“In our Custody, In our Care.”  That’s the motto of the Minneapolis Police Department.

This last week the jury that had convicted Derick Chauvin of murder assembled with the media for the first time since that fateful trial.  Seven of the eight met for an interview with the host of CNN’s Don Lemon Tonight.

Several jurors reported a moment of epiphany, when it dawned on them that something was missing.  Some critical act missing that was triggered by the motto of the Minneapolis Police Department – “In our Custody, in our Care.” 

The forewoman explained:     “At some point, I think it was Jodi, I’m pretty sure it was Jodi said, ‘Wait a minute, does the intended act of harm have to be the death of George Floyd, or can it be him not providing the life support?’ And it was like all of a sudden the light bulbs just went on for those people that I think were undecided or on the not guilty side.”[1]

As Jodi said, for her the defining moment of that incident is not what the officer did.  It’s what the officer failed to do.  That, for her, proved intent.

As another juror added, “George Floyd was in their custody. He was never in their care.”  That was the assessment of juror Sherri Hardeman.

Thus came the first ever guilty verdict for a white officer for killing a black man — “Never in their Care.”

Yet, CARE was not derelict.  Never absent at that scene.  A young woman who gave a care steadfastly kept her camera rolling as those fateful eight minutes, forty-six seconds ticked by.

And millions of Americans gave a CARE as in outrage they took to the streets to protest the indignity shown George Floyd.  Unfortunately, our congress has yet to muster up the courage to show the same spine, the same CARE as that young bystander.

As we celebrate the Saints of God, I am coming to believe that it’s all about CARE.  They are the ones who simply give a CARE.

That’s the entire story of the resurrecting of Lazarus.  Jesus is the cosmic embodiment of CARE.  As, might any suffering loss, suffering the sting of death of a dear friend, Jesus wept at the news of his friend.  He and the entire village, had unabashedly joined Mary and Martha in mourning the loss of their brother Lazarus.  Here we find the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”  Those two words encompass the entire mercy of God.

We are drawn to a God who promises to wipe away our tears when in a season of weeping.  A promise of comfort, of CARE.

We have lost several dear ones at St. Francis in this past season of weeping:  Our sisters Alicia, Stephanie and Diane.  Our brothers Fred and Oliver.  Numbered among the Saints of God to be sure.  In their own inimitable ways, they gave a CARE for us all and for the Church of Christ.

But, more than that, we worship a God who summons us back to life. Just as did those millions of marchers who filled our streets after the death of George Floyd.  Black, white – all ethnicities – rich and poor – urban rural.  All of them calling America back to its founding principal motto:  E Pluribus Unum – Out of Many, One.  Calling this nation back to life.

That trembling young woman with a cell phone, steadfast, she is one of the Saints of God.  She would have never claimed to be anyone special, would never have claimed any special notoriety.  She just followed the instincts of the Spirit-implanted humanity in her soul.  She simply did her duty as a fellow human being, a Saint to be sure!  Calling us to witness.  To life.

Yes, as the hymn proclaims, “You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea, in church or in trains, or in shops or at tea…”[2]  A saint has that force within to kindle the life quality where it was not.

Sometimes it’s by raising a ruckus, like those who steadfastly protest the indignities heaped upon the “least of these.”  They are about “trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”  As we move through the process of “sausage making” in congress, the Saints of God are on the alert for indignity heaping.  Senator Patty Murray is one, an exemplar of that necessary trouble when she calls out “one seventy-four-year-old man” who would deny paid leave to women having to tend to a sick child or care for an elderly mother.

Senator Patty Murray was in high dudgeon on Thursday:  “We’re not going to let one man tell all the women in this country that they can’t have paid leave,”[3]

The outrage didn’t stop there.  Remember the bit about “a woman scorned” and Hell’s fury. 

“I think it’s horrific that one white man can make this decision,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All. “But I think it’s also a failure of our entire government…And this could have been a cornerstone program that would have helped every working family in this country. And we’ve squandered that opportunity.”[4]  Shame.  Shame on us.

Legislating, that so-called sausage making, is not a pretty process.  Much sturm und drang.  Especially when it’s the little people, the “least of these” getting ground up in the process.  Ground up and discarded.

To no one’s surprise, the folks with the most means don’t usually get pulverized in this messy process.  In the midst of the offal and slime on the floor, God’s Saints call out privilege when they see it, when they smell it.  The Saints of God continue to call America to values imbued in its founding documents, foundational tracts and essays. 

Yes, Frederick Douglas, I’m thinking about you.[5]  I’m thinking about those stirring words in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.  I’m thinking about Jane Addams at Hull House and Susan B. Anthony.  I’m thinking about a good friend and fellow marcher, Rabbi Leonard Beerman.  A companion on the journey who always asserted, “My marching feet are my prayers.”  Mine too.  All Saints of God who have mentored our democracy through its fitful journey to the present day.  Raised us back to life.

I’m thinking of those intrepid guides who followed the “Drinking Gourd,” leading the enslaved to freedom up north.  I’m thinking about Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman – all the anonymous conductors, Black and White, on that most blessed Underground Railroad to freedom.  All following a bright North Star — leading America to a brighter destiny.  These are the incandescent Saints of God I celebrate today.  Holding the “least of these” in tender care.

Yes, you can meet them on trains, but also in demonstrations, at the workplace and in the Halls of Congress. You find them on the internet, lobbying for a just politics. You can find them in our Pilgrim Place dining hall, writing letters on behalf of those imprisoned and tortured for protesting tyranny and dictatorship. Yes, I’m thinking of you who monthly write those letters on behalf of Amnesty International. Right here in Pilgrim Place, in our churches and around the world. You have a CARE for the most despised and forgotten. Saints, to be sure.

One more thing.  In researching the turmoil around the Build Back Better Bill and paid family leave, I came across an outfit of insurance brokers serving the Black community.  This business was created because many national companies, due to “red-lining,” had refused to issue policies in minority or poor neighborhoods.

Wealth & Equity, a non-profit, was “created to unite the insurance industry on a mission to educate, underwrite, and empower the Black community by leveraging life insurance and enhancing financial education, while also helping Black agents and agencies reach their highest level of career success.”[6]

These people looked around and noticed that most insurance companies thought communities of color and low-income neighborhoods were not worthy of their effort.  This discrimination led some righteous souls early on to enter that market.  As a result, the nonprofit, Wealth & Equity, was given birth as a Black owned enterprise.  They gave a CARE.  And still do.

If ever business folks could make it into the pantheon of Saints, these self-help, non-profit folks are Saints of God!  They’re all about respect and empowerment.

Yes, saints galore.  Closer to home, so close — saints who abound.

These are the husbands and wives, who over the years have gone the extra mile with tokens of love and affection.  Flowers for no special day.  A favorite breakfast.  A spontaneous day in the park together.  Even through kiss-and-make-up arguments.  Sometimes it’s loved ones who forgive the unforgiveable.  Cherished quiet time they allow one another.  It’s how they’ve made allowances for each other, cut one another some slack.  It’s those joyous moments of celebration like the discovery that a new baby might be on the way.  It’s shared moments of sorrow too deep for words.  They do the necessary chores to keep things going, day in and day out, without complaint.  Saints to be sure!  Folks who daily give a CARE.

Saints are those who’ve kept up long-term friendships that have weathered misunderstandings and absences.  Friendships that year after year spring up, even after the years and months have flown by, as if not a day had been missed.  Folks who will always have your back.  The ones who bring out the best in you, expect the best from you and are willing to believe the best about you.  People who hold you in prayer and tender thoughts.  Precious, indeed, in the sight of the Lord.  Saints to be sure.

The Saints of God – “They lived not only in ages past, there are hundreds of thousands still, the world is bright with the joyous saints who love to do Jesus’ will.”  The Saints be Praised, AND May I be one too.   Amen.

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[1] Nick Paschal, “Jurors Reveal it was Something Derek Chauvin didn’t do that Convinced Them all to Vote Guilty,” Yahoo Entertainment, October 29, 2021.

[2] Lesbia Scott, The Church Hymnal, #293, Church Pension Fund, 1985.

[3] Chris Cillizza, “This Democratic Senator is Irate at Joe Manchin,” CNN State of the Union, October 28, 2021.

[4] Quoted in unsigned op. ed., Wealth & Equity, October 28, 2021.

[5] Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”  Speech given to Independence Day celebration for the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, July 5, 1852.

[6] Wealth & Equity, “Who are We,” https://wealthandequity.org/.

St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

                                              Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

        All Saints Sunday
 

       “In our Custody, In our Care”

                              Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9; Psalm 24;
                                     Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

I remember driving from Ridgecrest out through the desert to our church in Randsburg, just off Highway 395.

It was not an infrequent sight to see in the distance a group of buzzards circling over what I presumed to be their lunch,  As I got closer, I could see them fighting over the scraps of Br’er Rabbit, or whatever was left of some unfortunate road kill.  These buzzards were a tenacious lot.  It wouldn’t be until the last moment when I was about to run over the lot of them, that they would hop away or take to the air.

From time immemorial, these scavengers have been a warning to desert travelers that this forbidding terrain could be deadly to the lost and unprepared.  Fatal to those who scoff at the precautions of survival.  Or just the plain stupid. Yeah, what you don’t know can easily kill you out there.  With temperatures of one hundred twelve and higher, one does not last long without water and shade.  Besides the heat, hazards lurk under rocks. Unseen mine shafts await the unwary.  That circling group of birds is your stark warning.  You may end up dinner, with a few scraps left over for their breakfast in the morning.

Those circling birds are indeed a timely warning for the desert traveler.  Every bit as sharp and urgent as Amos’s prophecy to the nation Israel.  And now, to the nation America.

The purpose for this is exactly the same as that warning from your mother about the hot stove or the rushing traffic on a busy street.  It’s the skull and cross bones on that little green bottle in the back of the kitchen cabinet.  Its purpose is that you might “live long and prosper.”  That you might not be removed from the gene pool at a tender young age.  Or at any age.

For his nation, Amos’s warning was so that its people might keep and enjoy the freedom won by God when they had crossed the Red Sea before Pharoah’s horses and chariots.  Exodus was Freedom.  It would be hard to keep.

No nation can sustain itself for long when it is riddled by corruption and fraud.  More on that later.  Corruption has set in, so this is the law suit that God has brought against the nation of Israel.  Court is called to order at the city gate, the seat of judgement.  God is present to hear the case and pronounce judgement.

Here’s the opening summons:

“Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire…Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground…

Now come the particulars of God’s indictment against the House of Israel:

“They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth (read, “but we have Alternative Facts”).  Therefore, because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain …you take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate.”

Finally, the summation and judgement:

“Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said.  Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of the people.”

It may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to a righteous remnant – that’s the earnest and desired purpose.  Blessedness and Righteousness will kiss each other in your dealings — that’s the intent.

The purpose of it all is an amendment of one’s ways.  Repent, which simply means to turn around and head in a new direction – a saving direction, the direction of national solidarity and wholeness.

God doesn’t want that we should feel sad or guilty; the purpose here is that we should thrive.  It is that the nation should be a realm of justice and equity so that we dwell in peace with one another, and the sojourner who also lives in the land. 

This is a warning about the path you are on which is leading to ruin and destruction. 

Apart from God’s corrective word, our hearts are idol factories.  How quickly we lose the purpose of it all.  The prophets, running all the way from Moses to Zechariah to Jesus and to Dr. Martin Luther King are the corrective to our self-serving, destructive rationalizations.

Under the category of self-serving revelations: Jai came across televangelist Kenneth Copeland, who told his congregation that airline vaccine mandates were “the mark of the Beast,” and another reason why they should buy him a private Jet.

No, pastor.  God doesn’t want you to have a jet and lots of bling.  God wants you to be a decent human being and faithful to the gospel you pledged allegiance to upon your ordination.  God wants you to be an upright citizen in the land.

Perhaps a more contemporary warning and revelation has come from one of our conservative columnists, Robert Kagen — not an alarmist, but a deeply ethical foreign policy analyst who served in the U.S. State Department in the 80’s.

He sounds a warning to us Americans that our democracy is on the brink.  “The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance of over the next three to four years on incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves”

The warning signs are obscured by the theatrics of Trump and his supporters, the January 6^th insurrection, the pandemic, the economic malaise and flat-out “wishful thinking.”  But the evidence is right out in the open.  In front of God and everyone.

Bogus charges of election fraud only serve to diminish our faith in constitutional order.  Even in California, one of the leading candidates to replace Governor Gavin Newsom in our recent recall election, began claiming that the election was rigged before a single vote was in.

Election laws are being perpetrated across over a dozen states that would limit the franchise, reinforce gerrymandered districts and permit legislatures in Red states to overturn the results of any election they don’t like.  No matter what a secretary of state has certified.  “We just don’t like your electors.  Take ours!”

A local, John Eastman, a product of our very own Claremont McKenna College…that’s right, our own home-grown, a Claremont educated seditionist, provided Trump with the road map necessary to overturn the 2020 election.[1]

This is how it was to work.  I know, it’s “in the weeds.”  But this is how democracies die. 

Trump gets enough states like Arizona and others to have their Republican legislators submit alternative slates of electors – alternative to those previously certified by their secretaries of state.  All V.P. Pence needed to do was to void both slates of electors from those states, then declare that because were not enough valid electors for either candidate, and throw election into the House of Representatives.  There the number of small, sparsely populated red states would overwhelm the rest, and then declare Trump re-elected.  Warm up the Marine Corps Band for one more chorus of “Hail to the Chief.”

More realistic and far more dangerous than the delusional fantasies of Mr. Pillow Guy.  This week I came across the headline from Salon, the internet magazine: “Mike Lindell’s new genius plan: Knock on your door and ask whether you’re dead. The pillow maven’s last-ditch effort centers around sending out canvassers to neighborhoods across the nation.”[2] 

Maybe on Halloween such a canvasser might get a “yes” to that inquiry.  

When fraud and lies and fantasy prevail, no nation can long endure.  “Stop the Steal” and insurrection are dead ends for the promise of America.

Kagan, in preface to his essay quotes James Madison, author of much of our Constitution: “Is there no virtue among us?  If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”

Whether it be bribery, theft, cronyism, nepotism, or just plain idiocy…a nation governed on such a foundation cannot long endure.  That was the judgment of the prophets.  That was the judgement of earliest Americans who founded the Iroquois Confederacy, and those who met at Independence Hall in 1776.  That is the lesson of all nations down through history.

What can we then do?  We are not helpless.  We have a sacred right and responsibility.  We the moral obligation of agency as citizens in this republic.  An obligation that goes far beyond simply voting every two or four years.

Become informed and involved.  Yeah, newspapers are sometimes boring.  Books are long and definitely more difficult than Facebook or Snapchat.  If we want our children and grandchildren to have a chance at a decent life in a free society, it will take a bit of effort.  Actually, a lot of effort.

This is not the of heroics as storming the beaches of Normandy or conducting undercover operations behind enemy lines.  Won’t get you a Presidential Medal of Freedom or your name on that marble wall at the CIA headquarters.  But it just might help us keep our democracy.

To raise these issues might be unpopular in some circles.  But all it takes for tyranny to overtake us is for good men and women to say nothing, do nothing.  Just keep quiet.

It maybe it is you who is appointed as the Paul Revere of this moment.  You may be the one to trip the alarm.  Wake us up to the fire on our doorstep.  Or just urge your neighbor to vote.

Everyday in our morning news, faithful reporters and newscasters inform us of the rot in the Ship of State.  The timbers are compromised.  Wood borers have eaten through much of the structure.  The sails mildew.  The malnourished crew is exhausted.  The ship is adrift.  David Brooks, Robert Kagin and others are sounding the alarm.  Just as Amos did for his nation.

DO NOT DESPAIR.  Warnings are given that we might right the ship before it’s swamped.  Before malefactors have scuttled it. 

Warnings are given that all might enjoy “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Their aim is that we all might live in peace, each secure in their own home, under their own fig tree. 

Choose the better way and prosper.  To flourish is the will of God, in harmony with all others and all living things on this “earth, our island home.”

“Seek good and not evil, that you may live…”

There are critical steps we can take now to preserve the inheritance of this land.  Before it looks like Putin’s Russia, Kim Jong-un’s North Korea.

Push for the inclusion of all. Conservative and former Republican, David Brooks, a guiding light on the communal ethic necessary for our survival as a democracy, now urges not 3.5 trillion, but — GET THIS – 4 TRILLION in the Build Back Better legislation presently mired in congressional deadlock.  This from our conservative friend!  Why?

Like Amos and the 8^th century Prophets, David Brooks knows that no country, no economy is sustainable if over half the people are left out.  Left in hopeless destitution.  And that’s how they feel.  Jessie Jackson is right in his summons, “Keep HOPE alive.”

These people need a real champion, not a fraud who mainly cares only about himself and is too busy with mass rallies of adulation.  That was Mussolini and Papa Doc in Haiti.  That’s the old “bread and circuses” ploy of dictators.

“Seek good and not evil, that you may live…”  That’s active citizenship.

Do your bit to help on election day.  I never had so much satisfaction as when driving those without transportation to the polls.  Join a service club.  Subscribe to a local paper.  Support a philanthropic organization.  Maybe all you can do is send in a few dollars a month to a charity.  Remember, it’s not just you.  The money of us all adds up.  Support your local school board.  Many board members and teachers are presently under vicious attack.

You have opportunities at your disposal Amos did not have.  This is how we create the beloved community.  These are the building blocks of the New Jerusalem, the New San Bernardino, the New Highland, the New Claremont, the New West Virginia.

Truth is the cornerstone.  Love is the password.  Open are the city’s Gates of Justice.  It is all meant to be glorious in the Lord’s sight.

None of this work is glamorous.  Face it, meetings can be flat-out boring.  But this IS the work of DEMOCRACY.  It’s what you signed up for when you first put your hand over your heart in the third grade and learned the Pledge of Allegiance.  It’s what you signed up for when you were first allowed to hold your very own sparkler on a magical Fourth of July night.  It’s what you signed up for when you entered the voting booth that first time.

“Seek good and not evil, that you may live…”  Amen.

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[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066248-eastman-memo.

[2] Zachary Petrizzo, “Mike Lindell’s Genius Plan: Knock On Your Door and Ask Whether You’re Dead,” Salon, October 5, 2021.

                                     St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

       Pentecost 19, October 10, 2021
  Proper 23

        “Some Fundamental Respect Needed Now”

                                Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Psalm 90:12-17;
                                     Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

In one of Martin Luther King’s most poignant writings, written from a city jail in 1963, Dr., King spoke of our common fate in America.  We are one people tied up in a bond of interconnectedness.

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” [1]

This sage warning is no more apropos of our survival than today, when we consider our society’s response to COVID-19 and a myriad of other present challenges.  It is most relevant to our texts from Genesis and Mark considering marriage.  And…wait…wait for this….it ties into our celebration of St. Francis and our patronal feast day this Sunday.

First, on marriage and this rolling pandemic.

St Francis is the saint of interrelatedness.  He believed that all creation is a seamless work of mutuality.  All – humans, plants – even the sun and the moon – the physicality of it all, living and non-living.  And this is indeed true because in the end, you see, we are all stardust.  Precious in the being of God, stardust.

For most of us, in this mortal life, our family is the most immediate expression of the reality of our mutuality.  Marriage is the sacrament of transforming mutuality.  Somewhere, theologian and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor said marriage is our “one opportunity to grow up.”

“But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.  For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh’ So they are no longer two.  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Down through the ages peoples of all faiths have been very wary of infringing on this relationship between man and woman.  It is most precious and holy – except when it hasn’t been.  Since the days of slavery, families were torn asunder on the auction block with no regard to the sanctity of the marriage vows.  Just as they were most recently at our southern border.  All justified and excused by the supporters of our previous president and his party of so-called Family Values.  Heart-wrenching, the scenes were.

As our knowledge of human relationships and genetics has grown, society now can acknowledge that Ed and Steve can live in the same bond of wedded bliss as John and Alice, or Jane and Joan.  And do raise well-adjusted and successful children.  The point is – it is through the intimate mutuality of the family that most of us will find our greatest satisfaction and love in life.

I had a cynical high school teacher whose take on marriage equality was, “why shouldn’t they suffer just like the rest of us?”  Now it might have been that Mr. Coulson’s relationship could have used a touch of family counseling.

Given that some of us come out of damaged and damaging family relationships, the ideal doesn’t always work out.  Sometimes addiction and mental illness are challenges too big to overcome.  Sadly, divorce is the better option.

For some, especially as we grow older, deep and abiding friendships provide that love and support.  As especially for the aging who may have earlier lost life partners.

Growing up in Signal Hill we had neighbors who had know my family for years.  The wife had actually been the baby sitter for my brother and me when she was a teenager.  When they moved down to the ocean, one of their sons and his partner moved in to the house.  My father, especially, was intolerant of what he called their “lifestyle.”  He wouldn’t have anything to do with them and called them names you’d have gotten thrown out of school for using.

But over the years, a good number of years, Dad mellowed.  He grew beyond his West Virginia provincialism and prejudice – actually, ignorance.  Eventually, they were just Fred and George.  Two wonderful neighbors who helped him with some of his chores as he grew less able to do for himself.  And after Mom died, they became close companions.

That is the sort of “web of mutuality” of which Dr. King speaks — the interconnectedness of creation of which our beloved St. Francis lived.

Secondly, we also form those bonds with our non-human companions.  I still miss having our son’s two cats that lived with us for well over a year while he was in Spain and Morocco working on his dissertation – yeah, he’s still working on it!  I keep telling him, as in the old Grey Poupon mustard TV commercial, “While we’re young, Christopher, while we’re young.” 

But back to these cats — It would only be seconds after I got back home that they’d be curled up on the sofa with me watching the news.  Brian and Larry, I was so glad to see them when we went back to New Haven to visit.  It’s like we hadn’t missed each other a day as Brian curled up in my lap.

This past week we lost another beloved sister at St. Francis.  Covid and pneumonia took Diane from us, even though she had had her “jab.”  Departed, but still living on in the memories of those who loved her, she remains a part of our blessed, unbroken circle.  Diane, presente!

All life about us is precious without measure.  Let us cherish one another every day.

As the planet warms, much more than Brian and Larry will we all be missing.  Last week when I opened the Los Angeles Times, the accompanying picture to an article on the diminishing Salton Sea, as we rob it of water, was the photo of a magnificent great egret taking flight.  The wing span of that bird was breathtakingly beautiful as it began to gain altitude.  It’s long neck so graceful in takeoff.  In Spirit I am a part of that bird, and it is part of me.  I knew this reality deep in my soul as I sat transfixed, mesmerized by that picture.  We are blessed with one woman at our church with a tender heart who understands such relationships.  Sister egret, we cherish you – precious gift of our Creator.  Just as St. Francis taught us.  If we destroy your habitat, it will be a spiritual loss to our souls, to the soul of all creation.

Should we use up all the water from the Colorado river and dry up the Salton Sea, we humans have the power to drive these splendid creatures into extinction.  At least here in California.  Remember, we must, the old Beatles song from their White Album, “Hey, hey, Bungalo Bill – what have you killed today?”  That’s us. 

Don’t forget the millions upon millions of passenger pigeons, so numerous they once darkened the skies over America.  Don’t forget the “Good God Almighty” woodpecker whose last, dying cry long ago echoed through the old forests of Arkansas and Tennessee.[2]  A cry and a sight that astounded all who ever witnessed it.

Thank you for the warning, Dr. King, Thank you for the warning, St. Francis.  Extinction is forever.

Back in college, several of us guys would pack up most every summer and go camping in Yosemite.  Most mornings we would hike up to Vernal Falls from the valley floor, and once or twice, to the top of Half Dome.  Often, as we would begin our climb up the trail to the falls, an old guy – I mean, a really old guy, all muscle and bone, would pass us, running up the trail.  By the time we would be about two thirds of the way up, huffing and puffing, he’d greet us on his way back down.  Today, I’m not in his shape, but do still envy his stamina.  Face it – I was NEVER in his shape.  He, too, was every bit a part of St. Francis’ amazing web of interconnectedness, as was Half Dome and the rush of Vernal Falls. Thank you, King and Francis, for the reminder.

Those invigorating summer days were a life-saving reconnection back to God’s splendid, restorative creation.

One year us guys decided to go to see the Big Trees in Sequoia National Park — not all that far from Yosemite.  I had never seen anything so awesome.  Staring up into the heavens to where the treetops soared, was a spiritual experience.  Some of these 3,000-year-old giants were over three hundred feet tall.  With trunks larger than six feet in diameter.  St Francis would surely be one with these magnificent specimens. I surely was.  In fact, on first arriving, all us guys got very quiet as we beheld their majesty.  I remember us jumping out of the car and just staring up into the clouds and treetops.  WOW!

Now, we could lose it all to fire.  These magnificent trees, the Ancient Ones, as known by Native Americans — have stood for centuries – from the time of the Prophets, Amos and Hosea — from the time of Jesus and the Roman Empire.  From the time of tramping boots of conquerors: Charlamagne, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan.  From the time of George Washington, Mozart, John Muir and John Donne… from the moment of that very first Fourth of July at Independence Hall…Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea… Harriot Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger – these trees have witnessed it all.  Count the tree rings.

They now urgently summon us to face the catastrophe of Global Warming.

These lofty Ancients of Days have been on the minds of many of us lately as infernos now rage about them.

The Sequoia National Monument lies partly on the Tule River Reservation. Many of those devastated by the fire damage, and those who care for these trees, are First Americans.  But these trees are precious to all who’ve ever been transfixed by their majesty.

A forest ecologist with “Save the Redwoods,” Linnea Hedlund, remembers the first time she saw one of these trees.  “My 7-year-old brain could not fathom it was real.  It was unlike anything I had ever seen, she recalled.”[3]

Sequoyah Quinton, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a storm chaser, had been named after his grandfather, “who was named for Sequoyah, who had created a written form of the Cherokee language in the early 19^th century, felt his heart break as he watched firefighters wrap the base of the Sherman tree in aluminum foil.  The morning the fire approached the sacred grove, Sequoyah dropped to his knees and prayed for something to stop the destruction of the sequoia trees.”[4]

Together, we are one blessed gift of God, bound up in an “inescapable web of mutuality” — Husband, wife, lovers, children, companions – Brian, Larry, First Americans, and old man running.  Sequoias and Half Dome.  All that shares being itself with us.

The first gift of Grace, the first gift of Creation, is the simple blessing that there is Something at all.  Instead of Nothing.  “It is not fitting that man and woman should be alone.”  We are not.  We are all One in the Spirit of the Great Creator.

Thank you, St. Francis; thank you Dr. King, for this reminder.  In the splendor of all creation, “Soon and very soon, we shall see the King.”

Pray, God, we learn to take care of one another while there’s still time.

Now, let’s go bless the animals.  Amen.

.

---

[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham jail,” April 16, 1963

[2] Ed Bradley, “Finding the Good Lord Bird,” 60 Minutes, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/finding-the-lord-god-bird/

[3] Diana Marcum, “Making a Stand for the Giants,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2021.

[4] Ibid.

     St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

       Pentecost 19, October 3, 2021
  Proper 22

 “A Single Garment of Destiny”

                           Genesis 2:18-24; Psalm 8;
                         Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12; Mark 10:2-16

“Oops, I shouldn’t have said that.”  How many times have the words gotten out of our mouths before we wish we could take them back?

In the heat of argument, the insult, the half-truth, the jibe at another’s expense – those words come back to haunt us.

As a political pugilist I confess I have called those on the opposite side of an argument things one wouldn’t want to print in a sermon.  Definitely not flattering, life-enhancing descriptors.  So, I write this sermon to myself as much to anyone else.

The counsel from the book of James is a corrective.  James urges a more excellent way: “Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth…Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from?  Do they not come from cravings that are at war within you?”[1]

Envy, ego, malice – they rear their ugly heads at one time or another in most any congregation, making a most foul-tasting broth.  The author of the book of James was very aware of social and disordered spiritual dynamics of his flock. 

Every bit as much as much as St. Paul.  See first and second Corinthians.  Things get said that would have been better off left unsaid.

As a newly arrived pastor on one congregation, I was soon met by several women on the altar guild.  They were tired, they complained.  They had been doing this forever.  Couldn’t some of the younger folks take this over.

I spent several weeks talking with some of those younger folks about how they could assume their responsibilities for our common life.  Eventually a couple or so agreed to join the altar guild.

Things seemingly went fine – for a couple of weeks.  Then I encountered one of these women who told me she was needing to quit.  When I asked what was the matter, she said that what the existing members really wanted was newcomers who would do things exactly as they had done them – done them for years! 

They wanted clones of themselves with no new ideas and were somewhat rude in letting the newcomers know their place.  Definitely, not a more excellent way.  My way or the highway!

One of my associates was always fond of quoting Luke 6:5, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”  And fisticuffs fly.  And feelings are bent out of shape.

Avarice, competition, envy, guilt – they are so often reflected in our lame excuses.  Even to the point that the coverup become ludicrous. 

One day, as young students were walking up the hill from their elementary school there was a very loud explosion.  Then yells and screams.  When one of the teachers arrived on the scene, she discovered a boy with some badly burned fingers.  It turned out that he had brought a packet of gunpowder he had taken from his father’s reloading operation to school.  As he was bragging about it and what he could do with it, it went off.

Caught red-handed, or black-handed in this case, he told the teacher, “I don’t know where it came from.  It just dropped down out of the sky and I picked it up.”  That’s certainly much more inventive than, “The dog ate my homework.” 

Is this any more risible than the Wells Fargo’s lie to cover up bilking thousands of customers out of millions and millions of fake fees for opening bogus accounts in their names?  “The branch employees did it.”  Oh, really?  In branches all across the nation – all at once?   Hmmmmm.

Such lies and half-truths may bring forth a chuckle.  But repeated in full blossom, they can wreak havoc in any church, in society.  Did I tell you about the January 6^th damage inflicted on our nation by the BIG LIE?

Jesus is said to have brought forth a little child, suggesting that his career- climbing disciples should be as selfless as that young one.  If so, I don’t think Jesus knew much about children.  We learn deceit and treachery at a very young age. 

Taking the child into his arms, he said that whoever welcomes such a one, welcomes me and the One who sent me.  But be under no illusions.  We are born for trouble as the sparks fly upward – Job 5:7.

I remember rushing to the aid of our youngest one day, who was crying his eyes out.  It turns out that his brother had bit him.  Hard enough to leave teeth marks.

As I attempted to reason with our oldest, that it was much better to use words if you didn’t like what someone said or did, his response was, “Well, if they don’t agree with you, you just have to bite them.”  Here we are just at second grade and ready to wage war World War III.  Out of the abundance of the heart comes all sorts of vile and nasty stuff.  Teeth marks included.

“Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom” – it takes a lifetime to absorb this advice. 

Yes, take that young person into your arms, and train her up in the way she should go and she shall not depart from it.   The beginnings of that “excellent way.”

Definitely, there is a more excellent way.  The purpose of James advice is to preserve the gift of community.  Martin Luther King called it the Beloved Community.  It is Gospel Spirit that urges our hearts to yearn for such companionship.  It is the call that comes in darkest night.

My grandmother’s advice is appropriate here.  “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” 

Similar is the Four Way Test in Rotary of the things we say:

1.  Is it the truth?
2. Is it fair to all concerned?
3. Will it build good will and better friendships?
4. Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

Sometimes a hard truth is appropriate to the moment, but spoken without the personal attack, it might be heard.  Danger, abuse, racism must be called out, yet Dr. King knew this could be done without the demeaning ad hominem, the personal insult.

When Mrs. Reiner called me in after class to talk about the homework I was not turning in and my lack of preparation for her high school English class, she did it in such a way that I really wanted to do better.  And I did.  She had an investment in my succeeding, an investment in me, and communicated that with a generous spirit.  It is testimony to her active concern that today I still remember her fondly.  That is the more excellent way commended to our hearts.

Through friends, parents, teachers and mentors – those who want us to succeed — God reaches down to the best in us — instills in our hearts the power to choose for the more excellent way, the “way born of wisdom.”

“Be perfect as your Father/Mother in heaven is perfect.”  When we are urged to be perfect in Matthew 5:48, what is being urged is not some sort of compulsive perfectionism.  The Greek here means grow towards the end to which you are intended.  To grow into your full and true self, your full potential.  This is exactly what Mrs. Reiner was urging.  As with a more “excellent way,” this takes a lifetime of seasoning.

As my Methodist friends are wont to say, “I’m going on to perfection.”  Still a long way to go for me.

In a remarkable op ed piece in the New York Times, Venus Williams gives testimony to the wisdom she received from her mother as she began her remarkable tennis career.  Physical strength was certainly important.  But equally so, psychological and spiritual balance.  This is irreplaceable motherly wisdom passed down from generation to generation.

At the age of fourteen, Venus was beginning to move into the professional level of tennis.  She had traveled with her mom to an important tournament in Oakland, and was entering a new level of her young career.  There would be pressure beyond what she until then had known. 

That day in Oakland, her mom took her aside to warn her of the intense scrutiny and demands she would now be under as she advanced.

The wise counsel her mother gave her was that this sport was not just about being tough with a well-honed body.  It wasn’t about how hard she hit the ball.  It was about the balance of a complete life.

“What my mom was telling me that day in Oakland was that none of those elements of winning would work unless I also tended to my mental health. I needed to have a balanced life and not identify myself solely as a tennis player. Even though I was beginning to have success as a young pro, I had to remain committed to my education, stay connected to my religion and enjoy the experience of improvement — not be so driven that I would miss it all.”[2]

That gift of love, bestowed by a wise mother, has carried Venus through tough years when she discovered she had an autoimmune disease.  It has carried her through upset and disappointment.  It has carried her through triumph with poise and humility.  Her mom and her faith have given Venus the gift of a “gentleness born of wisdom.”

For those who have followed her career down through the years, Venus has been an example of perseverance and generosity.  Always tending towards what God has intended her to be.  Venus has chosen a more excellent way.  So may it be with each of us – that we grow into the fullness of our authentic, God-intended, selves.   Amen.

---

[1] James 3:13 ff.,  New Revised Version.

[2] Venus Williams, “Being Tough Means Taking Care of My Whole Self,” New York Times, Opinion, September 13, 2021.

St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

       Pentecost 17, September 19, 2021
  Proper 20

     “A More Excellent Way”

                         Jeremiah 11:18-20; Psalm 54;
                          James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”  So began a most bizarre adventure for a little girl and her dog in the aftermath of a fearsome tornado.  An adventure that would charm both adults and children for generations.

That might be fine for a film narrative, but it’s all too real and all too devastating for many abandoned Americans as the summer comes to a close.  We’re not in the usual, comfortable America anymore.

The sleepy little town of Fair Bluff sits on the banks of the Lumber River in North Carolina.  Like many small rural towns, it is facing its demise.  Battered by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and then again by Hurricane Florence in 2018, there’s little left to wash away.  The threat had become existential when their main industry, a factory producing vinyl products, had shut its doors and left after Matthew tore through.

Towns like Fair Bluff throughout the South and Northeast lie in sodden devastation.  Many residents have either died, or if fortunate, relocated.

“On a recent afternoon, the sidewalks were empty and the storefronts abandoned, their interiors smashed up and littered with trash, doors ajar.  The roof of one building had collapsed, a battered American flag stuck in the debris; inside other buildings were ransacked shelves, plastic containers full of Christmas decorations, an upside-down tricycle.  Speakers on a Methodist church played recorded hymns for no one.”[1]

Further south, New Orleans seemed on the verge of a comeback in the waning days of August.  And then Hurricane Ida hit — the coup de grace to this year’s tourist season.  Hotels had been completely booked.  Bartenders and restauranteurs were looking for a big Labor Day weekend that might help them catch up.  Lots of tips.  Now one manager had to let their guests know that storm damage had closed the hotel.  Much of the “Big Easy” swelters in unbearable heat, no electric power to be had for a couple more weeks.  No water either.

In California much of the state appears as an apocalyptic inferno straight out of hell.  In spite of super-human efforts, the Caldor Fire creeps ever steadily towards the resort community of Lake Tahoe — erratic winds driving the blaze from treetop to treetop.  The tourist season is up in smoke.

What an end to a summer.  All the while, the delta valiant rages and fills emergency rooms and ICUs to overflowing.  Our schools are opening.  But will they stay open?  We now have a pandemic of the unvaccinated!

The caldron of suffering and death is nothing new to the Christian community.  Remember those who hid Jews from Hitler.  As Jesus and his disciples traveled from town to town, he did not sugarcoat their immediate prospects.  He labored under no illusions.

“Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes and be killed…If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” 

This is not a journey for the fainthearted or the sunshine disciple.  Not for the lackadaisical or those seeking certainty or the self-congratulatory seeking redemption in worn-out dogma.  The fires rage, the winds howl, making it real.  No escape for the pious.  Jesus warned his followers that the only path of faithful discipleship was through the toils and the sufferings of humanity.  With some joy and respite along the way.  That joy we would discover in one another’s company as we pass through it all.

That is why we are called by our presiding bishop Michael Curry to turn the Jesus club into the Jesus Movement.  Jesus does not need admirers and disputatious folks who argue over who he is.

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

Get that cross off your lapel, from around your neck and onto your back.  Jesus is calling people who will do what he does – heal the sick, feed the hungry and visit those in prison, hold a hand of the troubled.  That is also the call of Bishop William Barber, leader of Moral Mondays—his summons to today’s communities of faith — to be a MOVEMENT.[2]

We, indeed, are called to be a MOVEMENT of joy and hope in the midst of our battered nation. 

No one may be attending to the hymns broadcast form the United Methodist church in Fair Bluff, but there yet remains a community of the faithful who pays the electric bill.  These are the ones who will do welfare checks on their neighbors.  These will show up with a covered dish for those whose home has been devastated.  These people will watch your children while you stand in line to complete forms for rebuilding at the emergency shelter. These are Spirit-empowered folks in it for the long haul.  In it for the journey to Jerusalem and beyond.

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

As one chef grilling hamburgers in downtown New Orleans for hurricane survivors said when asked by a reporter, “This is what we do here for one another.”  This is what we do.  Sounds like the beginnings of a movement to me.

Bishop Barber identifies the “ghetto of Nazareth” as the origin of this movement.  A movement led by those made poor by systems of exploitation – that is the context of “ptokos”[3] – the impoverished.

Out of this backwater, this impoverished village, this place not unlike Fair Bluff, or any of the myriad abandoned communities scattered across America comes a stirring. 

“In Caesar’s world, where narcissistic leaders only cared about the grand and the greedy, the pompous and the pretentious, Jesus announces a revival led by and among the rejected.  Caesar, who loved to put his face on money and buildings; Caesar, who catered to the greedy and led by fear and political shenanigans.”[4]

The Jesus mission is a clarion call to the broken and the lost, to those who will never receive an invite to Mar-a-Lago or much of anywhere else.  To those in disbelief, staring at their sodden belongings in a flooded home, comes a summons.

Into that world of stratospheric wealth and power, Jesus inaugurates a movement out of literally, “nowhere.” And through “nobodies.”   A Movement of the unlettered, the disenfranchised, both men and women, the lowly – in sum, the poor.

On this weekend anniversary of 9/11, most of us remember exactly where we were when those planes hit the towers.

I remember Jonathan calling from school, asking if I had the TV on.  “Go turn it on, Dad.  Planes just crashed into the World Trade Tower in New York.  This is bad.  I don’t think we can’t let this one slide.  Gotta get to class,” and with that, he was gone.

Mesmerized, I stared disbelieving at the screen — transfixed by the enormity of the tragedy.  One of the first thoughts that entered my mind after I started processing this reality was: “Can’t let this one slide?  Now, I suspect we are going to do something very stupid.”

Looking back at our exit from Afghanistan last week, that’s exactly what we did.  Not one, but two very stupid decisions.  That’s the assessment of two significant foreign policy scholars, both with combat experience:  Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America.  Also Col. Andrew Bacevich (ret.), who served in the Vietnam War.  Both, published authors and professors.  Andrew lost a son in the Iraq war.  Read their writings. “Chasing Ghosts”[5] and “After the Apocalypse.”[6] 

Twenty years later, we still remember those first responders clambering over “the pile” desperately searching for any survivors.  The pictures of fire fighters, covered with ash and dust, sleeping on the pews of St. Paul’s chapel down the street.  Exhausted beyond endurance.  The names posted on pictures and notes tied to the fence of that house of worship inquiring as to the whereabouts of family members and friends.  Lit at night by a sea of votive candles.  And hovering about it all, unseen, the prayers of a nation.

Looking back on the tragedy of 9/11, the Covid scourge tearing at our nation – the multitude of problems we face – we need a grounded community of Hope.  We need a Spirit Movement.

As I watched, probably the most compelling narrative of the events of 9/11 and twenty years forward, I was most grateful to the two film makers who put together “Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11.”   Record it, stream it.  It’s available in multiple showings on MSNBC.  And get a box of Kleenex.  The gift of this film is of the same kind as that of the Jesus Movement.  Chock-a-block Spirit-filled compassion.  And HOPE.

The Church at it’s best nurtures that Spirit.  Is a habitation for that Spirit.  But that same Spirit moves through and among those daily building the Beloved Community.  Some Christian, some Jewish and Muslim.  Some “Nones” whose faith alone is known to God.

On this anniversary of 9/11, surrounded yet by a sea of pandemic, we are not a people without Hope. 

I share a story from my friend Dick Bunce – shamelessly stolen from the sermon he preached to the Unitarians this last week.

From Dick I quote:

“Here’s a brief clip from a recent issue of a news magazine.  A Michigan judge, Bruce Morrow, gave Edward Martell, a drug dealer, probation instead of a prison sentence of many years.  This changed Martell’s life. 

Judge Morrow said:  Mr. Martell, I believe you have greatness within you.  I sentence you to probation and challenge you to become the CEO of a fortune 500 company. 

Martell worked his way up, first enrolling in a community college, then graduating from undergraduate and then from law school.  All the while, Judge Morrow stayed in contact with Martell, and Martell with the judge. 

Martell had many obstacles to overcome.  Recently, now 43, he stood before the judge again, this time to be sworn in for the practice of law. 

Martell says he cried like a baby.  I doubt that the judge had dry eyes as well.

Wow. What if this could become widespread?  What if a whole city could become known as a city of compassion? “

A nation of Compassion.  A nation of Justice.  A nation of Peace.  A nation of Generosity.  A nation of Equity and Opportunity. That is the movement Rev. Barber is summoning us to.  Jesus summons us to.

This coming week, we lay to rest the mortal remains of a sister who over the years has been a faithful member of St. Francis, Sally Mayock Hartley.  With these words we in thanksgiving return her to her maker:

“Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Sally Mayock Hartley.  Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming.  Receive her into the arms of your mercy, and the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints of light.”

Might we also live into the reality of this prayer.  At the end of this mortal journey might we be accounted a member of that Blessed Community.  “Servant, well done.”  Until then, may we daily strive to be staunch and steadfast members of the Jesus Movement.   Amen.

---

[1] Christopher Flavelle, “Battered Bottom Line in Towns Climate Change Has Come For”, New York Times, September 4, 2021.

[2] William J. Barber, II, We are Called to Be a Movement (New York: Workman Publishing Co., Inc., 2020).

[3] Op Cit, 11.

[4] Op. cit., 11-12.

[5] Paul Rieckhoff, Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier’s Perspective (New York: New American Library – Caliber, 2006}.

[6] Andrew Bacevich, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021).

     St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

       Pentecost 16, September 12, 2021
  Proper 19

     “Called to be a Movement”

                         Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 116:1-8;
                   James 3:1-12, [11-13], 14-17; Mark 8:27-38

“You are not a horse.  You are not at cow.  Seriously, y’all.  Stop it.”  This was the tweet from the FDA on why you should not use Ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.  Desperation is raging through our nation, rampaging like Hurricane Ida, along with this pandemic[1].

Feed stores all across the country are reporting that sales of this drug to deworm horses and cattle have skyrocketed.  Tucker Carlson and others on Fox News have been censured for promoting this drug as a cure for COVID-19.  Groups on Facebook are promoting it as a treatment. Sales reaching 88,000 prescriptions of this dewormer per week.  Texas, alone, reporting a 550% spike in poison calls from the ingestion of this drug.  Filling scarce ICU beds needed for Covid patients.  And so useless.  Almost 90% of these folks were unvaccinated.  “Y’all stop it!”

This takes us back to the Bad Old Days when a group of quack doctors and Trump were promoting hydroxychloroquine as a new miracle cure.  You remember the bogus group, America’s Frontline Doctors.  These were the first to promote the hydroxychloroquine cure.  Their spokeswoman was that very same doctor who had been asserting that ovarian cysts were caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.  You know — the same woman who said the government was run in part by humans and “reptilians and other aliens.”

And this group of crazy even got a hearing before the president and vice president.  “I thought she was still very impressive,” the Donald concluded after the visit.  Reptilian overlords and all.

And all the while, a safe, effective cure has been available.   Free.   At CVS or Walgreens.

But many, for ideological reasons, peer pressure or ignorance, (who knows?)  won’t take the vaccine.  So, out of shear desperation they’ve turned to snake oil.  “You are not a horse.  You are not a cow.  Seriously, y’all.  Stop it.”

I guess the upside to this quack cure is, if you had worms, you don’t now.

Desperation drives all sorts of behavior.  Some well founded.  Some absolutely off the charts.  It was out of such desperation that a foreigner approached Jesus concerning her daughter’s demon possession.  Women in that place and time did not approach men. It was unseemly.  Especially for a foreigner, a Syrophoenician.  We have our ways.  You best mind them.  Stay in your place, woman.

When asked for healing for her daughter, Jesus’ response is a slap across the face. “One does not give the children’s food to the dogs.”  At this she should have slunk quietly away, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.

But this woman persists.  “Even the dogs are allowed to gather the scraps under the table.”  She’s got him there.  She was a first century Molly Ivins, Katie Porter, Barbara Jordan, Liz Chaney and Elizabeth Warren – all rolled up into one.   Nasty Woman on a mission!

This interchange opens a whole raft of possible questions about Jesus.  We don’t usually associate snarky with him.  But then, we don’t associate violence with him either – like beating the hell out of a bunch of greedy money changers at the temple doorstep.

So, let’s leave the theological speculation aside and accept the story as we have it.  This woman was the prod to widen his vision.  Grace, healing, compassion – these are boundless.  Not the property of any one tribe. Her mission to save her daughter enlarged his vision.  A moment of Grace.

Like Dr. Seuss’s Grinch, Jesus’ heart grew one size lager.  Out of the desperation of this mother, comes a great religious epiphany.  ALL means ALL. That’s the whole story about Divine Love.

It is out of this gospel compassion that many worked tirelessly amid danger to evacuate U.S. personnel and Afghans at Kabul.  Though the danger was palpable, these folks put their lives on the line.  Literally, it turns out for thirteen of our service members.

Behind the scenes, in desperation, many more stateside worked untold hours to save Afghan friends and colleagues. The same desperation as that of the Syrophoenician mother with a demon possessed daughter.  That airlift effort was of a kind with the Great Compassion embodied in today’s gospel lesson.  Once finally organized, it was a phenomenal achievement.

Sadly, we didn’t reach all our friends.  We failed to save many of the most vulnerable: women and girls facing a bleak future of forced servitude and a waste of talents.  Many stories of heartbreak I find troubling.  The former president even blocked the processing of visas for these allies for months on end.  Stephen Miller and his ilk are still ranting about letting these folks in – “they’re going to kill us all.”  The very same desperate people, many of whom saved our butts at great risk to their own lives. Go figure!

I read the anonymous email of one Afghan man[2] and his family attempting to make it through the crush at airport gates. Syavash, an Afghan journalist for over fifteen years, his wife, Sarah, “one of the first women to attend medical school after the fall of the Taliban in her province of Parwan” – she was.one of the first woman doctors in Afghanistan.  They and their two sons, finally gave up after thirteen hours in the most inhuman conditions – wading through sewage that flooded the street, enduring the insults and beatings of Taliban security, the scorching heat and dust.  It finally became too much. 

“My wife was hit with a stick several times and so were numerous other people.  They threw water on us and repeatedly said, ‘Your owners, your masters, the Westerners abandoned you.’ 

“My wife, who suffers from severe back pain was hit so many times and I could only beg, ‘Please don’t hit her.  She is a woman and she is sick.’

“Pasoon may only be 7 years old but he knows what is going on around him.  He kept saying, ‘Let’s go home.  I will tell the Taliban to take two of my toy cars and don’t hurt my father and mother.’”

The Spirit, moving through this family’s desperation, can move us here, we who can do something helpful.  Might even move the Taliban to recognize our bond of a common humanity.  I hear that they have in secret been working with the CIA to continue to spirit Americans to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, even past the August deadline.

It was out of this same Great Compassion that many were led to save and shelter these vulnerable Afghans.  It is who we are at our best.  Spirit incarnated.

Yet even Jesus could not feed or heal everyone.  Nor could we extract everyone in those past several weeks at that besieged airport.  In these last hours of desperation, we failed ourselves.  We failed many friends — and we’re just not in His class.

Left with “thoughts and prayers,” we are not helpless – if that same Great Compassion which moves through these prayers, is emboldened and enfleshed, Spirit empowered, these “thoughts and prayers” can work healing and welcome. As my friend David often quotes Alfred North Whitehead, “Ideas won’t keep; something must be done about them.”

I called my friend Anne, another woman on a mission, who is part of Newcomers Access Center,[3] working to get these refugees safely resettled here in America, asking her how we at Pilgrim Place might be of help.  “Of course, money always helps,” she quickly responded.  But we can do more.  Much more.

We can tutor these folks in English, our women can take Afghan women shopping and to other appointments.  We can help in finding housing – hopefully at our almost empty United Methodist seminary in Claremont.

You can donate a car in good running condition.  You can be a long-term friend of an Afghan family. Contact them twice a week or so, plan a picnic.  And definitely practice English all the time.

Money, for certain, always helps, and you can donate through the Newcomers Access website. – http://www.newcomersaccesscenter.org 

Don’t worry, Anne’s making a list.  If you live outside Southern California, we can connect you with groups working in your local area to welcome these new neighbors.  Most churches have a connection to an organization in their denomination that is responding to the needs of these new refugees. 

If the One of Great Compassion touches your heart deep down to where your mojo is, do what the Spirit is whispering to you.  Now. 

Just as Jesus grew in Spirit in the instant of that mother’s rejoinder — grew to include those not of his tribe or religious clique, so might we.  Eternally, he comes to us in the face of the dispossessed seeking refuge.  As a refugee in Egypt fleeing Herod’s wrath.  So, now he does here in America.

James Baldwin put it this way about the bond of our common humanity — about the working of that Great Compassion among us:

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us.  The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”[4]  Amen.

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[1] U.S. FDA tweet, @US FDA, August 21, 2021.

[2] Anonymous, “What it’s like for an Afghan family trying to make it to the Kabul airport,” Yahoo News, August 29, 2021.

3 www.newcomeraccesscenter.org, (909) 455-3248, 401 N. Gibbs Street, Pomona, CA 91767.

[4] James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 393.

St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

       Pentecost 15, September 5, 2021
  Proper 18

     “A Woman on a Mission”

                         Isaiah 35:4-7; Psalm 146;
                   James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

Rudy Giuliani, Sunday morning was flustered and taken aback by Chuck Todd’s question as to whether his client, the former president Trump, would testify at his impeachment trial.  Fulminating and sputtering, he finally blurted out, “Truth isn’t Truth.”

Not any different sentiment from that of Pilate at Jesus’ so-called trial.  Bored with the whole proceeding, Pilate responds to Jesus’ assertions that he has come into the world to testify to the Truth, “What is truth?” a bemused Pilate asked.

“We have alternative facts,” Trump’s press secretary Kellyanne Conway would counter, when confronted by inconvenient facts.

Truth, indeed!  What is truth?

In John’s gospel, Jesus proclaims that he is the “bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”  A certain reference to the Eucharistic meal.

And what is this bread which satisfies completely?  In our disingenuous and duplicitous age, this heavenly bread is TRUTH. 

When Jesus in John’s gospel proclaims: “I am the way and the truth and the life,” this is the testimony of John’s faith community that Jesus is in his being and teaching true nourishment.  He’s the Real Deal.  He is what leads to ultimate fulfillment and satisfaction.  Jesus is the Door to the blessings that make our days worthwhile.  He is God’s true Wonder Bread that satisfies to the utmost.  No bad aftertaste.

In a bygone age many of us got our “truth” from a handful of trusted sources.  Walter Lippman, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Jim Lehrer or Dan Rather or a trusted local newspaper. 

We got another truth on what mattered and the formation of a “good life” from trusted clergy and medical professionals.  Don’t forget Dr. Spock.  From Scout leaders and our teachers.  The police were our friends.  “If you feel you’re in any danger, find a policeman,” we were told.

Those old verities are as obsolete now as a buggy whip.  Not that they are not true or don’t communicate wise advice, but nowadays, nobody pays much attention and there are too many exceptions to the rule.

Not all clergy, not all teachers or scoutmasters are safe.  News outlets put out patiently false information, “alternative facts.”  The kind that will kill you, if you trust them over CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Fauci.  Or your own doctor on getting your inoculation.  Kill you, they will.

Facebook is “less than.”  A poor substitute.  Fake News and alternative facts.  I’m not talking about how some of us keep daily contact with a wide circle of friends or post crazy video clips of cats doing improbable things.

Apparently, all sorts of “alternative facts” and sketchy narratives are pushed by some groups with an ax to grind.  Or a plot to overthrow an election.  Or racists organizing neo-Nazi and KKK hate events.  Or pillows to sale.  Caveat emptor – let the buyer beware!

Jill Lapore, in a recent piece about Facebook begins citing its mission statement — “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” 

“That sounds like a better fit for a church, and not some little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, side-of-the-road number but a castle-in-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-as-a-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the Vatican.”[1]

That mission statement is all a lie.  The real mission is to make money – a ton of money for Mark Zukerberg and the top management.  An obscene amount of money.  That’s the truth of the matter.

So go on, post the clip of the toddler trying to get up on the couch, pictures of your vacation.  But don’t rely on Facebook for your news.   For the truth of the day, go to Judy Woodruff on PBS.  That will set you free and will often delight.

The Truth that is Jesus’ mission statement is life affirming TRUTH, a warning to allow for life-giving alternatives, the warmth of human connection.  It is the door to a new way of walking that scripture calls life eternal.  It’s what builds up.

It is life enhancing.  After Simone Biles’s difficult week at the Olympics, her boyfriend, to boost her up, texted that one’s harshest critics will be those who have the “least investment in you.” 

Or as Yogi Berra quipped, “The loudest boos come from the cheap seats.”

Jesus Truth is magnanimity.  It is a “Generous Orthodoxy” to the wayward son in a “far country” — to that woman at a well in Samaria.  His Truth is a word of possibility to each of us.  It is Life Abundant.  Here is good counsel — wisdom with an investment in you.

“Just do it.  You will feel so good,” comes the deadly counsel for too many on our junior high and high school campuses.  

This, the “alternative facts” of those out for their own gain.  This is the lure to bring the lonely into their orbit of destruction.  This so-called truth is death and heartbreak for families across America.

In a three-part series our local paper ran an expose on drugs ravaging our quiet little community of Claremont.  “Forever 15” is about a local girl who, indeed will be forever 15.  Because she’s dead. Chloe is one of some nine recent suspected overdose victims at our high school.

On a Saturday early in July of this year, “Karie Krouse hosted a memorial service for her daughter Chloe Kreutzer, now forever 15.”  The rising Claremont High School sophomore died June 1 of a suspected drug overdose.[2]

The Truth is, we are a nation in crisis.  Our children are adrift.  Drugs and violence flood our campuses and streets.  That is the terrible Truth, more and more coming to light, as the Covid crisis fades – or had begun to fade until the delta variant came along.

In the case of Chloe, it was just one pill.  What she thought to be a Percocet, but laced with fentanyl.  Given from a friend, bought from a stranger?  Who knows?  In any case, enough to kill.  That was the sad truth for her, for her family and friends.

“The news hit Claremont hard. Chloe was by all accounts a kid who wasn’t a regular drug user. She had a lively, supportive group of friends who are still mourning today.”[3]

There is another truth, a TRUTH that is Light and Life, a Truth grounded in the spirit and reality of Jesus.  Help is available.

In the midst of this overdose tragedy, our communities abound with those who are there to listen, who will hold a hand.  There are alternatives. 

Narcotics Anonymous has helped countless addicts free themselves from addiction.  Their 12-step program may not work for all, but it has been the salvation of many.  Many high schools now have trained peer-advocates. 

The truth of “recovery high schools” is life-giving reality for teachers and students who hold one another up through the journey to sobriety.  This truth is of the same reality as that TRUTH that is ”amazing grace.”  It is Light and Life.  A taste of eternity.

Ed Bacon is fond of saying that, yes, the truth will set you free, but first it will hurt like hell.  It is inconvenient.  It’s saving TRUTH to wake us up.  Bread of Life stuff.

When former vice president Al Gore produced his film and the companion book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” many scoffed.  It was simplistic.  It was imagined apocalypse – Old Testament fearmongering.  It would now be labeled “Fake News” by those very same scoffers.  The cheap seats.

The inconvenient truth announced this week on global warming is that the folks in Europe are going to freeze.  We have just about managed to shut down that flow of warm water that issues from South America and the Caribbean we know as the Gulf Stream.  This is that current that continues up past Great Britain and Greenland that then dives down to the bottom of the ocean to return south again.[4]  This is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current.  Your science lesson for today.  There’ll be a test.

If this current is completely halted, Europe will experience the coldest winters ever since the Little Ice Age that in medieval times killed millions and destabilized the political order of the entire continent.[5] 

Nature made the last ice age; we may be making the next.  Inconvenient truth.

This calamity will wreak havoc throughout ocean circulation around the entire globe.  God only knows what it will do to the climate.  God only knows because the scientists surely don’t.

This “inconvenient Truth” is warning and danger given that we might amend our ways as a human race.  Whatever President Biden and our congress have in their budget to address global warming – It’s not enough. 

What to make of this hodgepodge of news, facts and various truths?  Indeed!

A visiting pastor attended a men’s breakfast in the middle of a rural farming area of the country.

The group had asked an older farmer, decked out in bib overalls, to say grace for the morning breakfast.

“Lord, I hate buttermilk”, the farmer began.

The visiting pastor opened one eye to glance at the farmer and wonder where this was going.

The farmer loudly proclaimed, “Lord, I hate lard.”

Now the pastor was growing concerned.

Without missing a beat, the farmer continued, “And Lord, you know I don’t much care for raw white flour”.

The pastor once again opened an eye to glance around the room and saw that he wasn’t the only one to feel uncomfortable.

Then the farmer added, “But Lord, when you mix them all together and bake them, I do love warm fresh biscuits.

So, Lord, when things come up that we don’t like, when life gets hard, when we don’t understand what you’re saying to us, help us to just relax and wait until you are done mixing. It will probably be even better than biscuits.

Let us pray – that with our effort, the result will be better than the raw ingredients served up on some days.  This is the life-sustaining TRUTH that we are invited to participate in, to engage with.  Keep bringing it on — Jesus TRUTH – wholesome Bread, “strength for the journey.”  Amen.

---

[1] Jill Lapore, “Facebook’s Broken Vows,” The New Yorker, August 2, 2021 issue.

[2] Mick Rhoades, “Forever 15: Fentanyl, and the opioid crisis hit home in Claremont – PART 1,” Claremont Courier, July 24, 2021.

 

3 Op cit.

4  Ryan Morrison, “The Real-life Day After Tomorrow,” Daily Mail.com, August 5, 2021.

[5] Brian M.Fagen, The Little Ice Age (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

     St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

       Pentecost 11, August 8, 202
  Proper 14

 

              “Truth, What is Truth?”

                            1 Kings 19:4-8; Psalm 34:1-8;
                           Ephesians 4:25-5:2; John 6:35, 41-51

In my role as chair of the religious studies department at Alaska Pacific University, I would sometimes be asked by our president Glenn Olds to look over the transcript of a prospective student who had been to what was frequently called a “Bible College.”  Could any of these courses be given credit towards our degree?  Almost all were in service of the theology or church dogma of the issuing institution.  They did not begin to meet the rigorous academic standards of an accredited school of higher learning in critical biblical scholarship.

Sadly, I would have to inform the prospective candidate for admissions that, for the purpose of obtaining a bachelor’s degree from a college like ours, he or she had wasted both time and money.  No matter how I soft-pedaled it, I could see the disappointment, the discouragement.  Sometimes we could accept an English course or something similar to our offerings, but that was it. 

Those responsible for providing this student worthwhile academic guidance had failed the person miserably. 

Jeremiah knew of such incompetence and corruption. 

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people:  It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them.  So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.”[1]

Bad advice by religious authorities may seem a little thing, and in the full scope of what confronts us moderns, might not see that significant.  Except to the downcast student in my office. 

I would try to encourage them to enroll anyway.  They were young with their entire life before them.  Not too late to get on a sound academic track.  If not our school, go for a community college.  Tuition at Anchorage Community College was very reasonable, and scholarship aid was readily available.

Those who fleece the sheep in academia at for-profit institutions are legion.  Look at Trump University and dozens of others that will gladly load their marks (that’s what they are) up with tons of student debt while issuing worthless degrees. 

Don’t our high schools give any sound guidance to their students?  Don’t they give any warnings concerning these bogus scams?  Don’t they know the difference between a properly accredited institution and a rip-off college?  A good mentor is worth the price of gold, much fine gold.  And a few wasted years.

Mentor, that’s how we now designate “shepherds of meaning,” shepherds of encouragement.  Or “life coach.”

Our oldest son said that one of the most valuable classes he took at his college in Ohio was farming.  For an entire semester he worked at a nearby organic farm.  One of the skills he learned was herding sheep.  At the end of the semester, he thought he had become reasonably good at it, though he admitted that the sheep dog probably was the one who really knew what was going on with the sheep and did most of the work.

A good and faithful shepherd is priceless.  So is a good mentor and life coach.

Our other son working on his PhD dissertation, has a “dissertation coach” he pays.  I told him that I would have been willing to kick his butt for free.  I guess, that’s not quite the same.

One of the oldest depictions of Christ in the catacombs of Rome, where Christians were forced to worship in secret, is that of the Good Shepherd.  As such, Jesus is most frequently portrayed as a comfort and companion in times of death.  To carry us through to the other side.

Unfortunately, we have no lack of those in positions of responsibility who would lead us astray – for greed, for power, or just out of sheer orneriness.  Never discount free-floating perversity when it comes to human motives.  Those who leave us adrift, who would forsake their posts – they are legion.

“As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

Under the barrage of “alternate facts” and a dumbing down of truth as “fake news,” The American public is adrift in an internet wilderness.  Is Rudy Giuliani right?  “Truth is NOT Truth?”

I remember once checking a reference on one of my eighth-grade American student’s papers.  “How do you know this is real, that it happened?” I asked him.  “It’s on the internet,” was the answer.  Lord, have mercy!

We have entire “news” channels that pour into American minds a constant stream of corrupt misinformation, lies and innuendo.  Some of it straight from Moscow.  It is the propaganda that fed the Big Lie — that Trump is really the legitimate president, to be restored on office this coming August.  The other guy is a faker and fraud, illegitimate.    And it all culminated in the January 6th seditious insurrection at the temple of democracy, the Peoples’ House.  Five killed, over one hundred police injured – many seriously.

One hundred forty-seven Republicans swallowed this Big Lie, hook line and sinker, refusing to accept the results of the Electoral College.  “These were “good people,” the former president said of the rioters.    

Where is that Good Shepherd?  Faith leaders who continue to denounce the lies, teachers who continue to teach science, judges who demand proof and facts.  Here are our faithful Good Shepherds.

Unfortunately, too many political hirelings have, through their neglect and duplicity, led students and parents astray in beggaring our public education.  Most high schools have only one counselor or two for an entire campus of thousands.  By diverting public funds to private schools, they have diminished public education to the point that much of the public has lost all confidence.  It becomes a vicious downward spiral: as funding is decreased, schools preform even more poorly, and the public becomes fed up and cuts funding even further.  The scandal of the past administration is that, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, had never even been in a public school until she took her government post.  She, who siphoned millions away from public education into private charter schools.  Woe to you, shepherds of greed and grift.  Incidentally, her brother, Eric Prince didn’t do too badly either on the dole with his Blackwater renegades in Iraq.  Certainly, didn’t lose any money there!

Not that we have a lack of scoundrels in the religion business.  I remember flipping through the channels one Sunday morning in Ghana.  There on several channels the “Prosperity Gospel” was on full display.  Hucksterism of the worst sort.  No, sir, Jesus definitely does not want you to have a Mercedes.  The prosperity gospel – another wonderful import from America. Where in the Bible does it say that?  That you deserve a luxury car while your fellows sink further into poverty?  What the gospel of Jesus Christ does command is an admonition to love mercy, do good, and to walk humbly with your God. 

Here was this TV preacher, this carny barker, in a fine sharkskin suit that would have cost three or four months of my salary, prancing about the stage yelling and shouting, jumping up and down, imploring us out in TV land, to send in our money right now for a special blessing.  And promising that God would reward us threefold, tenfold.  Why, there’s no telling what the return on such a donation might be!  Folks, you don’t need to go to Ghana to see this side show.  It’s home-grown right here.

I didn’t send anything in.  I didn’t need a special prayer cloth that morning.

It’s easy to characterize such theatrics as malfeasance, as religion gone bad, to lay such charlatans open to ridicule.  But we staid Christians, we “frozen chosen” are not without fault.

When we fail to lay open the full implications of the gospel in our daily life, in our political life we do the gospel a disservice.  We commit malpractice.  Jesus was fearless in confronting the powers and authorities of his time.  Pulled no punch. 

When we preachers fail to draw out the implications for our common life together, we fail our people just as badly as those rapacious shepherds of whom Jeremiah speaks – the hucksters on TV.  

Those preaching a brand of Christian Dominionism are a “real and present danger” to our democracy.  This perverted theology maintains that the “right-believing” Christians are destined to take over and rule the world by taking “dominion” over the political process and reinstituting biblical law.  Levitical law, heaven forbid?  Enter Pat Robertson stage right: “We don’t want everyone voting.”

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not meant as entertainment.  It is not meant as a warm blanket to snuggle in and doze off to sleep.  It’s meant as a goad to clean up our act, as a plumb line by which to evaluate our lives.  It is meant for encouragement to the distressed and mournful.  It’s meant as an affliction to the comfortable.  A call to “necessary trouble.”

Blessed is the nation whose leader is grounded in a faith tradition of generous spirit, whose leader is guided by a strong moral compass, guided by a heart for the left out and locked out.  Not that such presidents are perfect, but that they have often been leaders who by word and deed brought forth our “better angels.”   Leaders who gave direction.  Leaders who served the common interest.

Through such faithful elected officials, God has led us besides still waters, comforted us in the presence of the shadow of death, anointed our heads with the oil of goodness.  God has set a table in the presence of enemies.  Our cup has run to brim-full and overflowing.

Look around for these leaders?  WE are the leaders we have been waiting for.

Through those of us who weekly sit in these pews, Sunday in and Sunday out, through those who have been faithful to this same Gospel, God has been a true and trustworthy shepherd.  Mercy daily follows our steps, and we dwell in the House of Abundance and Everlasting Life.  This outpouring of God’s goodness that takes place in village and hamlet, big city and suburb — each week all across America.  Every week, the church of Monday is the action of that community which gathered on Sunday.  It’s about humility, not dominion.

This week, God has provided us all with Good Shepherds aplenty.  As dozens of raging infernos race through these western states in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho: fire crews, faithful to their duty, have been on the lines for unimaginable hours.

The pay is mediocre, the hours are beyond human endurance.  Fire season is now year-round.  Add in drought conditions and some of these massive fires are doubling in just a matter of hours as wind whips them from one hilltop to the next.  The crews that fight these fires to the point of exhaustion each day — are our present-day Good Shepherds.

Faithful pastors and lay leaders, who have through Zoom, kept their congregations together, who have comforted families that have lost loved ones to COVID-19 — these are God’s Good Shepherds in our midst.  Those faithful who have checked on friends to see that they are okay.  “Do you need anything?” often being the first question.  These common, every-day parishioners who make sure there are funds to pay the light bill and the skeleton staff who are the weekly face of Christ. 

Our bishops –John and Diane, and Mike in West Virginia – they have faithfully preserved the unity of the Body of Christ through these fraught days of deepest distress.  Bishop John’s parting word each week to our deanery clergy Zoom meeting, is always, “Call me if you need me” – and he means it.  These are our faithful and Good Shepherds who lead us beside cool waters, providing reassurance that we, together, will get through these dark days — that we, together, will raise an Alleluia on the other side.

They are our Light.  Good Shepherds, all.

This past week, some of our House of Hope team spoke with Senator Manchin’s staff concerning potential state and federal funding for addiction recovery.  If you read the news, you know this senator is plumb in the center many critical political issues these days.  Regardless of your opinion of Senator Manchin, his staff is doing an incredible job balancing federal priorities with the local state issues of West Virginia.  Every day they faithfully show up at the office by Zoom or otherwise.  They remain cheerful and keep on top of innumerable demands.  They, we – all of us know someone lost to addiction.  They get it.  These, too, are the Holy Spirit incarnate, Good Shepherds through an epidemic of addiction and political dysfunction.

Within the hearts of all Shepherds of meaning and duty, the Life-giving Spirit of God’s Abundance fortifies courage and commitment. The one and same Spirit, moving through our weak and frail humanity, gives to each of us “those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask.”

And for those who will again rouse themselves from sleep to do it all over again this day, Good Shepherds every one, we say THANKS BE TO GOD.  Amen.

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[1] Jeremiah 23:1-6, New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (New York: National Council of Churches, 1989).

St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

       Pentecost 8, July 18, 2021

 

                 “Good Shepherds”

                              Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23;
                         Ephesians 2:11-22; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

This past week Donald Rumsfield passed.  Not many of us in the peace action community will be shedding any tears.  Andrew Bacevich, formal colonel of the Vietnam War who now realizes the folly of that endeavor, believes our military adventures into Afghanistan and Iraq were the two major blunders ever of American foreign policy.

With his promotion of torture as an instrument of this policy, Rumsfield deeply stained any reservoir of international goodwill that had accumulated after 9/11.  I’m certainly not going to take issue with the headline announcing his demise, “War Criminal Found Dead at 88.” 

Amos gives us true and sure guidance in judging the policies of nations as well the authors of such policies – the Plumb Line.

I have always found in my work as a general contractor that the plumb line never lies.  Back in my days when a college student my parents built a new home in Signal Hill.  We had rented an apartment building just down the hill form the site of what would be our new home.  Every afternoon, after my father returned from work, he would hike up the hill to inspect the efforts of the framers. 

One afternoon I had gone up with him.  I was wandering around on the first floor when I heard him call out, “John, come up here.”  There on the second floor by what would be my parents’ bedroom I saw what had so alarmed him.  The framed in wall of two by fours had to be easily five to ten degrees out of plumb.  Scattered around the floor was the cause.  Apparently, the plumb line the builders had used that day was brewed by Budweiser – a good number of empties lay scattered around the floor by the tilting wall.

In my later days I often used a level.  But I eventually hung a plumb line from the top plate just to make sure.  There was the true measure:  no lies, no B.S.

The duplicity of “weapons of mass destruction” that was used to sell this war to a hyperventilating public bent on revenge was no Plumb Line.  The torture authorized by G. W. Bush, Rice, Rumsfield and a compliant CIA that jiggered the evidence was no Plumb Line of truth.  These stats had been bought and sold, traded like junk bonds on Wall Street.  The gullible public that never questioned anything?  Well, you get the picture.  There was enough deception and complicity to go around.

In the folly of these forever wars, our government delivered up our troops like Herod did the head of John the Baptist on a platter.  Just to satisfy his own ego and please the desires of a lascivious crowd of revelers.  “Mission Accomplished.” 

The reason that much of the psalmist’s writings appeal to me is due to the inherent wisdom they contain.  They draw from the same wisdom tradition as the book of proverbs.  To paraphrase President G. W Bush, “Actions have consequences,” just like elections.

Psalm 1 is my favorite from this tradition: “Blessed is the man (woman) who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scoffers, but his/her delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law s/he meditates day and night.  S/he is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season….” 

One reason I gravitated to it was that it was an assignment in Hebrew class – to memorize it in Hebrew.  As I have such a bad memory for poetry and the rest, that I can still remember the first lines…well I feel like that boy who stuck his thumb in the pie and pulled out a plum.

But I digress.  The theology behind this wisdom tradition in the psalms is also that of Amos’s Plumb Line.  Truth is truth.  Actions have consequences.  And Count Otto von Bismarck, known for his quip, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America” – we shouldn’t put God to the test.  We ought not to count on God being a magic fairy godmother rescuing us from folly.   God’s judgment is a Plumb Line.  Not a helicopter mom to preserve us Americans from self-inflicted wounds.

The list of our unforced errors would seem endless, as of late.

The theology behind the wisdom tradition of the Psalms, Proverbs, Job –  is that we have agency.  We can choose for good or ill.  That is God’s primal gift to our humanity.  It doesn’t depend on the Snake.  “Thoughts and prayers” are not magic charms.

In Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling clearly speaks to moral choice.  Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, advises his dejected young student, “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”[1]  Plumb Line theology straight out of Amos.

It’s timely to mention our disastrous response to COVID-19.  Perhaps that German count is right about Americans standing in special need of divine providence.  We have about the worst record of any nation on God’s green earth in our handling of this health catastrophe.  Six hundred thousand dead and counting.  More than the combined American casualties of both WWI and WWII.

However, don’t get me started on past malfeasance.  I want us to move forward.  I want us to consider our choices in the days and weeks ahead as we must now cope with a new variant of the disease, variant delta.

It’s more contagious and more lethal.  One doctor on the news this week said that of all his patients in the hospital, 99 percent of them have one thing in common.  They didn’t take the vaccine.  This past week alone, somewhere around ten thousand Americans died from COVID-19.  Most all of them needn’t have done so.  Had they acted with prudence and got the shot.

Those who counsel hesitancy do so out of ignorance or fear.  Do not heed their advice.  Turn off Fox News.  Turn off that ignorant neighbor.  Is he an epidemiologist?  A student of virology?  Unlikely.

Science is God’s Plumb Line here.  Its acceptance is the separation between the foolish sitting in the scoffer’s seat and the righteous woman planted by an ever-flowing Stream of Life.  She will still be alive most likely.  Not so that one who refused the shot, coughing up his lungs, whose heart is compromised and his shrunken brain is addled.  This disease is an equal opportunity scourge.  It attacks all organ systems including the tendency to shrink one’s brain.

Tell your friends to get their shot.  Drive them to Walgreens or wherever.  Get your family vaccinated.  As the psalmist, as a former president would say, “Don’t do stupid [stuff].”  Get the jab.  We need all our grey matter.

“I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, for he is speaking peace to this faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him.”   God sends guides along the way as bearers of this word of salvation.   Listen to them.  Listen to those to whom God has given knowledge.  Listen to Dr. Fauci, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Dr. Nahid Bhadelia.  They are today’s messengers of Gracious Providence.  Tell your friends to listen that they might “live long and prosper.”

This from a frontline medic, Dr. Zijian Chen: “Hundreds of patients, most of them women, showed up soon after the center’s doors opened. To the doctors’ surprise, however, many of them had experienced only mild cases of Covid-19. They hadn’t been hospitalized. They were relatively young and otherwise in good health, without the underlying conditions like obesity and diabetes that are known to make Covid-19 worse. And yet, months after their bodies had seemingly fought off the coronavirus, they still felt quite ill.”[2]

These patients had been felled with what professionals now call “long covid” or “Covid long-haulers.”  They struggle with a “hodgepodge of symptoms, including fatigue, pain, shortness of breath, light sensitivity, exercise intolerance, insomnia, hearts that race inexplicably, diarrhea and cramping, memory problems and a debilitating “brain fog” that can at times make it hard to put a cogent sentence together.”[3]  These are some of the consequences likely to follow survivors all their remaining days.

It is indeed tragic that many, through no fault of their own, bear the burden of our unpreparedness — though wearing masks and social distancing would have made a difference.  But now with an effective vaccine at hand, there is no excuse.  Science is our Plumb Line, not fear and ignorance.  Plumb Line theology is Light and Life.  Literally!

When we lose a righteous one to the foolishness or wanton depravity of others, I find it especially tragic.  The juxtaposition of such evil acts with righteous makes it all the more painful.

This week, also in the news, was the story of such a righteous man, José Mejía, an immigrant from San Salvador fleeing a brutal civil war.  José was only 17 when he began his trip through Mexico.[4]  There, he told of ending up “assaulted, robbed and left … with nothing.”  He was reduced to sleeping on a bench in a park until someone came along and offered him a job on a construction site.

Eventually, he made it to Los Angeles and was able to let his family know that he was still alive.  He found a job at as a janitor at a Toyota dealership.   He was able to send enough money back home to El Salvador that his family was able to move into a new home.

José eventually found a position as janitor at Park La Brea apartment complex in Torrance.  There, as a janitor, he became a familiar face, “…known and trusted by tenants and admired by coworkers…where he made $17 an hour.  He spent lunch breaks helping negotiate a new contract for himself and fellow workers.  When a car drove into a crowd of people during an immigrant rights rally in Orange County, Mejia jumped on the hood in an attempt to stop it.”

He saw the realization of a long-held dream.  At fifty, he bought his very own first house.

He put in decades with his union, “paying it forward.”  “He was walking the walk on the change he wanted to see in the world and put a lot of his life into helping others,” reported the secretary treasurer of the SEIU, Alejandra Valles.

Those who knew him never expected that his life would be tragically ended on the fifth floor of that building by a knife-wielding assailant no older than he had been when he fled El Salvador.

That morning José had told his wife Molina to take the bus to the market and he would pick her up after work and drive her home.  At 4:00 p.m. she headed to the store.  There she waited for him.

“’Where are you?’ she texted him. ‘Why aren’t you answering?’”[5]

“When Mejía’s cousin called and told her he would pick her up, she left the market sobbing.  She thought Mejia had been in an accident.”

“’I never thought it’d be something like this,” Molina said. ‘He didn’t deserve this.’”

Mejía was God’s Plumb Line – a life lived with integrity; a life lived for others.  He was the Gospel in flesh and blood.  These many, many “essential workers” like Mejía, who toil anonymously are what make our country work.

Living decent lives of integrity, they are the soul of this nation.  Mejía and his family — those who clean our office buildings after we have gone home, those who work eight, ten hours a day, bent over picking our food.  Those who stock the shelves and pick up the garbage.  Orderlies walking the hallways of our hospitals – they have a place in the Heart of God.  A Plumb Line straight and true.  These are the “little Christs” in our midst.  And woe to those fancy, too self-important politicians who forget this. You are not what this country is about.  It’s about Mejía and his compadres.   Amen.

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[1] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Cincinnati, OH: Scholastic Books, 1999), 333.

[2] Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “What if you Never Get Better,” The New York Times, January 21, 2021, updated January 26.
2 Ibid.

 

[4] Brittny Mejía, “A Legend Who Became a Janitor Meets a Tragic End,”: Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2021.

[5] Ibid.

St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

        Pentecost 7, July 11

                “Plumb-Line Theology”

                              Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13;
                               Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29

In a moment, as time goes, our nation came under a new form of government and new management upon the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America.

When Benjamin Franklin was returning from the last meeting of the Continental Congress after the drafting of the Constitution, a passing woman called out, “Mr. Franklin, what sort of a government have you given us?”  “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

If you can keep it.  Of my American family, I’m having some serious doubts lately.

“We are Family,” the lyrics go.  “We are Family” — but how far dysfunctional?  How far gone down the rabbit hole have we Americans gone?  To the point where we just might catch the rabbit.

Alice and Wonderland seems less and less like a tale and more and more a sick American joke.  On us.

“We are family

I got all my sisters with me

We are family

Get up everybody and sing”[1]

I seem to be having a little trouble of late getting it out.  Seems like all the red stripes have badly faded and not a few stars are missing from that field of blue.  It’s a bit tattered — both flag and my American family.  Don’t you think?

To shift the metaphor — as I sit transfixed by the enormity of the pile of rubble which used to be a Florida condominium, I have serious doubts as to whether we can keep the bequest of those men who gathered at Independence Hall on July 4, 1776.

My neighbor just put out his flag in honor of the upcoming holiday.  I’m not so sure.  Living through the headlines this week, I’m not in much of a celebratory mood.  That huge pile of rubble in Florida seems emblematic of where we are as a country.

The Corona virus continues to ravage and stress us beyond endurance.  Months of lockdown have taken a terrible toll on us all.  This past week Los Angeles authorities detained a woman after her three dead children were discovered at their home. 

Riverside County supervisors are launching a task force to uncover the roots of a rise in fentanyl fatalities, the cause of 41% of all drug overdose deaths in that county.  A dear friend recently lost his granddaughter to street drugs laced with fentanyl.  America, we’re coming apart at the seams.

In the midst of this calamity, some deride, some flout the science.  We are so divided that we now have two political parties living in two different universes.  Polls apart.  One tribe believes in the precautions science recommends.  The other intentionally refuses to heed any advice for caution.

One of our stellar congresswomen tweets that the problems of COVID-19 will simply disappear if we just “turn off CNN and vote Republican.” [2]  Another congress critter willfully disobeys protocol and refuses to wear a mask for his flight back to Texas.[3]

Oh, and this week it was 121 degrees Fahrenheit in Canada.  Canada, of all places!  The ground temperature this past week was 118 degrees above the Arctic Circle in Siberia!  Portland, Oregon clocked in at 115 degrees.  Talk about a “Tropical Heat Wave!”  Where is Peggy Lee?  Time for another verse of “Fever.”

To top it off, our Tuesday bike group can’t take the usual route to our favorite breakfast place in Upland.  One of our finer citizens recently torched the wooden bridge spanning the flood control channel several miles from our starting point.

So, I’m not sure about the flag, but I am about to head to the store to buy some chicken and brauts.  Going to get the fixings for our famous Forney potato salad.  The beer’s getting cold in the fridge.  And we have a new bag of charcoal ready for the grill.

We are not left without guidance and comfort – though one friend’s tee shirt reads, “My excuse is that I was left without supervision.”  But comfort and guidance, yes, indeed.

There is other breaking news.  Words as old as ancient scripture and as timely as the latest headlines.  “You have heard that it was said…”  With this simple introduction, Jesus lays out the way beyond daily distress.  “But I say to you…”  There is a path forward.  A path that leads to wholeness, renewal and abundance.

From a modern translation, The Message, here is a contemporary rendition of these familiar words from Matthew.[4]

“You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and it’s unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’  I’m challenging that.  I’m telling you to love your enemies.  Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst.  When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the supple moves of prayer, for then you are working out your true selves, your God-created selves.  This is what God does.  God gives the best – the sun to warm and the rain to nourish – to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty.  If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus?  Anybody can do that.  If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal?  Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that”

“In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up.    You’re kingdom subjects.  Now act like it.”

Pretty hard to do.  But there it is, folks.  A new way of walking.  This is an ethic that tastes of eternity.

As Dr. King reminds us in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “There was a time when the church was powerful.  It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed.  In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society…They went on with the conviction that they were ‘a colony of heaven…’

In a word, they lived out the new ethic of the Jesus Movement.  They were the message in deed and action.  They were a tribe of all sorts attracting those fleeing from the dissolution of the day.  And day by day, God added to their numbers.  These were not perfect people.  Not by a long shot.  But they remembered their roots as sojourners who had come out of enslavement and captivity to the standards of the world.  They remembered their heritage.  Their Morning Star was the One who “executes justice for the fatherless, the motherless, and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.  Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”

We’re invited to a community of care.  Care for one another, the stranger, and for this beautiful earth, our “island home,” drifting through the vast sea of stars and galaxies.

In light of these Gospel Words, I do take heart.  There are those in our midst who in this banal culture of deceit and duplicity live them out.  They are, in fact the Gospel.   In them I find inspiration.

George Packer, in his new book, Last Best Hope (Get it.  Read it.)[5]    He tells the last day of work, before resignation, of Nurse Ashley Bartholomew, coming off shift in the COVID intensive care unit.

She entered the room of a patient watching the TV coverage of the critical need of morgue trailers in El Paso, Texas.  “Fake news,” the patient said.  “I don’t think COVID is really more than a flu.”

“’Now you think differently, though?’ Bartholomew asked, unsure what he meant.”

“’No, the same,’ the patient said.  ‘I should just take vitamins for my immune system.  They’re making it a big deal.’”

“The nurse didn’t know that to say.  She was wrapped in protective gear.  The ICU was overflowing.  All around her were the sick and dying.  At the end of her shift she was going to resign her job out of sheer exhaustion.  Ordinarily she never spoke about other patients to one in her care, but now something made her do it.”

 “’To be honest, this is my last shift,’ the nurse said.  ‘you’re the only patient of twenty-five that has been able to speak to me today, or is even aware I’m here.’”

“’Really?’ The patient remained skeptical.  He asked if many of her patients had died.  She told him that she’d given CPR to more of them in the past two weeks than throughout her ten years as a nurse.”

“The man’s tone changed, and he said he was sorry.  The nurse began to cry.  Tears ran down under her glasses, her mask, her respirator, and her face shield, onto her gown.  She apologized for losing her composure.

“As she brought the man out of the ICU to a unit with a lower level of care, they passed some of the patients she’d told him about.  Later, while they were waiting for another nurse, the man said, ‘Thank you for telling me what you told me.  I saw a lot of the other ones when you were wheeling me out of the iCU.  It’s much more than a flu.  I was mistaken.’”

“Bartholomew thanked him and hoped for his total recovery.

“’I will tell everyone who denies how bad this is about my experiences,’ he said.”

“One mind changed – but this patient in intensive care had to hear the truth from a devastated nurse who summoned the will to make him think about others”

Remember you were strangers in the land of COVID. Remember those who continue to bear witness.  Remember the stout hearted “critical” workers of great patience and care who summon up the courage to bear witness to what they daily endure.  They are the true blessing of this nation.  They hold the promise of the Fourth of July.  Nurses like Ashley Bartholomew.  She gets the ethic of the Jesus Movement.

I lift up another Fourth of July hero, author Bill McKibben.  Though temperatures climb to 115, 120 degrees, he gives witness to the truth of climate science.  In his piece, “A Very Hot Year,” Bill, is unsparing in his warning.[6]

“We now know that government and university labs were not the only ones predicting the climatic future: over the last five years, great investigative reporting…unearthed the large-scale investigations carried out in the 1980s by oil companies.  Exxon, for instance, got the problem right: one of the graphs their researchers produced predicted with uncanny accuracy what the temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations would be in 2019.  That this knowledge did not stop the industry from its all-out decades-long war to prevent change is a fact…”[7]

Hey, Exxon man, just how hot is too hot?  Dust bowl hot?  California and New Mexico firestorm hot?  Whata you think?  Should we go for 140 degrees next year?  Or is it better business to just pay off your political puppets to ignore the melting highways?  Cheaper, for sure.

Thank God for Bill McKibben and those who early on sounded the warning like James Hansen.[8]  Nurse Ashley Bartholomew – all these I joyfully claim.  Jesus says I have a bit of work to do with some of the others.

These are the sort I claim as part of my American Family – those putting Gospel Live into our common life.  This is the heritage I can celebrate and give thanks for this coming Fourth.  We are family.

Break out the potato salad and toss back a brewski.  Fire up the grill.  I’ll see if I can find my flag.   Amen.

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[1] Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, Atlantic Records, April, 1978.

[2] Lee Moran, “GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert Ridiculous Way To Tackle Delta COVID-19 Variant,” Huffpost, July 1, 2021.

[3] Michael Biesecker, “GOP congressman flouts mask rules on airline flight to Texas,” Associated Press, July 1, 2021.

[4] Eugene Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: Nav Press, 1993), 1099-1100.

[5] George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 30-31.

[6] Bill McKibben, “A Very Hot Year,” New York Review of Books, March 12, 2020.

[7]Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from
 Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).

[8] James Hansen, Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury).

St. Francis Episcopal Mission Outreach

        Rev. Dr. John C. Forney

        Fourth of July, 2021

“We Are Family”

                        Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Psalm 145;
      Letter from a Birmingham Jail by M.L. King; Matthew 5:43-48