On this Labor Day weekend my mind goes to backyard barbecues, fairs and the end of summer’s lazy days.  At one time, when summer was not the scorching ordeal it now is, the day of peak attendance at the L.A. County Fair was now.  Presently, thanks to global warming, the fair has to be held in spring.

I fondly remember the huge Ferris wheel, all lit up at night, riding up and up with my girlfriend.  At the top, we might as well have been at the top of the world.  Part of that was the romance of the moment, holding hands as we seemed so precariously seated in that slowly swaying seat.  So high up looking down at all the other amusement rides below.

And then the reality of school beginning the next day.  Ugh. 

Due to all our family turmoil, I was never very good at my classes.  My mind was always elsewhere.  Looking out the window at the other kids on the playground – waiting for the bell to ring for our turn at recess.

This year, as our nation has headed into this weekend of beach trips, hot dogs and a can of Budweiser, there’s an unease in the land. 

We just made it through primary elections with a number of political earthquakes.  On one side of the aisle, many election conspiracy nuts were elected to run in the general election with the goal of denying all votes and throwing their state’s choice of presidential electors to ultra-partisan state legislatures. 

But of course – it’s all rigged.  The voting machines are being hacked by Jewish space lasers or some such nonsense.  Millions of illegals are stuffing the dropboxes with fraudulent ballots.  Rigged, they tell you!

Yes, we’ve gone off the deep end of crazy in this political year.  Same as the last, only more vicious this time.  Poll workers, fearful of threats from MAGA gun nuts, are quitting in droves.  Who can blame them?

Some sixty percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction.  As inflated rents throw more and more onto the streets and the job market tightens as the Fed puts the squeeze on the economy, there is little joy in Mudville.   More people living on the streets.

The noted historian, Richard Hofstadter wrote of our tendency as Americans for political distrust in his seminal work, The Paranoid Style of American Politics.  He demonstrated how this strand of thought has been woven through our common life together over the many years.  Perhaps, present from the inception on the nation.  It is a mode of thought born of fear and resentment — I’m not making it — And someone’s to blame.

Our friend, Lynn, may think, “We’re all in this together.”  But the rest of us?  Not so much.

The scourge of fentanyl and other street drugs continues to ruin lives.  This past week our House of Hope team was to meet Sheriff Beaty with his two colleagues, the sheriff of Handcock County to the north of Brooke and the sheriff of Ohio county to the south.  We had our QRT program – that’s Quick Response Team — ready to present.

That afternoon we received a call from Sheriff Beaty’s assistant.  He would not be able to make it.  While he had been engaged in traffic control at Brooke High, sitting in his sheriff’s black pickup truck, a woman ran into him.  She hit him so hard that her car ended up in the bed of the pickup, her front bumper going through the cab window.

Our friend ended up with a fractured vertebra, a concussion, and was banged up a bit.  I had supposed the woman ended up either in the hospital or in the morgue.  No.  She was so loaded up with drugs, she was feeling no pain.  “She ended up in jail,” the sheriff later told us.  To only be in jail…she was one of the lucky ones.

Our reading from Deuteronomy today gives us a long-range view from the top of the Ferris wheel.  A thirty-thousand-foot moral overview.

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.  If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous.”[1]

This stark alternative is before us each day.  What, this day, will we choose to give our life and energies to?  What will receive our loyalty and the treasure of our date book and wallet?

The Psalmist, presents the same opposing choices, makes the same case.  Those who choose wisely “are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper.”

“It is not so with the wicked: they are like chaff which the wind blows away.”[2]

Another view from the top of the Ferris wheel.  Unfortunately, faced with the complexities of real, lived life, it’s not so simple.

Not so simple indeed.  We humans are a mixed bag, a seething mass of inconsistencies and proclivities.  The evil we hate, we so often end up doing, as St. Paul says of his own spiritual struggle.  Or as one of my friends said of their tumultuous marriage relationship, “It’s complicated.”

This last week we received from the coroner the autopsy results of the famed country music star, who, when she sang with her daughter Wynonna, they were an incredible duo, recording a number of hits.

Naomi Judd, for years had struggled with bipolar depression and PTSD…post-traumatic stress disorder.  At 76 the country music legend ended her life with a gun.  The autopsy, just released revealed numerous drugs in her system used to treat her various afflictions.

She, with Wynonna, had been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame the day after her death.  Her mental illness had finally won the long struggle which had consumed most of her life.

Choices set before each of us – but it’s so tragically complicated.

We Americans again have a critical choice set before us.  Will we go with the crazy, or will we choose a generous democracy that includes all.

It is no exaggeration to say that a whole lot is on the line in the next two elections coming up.  From the top of the political and civic Ferris wheel: DEMOCRACY itself is on the line.  The whole enchilada!

Will America become a theocracy where a small minority subjects the rest to the pinched dogma of Christian nationalism?

Will unlimited money have the final say in our political life?

Will gerrymandered districts so subvert the choices of the majority that any notion of Democracy will have become meaningless?

Will women lose the rights to their own bodies and souls to a group of misogynistic men arguing about “legitimate rape” and whether a ten-year-old must be forced to bear a rapist’s child?  A ten-year-old girl for God’s sake!

America, we must be in this for the long haul.  The thirty-thousand-foot view.  As with those of the Jesus Movement.

The “Cost of Discipleship” is a whole lot more than proper etiquette before the altar.  It is much more than fussing over which candles to light first or extinguish in what order.  More than even showing up once a week to hear a brilliant sermon, or even a mediocre one.

It’s about engaging the issues of the day, in our corporate or private lives with the values of the gospel.  It’s how this all plays out under the mandate to love God and neighbor – one and the same duty.  It’s about daily seizing the joy that is to be offered each day.  And passing it around.

Jai sometimes – okay, often – thinks my rhetoric is over the top.  But, for hyperbole and exaggeration, I can’t hold a candle to Jesus.

“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and other, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Hard words, indeed!

If I dare to paraphrase our Lord, what he is saying is that this discipleship thing is a life stance that places all relationships and priorities under a long-haul mandate.  “Love God and neighbor as self.”  Every relationship, yea, life itself is to be seen through that lens.

This is not a eat-your-spinach (or Brussel sprouts, or rutabaga) command.  It is the joyful summons into eternity.  Into a life of overflowing blessings and delight.  And struggle.

I don’t know if there is the possibility of political absolution, but I must confess that I was once in the tank for one Richard Nixon.  I, a Nixon campaign worker when he ran for governor!  Coming out of a very Republican household, that was the brand of politics served up each evening at dinner.

With the contest between Nixon and Kennedy, I began to question that allegiance.  In for the long haul, I realized that my politics must comport with the Gospel values taking deeper root in my life.

For the long haul, I in fact abandoned the other party when it sold its soul for a fruitless and inhumane war in Southeast Asia.  The lies, the subterfuge – it was all to the destruction of what I had come to affirm.  Leaving was the cost of discipleship at that moment.  I ended up being a delegate to the California convention of the Peace and Freedom party.

Cause for great disappointment!  It took three or four hours for the gathering just to come to agreement on who might chair this assembly for the next three days.  Every cause imaginable was vying for attention.  Shouting over each other.  From the “Free Huey Newton” people to the animal rights folks – no one was listening.  All shouting over each other.

I remember our distraught pastor’s wife through flowing tears, commenting as several from our local Peace and Freedom club crossed the parking lot after the first day, “If this is our only hope, God help us.  God help us all.”  I was pretty bummed out as well.

No, I needed a politics for the view from the top of the Ferris wheel.  A political perspective for the long haul, not the ephemeral cause of the day.

What Jesus seems to be counseling here is revolutionary patience in the cause for Gospel Solidarity.  Count the costs, this journey will take everything you are – it’s not an add-on — but the results will be beyond your imagining.  Guaranteed!

As we try to walk our faithful discipleship journey at St. Francis, it is Gospel Joy to my heart that Joseph is nudging us towards a program of tutoring for neighborhood kids.  Truly, whatever is done for children, from the thirty-thousand-foot view, is never wasted.

Taking up our cross, in this place, for this effort, means setting aide our inertia and calling friends to recruit tutors.  Pestering, if necessary.  It means finding some to run the recreation program so contained young people don’t riot or fall asleep.  It means help for preparing healthy snacks.  This may be your summons to a deeper engagement with the Jesus Movement in our place and time.  Listen to the whispers of the Spirit.  She can be trusted.

To close, this from my favorite author, Wendell Berry: “Love is what carries you, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.”  Amen

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[1] Deuteronomy 30:15 ff., New Revised Standard Version.

[2] Psalm 1, NRSV.

September 4, 2022, 13 Pentecost, Proper 18
Labor Day Weekend

“From the Top of the World”

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

Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Philemon 1-20; Luke 14:25-33

We, that is one of our House of Hope staff and I, just returned from our sojourn in the hills of West Virginia where we were working on our opioid addiction center. 

I am amazed at how green the hills of that part of the country are.  Especially compared to the dried, arid California landscape.  West Virginia is definitely NOT burning up.

One of the major delights of our August trip is the Wounded Warrior event we hold on our farm – this year’s being the fifth annual.  When I asked if there were any of my generation, the Vietnam Era, the response?  “Nobody’s that old.” 

To see some of the old regulars attend and many of our local folks who put on the event — it’s an occasion for civic pride.  To thank those who have served is a civic duty.  To top it off, Dagmar’s hot German potato salad was as delicious as ever!

Not to mention the guys from Merco Marine who brought out their huge barbecue cooker and furnished smoked pork, chicken and hot dogs.  Wonderful!  Tom Ferbee and his band was also a real crowd pleaser, especially when they broke into “Who Stopped the Rain.” 

With 180 acres of backwoods abandoned logging trails, we take these vets and their families on the ride of their lives.  All in all, a great weekend for everybody involved.  And a big thanks to Scott, Rob and Michelle who provide the organizational muscle.  But I was the only Vietnam vet.  We’re a dying breed.

My veteran’s organization, Vietnam Vets Against the War’s motto is: “Honor the warrior, not the war.”  We were of the generation who tossed our medals over the fence of the White House to protest that misguided, obscene foreign policy disaster.  “They lied, people died,” was the truth of the matter.  But enough of that sermon.

In addition, we met with Senator Manchin’s staff, the West Virginia director of drug policy – a whole bunch of folks who could help us with bringing House of Hope into reality.

Yes, we had quite a week.  And so did our nation.  Back down the memory rabbit hole — do you remember the American version of a British political satire show, “That is the Week That Was?”  Probably not.  It was also out of the 60s.  But you remember some of the stars:  Alan Alda, Elaine May, Gloria Steinem, Gene Hackman, Henry Morgan, Calvin Trillin and Tom Lehrer.  Nancy Ames sang the opening song.

If, perchance, you missed it, you can get an approximate version.  Watch “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver or “Full Frontal” with Samantha Bee.  Same pedigree and same great laughs.

As FBI agents executed a proper search warrant at the Former Guy’s retreat at Mar-A-Lago, much of our nation became unhinged.  No laughs here.

These law enforcement officers were accused by the likes of Ted Cruz and others as being “storm troopers, brown-shirt thugs, kicking in people’s doors.”  That’s right, if they can do it to this upstanding Former Guy, they can do it to you.

For the record, my cousin Floyd was an FBI agent.  The family never knew this until his retirement because he was deep undercover on issues of national security.  He was NOT a jack-booted Gestapo thug kicking in doors and summarily executing folks.  He was a kind, decent-hearted man.  He’d take me down into his radio room in the basement and we’d listen to places like Australia and Canada “on the skip.” 

Floyd faithfully took care of his sister with Down Syndrome after their mother died.  No, Ted.  You’re way off base.

I still wonder what Floyd’s cover was.  We only saw him once a year and I was pretty young.  The other thing I fondly remember was their great big cat that would jump up in my lap.  That, and his delightful book of WWII stories.

That episode with the Former Guy would have in itself been sufficient news, but…THEN…with the passage of the “Inflation Reduction Act” which added in funds to replenish the IRS, then came cries of agents of our government, tarred as a mob of some seventy-four thousand, armed with AR-15s, kicking in the doors of small businesses.  Locked and loaded.  Fixed News was definitely in overdrive all this week.

Actually, the tax cheats they’ll be hunting are way, way, above your and my pay grades.  The “usual suspects” are those who hide their assets in off-shore bank accounts and shell corporations.  We’re talking billions here, not that chicken-feed business lunch you mis-designated on your 1099-Miscellaneous Income form.  Or left out.

Oh, and did I fail to mention that Senator Lindsey Graham lost his appeal concerning a subpoena to testify in Georgia concerning his role in election fraud?  But not to worry, more than one felon has successfully run for office behind bars.  What a week, indeed!  A lot of shaking of the pillars.

Which gets us to the lectionary selection from Hebrews.  This passage is a portion of a sermon on Moses on the Mount of Revelation.

“See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking; for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven!”

“At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.”

“This phrase, ‘Yet once more,’ indicates the removal of what is shaken–that is, created things–so that what cannot be shaken may remain.”

“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.”

I’d never get a pass on a sermon like that.

All this convoluted passage is to say that when God gets through doing the shaking, what will remain is what has value…”How Firm a Foundation.”  Just as the nations are shaken, those that endure are ones built on everlasting foundations.  There is lasting value.  Self-evident Truth.

Those values embraced by the American people, rooted in Divine Revelation, are the residue that will not be loosened.  They are the core of basic decency, the basis for our common bond as a people – whether we be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist or None-of-the-Above.  They are deeply implanted in the soul of the nation.

It is these attributes that will remain, that will not be shaken.  We hang on to those spiritual verities and we will arise from the chaos of the moment as one people.

David Brooks, in an opinion piece this week, lifted up a great Christian writer and theologian, Frederick Buechner.  He came from a distressing family background.  A family of isolated personalities, unable to share pain, joy or their aspirations for living.  They are a microcosm of our national polarization – everyone in their own bubble.  Dante’s lowest level of Hell is reserved for such frozen, isolated, most toxic human beings.  Completely cut off.  From everything.

“One morning in the fall of 1936, 10-year-old Frederick Buechner and his younger brother were playing in their room. Their father opened the door, checked on them, and then went down into the family garage, turned on the engine of the car and waited for the exhaust to kill him.”

“Buechner and his brother heard a commotion, looked out the window and saw their father on his back in the driveway. Their mother and grandmother, in their nightgowns, had dragged him out of the garage and were pumping his legs up and down in a doomed attempt to revive him.”

“There would be no funeral, or discussion of what happened. Their mother just moved the boys to Bermuda to escape. The rules in that family were, ‘Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.’ They became masters at covering themselves over.”[1]

Looking back over the life of Frederick Buechner, what remained after a traumatic and vigorous shaking, was a most decent human being, overflowing with the spiritual insight on what makes for a godly life.  A life brim full to overflowing with compassion and spiritual insight.

In a way, this is what remains of President Zelenskyy.   He was a TV comic who only played at being a president.  Now he often sounds like Churchill.

When confronted by naysayers that he didn’t have the experience to be a real president of Ukraine, that he didn’t have standing, his answer was simple and basic.  The most important requirement for the job was just to be “a decent human being.”  And he has exceeded all expectations.  Silencing his most vociferous critics.

That is what we need as citizens for our day and circumstances – just being decent human beings.

Jesus, in Luke’s gospel, makes that most clear.  When confronted by a woman in great medical distress on the Sabbath, he sets aside rules, customs and religious dogma.  He, as a decent human being, does what is required.  He heals her.  And LIFE overflows to all around.  Even the stuck-in-the-mud religious authorities with their fossilized attitudes.

And that is the promise to us in our fractured land.  My politics are at odds with many of our folks in West Virginia.  My cousin Lindsey is an ardent Trumper as are many others.  We set all that aside.  Our team absorbs the pain, the loss of those families devastated by opioid addiction.  In our desire to bring healing we go about the small, boring, tedious work to get House of Hope off the ground.  Setting our political divisions aside.

Frederick Buechner says of our vocation – at the deepest, always a spiritual matter — “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and the pain of it, no less than in the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”[2]

America, we need to “stop, look, listen.”  Yes, part of our story is tawdry and vicious, but there are moments of great glory and grace.  Much remains after the brutal shaking of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow.

Through that darkest of nights shines the “Black and White Together” spirit of the civil rights struggles of the 60s.  Let us not forget Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, Thurgood Marshall.  Oh, yes, The Rev. Dr. M.L. King.  An everlasting heritage.

Let us claim that sacred heritage of the “Conductors” on the Underground Railroad: Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Levi Coffin.  All shepherding folks North, following the “Drinking Gourd.”[3]  A firm foundation of a new birth of liberty.

These Americans knew their vocations as citizens and lived them.  They were not shaken in resolve or in goal.  May we find ours out as they did.

Your vocation?  Again, let us attend to Brother Frederick:  “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  — a foundation which will remain your whole life long. Amen.

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[1] David Brooks, “The Man Who Found His Inner Depths,” New York Times, August 18.  Any of his books are superb, novels, theology, or his autobiographical works.  An uninitiated reader might start with Now and Then, a very self-revealing memoir.

[2] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).

[3] “Drinking Gourd,” the Big Dipper constellation containing the North Star.

  August 21, 2022, 11 Pentecost, Proper 16

“What a Week!”

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

Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

My wife has a saying she came up with shortly after our first child was born, “When the going gets tough – lower your standards.”

She had kept our house immaculate.  Everything in its place and a place for everything.  EXCEPT IN MY OFFICE.  She just closed the door and didn’t let visitors in there.

It was the sanity decision.

When the second child came along, it was the only decision.

Similarly, COVID-19 has forced most of us to hunker down, reassess priorities.  That and inflation.  I noticed that balancing my checkbook is a lot easier these days because I’m not going anywhere.  I’m not buying stuff.

When Jai and I arrived back home from our trip East to meet prospective in-laws, (yes!  Christopher and Alexis have set the date)….we both came back with COVID.  The one good aspect of this experience is that nobody expects you to do much of anything.  And I didn’t feel like doing much of anything.  Life gets stripped to the essentials.  Lower your standards.  Plowing through at all costs is insanity.

But how often out of anxiety, out of fear, out of just plain greed do we strive after the wind?  And as the title of Margaret Mitchell’s novel puts it, it’s all GONE WITH THE WIND.

The passages assigned this week all raise the question, What Makes for a Godly Life?  What really counts?  What is the taste of the eternal to be had in this life?

In the opening chapter of Ecclesiastes, we read of striving after things of no account. 

“Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

“I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with.

“I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.  I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me.”

Remember the lesson of last week:  The Good Life – Eternity if you will, is wrapped up in love of God and Neighbor.  One and the same.

It’s not the bumper sticker: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”  That’s a lie.  Vanity, all that bunkum is vanity and a chasing after the wind.  Material gain, political ambition, fame – pursued “At All Costs” is nothing but futility.

Martin E. Marty captured the excessive ethos of this age in a proposed alternative bumper sticker: “In case of rapture, I have dibs on your Bugatti.”[1]

The political thing pursued at all costs might actually get the Former Guy 20 years of government housing.  The fame thing at all costs can get you on the Hollywood divorce roster or into drug rehab.  And ask Bugsy Siegel or Michael Milken where the money thing pursued at all costs leads.  And, we won’t go into the book thing.

It’s not hoarding up more and more and more stuff.  This lesson hits close to home as the Forney’s have an over-active packrat gene.

Maybe I’ve mentioned my wife’s dream of defrosting the freezer.  In her dream she opens the door only to find that it’s full of books.

That morning when she shared her Good Housekeeping nightmare, I told her that she was lucky to be married to a biblical scholar who could interpret the dream.

The interpretation?  She needed to buy a new freezer — for the food.

Now, I admit, my library is a little over the top.  I assuage my guilt by comparing it to Carnage’s library we visited in New York City.  The ceilings were at least sixty feet high.  There were three levels of books along the walls.  It was huge!

This grand collection was housed in over-the-top opulence.  Mine, not so much.

When I mentioned to Jai that, at least, my library wasn’t THAT out of control, she quipped something to the effect, “That’s only because you don’t have the billions Carnage had.”  Touché! 

Yes, we do have the Forney packrat gene.  I can’t tell you how many cans of dried paint I cleaned out of my dad’s storage room.  There must have been fifty or sixty cans.  A lifetime accumulation.  I’m sure some dated back sixty years to when we had lived in Compton and I was in the second grade.  All as dry as a Cambrian fossil.

I remember a film we used to show at church camp on the stewardship of creation.  The title was, “More.”  In the opening minutes is a baby screaming, “More, more, more” as it grasps for everything around it.  The film ends with the earth buried under mounds of stuff and more stuff. 

That’s where we’re headed with our insatiable appetites.  More, more, more.  And the planet is getting buried under a toxic cloud of carbon dioxide, the “greenhouse gas.”  To my friends in the Midwest – is it hot enough for you yet?  Yeah, as the movie says, “Some Like it Hot,” but that was about Marilyn Monroe, not the planet!

So, where then might we better expend our effort?  If it’s not building bigger and more barns to store our stuff.  St. Paul frequently offers good counsel on what makes for a good, well-lived life.  Godly counsel, if you will.

To paraphrase St. Paul, “Excel in doing good.  meekness, self-control; against such there is no law. … Humility, endurance; the law is not set against these things.

The planet can handle such good works without burning up.  Store up such charity in abundance.  You won’t need a new barn or larger library.  Toss those cans of desiccated paint.

Consider this path if you are driven at “All Costs” to excel at something.  There is no law against such generosity of spirit.  John Wesley said do all the good you can to as many as you can as long as you can.  Jesus would second that.  That’s what the Spirit inspires.

I think of my friend Nancy Mintie who founded Uncommon Good right here in the Pomona Valley after working in poverty law in downtown Los Angeles.  Nancy Mintie is the best of Catholic social teaching in practice. She and Uncommon Good do a lot of good for kids.  Against such generosity of Spirit there is no law.

Let me share one story from Uncommon Good’s latest newsletter.  It’s about a young man already making a difference in his community.

Luis Limon Sr. came from Mexico and began supporting himself in the U.S. at the age of fifteen.  A young woman from Mexico’s breadbasket Sinaloa came for a visit and stole his heart.  In due course Luis Limon Jr. was born.

His parents brought young Luis to Uncommon Good, hoping that they could show him the way to get an education and make a life for himself in their adopted country.

Luis has taken advantage of all that Uncommon Good has had to offer.  He was paired with a mentor from one of our Claremont Colleges.  He joined the sister organization of Uncommon Good, Gente Organizada.  After attending writing programs, and math camp he broadened his horizons. 

He became a student leader, inspired by his parent’s journeys, he lobbied the Pomona City Council to establish a Youth Commission.  In the face of withering, racist criticism by one of the council members – a Latino at that — Luis persisted.  With the support of his friends at Uncommon Good, Luis then took on the issues of mental health in his community, creating a yearly conference, Healthy Young People – holding their conferences by Zoom after Covid hit.

Uncommon Good helped Luis apply for, and be accepted by a mentoring program at Pomona College, PAYS, the exclusive college preparation program at one of our top liberal arts colleges on the West Coast.

As a high school senior, Luis has been accepted at one of our more prestigious and selective colleges, Kalamazoo College in Michigan.  Scholarship to boot!  They have a 4.4% acceptance rate.  Compare that with Harvard’s rate of 5%.  Now that’s selective. 

That’s the kind of GOOD that Nancy Mintie has excelled in.  She certainly walks the talk of her church.  Nothing wasted here.

So, to St. Paul in Colossians.  Uncommon Good, its staff and volunteers embody the spirit of this teaching:

“So, if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 

“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 

“When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.”[2]

Here’s Paul’s point — This same Spirit indwelling in Jesus has now been let loose in you, and inhabits all in the Jesus Movement.  It is the same life-giving force that brings us “Frozen Chosen” to daring acts of justice and reconciliation.  Through it, we are transfigured to joy incarnate, the Glory of the living God.

Yield to that summons – that’s LIFE ABUNDANT.  Free for the asking.  No barn’s required.  No extra bookshelves needed.

Here we discover the true riches of life, where treasure is to be had. 

Micheala Bruzzese sums it up: In and through such living we find that our “profound hunger to love and to be loved is satisfied.”  We are enfolded into the “unconditional and all-consuming love of God. …this treasure does not trap us, but liberates us, giving us the strength and courage to be liberators in the world.”[3] 

Amen.

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[1]Martin E. Marty, “Wheels of Fortune: ‘In Case of Rapture, I Have Dibs on Your Bugatti,’” M.E.M.O, Christian Century, July 25, 2006.

[2] Colossians 3:1-11, New Revised Standard Version.

[3] Micheala Bruzzese, “Possessed by Love Alone,” Sojourners Magazine, May 1, 2004.

July 31, 2022, 8 Pentecost, Proper 13

“At All Costs”

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

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23; Psalm 49:1-12; Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

Friday night bright lights.  The football team, their coaches and handlers trotted out onto the field of the stadium to the uproarious cheers of the hometown crowd.  There they all paused on the fifty-yard line, assembled in a clump, with bowed heads as their coach led them in prayer.

Anne Lamott, hearing of this pious spectacle was horrified.  She, a believer, considers such sanctimonious demonstrations of religiosity nothing short of blasphemy.  They diminish and demean the faith when it is so trivialized.  Not what Jesus had in mind.

She objects — when we consider the real problems of the world – the hellish difficulties women now face concerning their health care – the incineration of our natural world under the embers of global warming – the intolerable pain of places like Uvalde, Highland Park, the list goes on beyond remembering – when we read daily of the horrors in Ukraine, starvation and disease in Third World countries – when one takes all this into her soul, what the hell is a football game that God should be concerned?!  That God, that we, believers and non-believers should be concerned?  Such pious blather borders on blasphemy.

Here’s Anne’s rant:

“It offends me to see sanctimonious public prayer in any circumstance – but a coach holding his players hostage while an audience watches his piety makes my skin crawl.”[1]

And on such self-serving expressions of righteousness, remember Jesus’ story of the Pharisee and the Publican.  “I thank God I am not like…”

I remember long ago; our congregation was involved in a church volleyball league.  Before the opening game of the season, one of the pastors proceeded to lead us all in prayer.  He muttered something to the effect of…”Lord, we know it’s only a little piece of metal at stake…Not much of any consequence…”

Now, all the while, in my mind, I’m subverting the pious thoughts of this sanctimonious prayer… “Yeah, pastor — just a little piece, just a scrap of metal this league trophy…Right!   We’re going to go out there and KILL FOR IT.  Egos, elbows…they’ll be out in full force in service of coming out “King of the Hill for this little, bitty inconsequential scrap.”  And that’s pretty much how it went that evening.  Not quite Marquis of Queensbury sportsmanship on display.

As Jesus was concluding his prayers, he was approached by one of his disciples.  “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”  He said to them.  “When you pray, say:  Abba, Father – Daddy, really – (and here we recite this familiar prayer in the words and thought forms of the spirituality of New Zealand Anglicans, as heavily influenced by Māori and Polynesian culture):

Eternal Spirit,
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

May the hallowing of your name echo through the
universe; the way of your justice be followed by the
peoples of the world; your heavenly will be done by all
created beings; and your commonwealth of peace and
freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread that we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and forever.  Amen.

This essential prayer of the Christian faith is widely prayed throughout the world by almost all faithful followers of Jesus.  And also, by many outside the faith. I associate it with the summons to attention by one of my first teachers:

“FOCUS, JOHN.  FOCUS.”

This prayer directs us to what we need to sustain life, and invites us into the process – to what opens a window to eternity.

We need to acknowledge that life is not just about us.  There’s an overarching summons beyond our limited cares and petty grievances.  We need forgiveness because of the hurt we cause, and likewise we need to let go of the hurt others cause.  We need daily sustenance.  We need relationship with one another and the verities that make for a life worth living.

Without this life orientation, our existence is the slow circling of a Final Drain.  Jesus is telling us in these brief few words – FOCUS ON WHAT MAKES IT ALL WORTHWHILE.  What brings joy, what brings life abundant.

Don’t squander the splendor of it all in trivia.  We only go around once.  FOCUS, John!

Martin Buber, grasping at the idea of the unknowable divine, settled on an expression of that reality in relationship.  In his work, I and Thou, he fleshes out how it is that we are drawn into relationship wherein we are valued, and value others.

When Moses asks for the Holy Name at Mt. Sinai, all that is revealed is: “I am who I am.”  Or “I am becoming who I am becoming.”

We are, further, told that this reality is bound up with neighbor.  “You shall love the Lord Your God with all your soul, and all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

Neighbor and the Great Mystery – that’s about as close as any of us will get.

It is this simple prayer Jesus taught his followers that centers mind and heart on what is necessary for this love ethic – the final requirement of Torah.

Love of God, love of neighbor – one and the same.  Do this and you are very near to the Reign of the Divine.

It was for this reason that I was so overjoyed when our son Christopher shared his new vocational direction.  Being a PhD student at Yale, I always thought he’d end up a professor at some prestigious college.  But lately he began drifting from that direction towards thinking he might want to teach high school or maybe community college.  But then he surprised me with a revised vocational goal:  He wanted to teach in a prison. 

“Dad, these people really need the education, not some pampered, elite, rich kids.”  I thought, maybe all that he got from home, from church has put down some very deep roots.  Well, glory be! 

Not far from what matters!

I told him that I had a friend who actually teaches college-level classes in prisons.  Chris Hedges, a Presbyterian pastor and a Pulitzer-Prize-winning war correspondent for the New York Times, has seen some of the worst of the worst prisons in many far-off, war-torn lands.  He’s taught classes for a number of years in a New Jersey prison.

“Would you like to me to call him?  He certainly has some incredible experiences to share.”  Our Chris said that would be great.  I was surprised I still had Hedges on speed dial.  He said he would love to talk with our son.  Maybe our son should first read Chris’s recently published book, Our Class, a work about his classes behind bars which doesn’t sugar-coat prison life in the slightest.[2]

As these classes are college level, these students are bright and capable of difficult material.  To enable them to draw from their life experiences, Hedges has introduced a number of playwrights that open up prison life, notably August Wilson.  His play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in 1911 in a boarding house, refers to a song by W.C. Handy about “Joe Turner’s Blues.”[3] 

Like prayer – the real thing – deep listening – Wilson’s plays draw these men into their interior lives.  Into what most matters.  Into “finding their song.”

“What is this song?” Hedges asks.  “Like a prayer.  Like memory,” another answers.

“It connects you to where you came from.  It connects you with your ancestors.  It connects you with your own history; your own story.  It validates and lifts up your suffering, your dignity, your humanity, your resistance.  It tells you that you will not be defeated by the troubles of this world. It affirms you and your people.”

Until we find our song, we are but dried bones.  We only stand when we find our song, when we’re fully resurrected as free men and women, when we are able to shout out our song, when we can say who we are and where we came from.[4]

This brief prayer of the Jesus movement, if allowed to marinate over a lifetime, connects us with our song – the pain, the tragedy, the delight and the blessing.

“Our song is so difficult because of the pain,” one said.  “Because it’s about loss, about suffering and death, about families ripped apart, about people not being treated as if they were real human beings, because that’s the story then, and it’s still the story.”[5]

Taken to heart, Jesus’ prayer becomes deep listening, not a laundry list like a superficial prayer on the fifty-yard line or at the volleyball net.

Deep listening — inspired by a hug, an unexpected kindness, the tranquility of a forest grove or the splendor of a stary night above in the desert sky.

To see both God and neighbor as an unfolding Thou, to be cherished, to be wrapped in care, to be honored. That is prayer.  That is your song — your connection to the deepest Thou.  It is the unfolding of heart and mind and strength.  Without it, we’re just discarded bones.

“God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in them,” is how John’s community understood the connection.[6]

Lord, teach us to pray.  Simply…simply say:

“With the bread that we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us. FOCUS, John.  FOCUS.  Beyond and within all outward appearance is splendor, beyond and within daily routine, we each find our own song unto eternity.  Yes, “Give us this day…”  Amen

---

[1] Anne Lamott, “I Don’t Want to See a Football Coach Praying on the Field,” New York Times Opinion, Monday, July 11, 2022.

[2] Chris Hedges, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021).

[3] Ibid, 78-79.

[4] Ibid, paraphrasing Wilson’s character Loomis, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

[5] Ibid, 79.

[6] I John 4:16b.

July 24, 2022, 7 Pentecost, Proper 12

“When you pray, say…”

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

Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15, [16-19];
Luke 11:1-13

Upon arriving home, I noticed a flyer that slipped out of our local Claremont newspaper.  It concerned a proposed development to provide housing for the neediest amongst us.  Larkin Place is to be a supervised residence providing housing for the unhoused.  Of course, some of these folks will have problems with substance abuse.  Many will have various degrees of mental illnesses.  Some will be returning from incarceration.

When I saw this broadside, it was more like “Monsters on Maple Street.”  Something out of Rod Sterling’s dark imagination.  Or maybe “Zombie Apocalypse.”

Our peaceful community – read WHITE – would be invaded by the most distorted forms of humanity.  Druggies, the insane – insane slashers?? – an unreformed criminal element setting to prey upon our nearby school children.

Yes, right “next to kids’ soccer fields, Joslyn Senior Center, El Roble Intermediate School, a preschool…”  Right!  Zombie Apocalypse!

And whoever these dregs of human society might be, we CERTAINLY DON’T WANT THEM AS NEIGHBORS!  Not OUR neighbors.

Send them off to Pomona.  Send them off to L.A.  Just keep them out of Claremont.

This was a call to “Take Action.”  “Save Claremont!”

The project developer, Jamboree Housing Corporation, has a track record of successfully providing low-income housing to seniors, veterans and the homeless.  Their supervised “Permanent Supportive Housing” in Orange County is exemplary.  Their efforts have brought hope and ended homelessness with solutions that work.

They’ve held a number of community-wide meetings here in Claremont, but to no avail.  As the Good Book says, “Those with ears to hear, let them hear.”  Well, the shouters and nay-sayers seem to have heard not much of those presentations.  Still – Monsters on Elm Street.

You know, we all know, the paradigmatic story of neighbors Jesus tells in Luke’s gospel.  “Just then a lawyer (wouldn’t you know it – a lawyer — Had to be a lawyer!) stood up to test Jesus.”  Wanting the quick and easy answer to salvation.  So, what need he do to enter the Kingdom of God?

And when Jesus throws the question back at him, the man responds exactly as he had been taught in Sabbath School.  “Love God and love Neighbor.”

Right.  He gets an “A” from the rabbi.  So, what’s the problem?  Just do it.

Not wanting to look diminished in the eyes of the gathering crowd, the lawyer retorts, “Just who is neighbor?”

Whereupon Jesus launches into a story.  So famous that the hero, the “Good Samaritan” lives on in legend and as moral exemplar down through the ages.  Of course, it was the one who actually provided aid, who bandaged up the assaulted traveler and saw to his housing.

When folks protest the work of House of Hope to bring healing to those suffering addiction, to cries that we should locate somewhere else – anywhere else, this is my response.

These people are already here.  You see them living in tents on the streets, on the bike trail, in empty lots.  They’re already here.

Would you rather they be tucked safely in their beds at 9:00 o’clock at night in a supervised facility providing recovery, where they’re learning the work of sobriety?  Or would you rather encounter them in your living room at 2:00 in the morning, or in a parking lot on the wrong end of a gun? They’re already here.

People, these are your neighbors.  They’re here.  They’re hurting.  They’re desperate.  Your choice.

Here’s today’s update of Jesus’ parable:

A group of city fathers and mothers on a stroll through the Village came upon a most unsightly scene.  People sleeping on the sidewalks and in the parks.  Actually, they noticed the smell before they saw the tents and sleeping bags and cardboard lean-tos.

Some, long established residents, fretted, “This is going to bring down property values.  I worked hard for my home.  This riffraff is ruining my investment.  It’s unsightly.  It smells.  They smell.”  These fine citizens called the city council demanding action.

Another group, a couple on the city council, were likewise aghast.  “We aren’t going to get re-elected if these people swarm the city.  We’ve got to get rid of them.  Send the cops out to let them know in no uncertain terms that they’d better be gone by sundown.  OR ELSE.” 

“And forget that resolution the do-gooders are pushing for inclusionary housing.  We definitely are NOT for including THESE people.  Let’s pass an ordinance outlawing these deplorables and their shanties.”  “Oughta be a Law!”

Finally, a sanitation worker and some police officers came by.  “This is unsanitary.  These people are using the alley and bushes for their bathroom.  Their panhandling is driving away business.  The crime rate is on the rise.  Ship them off to Pomona.  Anywhere, but not here.  Definitely –“Oughta be a Law!”

Then along came some folks and when they saw the squalor, and listened to the pain and distress of those living on the sidewalks, their hearts were moved with pity.  They provided shelter at a local church.  When they realized that this was at best a temporary band-aid solution, they found an empty lot and convinced the owner to make it available for a more permanent solution – a solution that would address the underlying problems of addiction, mental illness, impoverishment, and flat-out bad luck.

They found a developer, drew up plans, talked and talked and talked to their neighbors.  They attended meeting after meeting.  They fought like hell to persuade the persuadable and rally allies.  And they still are. 

That’s because they recognized their neighbors as people like themselves.  People deserving a break, people deserving healing, people with the same dreams, the same hopes — the same right to respect and a decent livelihood.  Neighbors, in short.

As our nation is further polarized by recent political events and the rulings of our Supreme Court, the stress on national neighborliness is at the breaking poin — definitely at the fracture point.  About the only thing still holding us together, the only thing we can agree on, this past Fourth of July, was the fireworks — in communities where we could actually shoot them off without fear of burning the place down.

As the January 6^th Committee delves further into the potential criminality of the Former Guy, half the country is either not paying attention, or has dismissed it all as “Fake News.”  Nothing to see here, folks, just move along.

So how do we put it back together?  America is presently a pretty smashed-up Humpty Dumpty.  Jon Mecham fears that if we break America, we won’t get it back.

If our nation is to survive, the definition of “neighbor” must be, in our global community, far more expansive than someone living up the street.  Or across town.

As Hitler was marshalling his forces to subdue Europe, magazine empire oligarch — publisher of Time-Life — Henry Luce wrote an editorial destined to shape American foreign policy for the next one hundred years, “The American Century.”

Therein he assumed that America, in a unipolar world, would be the essential neighbor keeping the peace and creating a world safe for global capitalism and democracy.

We should … “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and . . . exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”[1]

Over the years, it hasn’t worked out that way.  Through one intervention, one ruinous war after another, our misguided support of despots has only created more death than had we left well enough alone.  The gospel of Matthew’s “City on a Hill” has morphed into an “Armed Metropolis.”[2]   Such a neighbor!

The principles of this so called “liberal Internationalism,” as articulated by Woodrow Wilson, seem not to have made us any safer; only poorer and, under a despot like Trump, more isolated and feared.

Those promoting what has been called a more circumscribed foreign policy, the “Restrainers,” say it’s time for a lighter American footprint on the world’s stage.  The evidence has not supported a foreign policy of robust intervention.

Daniel Bessner writes, “Since the late Seventies, Americans have been suffering the negative consequences of empire—a militarized political culture, racism and xenophobia, police forces armed to the teeth with military-grade weaponry, a bloated defense budget, and endless wars—without receiving much in return…”[3]  What Chambers Johnson calls, the “Sorrows of Empire.”[4]

The historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin estimates that we have racked up over twenty million deaths in Cold War conflicts – the “equivalent of 1,200 deaths a day for forty-five years.”[5]

As pundits, in the days following the celebration of our nation’s birth, ponder our American legacy and what to make of it all, Jon Mecham and Joe Scarborough sufficiently nailed it for me.  At least for the moment.

Joe, interviewing Jon, pondering the promise and hope of America, related a comment which answered his question, — on Twitter Joe had asked: “Even with all our flaws, why are you proud to be an American?”  One of his favorite replies was by a Joe Reynolds: “When you’re some small person with your back against the wall – a natural disaster, a political prisoner, a pandemic, you don’t say, ‘maybe India will help us, or maybe China.  You say maybe America will help.’  We don’t always live up to that, but we should.”

Joe then turned the question back to Jon who responded: “I’m proud to be an American for same reason [that] I’m proud to be a human being.  I know that I am capable of great evil, and great shadow and great darkness.  But I also know that there are days and moments when there’s light and life and love.  If we can just get there fifty-one percent of time, then we’re having a good day.

What would be your answer?  What’s your “good day?”

If we can come close to Jon’s humility, we just might become a good neighbor.  And we just might recognize and treat those around with the God-given respect they deserve.  On a good day — kneeling by the road’s edge at the side of the hungry, the diseased, the refugee — God’s very own.

The hymn by Lloyd Stone and Georgia Harkness, to the tune Finlandia, says all that needs to be said about being a proud American in this new era, one who wishes to walk humbly with God and neighbor:[6]

“…this is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine:
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover…”

Amen.

---

[1]Henry Luce,quoted in Daniel Bessner, “What Comes after the American Century?” Harpers Magazine, July 2022.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4][4] Chambers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

[5] Daniel Bessner, op. cit.

[6]“This is My song,” United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1964).

July 10, 2022, 5 Pentecost

“Just Who is Neighbor?”

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

Deuteronomy 30:9-14; Psalm 25:1-9; Colossians 1:1-14;
Luke 10:25-37

Well, this Monday Jai and I head off to the East Coast to meet our future in-laws.  We have a couple of other stops on this excursion.  Washington, D.C. to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, if we can get tickets, and one of my favorite bookstores, Politics and Prose.  And that’s right next to two pretty good restaurants.

The other stop is New York City to see some plays, visit Strand Bookstore and some museums.

But, HOLD ON!  I read in the NY Times this week that Las Vegas-style gambling might be coming to New York City.  The paper announced that their legislators, in their infinite wisdom, had opened the path for three such casinos in the area of the city.  What could possibly go wrong?  Here’s the opening blurb:

“Before too long, New Yorkers and the millions of tourists who visit the city every year may have a new way to test their luck — and part with their money — amid the bright lights and skyscrapers of Midtowns…all the trappings of Las Vegas, down to the incessant ringing and fluorescent flashing of a sea of slot machines.”[1]

The part that got my attention was the bit: “—and part with their money.”  Only a simpleton would believe that so-called “luck” is involved.

Trust your luck?  Trust your luck???  NO!  Hold on to your billfold.  There is no luck.

As Christopher’s Tee-shirt says.  “The lottery is a tax on people who are stupid at math.”

Repeat after me: THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS.  THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS.  THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS.  (Unless, that is, it’s one of Trump’s mismanaged and looted Atlantic City casinos).  But like Rick Wilson says, “Everything Trump touches dies.”  Pssst – hope you saw the January 6^th Committee hearing on Thursday late afternoon.

So, now, we’re clear about “luck.”  The house does not leave winning up to chance.  It always wins (the Trump caveat taken as an exception and its BK).

That’s not the inalterable certainty is not the brand of theology we celebrate on Trinity Sunday.  The Mystery we celebrate this Sunday is an expansive God.  As the SciFi author Octavia Butler proclaimed, “God is Change.”  It’s a love relationship writ large we affirm.

For that reason, we look for expansive metaphors to inform our hearts and minds.  However, language ultimately fails.   We speak in poetry and story.  Yes, I know, we have the Nicene Creed attempting to button it up.  However, if this attempt had succeeded, why is it that the Church went through a bunch more councils attempting to get it right. 

And had we believed that we’d succeeded in nailing it down — that God wouldn’t have been an actual God – it would have been an idol.  Pilot thought he’d nailed it down on Good Friday, but it was too elusive for Imperial Rome.

Our conceptions and intellectual constructs ARE NOT GOD.  That’s why Jesus spoke in parables.  Not in Greek syllogisms, which would not have saved anybody.  Tillich got it right.  The minute we say “God,” we have created in our mind THAT WHICH IS NOT GOD.  The best we can do is point and repeat the ancient story.

So, what is this Trinity?  Look about.  The Psalmist points to God’s handiwork. For the beauty of the earth.  Sing, o sing always. The writer of the Book of Proverbs instructs – handprint of the Holy is beheld in creation’s majesty.  The Divine is given witness to in THE GREAT UNFOLDING.

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.  Ages ago I was set up, at the first before the beginning of the earth.  When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.  Before the mountains had been shaped, before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth…then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” [2]

A GREAT UNFOLDING.

The beauty is infinite, only look at the snapshots from the James Webb Telescope.  Just spend a few moments in your backyard with a majestic monarch butterfly as it rides the air currents, flitting from one flower to another.

My friend Dick Bunce told me a marvelous story that captures the infinite mystery of this Triune expression of the Divine.  An understanding unfolding through the long-drawn-out experiences of the Holy by the People of the Word over the generations.

So, on with Dick’s story:

Upon high school graduation, a father asks his sons what his plans might be for going forward.  “What’s next for you, son?”  The lad hasn’t a clue.  Finally, he blurts out something like, “I guess I’m just going to have to trust God.”

“Well, let me know how that works out for you, responds his skeptical father.”

No sooner has the father left the son’s room than the boy hears God speaking.  God tells the boy to pack up clothes, get his car gassed up and drive to Las Vegas.

Now it’s the boy who is skeptical, but he does as God asks.  He packs up and heads out to Vegas with a full tank.

Upon coming to the main drag, God directs him to park the car at one of the casinos he passes.  Upon entering the main room, God directs the boy to go over to the cashier and empty out his wallet, buying as many chips as possible.

Then he is instructed to go over to the blackjack table and lay his bet down.  He receives his five cards and God tells him to discard the one that doesn’t fit an inside straight.  The boy objects, the odds being almost astronomical against making an inside straight; but he does as God instructs.  Amazed, he wins that hand upon completing the straight.

After following God’s prompting for the next hour or so, this young lad is sitting on top of almost a million dollars of chips.  At the next opportunity God tells him to bet the whole stack.

With his heart in his throat, the boy does as God tells him.  Upon receiving his cards, God instructs him to discard one and take the next.  As the other players and the dealer are finished with their bets, God tells the boy to begin to lay his hand down.  The boy turns over one card, then another, finally coming to the last card God had instructed him to take.

The young fellow, to his shock and surprise discovers that that last card completed a winning hand.  WOW!

WOW!!!  God exclaims.  “I’m as surprised as you.”  WOW!

All of which is to say, that all created order is the revelation of delightful surprise.  Contingency has no limits.  And that includes the Divine.

The only guarantee we get is that GOD IS CHANGE, and will, along with creation unfold in the most beautiful, delightful, awful and unexpected ways. 

This Trinity Sunday, we must concede that this formula is only our poor human attempt to wrap our hands around a mystery, to tell a story which can’t finally be explained. 

We know experiences of this mystery: Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer – in more traditional language: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  But each of those words must be provisional as my friend Rosemary Radford Ruether would remind us.  Had we been fortunate enough to have had women at the Council of Nicaea, we wouldn’t have been burdened with this excessively male, patriarchal mentality – but that’s another sermon.  Fact is — the surprise is always in the last card.  UNTIL THE NEXT IS DEALT.

Several weeks ago, I came across a new paleontological article in the NY Times.  It was about an early limbed fish which struggled ashore out of the shallows.

The creative headline writer put it, “When the Troubles of the World Ambled From out of the Ooze.”  All life moves towards ever more complexity. This three-to-nine-foot-long tetrapod with both gills and nostrils on top of its head, came ashore 374 million years ago.  To escape a predator, to search for prey, to leave a drying lagoon? – we don’t know.[3]

Tiktaalik rosae was a wild impossibility that came ashore.  It was the surprise of that last card.  And from such, or a similar creature, came all reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals – and finally us – we, its descendants.  The glory and the liabilities, from Mozart to stratospheric gas prices and global warming.  For the beauty of the world, sing, o sing today.

Graduate student Ben Otoo, opines; “It’s a lot of galumphing, wriggling, slithering, huffing, flopping.”  The Late Devonian could be called the “flop” era.[4]

“Tiktaalik’s flat head, with two eyes resting on top like blueberries on a pancake, made it perfectly suited for gazing above the water…’it looks like a muppet,’” quipped another researcher, Yara Hardy.  All radical contingency.  That’s what makes up the splendor of creation – all moving to new intended and unintended configurations.  That freedom is the definition of divine love.

I close with a final story that comes out of the tragedy of the Vietnam War.  Most of you know that iconic photo of a young, naked girl in great anguish, running down a dirt village road amidst other fleeing refugees.

That Pulitzer-Prize-winning photo, the “napalm girl,” taken on June 8, 1972, fifty years ago, became the defining image of the horrors of that war. 

Thanks to the South Vietnamese photographer, Nick Ut, who dropped his camera, covered her with a blanket, and got her medical help – that story, fifty years later has unfolded in a beautiful, life-affirming way.

Ms. Phan Thi is not that terrified nine-year-old girl any longer but a stately, competent woman in her sixties.  The picture of her reclining on her sofa radiates poise — both an outward and an inner beauty of character.

“I tried to hide my scars under my clothes. I had horrific anxiety and depression. Children in school recoiled from me. I was a figure of pity to neighbors and, to some extent, my parents. As I got older, I feared that no one would ever love me.”[5]

“I helped establish a foundation and began traveling to war-torn countries to provide medical and psychological assistance to children victimized by war, offering, I hope, a sense of possibilities.”

She knew what it was growing up among so much death, seeing friends and family members die and seeing neighbors laying mangled in the street.  She knew utter devastation, losing her home and school.

It was only later, after defecting to Canada and supported by a husband and friends, that she began to blossom as she grew into her mission in life, her calling.

“I am grateful now for the power of that photograph of me as a 9-year-old, as I am of the journey I have taken as a person. My horror — which I barely remember — became universal. I’m proud that, in time, I have become a symbol of peace. It took me a long time to embrace that as a person. I can say, 50 years later, that I’m glad Nick captured that moment, even with all the difficulties that image created for me.”[6]

Nick’s picture so long ago, for Ms. Phan Thi, was the surprise of the last card, the WOW which would unfold into the majesty and glory of what would become her accomplished life.  She in her mission over the years is indeed, the Glory of God, a woman fully alive!

As James Baldwin says of the splendor of this unfolding universe, “For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock.”[7]

This marvelous and wondrous life is captured in one line of the hymn, “I Bind unto Myself Today,”

“I bind unto myself today the virtues of the starlit heaven, the glorious sun’s life- giving ray, the whiteness of the moon at even, the flashing of the lightning free, the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks, the stable earth, the deep salt sea, around the old eternal rocks.” What is this Trinity of Divine Rapturous Love?   Take in the astonishing splendor of the unfolding handiwork of creation that fills our senses!  There’s your clue.  For the beauty of the earth — Sing, o sing today.  Amen.

---

[1] Nicole Hong, “If New York City Gets Las Vegas-style Casinos, What Else Will It Get?” New York Times, June 4, 2022.

[2][2] Proverbs 8:22 ff., New Revised Standard Version.

[3] Sabrina Imbler, “Is Four-Footed Fish to Blame for World’s Woes? – When Trouble Ambled Out of the Ooze, New York Times, April 30, 2022.

[4] Ibid.

[5] By Kim Phuc Phan Thi, “It’s Been Fifty Years.  I am Not ‘Napalm Girl’ Anymore,” New York Times, June 6, 2022.

[6] Ibid.

[7] James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket “Nothing Personal” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 393.

June 12, 2022, Trinity Sunday

“For the Beauty of the Earth”

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

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Canticle 2;  Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

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.

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[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

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[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