, rent, food, clothing.  The number of children who didn’t have enough to eat fell by 3 million.

Critics were expressing mostly their resentment, not reasoned policy differences.  I didn’t hear this crowd bellyaching over the outrageous amount spent for Bezos’s few hours in space, or Elon Musk’s $44 billion to gobble up free speech in his purchase of Twitter.  Nothing at all mentioned about these extravagances from the Fixed News crowd.  AND, NO – this wasn’t solely their money.  They grifted it off of tax loopholes not available to the likes of you and me.  What might these billions have done for early childhood education programs?  For addiction treatment centers? For the remediation of student debt?  

Of course, Julia Ward Howe and her sisters would today be casting an eagle eye on our bloated Department of Defense budget.  Yeah, what’s a little waste, fraud and abuse among friends?  Besides, these are very good friends.  And, I’m sure, eminently worthy of their ill-gotten largess.  Let’s consider, just as an opening bid, a 10% cut as a Mother’s Day gift from this year’s upcoming military budget. 

That’s why our charity has always supported women’s education and economic advancement in Africa.  Give the opportunity, the money to mothers who bear most of the burden for the care of their families, and they’ll use it wisely.  The men would be down at the bar or the juke-joint.  And who knows what they would have spent it on!?  Meanwhile, mothers would be using it to enroll their children in school and feed them.  The truism is: raise up the women and a nation prospers.

Here’s another Mother’s Day gift opportunity.  Write your representatives, send a letter to the editor pushing our government NOT to freeze Russian’s reserves that are being held in American banks.  DON’T FREEZE THEM – LIQUIDATE THEM to support the refugees streaming out of Ukraine, most of whom are women and children.[3] 

Use these funds to rebuild their houses, their schools, their hospitals, their factories. 

Of course, Putin would complain bitterly.  O well.  We have to get the money from somewhere to rebuild this nation.  We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of billions, especially if our NATO partners join in concert.  A good down payment on the damages he’s caused.  War reparations can cover the rest.  And if Russia ever becomes a democracy again, we can at that point consider another Marshall Plan.

A donation to Citizens’ Climate Lobby would be a superb gift of a livable planet for a mom.  Or another organization like 350.org (Bill McKibben’s group) or The Climate Reality Project (Al Gore’s group).  A livable planet would indeed be a nice gift to remember or honor Mom.

Or make a donation to Ukrainian Relief through the UNHCR or your church’s international aid organization.

All these opportunities are openings for God to work healing and restoration, much better than some sappy card.  I have to now go out in the yard to see if I can find some dandelions to cover the flower thing.  Maybe, I can make up for them by cooking dinner.

Do whatever you have to do to let her know she is honored, appreciated and loved.  She’s your Very Good Shepherd.  So, do bring your political action and contributions to those supporting women along with your thoughts and prayers.  And in any case, Happy Mothers’ Day.  Amen

---

[1] John 10:27-30, New Revised Standard Version.

[2] Ezra Klein, “America Has Turned Its Back on It’s Poorest Families, New York Times, April 20, 2022.

[3] Laurence E.H. Tribe, Jeremy Lewin, “Don’t Freeze Russia’s Reserves.  Liquidate Them,” New York Times, April 17, 2022.

May 8, 2022, Mother’s Day, Easter 4

“My Mama Done Tol’ Me”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17;
John 10:22-30

“Get that thing out of here.  It smells to high heaven!”  Or something to that effect, my mom was yelling.  There I proudly stood at the kitchen door with a gunny sack of fish I had caught that day.

Growing up in Long Beach, I learned to love to fish.  You could fish off the dock at the harbor.  You could fish on the shore, casting as far as you could beyond the breaking waves.  Or you could save your lawn-mowing money and go out on a charter with some twenty other people.  That’s what my buddy Bill, his father and I had done.  And we all caught some fish that day.

I had no idea what sort I had caught but my parents knew when the smell of them arrived five minutes before I did.  When told they were mackerel and not suitable for eating, I protested, “But I caught them.”  I assured my mom that a fishy smell wouldn’t bother me.  “They’re mine!”

No matter how much she pressed her point that NOBODY BUT NOBODY eats mackerel, I refused to listen.  The compromise we arrived at was that If I cleaned the fish and cooked it myself – after they ate dinner – I could fry it up.

I found out two things that day.  One I already sort of knew.  First, sometimes moms are right.  Second, this fish really wasn’t good for eating unless you’re stuck on a desert island and hadn’t eaten in a week.  I don’t remember if I tried to give some of it to Skippy.  You’ve heard of Skippy.  The dog that would eat almost anything except Dad’s smelly cheese.

The upshot was, after a few sample bites, the remains went down the garbage disposal and the other two fish went to the garbage.  That fish was evil.

Right about now, you’re probably wondering where this fishy story is going.  Hang in with me.  We’re getting there.

The gospel of John tells of another fishing trip.  It ended up being a lot more rewarding.

The disciples, dejected and discouraged after Jesus’ crucifixion, went back to their former lives.  Peter and several others set out in the evening in their small boat on the Sea of Tiberias.

They’ve been at it all night but had caught nary a minnow.  The entire night and nada. 

An inquisitive stranger on the shore asks them how’s it going.  When they report back their skimpy results, he suggests they lower the nets on the other side of the boat.  As they struggle to pull in the bounty, they recognize that it is Jesus who is giving such wise counsel. 

What we catch all depends on which side of the boat we’re fishing on – the side of fear and greed, or the side of hope and God’s abundance.  Which side are you fishing on?

If you’re fishing on the side with the power-hungry folks attempting to hoard up as much as possible, you just might find yourselves in the company of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk.  Or Elon Musk with his $44 billion offer for Twitter.  All you will catch there is sedition, greed, fake news and subpoenas.  Yes, Marjorie Taylor Greene — even within days of Biden’s upcoming inaugural, she was urging that martial law be declared (or was it Marshall’s Department Store Law?) and Trump retain the presidency.  Treason, insurrection and sedition for sure!  These folks are QAnon Looney Tunes Crazy.  Forget Musk.  This is our republic at stake!

You don’t want to be fishing in those waters.

Cast your nets on the other side of the boat with those fishing for the preservation of our democratic society – a compact founded on Common Sense[1] and the rule of law.  It was heartening this week to note that Rep. Liz Cheney received a “Profiles in Courage” award at the Lincoln Center ceremonies.  It was heartening to witness Mitt Romney, the lone Republican who remained to join the other senators applauding the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to a seat on the Supreme Court.  And don’t forget Adam Kinzinger, the other Republican on the January 6^th Committee who has stood firm against this attempted coup.  Yeah, I want to go fishing with them.  And the good folks at the Lincoln Project and the Bulwark.

While, on probably most policy issues, I would have little in common with this group, yet when it comes to protecting our democratic heritage, we’re exactly on the same page.  We’re fishing on the same side of the boat in godly waters. 

It will take a while to settle back down to John McCain’s call for “Regular Order,” but if we fish on the side of expanding the vote, if we fish on the side of honest inquiry into what went wrong on January 6^th and the events leading up to it, we’lll get to “Regular Order” again.  That’s where we allow the processes of deliberation and compromise to work their way to good policy decisions.

Look at that boat trip in the Gospel of John.  Peter is the instigator of this fishing excursion.  Impetuous, impatient Peter.  It is instructive to follow along with this hot-headed disciple through his career in the Jesus Movement.

Time and again, Peter gets it all wrong.  He wants the easy way, the fun way, the spectacular way.  He would like nothing better than for the whole band to march into Jerusalem and magically depose the religious and political oppressors.  To bring, right then and there, the Age of Aquarius – harmony and understanding.

But this is not Jesus’ way.  He warns them that this is not how it’s going to go down.  He will not avoid the valley of the shadow of death, but must pass through it.  What makes us think we’re any better?   It is in THAT journey, that we will encounter eternity.  In the struggles and the heartbreak we will be sustained by the wounded Christ and his company.

Mr. “Smooth-the-Way” calls us to an easy religion that would avoid all unpleasantness, all hard work, all of life’s difficulties – a religion that reinforces our prejudices and imperial nationalism.  But Jesus lets his followers know, that’s not how it’s going to go down. 

That’s why the communion prayer says, “Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.”  We are called to be counter-cultural.  How often is the church entertainment, not challenge?  How often could believers piously sit in a pew on Sunday morning and then join a mob of KKK nightriders, torches in hand, on Monday evening!?  Or cheat their customers?

Peter doesn’t get the new ethic of the Jesus movement, yet Jesus calls him Rock-man.[2]  Through this imperfect flesh, God will lay the foundation for a new heaven and a new earth.  Though Peter is to be the foundation of the church, he fails abysmally time and again to understand this movement.  When Jesus tells him that it will not be an ascension to fame and glory but that first “the Son of Man must suffer,” Peter rebukes him.

“He [Peter] will honor and follow his Lord; but that Lord must so behave as to deserve his honor!  Deep in Peter’s loyalty is a vein of self-will…”[3]  How often our loyalty arises from sentimentality and egotism.  Not thy way, but mine be done.

You notice, that the resurrected Jesus still bears his wounds – so will we, even as we’re raised up in our present moment as the Body of Christ, the Church.

Someone is reputed to have asked Karl Barth, why this Christian journey is so arduous if we are now a new creation in Christ.  Barth replied, “that’s because we are still chained to the old man, [the old women].  We’re still dragging them around behind us.”  This is going to take some effort on our part.

That’s why I want good strong hymns that are up to the challenge.  No “Happy Jesus Music” for me.  They are a prescription for seasickness.  Give me any day another chorus of “A Mighty Fortress” or “How Firm a Foundation” over some wretched little ditty whose sappy tune has quickly faded before we’re out the church door.  Just sayin.’

Our young people who have a good nose for religion that smells fishy, are leaving the church in droves.  Especially so-called evangelical congregations that are indistinguishable from the Party of The Former Guy.  Especially after January 6^th.

Unfortunately, this boat we’re all fishing from is looking more and more like the Leakin’ Lena of the early TV show, “Time for Beany,” later the “Beany and Cecil Show.”  How many of you remember Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent?  Yeah, you’re my age.  Did you see it on a small, round, black-and-white TV, beginning in 1949 when only three channels were available in the L.A. market?

Well, our Ship of State with all its dysfunction, pay-to-play politics and profiteering, more each day reminds me of the Leakin’ Lena.  With tax breaks for the rich and ultra-rich, tax havens for the asking, what can possibly go wrong?  Just alone the 734 U.S. billionaires are at last count worth $4.18 trillion.  Just think of all the books you could by with that.  Or maybe Twitter.  How about a space trip?  You could probably buy Greenland if it was for sale.

I’ll tell what can go wrong if this is the side of the boat you’re fishing from.  Right now, our nation is in the midst of a mental health crisis for our youth.  The New York Times on the front page had a section on this silent health crisis.

When I was a teenager, the worst trouble my peers would probably end up in was drinking under age, pregnancy, smoking and shoplifting.

One mother, Linda, tells of catching a glimpse of her daughter “M’s” cell phone.  She was horrified by what she saw: some of the pictures “showed her M’s ankles with blood on them from self-cutting.  Another showed a cartoon character Genocide Jack – a brunette girl with a long red tongue who, in a video series, kills high school classmates with scissors.”[4]

In 2019 some 13 percent of adolescents reported having a major depressive episode, up 60 percent since 2007.  Emergency room visits related to mental health issues for children and teens have risen for anxiety and mood disorders, suicide attempts and self-harm.  COVID-19 has only intensified the distress our kids are under.  And yet, clinics and services are horribly underfunded.  All to give the U.S. more billionaires.  On that side of the boat the catch smells to high heaven.  On that side of the boat is only death, the result of beggaring our social safety net.  Death for the most vulnerable.  The weight of this dereliction threatens to capsize the basic decency and norms and that hold us together.

On the other side is life.  On the other side is flourishing and hope.  That’s the side from which Jesus instructs us to cast our nets. Sometimes it’s a lonely struggle with few rewards as society figures them.

Consider the prison chaplain Chris Hoke.[5]  This is his story.

Chris, a wet-behind-the-ears white college graduate, volunteered as a chaplain in the Skagit County Jail some seven years ago.  There, among others, he met an inmate who went by the moniker Neaners.  He was born José Israel Garcia, who at age ten, like most boys in the village, joined a Mexican gang.  With a shaved head and tattooed arms and face, he’s not your picture of a Rotary Club member.  Or, for that matter, a member in most any church.

Yet, heart reached out to heart, eventually leading Neaners to proclaim this young White guy the “pastor” of his entire network of homies.

“In a way, we adopted each other.  He welcomed me, a white college graduate, into the hidden world of criminal street gangs – not into gang membership, but into the hidden pain and need of his community members.  He invited both my prayers and my friendship, and over the years I ended up welcoming him, a tattooed and violent felon, into the family of God.”

“That means that he now has a long e-mail list of Christian friends from various denominations and traditions who write to him, pray for him like a nephew, post his photo on their fridge and sometimes put money on his books so the gang doesn’t have to.”

Chris concludes: “When he gets out, he’ll have work waiting for him at Tierra Nueva, a ministry in Washington’s Skagit Valley.  There is a bed reserved for him, and there are church folks and former gang members who are ready to help Neaners become a father to his two young daughters.  And we are ready to act on his vision for a gang ministry.”

“He calls his vision Hope for Homies.  He wants to work with churches, ministries, families, farms and businesses to create an environment where tattooed gangbangers and the young women who live in the gangs’ shadows do not have to live in dangerous circumstances but can instead plant vegetables and learn job skills.”

Doesn’t this remind you of the risk that Ananias took when he invited the fire-breathing Saul with murder in his eye into the fellowship of the Jesus Movement?  Where would the church have been?  Without this catch, I pause to think what the church would have lost had Saul not become Paul.

Ananias and Pastor Chris Hoke were fishing on the Jesus side of the boat.  And magnificent, glorious was the catch.  Definitely not without risk.  But, as I say, we are the Church of second and third chances.  And how many more?  My proof reader suggests possibly 70 X 7.  Well, however many it takes.  Lower your nets on this side of the boat.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, at the end of his massive theological tome on the historical Jesus, characterizes our summons to the Jesus Movement in a section my friend Jim Strathdee has set to music: “He Comes to Us.”

“He comes to us as one unknown without a name, Without a name, without a name as of old by the lakeside he came to those men who knew him not.  He speaks to us, he speaks to us the same word: Follow me, Follow me! And sets us to the task which he has to fulfill for our time.  He commands and to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts and the sufferings.  They shall pass through in his fellowship, As an ineffable mystery they shall learn in their own experience who He is.”[6]

If I might have the audacity to take issue with the good doctor, as often as not he does come with a name.  It might be Chris Hoke, Ananias, and, now, Neaners. 

Amen.

---

[1] See Thomas Paine.  “Common Sense,” his most influential tract written in 1776.   Or James Madison, The Federalist No. 10 on the danger of factions.

[2] William Temple, Readings in John’s Gospel, First and Second Series, (Toronto: Macmillan, 1939),403.   This a dated commentary but the pastoral insights are cogent and relevant still today.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Matt Richtel, “’It’s Life or Death’: U.S. Teenagers Face a Mental Health Crisis, New York Times, April 24, 2022.

[5] Chris Hoke, “Jesus’ Barrio: Inmates as Apostles,” Sojourners, November 13, 2012.

[6] Jim Strathdee, Albert Schweitzer, “He Comes to Us,” There’s Still Time, Desert Flower Music, 1977.

April 17, 2022, Easter Day

“Holy Mackerel”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Acts 9:1-6, 7-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14;
John 21:1-19

I used to have a little Bishop’s Miter cactus in a small blue pot.  Actually, it was our son Christopher’s plant.  It’s now in a new home in our relandscaped side yard of drought-tolerant plants.  And every time this year, as Easter approaches, what looks to be a boring, dead thing, bursts forth with two or three yellow flowers.  Luke says, “On the first day of the week.”

It looks again this year to be right on schedule, reminding me that no matter how drear the headlines or how bad the news Ali Velshi is serving up, RESURRECTION HOPE is at hand.  And I’m reminded of the words of determination of Ketanji Brown Jackson toher Sisterhood when discouraged, “WE CAN DO THIS!”That’s RESURRECTION HOPE!

It has been said by Frederick Dennison Maurice, an Anglican divine, that It is of little consequence to believe that one dead body was reanimated on Easter morn if the believer cannot believe that RESURRECTION is a real and present event for the faithful.  Otherwise, the Easter miracle is just an obscure, one-off event of little practical consequence for how we go through our days.  RESSURECTION is empowerment in the Spirit available to all.  It is behind the belief that, as Ketanji would urge her sisters, “WE CAN DO THIS.”  For Easter People, it is always the “first day of the week.”

No matter the darkness of Good Friday, no matterhow badly this republic may falter,no matter the mediocrity of some of our political class, we have the possibility of correction.  Our nation is daily being resurrected as a compact of the rule of law.  Yes, this week a problematic personality popped up again in the news:  Marjorie Taylor Green.  She’s somewhat dismayed that the framers of the 14^th Amendment frowned on seditionists and insurrectionists being eligible for election to public office.  Imagine that!

In my eighth-grade history class unit on the Constitution, had she been paying attention, she might have come across the words:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who…shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof…”[1]

A group, of her constituents, “Our Revolution,” has filed suit in her 14^th Georgia congressional district, litigating this issue in an attempt to have this provision of the Constitution fully enforced.  And of course, MTG is apoplectic.  How dare the Constitution be ruled determinative – that the law be followed!  Isn’t that just for the “little people?”

This turn of events gives me RESURRECTION HOPE that we yet remain a nation of laws, that someone would bring this case forward.  It’s as hopeful as my little bishop’s miter cactus blooming its heart out every sunny day.

It is the Resurrection People who do not give up, do not give into cynicism.  Who engage the battle for a civil society each and every day.  They run for office, donate to support voter rights, write postcards urging infrequent voters to, for God’s sake, VOTE.  No matter how long they make you stand in line.

Even after a former president who, himself, ought to be barred from reelection by the same legal stricture–even after her antics at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Ketanji Brown Jackson to be confirmed to the Supreme Court — should Marjory Taylor Green and Trump both be barred, I shall certainly shed no tear.  Disgraceful, rude and obnoxious come to mind in considering her contribution to the hearing.  And did I mention ignorant?Why not? She’s an entitled White woman. 

Judge Totenberg may possibly have her ruling this coming week as to whether the case can go forward.  That would certainly be an affirmation that nobody but nobody is above the law.”  RESURRECTION HOPE, indeed!  Maybe this republic will yet stand.

Speaking of Hope, this week I just received an e-mail from one of our team that a very prominent CA state senator, James Ramos, who’s on the Appropriations Committee, has put a $26 million earmark in the California state budget for addiction treatment in San Bernardino County.  Targeted for House of Hope.  We have been working closely with his office and are assured that he is highly supportive of the House of Hope – San Bernardino program.  As Ketanji urged her sisters, “WE CAN DOTHIS!”

I’ve just finished reading a book on teen addiction written by a mother and her fifteen-year-old daughter.  It is a heart-wrenching portrayal of what addiction does to a family — a real eye opener on the difficulty of achieving sobriety, especially for a young person. 

Off the Rails: One Family’s Journey Through Teen Addiction[2]begins with the parent’s last-gasp attempt for help and sanity.  Their daughter Hannah’s destructive behavior has literally terrorized her family – dragged them through hell and gone.

As one reviewer writes: “… a desperate story of teen addiction, punctuated by misdiagnosis, overdose, and rehabilitation…A brave if harrowing, work…”[3]

Yes, this book is about addiction, but more than that – from her mother: “…it is first and foremost about my relationship with my daughter and how we saved each other, with help from our family, and lots of people who supported us along the way.”[4]

Some of the harrowing problems from Mom’s perspective:

“Hannah threatened to rip her sister’s homework in half.  When I told her to stop, she called me an ugly hag and told me to shut the hole in my face.  Then she smiled.”

“When Camilla refused to give Hannah money, Hannah cut the heads off Camilla’s favorite stuffed animals.  This scares me.  Is she a psycho?”[5]

Hanna would phone her mom at all hours of the night very drunk and very high, calling for help from some party or some street corner, cold, hungry and shivering.  Literally, this girl was “off the rails” and shredding her family in the process.  Any family dealing with drug abuse or mental illness has lived this nightmare story.

In the end, Hannah is placed in a wilderness camp in Utah, Second Nature, which is for teenaged girls with substance abuse problems.  For three months, in the most primitive circumstances, these girls and their counselors would face the behavior which not only landed them in this camp, but landed them in jail, hospitals and on the streets.  Stealing, begging, trading sex for drugs, lying, overdosing, suicide attempts — all a very dead-end journey.

As Hannah concludes at the end of her story:  this camp is a sort of last resort for only the most screwed-upness (she uses another word here) situation in which she and these girls found themselves.

Hannah is resistant from the get-go.  Writing to her mom: “I’m in a wasteland with a bunch of messed-up street urchins who are so bored that they want to fix me.  I look at this bunch of hobos and whores and know they have nothing to teach me.  They are dirty, they stink and they are meaner than hell.  At least to me.”[6]

The trials and melt-downs are many.  The other girls, she derisively calls the bitches, will not let her slide during community meeting time – read group therapy here.  They call her on her evasions, lies, seeking sympathy, and self-aggrandizing B.S.

Every morning and evening each girl has to get her own fire going using a bow drill, a stick and stone.  No matches.  If she can’t get her fire going, it’s a cold meal.  The best she can do is a whisp of smoke.  No flame.

Most of the girls come in with some very serious behavioral and psychological problems.  One new girl rejects the first and most basic requirement to join the circle.  She is consigned to the outer edge of meetings because she refuses to write her life story.  That’s where everyone starts until that assignment is completed.

She is also consigned to the edge of the circle because she won’t dig a latrine.  She poops in her pants.  As the smell becomes overwhelming after days, she is referred to as Poopster or Poopzilla by the others.  Talk about passive-aggressive behavior!  Finally, she just decides to hold it in.  After several days, this behavior lands her in the hospital. 

When she returns to camp, she is still on the edge of the circle, but has begun to write her life story.  It looks like she may get with the program after all.

A turning point comes as the end of the three months as Hannah’s stay at Second Nature draws to a close.  Hannah is doing much better, but has a long way to go.  Returning to Santa Cruz and its drug scene with the same old druggie friends is not an option.  Recipe for failure.

When Hannah is told by her parents that she will be going to Vista, a rehabilitation high school, she goes into meltdown.  Yelling, cursing, crying, for which she’s busted back down to newbie status.  But after several months working back her privileges, she graduates wilderness camp and is ready for Vista.

The story ends with Hannah learning the necessary life skills at Vista and developing pride in helping the other girls with their recovery – the bitches, she now calls them with true affection.  She leaves that high school with a sense of accomplishment.  She is accepted into a first-class art college, and in the epilogue reports she is able to support herself with her art, now having a B.A. degree.

This is RESURRECTION.  It has taken an entire village, literally, to give Hannah the tools, the love, the belief in herself to pull through.  This book is a collective, “WE CAN DO THIS.”  One day at a time.  It’s the really real Easter story.  Not just of one, but it’s truly — WE ALL RISE TOGETHER.

A heck of a lot better than dyed eggs, bunnies and all the other junk our society hawks this time of year.  It’s the glorious Gospel come alive in living 3-D color.

That is what we aim to be about at House of Hope – RESURRECTION.

I close with a poem a Black woman writes of her journey against all odds.  Graduate of Harvard in English literature, and now Poet, Writer, Professor at Vanderbilt University.

won’t you celebrate with me 

lUCILLE cLIFTON

won’t you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.[7]

Yes, indeed!  Won’t you celebrate with me this first day of the week?  This Easter morn?  Happy Easter.  Amen

---

[1] The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Section 3,

[2] Susan Burrowes, Off the Rails: One Family’s Journey Through Teen Addiction (Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2018).

[3] Op, cit., back cover.

[4] Op, cit., 7.

[5] Op.cit., 98.

[6] Op. cit., 73.

[7] Lucille Clifton, “Won’t You Celebrate With Me” from Book of Light (Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1993).

April 17, 2022, Easter Day

“We Can Do This”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43;
Luke 24:1-12

“Let the same Mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself…”[1]

In one sense, Palm Sunday is a procession into humility.  It is a drama of emptying out — setting aside one’s own prerogatives, one’s rights.  That is the mind of Christ.  To go to Jerusalem is to willingly enter the pain and suffering of the world. To head for Jerusalem in our day means, “DO NOT LOOK AWAY.”  Allow this distressed world to penetrate your soul.  Those broken bodies on Ukrainian roads and highways, on that train station platform in Kramatorsk — they are Christ crucified.

This was Jesus’ choice some two thousand years ago in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire. “He set his face towards Jerusalem,” is how the story goes.  This week the Church sets its face towards Jerusalem.  Do not look away.

As the Jewish Passover approached there were two parades in the city that morning.  According to Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan in their book, The Last Week,[2]the choice was between a humble rabbi with a message of peace, rebirth and joy — and the full might of Caesar.  That morning before the Passover festivities, imperial Roman legions marched into the Antonia Fortress to ensure law and order during the Jewish high festival.  Pax Romana.

As we approach the events of Holy Week, Caesar’s military might looks more like tanks, missiles and bombs.  It is born of the same cruelty – indiscriminate massacres, wanton destruction, rape, looting and torture.  Nothing much has changed over two thousand years.  As it turns out, most empires pretty much end up being evil empires.  How can they not when the goal is always conquest and subjugation?

This new Caesar, Vladmir Putin, looks more like Vlad the Impaler, who had tens of thousands of his captives impaled on stakes when he returned home.  The atrocities now being committed in Ukraine by Putin’s Russian hordes are of the same medieval cruelty.  This is a new Caesar’s rampage across Ukraine.

Putin is ignorant or dismissive of Thomas Pane’s warning on the horrors war brings to a nation.

“He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death” — a lesson Caesar never learns, no matter the epoch.  A lesson of which America is too often dismissive.

On the other side of the city is another procession.  This was a procession of a little-known rabbi and his followers from the countryside.  His reputation as a noted teacher and healer had proceeded him.  Some thought that he might be the anointed one come to rid their land of the despised Romans.  Some thought he might be the one to herald in a new age spoken of by the prophet Isaiah – a new age when the crippled would be healed, the blind would see and there would be an abundance of food and drink for all. 

People joined the band waving palm branches and little children skipped and ran along side.  But for Jesus this was no picnic.  This was deadly serious business.  This was a parade of resistance.  A parade of the disinherited and beat down.  The locked out and shut out.

Opposite Caesar’s army, in places like Bucha, Mariupol and Kramatorsk there are now other processions.  Not at all joyful as on that first Palm Sunday.  It is the procession of Ukrainians emerging from basements where they have been sheltering for weeks with little food or light.  Squinting as they emerge into the bright sunlight for the first time in days. 

They gather up the dead lying about the roads, in gardens and on that bloody railway station platform.  They carry the wounded to hospitals, praying those will not be bombed as well.  They light fires to melt snow for drinking water.  They seek for others, hoping to find neighbors, family and friends still alive.  They begin combing through the dust covered rubble searching for family mementos and documents, for anything of use in what had been their homes.

This is a saga of imperial might arrayed against vulnerability. Russian armor and planes up against ordinary people who simply wanted to live their lives.  People who sought only a bit of joy in passing birthdays, weddings, baptisms and bar mitzvas.  Just ordinary folks wanting to go about their lives and pass on a little bit to their children.  People who love their homeland.

As they welcome the liberating Ukrainian army, receive the first food in days, that is their meager joy.  These stunned survivors will find some little satisfaction in telling their stories of endurance to the media now entering their towns with the soldiers.  Hoping that those responsible will be held to account for their crimes.  To bear witness is some satisfaction.

In the midst of this carnage, hope is pretty scarce, yet it’s evident in the resolve of these survivors emerging from their basements.  These are the living, determined to carry on.  They will hold on to one another.  They will share what little is to be had.  They will weep together and pray together.  This is the other procession we witness this Palm Sunday.  And they will, in the words of Jessie Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, KEEP HOPE ALIVE.

In the midst of such devastation are the followers of Jesus to be found.  They are the ones on the scene offering aid and comfort.  Binding up the wounded.  Grieving the dead.  These are they, who in the face of death, proclaim hope and that life endures.  Proclaim resistance even to the gates of Hell. They are the ones who send in what little they can afford for the relief efforts.

In America we have witnessed those of that parade for human dignity and opportunity in the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.

That celebration is most joyful.  To see the strength of her sisterhood, those other black women who hung together despite their own doubts at times as to whether they were even worthy of Harvard Law School — Lisa Fairfax, Antoinette Coakley and Nina Simmons.  Despite racial slurs and the dismissive attitude of some professors – they prevailed through the strength of this glorious Sisterhood.

That scene of the three of Ketanji’s Sisters-In-Law, to borrow a moniker from Barbara McQuade and the other women of her podcast by the same name – to see them on the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell – that interview was a cause for tears of pure Gospel Joy as they shared their stories of Ketanji and how they all pulled through together.  And, at the top of their class.  These women are leaders of a parade which leads all the way to the Promised Land of full Personhood and Unlimited Opportunity.  They are the very Glory of God – fully alive, full of accomplishment.  You want a Glory Attack? – you catch that interview![3]

I close with another occasion for pure joy which grew out of this event.  As the votes in the Senate were being tallied, Vice President Kamala Harris, presiding at the vote, called the few Black senators to her desk.  She gave each a sheet of her own personal stationery with the seal of the Vice President on it.  She then assigned each to write to a girl what this moment meant to them – the confirmation of the first Black woman to the Supreme Court in its 233-year history.

One of those summoned to the Vice President’s desk was the new senator from Georgia, Senator Ralph Warnock.  I close with the letter he wrote.  Written in the Mind of Christ.  Written to his young daughter.  This is what the senator wrote:

7 April 2022

Dear Chloe,

Today we confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court.  In our nation’s history, she is the first Supreme Court Justice who looks like you – with hair like yours.  While we were voting on the floor of the Senate, a friend of mine – the Vice President of the United States handed me this piece of paper and suggested I write a note to someone who comes to mind.  By the way, she is the first Vice President who also looks like you!  So, I write this note to say you can be anything, achieve anything you set your head and heart to do.

Love you!  Dad

If our nation can bring itself to continue forward in that humble and hopeful spirit, we will come closer to our nation’s ideals, and to the Mind of Christ…  If we can take on the spirit of sisterhood Ketanji’s classmates have shared over the passing years…  If we can take on the perseverance and solidarity of these Ukrainian survivors — We will KEEP HOPE ALIVE.  And have some little part of the Mind of Christ.

That’s the Palm Sunday parade I want to join.  With this mind and spirit, we really are heading to that heavenly kindom[4] where all are valued as of infinite worth.  Amen.

---

[1] Philippians 2:5-8a.

[2]  Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem (San Francisco, Harper Collins, 2006).

[3] https://twitter.com/Lawrence/status/1506282845718949888, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-ketanji-brown-jackson-friends-harvard/.

[4] As we’re all kin in Christ, this term is much more appropriate than “Kingdom” – this from the Rev. Mike Kinman of All Saints Church, Pasadena, CA.

April 10, 2022, Palm Sunday

“Keep Hope Alive”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11;
Luke 22:14-23:56

New beginnings are afoot for the Forneys.  Our son has become engaged to a most delightful woman with a wedding planned a year or so down the road.  When asked if she or her family came from any faith tradition, he answered that they were African Methodist Episcopal.  That’s when we learned that Alexis was African-American.  Definitely a new beginning. 

She’s shared a couple of Christmas holidays with us, and our original assessment is correct.  She’s most delightful.  This June we go back East to meet her family.  Ours compared to hers is rather tiny.  Even though she was an only child, she has scads of aunts and uncles.  We are definitely looking forward to an expanded and enriched family in the years ahead.

That is the beauty and wonder of new beginnings.  That, and the fact they love each other dearly.  New beginnings are a delight.

Over the years, they will learn what every couple must learn if they are to stay together.  There will be differences of opinion, differences of values, differences of temperament and style.  The bit about “the two shall become one flesh” can work splendidly on the physical level.  At the beginning.  But differences will emerge that need to be worked out.  This is something so close to the heart that it can’t be faked.  It takes work, not excuses.  My parents always urged us to stand tall to the challenge.  No slouching!  My father hated slouching. 

I’ve worked with more than one alcoholic whose refrain was, well, if you were stuck with my wife, it’d drive you to drink also.  If that’s the case, all you end up with is a sad, sad “pity party.”  A party friends and family soon want nothing to do with.  You’ll be left all by your lonesome to count the cracks on the wall and drink yourself into oblivion.  So sad, so sad. Pity Parties are a form of moral and spiritual slouching.  Giving up.

I tell divorced persons, that unless they want to go through the same mess with their next partner, they ought to think about getting some professional counseling.  Otherwise, the same passivity, the same rage, the same excuses will just as surely devour the next go around.

Or you can get a life.  Make a life.  No slouching.

The story is told in the Book of Joshua of when the band of Israelite wanderers camped at Gilgal, they celebrated the Passover.  Instead of manna, for the first time, they “ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain.  The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.”

As bountiful as the land is, as freely as it’s blessings flow, at some point the manna ceases and the garden needs tending.  It’s sweat-of-the-brow time If one is going to reap a harvest.  One needs to sow, do the weeding and cultivating.

Jesus tells a story of a young fellow who knows it all.  No one can tell him what to do.  Chores are for the stupid.  “Move out now while you know it all and are the smartest gal or guy in the room.”  No more of their stupid rules.

So, he demands his share of the family fortune and sets off for a promised land of good luck, women and high times.  It all works for a while.  It always does.  But at some point, reality sets in.  Especially when the money’s gone and friends begin to evaporate.

Yes, reality sets in.  Isn’t reality inconvenient?  Not much leeway.  Not much slack.  The hunger pangs become a big ache in the stomach.  Cold, hard sidewalks don’t promote much sleep.  The loneliness becomes unbearable.

It’s reality check time.  How’s it all working out for you?  Eventually the manna runs out.  Good Times Charley is in his cups.

The excuses are legion.  Everybody’s against me.  The system’s rigged.  Everyone’s corrupt, so why not?  Slouching to the max.

As my friend Jim Rhoads says, “How do you know when an addict is lying?  His lips are moving.”  Fact is, there’s either recovery or there’s not.  Excuses are a pretty poor diet.  It is, as Yoda says in Star Wars, “Do or Not Do.  There is no Try.”

Yes, DO or NOT DO.  Excuses, resentment and blame are the putrefying dish served up to too many poor Whites in the South.  “You may not be much.  Your life may be going nowhere, but at least you’re better than… [fill in the blank] …”  Jim Crow might momentarily satisfy, but in the end, it’s a pretty thin diet.  Even for White Supremacists and their neo-Nazi buddies.  Eventually, the politics of resentment do not satisfy.  No slouching!

I love the story of the newly arrived preacher at a small country church.  One day as he is walking down a dirt road, he spies a farmer out in his field — A most productive field.  He hadn’t seen this fellow in church yet, so he ambles over to the wooden rail fence and calls out to the man.

“Hi, there.  That’s a mighty fine farm you have there”.  Indeed, the corn was as “high as an elephant’s eye” and ears were plump and almost ripe for the picking.

The preacher continued, “if I had a farm like that, I’d think I’d want to come to church and let God know how thankful I was.”

“Well,” drawled the farmer.   “I want to tell you; the farm certainly didn’t look like this when God had it all to himself.’

St. Paul calls us to be “cooperators with God.”

The incredible, awful and renewing Grace of God is the moment of awakening.  It’s Reality-Check Time.  If we’re going to eat, the garden needs a whole lot of work.  That’s what vocation is all about.  The beauty of it is that we’re needed.  And in useful work, we grow into the stature of Christ.

Over two hundred years ago our nation set out upon a new venture.  The story is told — it may an apocryphal myth — that as Benjamin Franklin was leaving Independence Hall at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention he was asked by a passing woman, “What sort of government have you gotten us, Mr. Franklin?”  “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.” 

Within only a short time, trouble as well as opportunity mounted.  The disputations that would eventually tear the nation asunder, culminating in the Civil War, had their inception in what all thought to be the best possible compromise to be had.  The best form of government humans could devise.  We are still bedeviled by the flaws in that original design.  That, and tragic choices early on.  Problematic from the inception — read The 1619 Project.[1]

The remnants of a slave constitution linger, almost guaranteeing a fatal imbalance of power which allows for a minority government. With a Senate that gives disproportionate power to a minority, through gerrymandering, race hatred and voter suppression, this anti-democratic arrangement could likely be our undoing.  Isn’t that what the January 6^th Commission is all about?  The makings of insurrection.  Even during the Civil War, the Stars and Bars did never besmirch and disgrace the halls of the Capitol.

Malevolent forces have seized upon the internal contradictions.

It is time to tend our national garden.  To renew our democracy.  As in the story of the “Prodigal Son,” it’s time to wake up.  To open our eyes.  That is the moment of Awful, Sustaining Grace.  That’s the moment a drunk comes to the realization that he or she is killing themselves — when they’ve hit bottom.

That’s the moment the drug addict realizes that he just might not have survived this last overdose.  Fentanyl could really kill.  It might be the one and same moment that she realizes that there is indeed something to live for.  That someone dear loves them.  With one fellow, it was the enlightenment that he actually could get a job.  There was a purpose to his life.  All that is the Grace of Hard Knocks and Splendid Opportunity.  It’s what that Hebrew band realized at Gilgal.  It’s what a son in a far country realized. 

The voice of the Holy Spirit is urging diligence, productivity.  No slouching.  That’s what reality-check time is all about.  A moment of awful, terrifying Grace.  The moment for repentance and turning around.

In Obery Hendricks we have a prophet who does not sugar-coat the choice now before this nation.  In his book, Christians Against Christianity, he lays out how a segment of the church has aided and abetted America’s descent into our recent moral and political disaster.[2]  Theological slouching to be sure.

Obrey Hendricks, author of numerous books, professor at Columbia University, biblical scholar, and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, comes thundering out of our national wilderness like a modern-day Jeremiah.  His voice filled with the judgement and promise of God.

His message to America is God’s wake-up call.  This is his thesis:

“A travesty, that’s how I would characterize Christianity in America today.  A travesty, a brutal sham, tragic charade, a cynical deceit.  Why?  Because the loudest voices in American Christianity today – those of right-wing evangelicals—shamelessly spew a putrid stew of religious ignorance and political venom that is poisoning our society, making a mockery of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Their rhetoric in the name of their Lord and Savior is mean-spirited, divisive, appallingly devoid of the love for their neighbors and outright demonizes those who do not accept their narrow views—even fellow Christians.  Perhaps most shocking is their enthusiastic, almost cultish support for the cruel, hateful policies and pronouncements of President Donald Trump, whose words and deeds more often than not have been the very antithesis of the Christian faith.”

Too many Christians have sold their faith for this rancid mass of potage.  The stench rises to the heavens.

This autocratic mindset and upchuck theology, hostile to the spirit of democracy, has through the perpetrating of a BIG LIE, sucked in all sorts of complicit malefactors. 

Reading this week of Ginny Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – the expose` of her emails to Trump’s close advisor Mark Meadows, urging the overthrow of the 2020 election, actually, the overthrow of our government — this is nothing short of sedition.  And Thomas was the only justice voting AGAINST allowing the January 6^th Committee’s access to those e-mails.  As Dan Rather asks: “What did he know, and when did he know it?”

Our moment of Grace is this Reality-Check Time for America.  Is this the path we want to go down as a nation?  In nation after nation, this is the path to unfreedom.  The path to tyranny.

That we might rouse from our slumber, that we might tend to the flickering dim light of our democracy – that is Hendricks’ plea.  Wake up, America.   Wake up, Christians.

Obery’s loving Christian parents worked diligently to instill pride and ensure that their children “felt their God-given worth in a society that did not fully value children like us.”[3] 

“No slouching.”  That was his mother’s prescription for self-respect.  “No slouching, they admonished; stand tall and proud and ‘act like somebody.’  Mumbling was unacceptable; we had to speak up and look the other in the eye.”[4]

No slouching.  It’s now up to us.  Will we be what Democracy looks like?

This is as good as any wake-up call we can expect — to the Church, to our nation.  It’s all on the line: “No slouching.”  God has need of each and every one of us.  So does our nation.  No slouching!  This deafening claxon we now hear is the Awful, Liberating Grace of God.  Thanks be to God.   Amen.

---

[1] Nikole Hannah-Jones, et al. ed., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021).

[2] Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals are Destroying our Nation and our Faith (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2021).

[3] Hendricks, op.cit., p. xiv.

[4] Ibid.

March 27, 2022, Lent 4

“No Slouching”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney, St. Francis Episcopal Mission

Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21;
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

I began as a geology major in college, but in my senior year transferred to the psychology department.  It seemed, more and more that studying rocks and the eons long ago of tree ferns and dinosaurs had little to do with the real-life problems all around me.

It may have been that the impetus was a search for why my own family was so off the rails.  We couldn’t seem to get through a dinner without my parents ending up in a big family fight.  I was too young to have any idea as to what the underlying issues were.  More than once, Dad would just up and thew down his plate, breaking it into smithereens, food flying.  Our dog, Skippy running for cover.  Then in silence, he’d stomp out of the kitchen.  Those of us remaining would quietly finish our dinner and leave the table.  As quickly as possible.

I began to get an inkling that there could be some deep, underlying issues when in high school I took Mr. Stowe’s psychology class in my senior year.  My girlfriend also was taking it and we’d discuss it over lunch.

Mr. Stowe was enamored by the weird behavior one encountered.  A good portion of the semester was devoted to what is called “abnormal psychology.”  From neuroses to psychoses, we went through quite a menu of aberrant behaviors – paranoia, schizophrenia, narcissism, sociopathy, depression, kleptomania, addiction – the entire gamut of the bizarre behaviors.

As Mr. Stowe would introduce the psychosis or neurosis of the week, my girlfriend would become very overwrought, wondering if she might have that problem.  It usually took me several days to talk her down.  “No, you aren’t crazy, we all do that in some small ways.”  So, for another week I had her convinced that she probably wasn’t a homicidal maniac or something. 

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden was a very in-depth exploration into the limitations of what happens on the psychologist’s couch.  It became a best seller as the psychotherapy movement became popular in America in the fifties and sixties. It is the semi-autobiographical novel of a young women who struggles for years through therapy with mental illness.  Her life never becomes perfect.  When she complains that it isn’t, her therapist responds that he “never promised her a rose garden.”

That’s what I discovered in my study of psychology.  I gained some insight into our family dynamics.  No magical reprieve, no rose garden.  Our problems were still there.

As my pastoral psychology professor would later tell us, no matter what behavior people may be exhibiting, they’re doing about as good as they can in the moment.  So do we all.

Our Covenant with God is, in like manner, not a Hollywood promise of roses and fluffy clouds either.  No magical prancing unicorns or instant jackpots.  As my son’s tee shirt says, “The lottery is a tax on people who are stupid at math.”  Ed McMahon will most likely not be at your mailbox in the morning with your million-dollar check – or on any morning.  That’s not the deal.  There’s a reason Harrah’s in Las Vegas is bigger than your house.  It’s calculated greed.  They make their luck.  No magic here at all. 

“Abram.  I am your shield; your reward shall be very great…Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them…I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.”

“As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.  When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces [of Abram’s sacrificial offering].  On that day the Lord made a Covenant with Abram.”

What happened in the darkness is an unfathomable mystery.  And who can tell about the vision of the smoking pot and flaming sword.  All the hoo-ha with the smoking pot and sword is the biblical writer’s way of assuring us that this is the Real Deal Promise.  “Signed, sealed and delivered.”

However this happened, in a dream, a vision, or otherwise, Abram knew that this sealed the deal.  He, Sarah, and all their descendants were forever bound to this One, to Being Itself, that had freed them from slavery in Egypt. 

Read what follows for Moses and his band of trekkers.  This is no picnic.  Starvation, thirst, poisonous vipers, mass hysteria and superstition over a Golden Calf, total uncertainty, and enemies.   It’s all there in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.  And it doesn’t stop there.  Read through Joshua, Judges and First and Second Samuel.  Kings and Chronicles — down through Jesus and then the early church.  This Covenant business is no picnic.  BUT you won’t be alone.  There is guidance and comfort.

Part of this Covenant is the continued revelation of God through those who have become part of the journey.  God’s goodness to us has been shared by parents, teachers and total strangers.

There’s a big dose of realism connected with this Covenant business. 

For Abraham, God’s promise of presence is no magic bullet.  Abraham will succumb to the worst sort of behavior.  (And don’t we all from time to time?!) 

Abraham, to save his own skin, tells a foreign king with a big army that, of course, he can have Sarah.  She’s fobbed off as his sister.  “I hardly know her.  Isn’t she just the  ‘coffee girl’ or something?”  And in Genesis he does this, not once, but twice!  What a stand-up guy!  It’s all there in Genesis, chapter 20, verse 1.   Read it yourself.  And he does a repeat in verse 12 — she’s really my sister.  Seriously!  What a schmuck!

This is the sort of imperfection, duplicity and fallibility that God has to rely on.  Both in Abraham and in the likes of us.  That’s all God has to work with.  Imperfection to the max.  No rose garden here.

Our end of the Covenant, our part of the Deal, is not magical theology.  When Satan leads Jesus up to the highest pinnacle of the temple and tells him that if he jumps, God’s angels will protect him, lest he dash his little pinkie against a stone, Jesus rightly responds, “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test.”  If Jesus is unable to rely on magic, what makes us think we’re any better?  No magical escape in the last reel. 

Just as therapy is not magic, neither is faith.  The gift we do receive is insight, courage and vision.  We get clarity on what is the right thing to do and what enhances life.  And in faith, we step forth.

Definitely, no magic in my college parking lot!  I remember carpooling with a Catholic friend, rushing into Cal. State L.A., running late on most mornings.  Freeway traffic, atrocious, as usual.  By the time we arrived, five or ten minutes late, the parking lots were already full.  Ron would begin his prayer, “Hail Mary full of grace help us find a parking place.”  It hardly ever happened.  My mantra was, “Never discount dumb luck.”  Sometimes we did find a place.  Actually, I don’t ever remember it working.  And when we did find a place, it was way the heck out in the back forty. 

Like Woody Allen, I can’t bring myself to believe in any deity with nothing better to do than go about finding parking places at a mall in Houston.  Or Cal State LA for that matter.  Not when children’s’ hospitals and maternity wards in Ukraine are being reduced to rubble by a psychopathic killer.

As sisters and brothers of God’s Covenant, this is what we can expect.  If we work at it.

We will find companions along the way to share the burden and the sorrows.  Those who will rejoice with us when we rejoice.  This is playing out all over Ukraine these days.  The bloody and broken injured are tenderly aided by total strangers.  This is the impulse fortified by what they learned in catechism classes in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.  It’s the impulse taught by the imam in the mosque or the rabbi of the synagogue they attended.  It’s in the air of the values of Western Civilization. 

Yes, sometimes like Abraham, we will fall short.  We, in a moment of moral amnesia, will lose sight of our duty even to those most beloved.  But that is the standard to which Divine Wisdom calls us to return.  Implanted in hearts and minds of all children of the Covenant. 

The Covenant is about Trust.  It’s like that trust of a young mother in Ukraine who put her young son on a train ride of over one thousand kilometers, all across Ukraine to Slovakia.  Amidst the shelling and bombs in eastern Ukraine, this eleven-year-old boy, Hassan, traveled from Zaporizhzhia and crossed the border into Slovakia.[1]

He left with a mother’s kiss and hug and the trust that she and her husband had given him the character to make this arduous journey on his own.     With a backpack, his passport into which she had slipped a note and with a phone number written in ink on his hand he set out.

The boy’s mother, Julia, sent Hassan to the safety of Slovakia to find relatives there while she remained behind to care for an elderly mother unable to travel and his father remained to fight off the Russian army.  A tough choice made in the faith that they were doing the right thing to get their boy to safety.

That’s how it is with our Covenant with God in Christ.  We are given basic instructions, some innate ability, some friends and strangers who assist along the way – and we set out on our journey of life.  Also, in faith.

I’m sure amidst the doubt, the loneliness and longing for what he left back home – a love of his parents – this trip was no rose garden.  His mother never promised such.  Neither does God.

How many tears did this young boy shed as the kilometers passed by through the deep night?  How severe the longing for the comfort of his mother’s caress?  His father’s reassurance?  All that sustained was a bond of absolute trust between this boy and his parents.  In faith, he ventured into the unknown, into a foreign country.

“After completing a solo journey, the 11-year-old was hailed ‘a hero of the night’ by Slovakian authorities. In a Facebook statement, the Slovak Ministry of Interior said that the boy won over the officials ‘with his smile, fearlessness and determination, worthy of a true hero’”.[2] 

“Volunteers took care of him, took him to a warm place and gave him food and drink,”

“With the piece of folded paper in his passport apart from the phone number on his hand, officials at the border were able to contact his relatives in the capital, Bratislava, and hand him over.”[3]

The mother profusely thanked the Slovak government and police for taking care of her son.  “People with big hearts live in your small country.  Please save our Ukrainian children.” 

This might well be the plea of that nation to the peoples of the world in this moment.

Like Hassan, we in faith, and in God’s trust in us, embark on the journey of life.  We trust, also, at the end, we too will be met with a Big Heart.  No rose garden promised, only a Big Heart.   That’s the Covenant and the Promise.  In Christ’s love it shall be sufficient.  Amen.

---

[1] Bhavya Sukheja, “’A true hero’: 11-year-old Ukrainian Boy Travels 1,000 Km Alone To Slovakia To Escape Russian Attack,” Republic on Telegram, March 7, 2022.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

March 13, 2022, Lent 2

“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1;
Luke 13:31-1-9

We see the grim faces of mothers pushing strollers waiting in lines that stretch for hours.  Hundreds, mostly women and children, seeking refuge from indiscriminate bombing.  Many have had little sleep and little to eat.  Sanitation facilities are in horrid shape or non-existent.

Husbands, older sons and other male relatives are left behind to defend their beloved homeland of Ukraine.  To stand with their freely-elected president Zelensky – who is, more and more, looking like Churchill.  We will all remember his refusal of the U.S. government’s offer to hustle him out of his battered city of Kiev.  “I don’t need a ride.  I need more ammunition.”

Remember, this is the man Trump attempted to corrupt by withholding aid as their country was being surrounded by hostile forces.  He proved incorruptible, to Trumps shame.  By the way – if you want the backstory on Ukraine, read Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum. 

This should be your required Lenten reading this year.[1]  Lent is our pilgrimage down the Mountain of Transfiguration into the misery and problems of the world.  As the old spiritual says, “If you can’t bear the cross, then you can’t wear the crown.”  By faith, sometimes little faith, we embark upon this pilgrimage.

No this is not a “feel good message.”  It is a Gospel message.  It is a message chock-a-block full of solidarity with all who are refugees, either in strange lands, or in their own strange country.  But I digress.

These are the harried refugees pouring out of Ukraine.  Fortunately, for them, arms are open and spread wide.  Though, it seems, not if your skin is of a darker, African or Indian, hue.  In Poland, Moldovia, Hungary and in most of the rest of Europe. 

These people are leaving with little or nothing.  They grabbed what papers and mementos they could of their past life.  Now they’re on the run with little else and little knowledge of what awaits.

“My father was a wandering Aramean; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.  When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.  The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders he brought us to this place…”

As I survey our political landscape, I am disjointed, feeling out of place.  I am an alien in the land of my birth.  Our family was solidly Republican, firmly ensconced in the middle class – or maybe a little bit better.  And while I frequently disagreed with my folks on such things as welfare, Watergate, and which party would be best for the economy – we held to the same values and verities.

Communism was bad.  Fascism was bad, especially the Nazi variety.   Knowledge and achieving high grades were good.  Democrats were bad.  A whole bunch of people we shouldn’t associate with were bad or at least questionable.  BUT if someone sued my dad, THEN he wanted a Jewish lawyer!  Our country, while not perfect, was perfectible – and close to perfect under Eisenhower.  We supported United Way and our church.
We still didn’t mention FDR.  He was THAT MAN who “fired your grandfather” – Grandpa had been the postmaster of Lodi, California, appointed by Herbert Hoover.  

I can’t imagine in my wildest dreams my parents’ Republican friends supporting a Russian, former KGB tyrant.  Our family was ready to go to the mat with the Soviets.  Especially, my mom who was the founding president of the Signal Hill Women’s Republican Club.  Dad seriously talked about constructing a bomb shelter in our front yard.  We were definitely of the “Better Dead than Red” opinion

I find it appalling that Mitt Romney is the only party member with the moral compass to denounce the “treasonous” Kremlin mouthpieces in Congress.  They and the entertainment wing of his party over at Fox News.

And it’s high time to cut off all Russian oil purchases.  Yes, gas prices will go up.  Can’t we sacrifice a little bit without whining?  As my friend Debi would say, “Suck it up, buttercup.” 

The Russian people are presently cut off from almost all reliable news.  They have become captive to an unwell leader bent on total destruction.  Not much different from the Trump cult of QAnon Republicans marshaled to storm the halls of Congress.  A cult is a cult.  And Trump’s people brook no more dissent than Putin.  Yet these people continue to fawn over Putin.  My parents must be rolling over in their niches at Forest Lawn. 

Comrade Putin is now rounding up and arresting even children protesting the war – children as young as seven and eleven.  What a mensch!  He must now be very scared.[2] 

Is Tucker Carlson okay with that?  Really – the guy who calls Putin savvy.  Talk about “useful idiot!” – Stalin’s dream child.

George Orwell nailed it.  “War is peace and peace is war.”  We find ourselves as aliens in the strangest of lands as we move into our midterm elections.

I hardly recognize my country at times like this.  Those who side with decency, with truth – yes, we seem as aliens in a rather strange land.  A very strange land.  So, by faith we will travel as sojourners in this unrecognizable landscape. 

Maybe, in standing with Ukrainians, we in some small way, might be able to do penance for all the slaughter we have committed over our own bloody history, beginning with the systemic massacre of the First Nations people and those under the lash of the slave master.  That’s beyond my paygrade.  We are where we are and we do what we can in the moment given us.  It’s truly a leap of faith into this strange new world.

Lent is a period that demands what Otis Moss III, calls “Blue Note Preaching.”  The Rev. Dr. Moss is pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, one of the most influential pulpits in America.  In his book, Blue Note Preaching, Moss brings metaphor and story to its proper place, the imagination.  He is a most apt successor to Pastor Jeremiah Wright – a prophet in our time.

“What is this thing called the Blues?  It is the roux of Black speech, the backbeat of American music…the curve of the Mississippi, the ghost of the South, the hypocrisy of the North.”

Blues addresses both the darkness and the light, the pain and the joy with hope.  No sugar-coating.  Through the moan, the stifled soul is freed[3].  And life goes on.

Blue Note preaching gets through a week of stormy Mondays.  It’s getting it “REAL.”  That is the message of Lent — just happy Sundays don’t do it.  That’s surely not what the flock is getting in Kyiv today.  They crave a message that will get them through this tragedy, and so do we.  So, let’s not sugar coat Calvary.  The cross is real.  Uncertainty nags.

“The world is experiencing the Blues and pulpiteers are dispensing excessive doses on non-prescribed [opioid?] blather with serious “ecclesiastical and theological side effects.”  Lent demands we all “keep it real.” 

Lent demands we enter the suffering and dark places of the world, of ourselves.  That land which is so often strange to us, that land where we find ourselves as alien sojourners.

We must address the woundedness of the world, of our very souls.  Only then will the Spirit be able to debride those wounds, cure our soul-sickness.  It’s singing those songs down by the Waters of Babylon – captives, yet free men and women.

We Christians must have a message that will “help you get out of bed in the morning…get up knowing you ain’t alone,” as the character Ma Rainey in August Wilson’s play insists.[4]  It’s about finding God in the darkness.

Otis tells a wonderful story of being awakened (the Holy Spirit? – just listen on) – awakened in the middle of the night with noises through the house.

Otis remembers, having difficulty getting to sleep, after receiving bomb threats against his church.  He was half awake, half asleep when his wife Monica punched him in the arm, “Get up.  Check that out.

“So, I did. Just like a good preacher, I grabbed my rod and my staff to comfort me.  I went walking through the house with my rod and staff that was made in Louisville with the name ‘Slugger’ on it.”

“I looked downstairs than heard the noise again, and I made my way back upstairs and peeked in my daughter’s room.  There was a six-year-old girl dancing in the darkness…just spinning around, saying, ‘look at me, Daddy.’”

“I said, ‘Makayla, I need you to go to bed.  It is 3:00 a.m.  You need to go to bed.’”

“But she said, ‘No, look at me, Daddy, look at me.’”

“And she was spinning; barrettes going back and forth, pigtails going back and forth.”

“I was getting huffy and puffy wanting her to go to bed, but then God spoke to me at that moment and said, ‘Look at your daughter!  She’s dancing in the dark.  The darkness is all around her but not in her.  But she’s dancing in the dark.’”

This season of both Lenten Ashes and the anticipation of Easter Joy, let’s take to heart a message that will keep us dancing through it all – sorrow and laughter.

We sing a soulful song and find the strength to move on, doing what we can. For as long as we can.

On Thursdays I bike with a group of friends in the morning, even when its only forty degrees out there.   We head out to a small café in downtown La Verne for breakfast.  Oatmeal, if I’m good about my diet.  Corned beef hash and some other stuff, if I’m not. 

In my car, this route looks pretty level.  But once I start pedaling, it’s suddenly uphill – all the way back home.  The last two-block stretch up Mountain Ave. is quite a steep challenge.  I have to rest at the top of it.  Every time I make it, I say to myself, “Well, you’ve made it this week,” knowing that sometime the ride will come when I don’t or can’t.  But, today, I made it.

That is how life is as we approach it’s close.  Lent is preparation for those days.  A Blue Note Gospel will get us there.  A fulsome message that accepts both the heights and depths of the challenges of this new, and strange land.  Getting old is new territory.

In Lent is the assurance that as we complete the journey, it is not as aliens but as beloved sons and daughters of the Most High.  Brothers and sisters of one another.

By the way, a love offering to assist with the Ukrainian refugees would surely be an acceptable gift to lay at the altar of the Almighty – just sayin.’  It might now be widow’s-mite time.

“If thou but trust in God to guide thee through the evil days.  Who trusts in God’s unchanging love builds on a rock that nought can move.”  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Amen.

---

[1] Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday 2017).

[2] Sebastian Murdock, “Russian Police Reportedly Arrest, Jail Children Protesting War Against Ukraine,” Huffpost, March 2, 2022.

[3] Otis Moss III, Blue Note Preaching (Louisville, KY: John Knox Westminster Press, 2015).

[4] August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 1982.  His play named after a popular dance in the 20s, the Black Bottom.

March 6, 2022, Lent 1

“Aliens in a Strange Land”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13