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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

---

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

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

[3] Ibid.

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

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

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

April 17, 2022, Easter Day

“Holy Mackerel”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the harrowing problems from Mom’s perspective:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

won’t you celebrate with me 

lUCILLE cLIFTON

won’t you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.[7]

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

---

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

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

[3] Op, cit., back cover.

[4] Op, cit., 7.

[5] Op.cit., 98.

[6] Op. cit., 73.

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

April 17, 2022, Easter Day

“We Can Do This”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 April 2022

Dear Chloe,

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

Love you!  Dad

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

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

---

[1] Philippians 2:5-8a.

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

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

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

April 10, 2022, Palm Sunday

“Keep Hope Alive”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malevolent forces have seized upon the internal contradictions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

[4] Ibid.

March 27, 2022, Lent 4

“No Slouching”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

March 13, 2022, Lent 2

“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

March 6, 2022, Lent 1

“Aliens in a Strange Land”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

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

A rather unusual experience happened to me one sometime past at the grocery store.  Our local store was in the process of being remodeled, and the location of virtually everything has been changed.  I’m not sure why this was necessary, but I go in there and can’t find anything.  I spend so much time and energy just looking for the items on my list that I can’t even impulse-shop anymore. 

As I was searching up one aisle and then another for a household cleaner, I spied a young woman, a sort of plain looking person in what would seem to be her early twenties with two children hanging on her.  She reminded me of someone from what my mother used to call “the projects.”  Being as young as she was, she looked ill-kempt and tired.  She turned around to see me hurriedly looking down the aisle for the next item on my list, and for some reason she seemed to think I was looking at her, while in reality I was straining to see past her. 

I soon forgot the whole incident until, while standing in the check-out line, I sensed someone sidling up to me on the other side of the chrome bar.  It was that young mother.  She wanted to know if I could help out with some money for her groceries.  As I started to speak, a tall, thin – an older woman in a shabby black dress, with her gray hair done up in a bun, from the next checkout stand over called out, “We’re thirteen dollars short.”

I was soon going home to a hearty meal, and my conscience began to nag, “Well, what would it hurt to help out a little bit?  What did Jesus say? ‘Give to all who ask?’”  Actually, I don’t know if Jesus said that or not.  But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to help out.  I certainly could spare thirteen dollars for Christ’s sake, and for the sake of her family.

I was now approaching the cashier.  Some people nearby were starting to stare at us, this older guy being importuned by this strange young woman.  But I really didn’t mind.  I was determined to help.  One person behind me hissed, sotto voce to a friend, “you’ve gotta watch those kinda people.”

I really didn’t mind helping. I really didn’t.  I was okay with it.  Figure it was my good deed for the day.  But it didn’t seem to end there.

As I paid the cashier and prepared to put my bags of groceries in my cart, there she was again, wondering if I could take her and her family home.  They only lived a short distance away, right behind Home Depot.  Her mother had difficulty walking, and it would be a big help if I would drive them.  Well, I guess I could do a little more.  Oh, and one more thing, could I give her a little money for the week.  I pulled another five-dollar bill from my wallet.  I turned my head just in time to see her step over to the line to buy a pack of cigarettes as her mother was asking where my car might be.  Now, I was getting a little annoyed.  While I didn’t mind paying for the family to have something to eat, I definitely wasn’t interested in helping her purchase a pack of “coffin sticks” so she could smoke herself and her family to death.

Getting into my car is something of an experience.   This was back when I still had my old Buick. I’m really not set up for passengers.  On the floor in the front is my stack of stuff for my construction business.  In the back seat were some lamps for the church in big boxes.  On the back floor on one side is a pile of papers for our youth group.  In the trunk are all the paper goods like cups and napkins and stuff I need for youth group meetings (my mechanic actually wondered one day if I was living out of my car.  Maybe he’d thought my wife had thrown me out.  I suppose some days I wouldn’t blame her – but that’s another story).  Then strewn around are some bottles of antacid, a plastic container of dental floss, an umbrella, some dead straws and a McDonald’s cup, and two very large church posters.  My oldest son had the nerve one day to tell me that my car looked more like a motorized dumpster!  He once asked, “Dad does the landfill company pay you to store their stuff in your trunk?”

Well, somehow, I made room for my newly found entourage with all their baggage, and yes, the cigarettes – that was still grating.

On the way home the grandmother, sitting in the front seat, is telling me about having lost her husband last year and how things have been very difficult.  Her daughter in the back seat with the boy on her lap, next to the boxes of lamps and young woman is saying something about how maybe I could give her my phone number so she could call me sometimes during the week.  We could see each other.  She’d like that.  I averred that that wouldn’t be such a good idea as I had my own life and she had her’s.  By this time the mother was going on about what her daughter really needed was a boyfriend.

Whoa.  Time out!  As I held up my left hand, prominently pointing to my wedding ring, I assured them that I was already happily married.  Moaned the daughter, “See, Mom, the good ones are always taken.” 

We couldn’t have arrived any sooner, to my way of reckoning, to a run-down looking house with a dead lawn and the front door hanging open.  As I helped the grandmother sort out her remaining bags of groceries from all my stuff in the trunk, she spotted my packages of napkins and paper plates.  Maybe I could help out a little more.  They could use some paper towels and things.  “Sure,” I said, handing them to her and trying not to sound too annoyed.  By this time I just wanted to get out of there before her daughter came back again.  And maybe I could help out a little with the electric bill.  “Why not,” I wearily responded.   By this time the twenty–dollar bill I’d gotten for the week had evaporated.

As I drove off, finally glad to be rid of this very needy group of people, a woman suddenly drove up in front of me and abruptly stopped her car.  It seems that she’d seen all that had gone on with us at the grocery store and had just wondered if I had gotten out of it without being mugged or anything.  I thanked her for her solicitousness, assuring her that I really, really hadn’t minded helping.

On my way home, I thanked my lucky stars that I had married someone who was so sensible, and not a complete and utter flake.

But as I got to thinking more and more about this out-of-the-blue mini-adventure, I was forced to acknowledge those times in my life that I have been just as flaky, just as desperate, just as needy – maybe in a different sort of way.   I began to reflect on how it is, ultimately, that we all come before God in not much better shape than this desperate and out-of-control young mother.  Being, more sophisticated, I’m just better at hiding it.  But, ultimately, you and I, we all come before God with very empty hands.  As the song says, we all arrive at the throne of heaven with a “broken alleluia.”

On Ash Wednesday, that is what we at the bottom of it all, are here to acknowledge – our absolute, and utter need for God.  That God-shaped hole in our lives, as Augustine calls it, that nothing, nothing but God can ultimately fill, though we so often attempt to fill it with all kinds of stuff or addictive behaviors.

We come to this rail in our common humanity, remembering that we are but dust, and to dust we do return.  There are no do-overs.  I, that young mother, her two kids and their grandmother, yes, poor and needy, we all come.  Lord, have mercy upon us all.  And we come hoping and trusting in our heart of hearts that there might be some saving mercy indeed, even for the likes of us.  Even for those desperate souls in Ukraine.  So begins our forty days wilderness journey of Lent. Amen.

March 2, 2022
Ash Wednesday

“Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 103:8-14; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

This Sunday we wind up the liturgical season of Epiphany.  Most of our readings have been about the revelation of the Holy in Christ and God’s presence as manifest in the Church – the Body of Christ (see the book of Acts).  Our readings reveal Jesus’ presence that turns daily living into the finest wine, and the calling of many to be part of a new faith journey that lives out the Gospel ethic of the Jesus Movement.

I thought I had this sermon well in hand when on Wednesday evening it was abruptly upended.  That’s what sometimes happens when the world’s agenda overtakes what one has written on paper, especially when events are of such enormity. 

On a personal level, as I contemplated all the dazzle and sparkle of the Transfiguration, I had to face it.  In light of the Russian invasion, the detonations and the air raid sirens going off in the background of news reports from Kiev, I’m not feeling much sparkle.  This invasion will be a complete and utter disaster for millions.

Putin has threatened to undo all the Post WW II security arrangements and national borders.  He trashes the international rule of law that has kept the peace in Europe for over seventy-five years. There will be millions of refugees flooding into the rest of Europe.  Hundreds of thousands will perish in Ukraine. 

The Russian invaders are already committing atrocities and war crimes in Odessa.  The invasion itself is a violation of the Geneva Convention, making Putin a war criminal. The economic costs are mounting, and soon will be staggering.  Only “shock and awe.”  No dazzle.  No sparkle.  Just grunge and devastation.

As one of my sons said on the morning of 9/11, “Dad, I don’t think we can let this one slide”.

Consequences for all will be enormous.  What will become of Ukraine?  Will Putin stop there?  Will sanctions make a whit of difference?  Or just amount to a petty annoyance.

We as Americans must gladly bear the costs of sanctions and must be resolute in using all the soft power at our command to bring Putin to the table.  We must bear in mind the alternative – a possible wider war throughout Europe with nukes.  And whatever happens in Europe won’t stay in Europe.

The efforts of peacemakers will be the radiant transfigured face of those who follow the Way.  And if it works, and let’s hope to God it does, my face will be a little brighter.  Meanwhile, our hearts and prayers, and all the aid we can muster, must be with the Ukrainian people and those brave Russians protesting this insanity.  The insanity of one man!

But for now, we’re betwixt and between.  I feel we’re somewhat like Peter in the Transfiguration story – gobsmacked.

In Luke’s telling, Jesus takes his followers Peter, James and John up on the high mountain of God’s revelation to pray.  Pray for what, they probably had no idea.

Jesus’ appearance is suddenly dazzling.  He shimmers and shines like that first star which led the Eastern Sages to Bethlehem.  It is indeed “Christ of the shining mountains, True and transfigured King.”  God speaks almost the same words which began Jesus’ ministry at baptism, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.”

And in the midst of it all are Elijah and Moses, talking to Jesus.  Elijah and Moses, harbingers of the Messianic Age.  When they appear, a new day is at hand.  Better than the Age of Aquarius.   Freedom and solidarity will reign in the land.

And poor Peter, he has no idea what to make of it all.  He, obviously,     skipped Bible class.  He is consumed by the experience.  He might as well be in paradise.  He doesn’t know what to say.  He’s like a little boy hauled in before the principal, afraid and stammering.”    Finally, he blurts out, “Wow, this is great.  Let’s make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Again, he has absolutely no idea what he is saying.

These are strictly Old Testament rumblings:  the mountain, the cloud, the voice, the light show, Moses and Elijah.  The glory of God is fully manifest in Jesus as culmination of deliverance and justice.

Elijah is the sign of God’s solidarity with us, the prophetic tradition of just dealings and God’s preferential option for the poor and defenseless.  When we see Elijah, the time of fulfillment is near and very near.

Moses is the figure of deliverance from all that binds and holds us down from the full stature God intends for men and women. 

It was not coincidence that those escaping the bondage of slavery referred to Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, as Moses. 

Time and again, despite the floggings and vicious dogs, she led hundreds to freedom up North.  Following the Drinking Gourd.  It was the North Star of that constellation which would lead them to freedom. She was one of the most successful conductors and best known on the Underground Railroad

Yes, go down Moses and lead us all to Freedom Land where all God’s children can sparkle.  Go down Moses

Jesus in this revelatory episode, is the embodiment of these two traditions.  God’s will that we all sparkle like bright shiny beads – that we and all who follow become the Transfigured Christ.  That’s the divine plan, told down through the ages in both Old and New Testaments.  

It is God’s will that we, the Church, reflect that same radiant face of Christ upon the Mount of Revelation.  God working through us to effect exactly the very same brilliance of Moses as he came down Mount Sinai.  As Jesus upon the mount.

And sometimes Transfiguration takes place in the most unlikely of persons.  Yeah, people like you and me.  People like Fannie Lou Hamer and those of Freedom Summer down in Mississippi in the sixties.

Several Sundays ago I briefly mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer.  She was a poor Mississippi sharecropper who, like Harriet Tubman, was also a conductor on the road to freedom as she led her people to the voting booth.  She stood powerfully in a prophetic tradition where all count.

Let me tell you how this impoverished woman, with no more than a sixth-grade education, showed up the hypocrisy of a president of the United States and the Democratic Party.  I don’t say she brought him low. President Johnson did that all by himself.  As did a cowardly convention.  That convention’s own racist behavior in expelling the Mississippi Freedom delegation was its own abject shame.

As King said, “It is always the right time to do the right thing.”  The power structure of the party failed.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegates, seeking to unseat the regulars on the floor of convention, maintained that they, an interracial delegation, under the provisions of the Constitution, had the right to those seats.

Johnson, and the Democratic establishment was worried that Fannie Lou and her rump group would alienate their White southern, segregationist voters. 

Party power brokers threatened, they tried to bribe, they promised all sorts of programs for Mississippi — if Fannie Lou and her people would just go back home, or at least accept a compromise. 

Hubert Humphrey, whose spot on the ticket as VP was contingent upon getting the MFDP group to accept a compromise, pleaded for her understanding on the floor of convention.  The compromise would be just two seats out of the sixty-eight allotted Mississippi.  And mind you, neither of those two could be Fannie Lou Hamer.  That was the deal, just two seats and no Fannie Lou Hamer.  Definitely, not THAT woman!

Fannie Lou was aglow with Gospel radiance, Christ-like radiance.  She was delivering her people into a new future.  Johnson and the Democratic Party had no comprehension of the force they faced.

Fannie Lou was proving to be a most righteous sword of justice that God was wielding through our segregationist laws and racist attitudes, both South and North.  Cutting a wide swath of Freedom.

She told Humphry that if this compromise was the price to be paid for getting all his promised benefits for Mississippi, that he, in the end, would get none of it.  The entire MFDP delegation backed her.

When Fannie Lou gave her testimony before the Credentials Committee, her story of what she had endured to be accorded the basic rights of a First-Class American, the right to register and vote – the beatings, the humiliation, the sexual molestation at the hands of deputies and police back home, Johnson realized he was losing the ballgame.

President Johnson called an impromptu press conference in the middle of her testimony.  And while the media attention swung to the White House for Johnson’s presser, which was a big “nothing burger.” Never even mentioned Humphrey, whom most thought would be introduced as his VP choice.

All the while, in Atlantic City, the TV cameras kept rolling.  Recording every bit of what Fannie Lou had to say on behalf of her delegation of sixty-eight.  Every word.  And the ovation which followed.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the room except for the “regulars,” who sat in stony-faced silence during her presentation.  Shaking their heads in disgust.

President Johnson thought he had averted a whole bunch of bad publicity.  He was wrong.  That evening the nightly news programs put out her witness before all of America.

But wait, it gets worse.

Every delegate of the Mississippi regulars, rather than even accepting this minimal compromise, walked out en masse and went home, leaving a block of seats on the floor cordoned off by ropes.

Many delegates, supportive of Fannie Lou and her group, gave floor passes to the Freedom Delegation which, the next morning went under the ropes and occupied that block of seats. 

The following day, the MFDP found that all those seats had been unbolted from the floor and taken away.  So, Fannie Lou and her group just sat on the floor — made Johnson and the party regulars look like the chumps they were.

Fannie Lou may have lost her battle for those seats.  But that evening on the six o’clock news, she overwhelmingly won the hearts of the American public.

Through it all, with her freedom songs, testimony, Bible references, and encouragement, she reflected back divine, Transfiguration.  Her face shone and glittered with Gospel goodness.  As did the faces of her delegation.  True and Transfigured!

Now this was a Glory Attack if ever there was one!

This story of Transfiguration was preserved not as just a weird, one-off miracle.  It is the destiny of God’s people.  Our destiny.  Yes, we, the Church.

Martin Luther King would berate the Church and its leadership for being the taillight of history.  We are meant to be the headlight.  A true and transfigured hundred-thousand-watt headlight.

 Fannie Lou and all who have followed in her footsteps, those murdered volunteers buried in Mississippi’s swamps and lagoons, they are the True and Transfigured image of Christ.  This is the glory God intends for us.  We have but a few days.  How shall we use them?  To what end?

In San Bernardino, West Virginia and Ohio, that is the destiny of the House of Hope.  A transfigured hundred-thousand-watt headlight.

I don’t know exactly what happened up on that mountain with those befuddled disciples.   I wasn’t there.  What sort of miracle or apparition they might have seen — I have no idea.

But I do know about the miracle of some transfigured souls who have come through the tribulation of addiction.  They are the living testimony to “once was blind but now I see.”  I have witnessed their sparkle and shine, eyes wide awake, as they delight in a new rebirth.   I have seen that miracle with my own eyes

They, through their recovery, are splinters of light off that same True and Transfigured Christ.  We, through our faithfulness, are Transfiguration.

This is the vision.  This is the journey’s end.  What we call sanctified. Now, as we prepare to enter our Lenten journey, let us keep our eyes on this Gospel prize.  And may we do all we can to support our sisters and brothers in Ukraine.  And pray for the antiwar marchers in Russia.    Blessed are the feet of those Messengers of Peace.  Amen

February 27, 2022, Epiphany – Last

Transfiguration Sunday

“Bright and Shiny Church”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36

In the days of another former president, I would some days wake up, and after listening to the morning news think, “I could do better than that.”  With some presidents, that was a more frequent thought than with others. 

Mumbling about idiotic decisions and crony appointments, my wife knew it was safer not to say anything.  Just let him rant and rave.  Even presidents I had voted for often disappointed.  How many times was I fuming over Obama’s boneheaded Middle East wars!  I was probably the best Monday Morning Quarterback any president could have ever had.

As President Biden frequently says, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty.  Compare me to the other guy” (or woman).  My standards were tough – except for myself.  We all disappoint.  I know I have.

Jeremiah offers wise counsel here:

“Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.  They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes.  They shall live in parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.  Blessed are those who trust in the Lord.  They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out roots by the stream.”

“Trust in the Lord” is not some empty phrase.  It means to heed the wisdom given to your heart and mind and soul.  Heed the wisdom that builds community and binds us together and to the earth.  Heed the wisdom that is tested by life experience and community reflection.  You can even find some in the Bible.

We are given this because God has implanted agency within us.  We can choose – for the better, and not the worse.  Choose LIFE.  That’s always the summons.  Choose LIFE. 

This trust is mentioned again in Psalm 1.  The people who trust in the Lord are those wise who do not run with the wrong crowd or sit in the seat of the scoffers.  The righteous, the tzaddikim, are in solidarity with neighbor and stranger, with creation – for solidarity is a better translation than “righteous.”  This is a woman, a man, you can count on.  These are people who know deep down they are loved and that same love just bubbles out of them.  They’re people you want to be around.  For lack of a better word, we call them saints.  But that is the vocation of each who is called to follow the Way.

Take up with those who have followed that path, like Bryan Stevenson and Fannie Lou Hamer.  They have been so tested and purified that they have become windows to God.  As they lived out this wisdom they draw others in.  Spirit just oozes out of them.  They are tokens of God’s solidarity with us.

Luke in the Beatitudes enumerates the qualities of the tzaddikim:

“Blessed are you…”   These blessings are about the so called “little people,” those without pretension. 

Then follow the “woes.”  Woe to you who are satiated with good things.  Woe to you who hoard up more than you know what to do with.  How is it that just three gazillionaires own more than half of all Americans?   When did “enough” become “filthy rich?”  Three people!   Life is not about “whoever dies with the most toys wins.”  Woe to the puffed up and self-important.  You will always be searching if this is where you’re looking.  Take the off-ramp.  Choose LIFE.

When I drove plastic bottles in a big rig at night down to the Coke bottling plant in Los Angeles, several of us would be lined up in the street waiting to be unloaded.  A Black fellow poorly dressed and quite odiferous would often approach our trucks looking for a handout.

After a few encounters, he would engage me in more extended conversation.  I didn’t want to just give him a dollar or two, as if I was some superior, benevolent person – which I wasn’t.  So,it came to be that I would carry some rags and chrome polish with me in the cab.  I’d tell him that If he polished the bumper or the chrome on the wheels, I’d be worth five dollars to me.

When I asked him his name all he’d tell me was that it was “Can Man.”  That’s all I ever got out of him.Obviously — that was what his shopping cart was full of, cans to be recycled for a little extra. 

Several others would offer to help, so each night I’d make sure I had some extra cash with me.  I figured that this small offering was the price of doing business in the big city.         My encounters with Can Man always made my day.  He was a blessing each night.  I prayed I might have been as well.

When my youngest son, living in Cairo, mentioned that he would feel badly, seeing all the beggars in the street or at the entrances to mosques or churches, I told him about my approach to the destitute in Los Angeles.

Just take some extra coins in your pocket, each large enough that a person might use it to get something to eat from a street vendor.  And when they’re gone, they’re gone.  Whatever you can afford to part with.

Just remember, even Jesus didn’t feed everyone, didn’t heal everyone.  And you ain’t in his class.

What counts is that everyone counts.  What counts is that out of the abundance of our lives, we share what we can.  And a bit more.  Without  judgment.  Without expectation.

The Beatitudes are not a new law, not a way of earning divine favor.  Rather, they serve as a direction as to where life is to be found. It’s about “seek and ye shall find” – more abundance than you ever counted on.”   It is more about the sentiment of the heart than any notion of perfection or earning one’s heavenly brownie points.  That’s already been taken care of when the Spirit touched mind and heart.

Blessed is not the same as “happy.”   “Happy” is a transient superficial emotion.  One can get “happy” from a bottle of Jim Beam.

To be BLESSED is to be grounded deep down in God’s goodness.  It’s to be so grounded that goodness spills out of you and overflows into all you do, all that you are.  BLESSED doesn’t depend on the approval of others.  BLESSED just IS.

Bryan Stevenson’s mother lived the beatitude of reconciliation. 

Blessedness restores broken relationships and enables life to go on.  Bryan Stevenson tells of a lesson in saying you’re sorry his mother taught him that has stuck with him over the years.  Sometimes the most embarrassing lessons are the ones that stick.

Blessed are those who say they’re sorry.  Blessed are those who go the extra mile, those who seek to understand with the heart. 

Bryan Stevenson’s mother is one tough lady, the sort of disciple Jesus needs.  You have to be tough sometimes to be a parent these days.  She, and any parent on God’s green earth knows, parenting is tough stuff – not at all for sissies or the unformed.  There’s a reason sixteen-year-olds shouldn’t be having children.

For those who don’t know Bryan Stevenson, he is the Black lawyer who works on death penalty cases for indigent inmates awaiting execution in Montgomery, Alabama.  As he listened to one inmate about to be led into the execution chamber who was having great difficulty in talking with Brian due to a severe stutter, Bryan had a flashback to an old memory from his childhood. 

Bryan and some of his friends had been making fun of another boy with a speech impediment.  As Bryan and his friends were laughing at this boy, he saw his mother looking at him with an expression he’d never seen before.  Bryan continues his story in his book, Just Mercy:

It was a mix of horror, anger, and shame, all focused on me.  I stopped my laughing instantly.  I’d always felt adored by my mom, so I was unnerved when she called me over.

When I got to her, she was very angry with me.  “What are you doing?”

“What? I didn’t do…”

“Don’t you ever laugh at someone because they can’t get their words out right.  Don’t you ever do that!”

“I’m sorry.”  I was devastated to be reprimanded by my mom so harshly.  “Mom, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”

“You should know better, Bryan.”

“I’m sorry. I thought…”

“I don’t want to hear it, Bryan.  There is no excuse, and I’m very disappointed in you.  Now, I want you to go back over there and tell that little boy that you’re sorry.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Then I want you to give that little boy a hug.”

“Huh?”

“Then I want you to tell him that you love him.”  I looked up at her and, to my horror, saw that she was dead serious.  I had reacted as apologetically as I possibly could, but this was way too much.

“Mom, I can’t go over and tell that boy I love him.  People will—”

She gave me that look again.  I somberly turned around and returned to my group of friends.  They had obviously seen my mother’s scolding; I could tell because they were all staring at me.  I went up to the little boy who had struggled to speak.

“Look, man, I’m sorry.”

I was genuinely apologetic for laughing and even more deeply regretful of the situation I had put myself in.  I looked over at my mother who was still staring at me.  I lunged at the boy to give him a very awkward hug.  I think I startled him by grabbing him like that, but when he realized that I was trying to hug him, his body relaxed and he hugged me back.

My friends looked at me oddly as I spoke.

“Uh…also, uh…I love you!”  I tried to say it as insincerely as I could get away with and half-smiled as I spoke.  I was still hugging the boy, so he couldn’t see the disingenuous look on my youthful face.

It made me feel less weird to smile like it was a joke.  But then the boy hugged me tighter and whispered in my ear.  He spoke flawlessly, without a stutter and without hesitation.

“I love you, too.”  There was such tenderness and earnestness in his voice, and just like that, I thought I would start crying.[1]

That day Bryan learned compassion.  Now, that’s a BLESSED moment!

Out of the tough love of such a Gospel-Soaked mother, Bryan grew to be the man he is today.  She was a living, breathing Beatitude.  Through her persistence of, Jesus would raise up a man who would end up devoting his life to serving the most despised and discarded.  Those of you who are mothers know exactly what I am talking about.

This godly wisdom is the door to all that is holy, all that is true, all that is just.  It is the open door to an abundant life. Trust this, and you will have put your hand in the hand of the Man from Galilee, The Man who stills the rough waters of life.  What a Friend you will have – trust in him.  This, my friends, is BLESSED. Amen.

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[1] Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, (New York, NY, Random House, 2000), p. 286,287.

February 13, 2022, Epiphany 6

“Blessed Are…”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20;
Luke 6:17-26

Every spring our little church in Petersburg would host what was called “Soup and Sandwiches.”  This was an opportunity for cannery workers who lived in what was known as “Tent City” an opportunity for a good meal and fellowship.  Most of the churches in town participated.

And many years there was the discussion around the question, “Why should we always do this?” 

One year I distinctly remember the answer of our junior warden, “Well, isn’t this what Jesus would want us to do?”

The quick rejoinder, “Is he going to pay for it?”

I’m thinking, pay what?  We’re out a bit of electricity and heating oil.  No big deal.  Then the answer came to me. 

“Yes, he’s going to pay for it.  Jesus is going to use my wallet and any other wallet and checkbook here that’s been through the waters of baptism and he’s going to foot the bill.”  And, again that year, he more than paid for it.  In abundance.

That’s because “Abundance” is the hallmark of his ministry.  Not scarcity.  Jesus came to announce God’s Abundance.  This guy EXCEEDS ALL EXPECTATIONS.

Exactly the abundance that issued from the call of Isaiah.  As the temple filled with smoke and supernal visages soared through the chaos, Isaiah trembled in fear.  A cosmic extravaganza worthy of a Superbowl halftime.  He was not up to whatever was going on.  This was time for a 911 call into Ghostbusters.  The space-time continuum was coming unstuck.  Seraphs and whole host of God-knows-what-else materialized out of the noxious cloud.

Throughout it all reverberated the earsplitting, “Holy, holy, holy,” of the phantasmagoric scene.  Mega boom-box sound turned to the max.

“And I said: ‘Woe is me!  I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts!”

Actually, that’s probably not what he really said.  It was more like, “HOLY CRAP!”  AM I SCREWED!!!  WE’RE ALL SCREWED.

 Yes, we all are.  Terminally, abysmally ignorant of what makes for any kind of life, any kind of society.  We’re in deep stuff.

“Then I heard a voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’  And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’”

Now, I don’t know about the physicality of that vision, if this stuff really, really happened, the temple being filled with a Fourth of July fireworks production; or if what had transpired was solely between Isaiah’s two ears.  But whatever it was, God had Isaiah’s complete and undivided attention.

It was either respond or just give up – lie down and die – a do-or-not-do moment. 

In all the smoke and din Isaiah had a choice.  And don’t we all?

Isaiah chose LIFE and ABUNDANCE – a more excellent way.  He chose to be a servant of that Word given him.  His answer to that call would exceed all expectations.  That’s always God’s call to each of us.  And in our acceptance, might we catch a faint echo of that haunting refrain, “Holy, holy, holy.”

In an instant, not only Isaiah’s wallet, but his entire life was baptized in that fire and smoke.  Imagine!   And all this time I thought it was about the car, the chicks and the loudest boom box on the stereo system.  Was I ever out to lunch!  Clueless.

I don’t know about an unclean people, but in the midst of this raging pandemic we’re surely reading about a whole bunch of deluded, thoughtless people.  As our football season draws to a close, several teams are headed for the playoffs and it’s all on the line.   How many fans will be crowded together cheek by jowl without any masks?  We may or may not be a people of unclean lips, but certainly a people of little sense.  It’s into this imbecility God’s call comes.  That’s how it found each of us.  Not always in our brightest moments.

For all who answer, God’s will is to exceed our expectations.  Those who answer are called from the kitchen, from cotton fields, university classrooms.  They are called from long lines of preachers.  They are called from mind-numbing work in Amazon fulfillment centers and post offices.  Called from union halls and corporate executive suites, or off the factory floor.  Called to exceed all expectations. 

I caught the vision at a speech by Dr. King.  We are all here because of some event, some vision, some nudge.  My Methodist friends call this prevenient grace – grace that goes before us, directing us to where Life is to be had.

One of my Pilgrim Place friends posted the story of the fortuitous intersection between one of God’s servants, Martin Luther King, Jr. and a young boy.

This was an eleven-year-old white boy living in the black section of Kentucky, living for the fall of 1969 with his mom, both guests of Dr. Abbie Clement Jackson, his mom’s best friend and a national leader in the AME Zion Church.  Abbie became over that fall his adopted grandma.  David Russell, a relative of one of the Pilgrims here at Pilgrim Place, shares his remembrance of the in-the-flesh Good News of healing and restoration:[1]

“One Saturday morning, Grandma Abbie asked me to wait by the front door to greet her ‘escort’ and let her know he was here to walk her down to the AME church conference where Grandma was the keynote speaker that day. Her ‘escort’ was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was already becoming well known and I was excited!

“Later that afternoon, King, Jr. and [the boy’s] parents came back to the house for tea, coffee, treats and conversation with Grandma, Mom and me. At one point, Martin Luther King Jr. turned to me and asked: “David what is it like being the only white boy in an all-Negro school?” I thought for a moment about my friends Cecil and Ellis, my Scout troop, my church and I said… “It’s normal”.

“The ‘Beloved Community’ begins when we can feel comfortable in our own skins and respect the skin of the person next to us. When we look into each other’s eyes and begin to see a Child of God, then being together in community begins to be ‘normal.’”  

This was a journey that summer exceeding all expectations.

The vision of what might be, what ought to be, came to Fanny Lou Hamer, a little girl with no more than a sixth-grade education who toiled in the cotton fields of Mississippi to help support her impoverished family. 

Fannie Lou was raised up to be one of the most powerful women in the civil rights movement of the sixties, a giant for justice.

Kate Larson, in her new biography of Fannie Lou, Walk with Me[2], brings this amazing woman’s story to life.  Fannie’s moment comes as a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Freedom Delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964.  They were demanding to be seated in place of the all-white segregationist, official slate of delegates, from that state.

Here’s Fannie’s story as told by her biographer:

“She wore a borrowed dress, one suitable for such an important occasion.  A Mississippi sharecropper, she never had new things.  Used, reused, patched, and patched again—these defined the fabric of her everyday experience.  Someone loaned her white shoes and a white purse, too.  From her seat at the table at the front of a packed hearing room, she scanned the faces of the men and women waiting to hear her testimony.  The din of the conversations and rustling papers and creaking chairs muffled the notice of whirring television cameras.  She folded her hands to steady herself.  A man to her right gave her the cue to start.

“’Mr. Chairman, and to the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland and Senator Stennis.  It was the thirty-first of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens.’  Her white landlord, she said, evicted her when she returned home that night from Indianola because he told her, ‘We are not ready for that in Mississippi.’”

Fannie Lou and more than sixty other Mississippians had gone to Atlantic City, site of the convention, to press their case to unseat the white segregationist delegation.

“It was late in the afternoon and the summer humidity seeped into the crowded room.  Hamer’s brown skin glistened with sweat.  The committee members shifted and settled in their seats, and the chatter in the room subsided into a few whispers.  The white Mississippi delegates shook their heads to disgust while she spoke.  Without notes, from memory, from her heart, Hamer recounted the struggles, terror, and violence she had endured trying to do the most basic thing a citizen of any county can do:  register to vote.

“Her Mississippi drawl ebbed and flowed through her words, giving them a cadence that drew the audience in.  She described the death threats and gunshots that had rewarded her demands for civil rights.  The room grew quiet.  When she recounted how brutally the police had beaten her one day for standing up, eyes welled with tears.

“Her eight-minute plea ended with a question that haunted many for years afterward. ‘Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?’

President Johnson, fearing he might lose that white segregationist vote, fearing the attention Fannie’s address to the convention was getting, to distract the national attention, called an impromptu press conference.   A conference called on the spot, right in the middle of Fannie’s address, succeeded in capturing the media for three and a half minutes.

“Johnson miscalculated, however.  The television cameras had kept rolling through her speech, capturing her every word, and the evening news programs replayed her testimony and the ovation that followed.  The whole nation watched as a dirt-poor Mississippi sharecropper with a sixth-grade education shamed them into acknowledging how deeply and profoundly broken American democracy had become.  That day, Fannie Lou Hamer called on Americans to walk with her toward equality and justice for all.[3]

Certainly exceeded President Johnson’s expectations.

This, a Gospel Journey that has exceeded all expectations.  And there are still miles to go.  This work is not done.  And so it is with us here at St. Francis.

As with the call of Isaiah, as with the summons of Jesus that morning to those on a fishing excursion.  Fished all night caught nary a minnow.  Jesus instructed them, instructs us, to keep at it.  Lower your nets a little deeper.  That’s what Jesus tells his disciples.  “Lower your nets a bit deeper.” God alone knows what’s in the offing.  Who knows what that effort will surface?  Just might be beyond our puny expectations.

This morning each of us might have been in a dozen other places.  But we’ve chosen to be here.  Let’s hope and pray and see what God might do with us.  The results just might astound.  Exceed all expectations.  So, here we are, O Lord.  Here we are.  Send us.  Amen

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[1] David, Russell, “Little Blessings,” Shared by sister-in-law Marry Russell in the  Pilgrim Place Google Group (with permission) January 17, 2022.

[2] Kate Clifford Larson, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

[3] Op. cit., 1-2.

February 6, 2022, Epiphany 5

“Exceeds All Expectations”

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13); Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11;
Luke 5:1-11