The congregation was dumbstruck that Sunday morning as Jai and I stood before the altar during the time of announcements to announce that we were expecting.  Yes, Abraham and Sarah, in our old age, expecting our first.

I still remember one of the congregation busybodies taking me aside after the service to express her relief.  “I’m so glad to hear your announcement.  I just thought Jai was letting herself go.”

Having come from a family with not the best example of fatherhood, I was pretty insecure about my nurturing ability.  As the day drew near, waiting over two days of contractions, my nerves didn’t settle down.  After the third trip to the hospital, the midwife suggested we call in medical expertise. 

In came two people, I remember the names exactly – they were classic – Emerson and Newton.  No. I’m not kidding.  And they both looked like they were only a year or two out of high school.  By this time, we were looking at a caesarian section.  I thought to myself, “These two kids are going to cut up my wife?”

Was Jai in travail?  No, she was pumped full of happy juice.  Not feeling any pain, or much else.  As the hospital had a policy that fathers could be present for the birth, there I was as Dr. Newton made the incision.  Biting my fingernails.  Though I had been an Army Medic and had seen lots of blood, I was never related to any of these patients. You might say, I was the one in travail. 

When a boy was delivered, it didn’t help my anxiety to hear several loud slaps and our pediatrician, Dr. Clint, yelling, “Breathe, damnit.  Breathe!”  Finally, there was a reassuring piercing cry and I knew the worst was over.  Talk about “high anxiety!”

Paul, in his letter to the Christians at Rome speaks to such times as “high anxiety.” 

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our bodies.” 

“But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Remember the old TV show, “Kung Fu?”  “Patience, young grasshopper.”  As the old master would seek to settle his young novice.

We are in the midst of a contagion unlike anything our generation has ever seen.  We have suffered more death than twice the casualty rate of the Vietnam War.  We are sick and tired of being shut in.  We are even sicker when we come across people not wearing masks in public – those, who through their carelessness, through just not giving a rip, who through their dismissive attitude, continue to put the rest of us at risk.  And prolong the shutdown we all are sick and tired of.  As Fanny Lou Hamer was fond of saying, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

And that goes double if we have young children at home.

With COVID-19, we’re all in travail. 

We wonder how much education our children will lose.  This week the Claremont Unified School Board went back into emergency session to reverse its decision of a week previous.  Now, there will be no face-to-face school in session.  All teaching will be by internet.  I’m sure parents are groaning in great travail.  And patience for grasshoppers, or much of any other creature, is in short supply.  The only hopes parents had for respite have been dashed. 

Paul can talk about hope.  Well and good for him.  He didn’t have a cooped-up seven-year-old and a junior higher to deal with!  Yeah, “…we wait for it with patience!”  Right.

All creation groans in COVID-19 travail. 

For people of faith, our usual support is lacking or somewhat anemic.  We at St. Francis miss each other terribly.  We long for a hug.  We long for that familiar face.  With the reoccurrence of massive infections, our bishop John counselled patience and forbearance.  It may not be until September or later before we can safely resume worship on site.

One wit remarked, “When this is all over one half of us will be excellent cooks and the other half alcoholics.”

Uncertainty and deprivation bring out the worst AND the best in many.  The parable of the seeds explained in Matthew 13 indicates, amongst the church folk, there is some variation.  Some look like followers of Jesus, and some – we’re not quite sure WHO they are following.  But it sure doesn’t look like Jesus.  In such situations, folks were tempted to judge.  Divide the congregation up into First Class Christians and Second (or Fifth or Tenth) Class Christians. 

I remember as a young child our family attended a Presbyterian Church.  Faithfully.  I knew my father must have had a large pledge because one Sunday morning my teacher whispered into my hear that she so appreciated the large financial support our family gave the church.”  I wasn’t old enough to know that such a comment was out of place.  But I did feel a bit embarrassed for having been singled out.

Well the day came when our old pastor retired and we got a new fellow.  A number of weeks afterward we stopped attending.  When I finally had the nerve to ask my dad what was wrong, he told me the issue.  This new pastor believed in the Calvinist doctrine of Predestination.  He, in sermon after sermon, let those sitting in the pews know where they were predestined to end up.  And where he was predestined to go.  And they weren’t the same place.  Eventually, my parents, and a number of others, got tired of hearing that they were unalterably bound for perdition.  Hellfire is not a very good selling strategy for the love of Christ.

Such is the situation in Jesus parable of the seeds.  Don’t condemn.  Don’t shun or cast out.  Let God sort ‘em out in the end.  It’s beyond our pay grade.

And if we are honest, brutally honest, with ourselves, each of us is a mix of good wheat and weeds.  Some of us filled with a lot of devil grass and puncture vines

You look how this pandemic has brought out the best and the worst. 

Sometimes it is just a little act of kindness that makes my day.  Like the image of a young fellow helping an elderly woman get her shopping cart of groceries out of the bus as she was exiting the door.  A priceless, simple act of kindness.

Yes, there are inconsiderate, narcissistic people who will not wear a mask, but there are so many who do.  It was such a climate of common consideration that enabled Taiwan, which has a little over one tenth the population of the United States to get through their experience with COVID-19 with only seven deaths.  Seven deaths in the whole country!  Just imagine.  If we had been as proportionally successful as Taiwan, we would by now only have about 97 deaths – instead of 138,000.  And counting. It’s all about leadership and consideration.

We might also note, incidentally, that the countries that have come through this pandemic intact — Taiwan, New Zealand, Denmark, Germany, Iceland – they all have one thing in common.  They’re all lead by women.  Causes one to ponder.  Could it be that too much testosterone is an impediment to doing the right thing, the bright thing?  Just sayin’…

As our bishop John says, WWJD?  “Wear a mask.”

Yes, in spite of the travail and struggle, there is yet much joy to be had.  The people I meet on my walk, almost all are wearing masks.

I turned on my Facebook site and came across the most post someone had left me, an orchestra playing on the streets of Havana, Cuba.  Rondo alla Mambo’ by Sarah Willis and the Havana Lyceum Orchestra.  Rhythm. Bodies swaying.  Smiles on the old faces of folks peering out of second floor windows.  Check it out.  It will delight your heart and warm your soul.

Travail, yes.  But in solidarity we move through COVID-19.  Bowed but not broken. Knowing discouragement, yet immersed in the joy of solidarity from common support.  Surrounded ever by that glorious company of saints, those living and those having gone on before – in them I rejoice.

Travail, yes.  BUT, JOY IN THE MORNING!

I also rejoice in this Spirit-filled meditation by a Lutheran pastor serving an Episcopal congregation, Grace Memorial Episcopal Church in Darlington, Maryland.  The Rev/ Nadia Bolz-Weber:

I do not know when we can gather together again in worship, Lord.

So, for now I just ask that:

When I sing along in my kitchen to each song on Stevie Wonder’s Songs in The Key of Life Album, that it be counted as praise.

And that when I read the news and my heart tightens in my chest, may it be counted as a Kyrie.

And that when my eyes brighten in a smile behind my mask as I thank the cashier may it be counted as passing the peace.

And that when I water my plants and wash my dishes and take a shower may it be counted as remembering my baptism.

And that when the tears come and my shoulders shake and my breathing falters, may it be counted as prayer.

And that when I stumble upon a Tabitha Brown video and hear her grace and love of you may it be counted as a hearing a homily.

And that as I sit at that table in my apartment, and eat one more homemade meal, slowly, joyfully, with nothing else demanding my time or attention, may it be counted as communion.

The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber

She gets the “Last Word.”

Amen.

July 19, 2020

Pentecost 7, Proper 11

“As in Travail”

The Rev. John C. Forney
Isaiah 44:6-8, Romans 8:18-25, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Some will remember that “Hot August Night” when Neil Diamond stepped out onto the stage.  The orchestra began with a winsome prelude that slowly crescendoed to a pulsing beat.  Then began the first strains of that ballad that so aptly celebrates the promise of this nation for millions around the world, “We’re coming to America.”  Neil Diamond in an iridescent blue shirt with flashing blue lights spangled about it, and the joyous crowd responding, “Today.  Today.  Today.”  The camera does a slow pan across the audience and comes to rest on the face of an old guy about my age with tears streaming down his face.  “Today.  Today.  Today.”

This is the America I grew up with as a young boy.  In school we made Pilgrim hats and the white shoulder coverings those early pioneers wore.  We read of that almost deified, mythical Thanksgiving feast.  We learned of the colonists rising up and throwing British tea into Boston harbor made up as Indians. And watching over all, Divine Providence. 

Yes, actually, historically, some of those things happened.  There were a few heroes in all this.  But the reality is much more complicated.  And not quite as divine. 

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place which he was to receive as an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was to go.  By faith he sojourned in the land of promise.”

Unfortunately, that so-called Promised Land has been too much promised.  So, with America.  Other than the first inhabitants, all the rest of us arrived to find it already taken. And, don’t forget, even those first inhabitants drove much of the original wildlife into extinction.  All of us have blood on our hands.

Yet by faith, generation after generation, we persevere.  The original promise continues to unfold, but we all stand in the need of Grace.

To put it into the passive exonerative voice, “Mistakes were made.”  Many. You know them.  We’re still making them.  I wouldn’t have been sad at all to see the statue of Andrew Jackson toppled in Lafayette Park in D.C. the other night.  You remember that president, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”  His expulsion of some sixty thousand Native Americans from the Southeastern United States today would have been considered a war crime.  If this bit of our history escapes you mind – maybe you weren’t paying attention in your eighth-grade history class.  Oh, you say it wasn’t in your history book.  Well, that’s not a surprise.  The victors write the history.  Don’t remember?  The Cherokee, Seminole and Choctaw – they remember.  Ask one of their people.  If you’re ready to listen respectively, with a heart ready to be wounded – maybe one of them will share the story of the “Trail of Tears.”  Mistakes were made.  In abundance.

So here we are.  With the exception of those original inhabitants – and while we all came in different boats – we’re all in the same boat now.  America is adrift and pestilence stalks the land. 

And yet, and yet…by Faith… “They’re Coming to America.”

The first came to escape tyranny and the oppression of kings and Church.  We didn’t believe in the freedom of religion in these scattered colonies much more than the king believed in it in Mother England.  Here, we ended up with so many different religious traditions on these shores, we were forced to come to an accommodation.  People leaving Europe were exhausted by religious wars.  If you can find that in your old, musty history book.  These stories are there.  Start under, “Thirty Years War.”  It left some eight million dead.  All over whether Jesus was actually in the piece of bread at the altar, or whether he was present in our celebration of his presence in the reality of those who gathered in the memory of his name.  Eight million souls gone to wherever over a theological disputation – and a few other things.  For sure, politics and nationalism and other stuff were mixed in.  As they say, it’s complicated.

The genius of this new land is that we have found a better way (not that we always heed it).  As Winston Churchill noted about us, “Americans always do the right thing.  After they’ve tried everything else.”  Eventually, we made progress.  A Catholic could be president.  Recently, a Jew did almost win the Democratic nomination twice.  Jews, Catholics, Protestants serve on the Supreme Court and in Congress with their Muslim brothers and sisters.  Don’t forget our first black president, EVER.  In the twenty-first century, gay, straight and trans, we elect them.  And not a few atheists.  Yes, God loves atheists, too.  Or what part of “ALL” didn’t you understand? 

By faith we till the soil of this Promised Land.  We hold an expansive vision for all.

For those who might be a little squeamish or put off about this last assertion, I refer you to Calvin (also in your history book).  Think Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregationalist.   “Man does not have the authority to decide whom God will save.”   Nor does woman.  Any of us, flawed as we are, can be an instrument for Good under the power of the One who created the heavens and earth.

“We’re Coming to America.”  Today.  Today.  “By Faith…”

What is that ineffable quality about this land that others find so compelling?  Listen to the stories of those Jews fleeing the shtetls of Russia and Poland in the eighteen-hundreds.  Those Orthodox village communities that had known stable communal life for hundreds of years were beset by famine and pogroms.  Thousands were killed by czarist mobs and driven off their lands.

“We’re Coming to America.”  Today.  Today.  “By Faith…”

The Forneys, originally French Huguenots fleeing papist mobs in France, first settled in Switzerland and then in Germany.  Looking for a better life, we landed in the Port of Philadelphia in 1767 or there abouts.  Between my father’s and mother’s families we are a mix of French, German and English.  Throw in a Jewish peddler who married into the family in Iowa and gave my mother’s side the surname, Gross.  Her mother was a Howe.  Yes, in our lineage Julia Ward Howe – think the first Mother’s Day Proclamation.   Also General Howe, the British general who proved so inept as to let George Washington slip through his fingers three times.  He was finally sent home back to England.  But, apparently, not all the Howes.

We’re coming to America.  Sweet Land of Liberty.  Today.  Today.  Today.  “By Faith…”

We all came in separate boats, but now we’re all in the same boat.  Today, virtually every one reading this — your family — came from somewhere. By boat, on foot or, lately, by plane.

As immigrants, our ethic should be formed by Torah values, as explicated in the book of Deuteronomy. 

“The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great the mighty, and terrible God, who is not partial and takes no bribe.  He executes justice for the fatherless 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.”

You should love and cleave to God, “…who has done for you these great and terrible things which your eyes have seen.”

This ethic, passed down from Abraham in the Torah to the Prophets, and enshrined in the teachings of Jesus is the heart of who we are created to be as an immigrant nation.  This ethic is the cornerstone of the Declaration and Constitution.  It was in the mind of Lincoln when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.  This ethic tore at the hearts of Congress when, shamefacedly, they issued a formal apology to Japanese-Americans interned in concentration camps during WWII. 

And what amends will we make to generations of African-Americans who built much of this place?  Built the very White House itself and laid out the boundaries of our nation’s capital.  Look up Benjamin Banneker, surveyor, astronomer, and farmer.  He calculated the solar eclipse of 1789 well before other, more famous astronomers.  He worked to set those boundary markers.

What reparations will we make to the people of Greenwood?  Who built the section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, stormed by white mobs in some of the worst violence our nation has known?  What reparations?  “Black Wall Street” burnt to the ground, the pride of generations of Tulsa’s Black citizens?  They’re still waiting for an answer. 

What amends will we make to the First Nations people from whom we stole Mt. Rushmore and so much more?  Impoverished on neglected reservations.

Th e miracle is that we have survived thus far and somehow managed to keep the country together after some fashion.

This ethic reverberates in the agonized plea of Rodney King, “…can we all JUST get along?  Can we get along?”

So, listen up, Sweet Land of Liberty, we’re at a new beginning.  As M.L. King wrote, “…tomorrow is today.” 

 “By Faith…”

Read the opinion section by Caroline Randall Williams, “You want a Confederate Monument?  My body is a Confederate Monument. The black people I came from were raped by the white people I came from.  Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?” [1]

Yes, read it.  The mere fact that such a searing story could be printed at all is evidence that God has graced this land.  True greatness begins with truth-telling, repentance.  And at some point, hopefully, absolution.  Absolution, not ours to demand, but a mark of God’s grace that grows out of honest, heartfelt conversation with those harmed.  Freely offered, not ours to demand.  Ultimately, a gift of God’s Grace.

“Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past.  They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land.  They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.”

“To those people it is my privilege to say, I am the proof.  I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.”[2]

The fact that Ms. Williams’s story could even be told — and read — and hopefully absorbed with empathy by a white audience, is a mark of God’s grace.  Freedom begins with truthful story telling.  She, and all who have survived such a shameful legacy – they are the true heroes of the South.  They are its righteous legacy.  So, also with those of the southern branch of the Forney family.”

If America is ever to be Great Again,” it would only be when we disenthrall ourselves of our made-up, high school sanitized history.  With the Rev. Al Sharpton, we must acknowledge that any greatness will only begin when we honestly ask, “Great for whom?”  Great for whom?  And prayfully listen for an answer. The Spirit will speak to an open and contrite heart.

Any greatness will begin with an honest assessment of who we are and from where we have traveled.  As my mother always said, “Handsome is as handsome does.” I think I now know what she meant.

“By Faith Abraham…”  By Faith, each one of us embarks on a new journey, sojourners in a land every bit as strange and as foreign as it was to those first people who crossed the Bearing Strait eons ago.  Every bit as foreign as it was to those first Pilgrims.  As it was to those who disembarked from fetid slave ships. Every bit as foreign as were the streets of New York that opened to hundreds of Suffragette women marching for their personhood to be acknowledged at the ballot box.  Every bit as foreign as to those who on Bloody Sunday crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge — named after a Grand Dragon of the KKK.  Every bit as foreign as America now is to all of us in this new era of #BlackLivesMatter, COVID-19 lockdown, and the beginning of an economic collapse unlike any since the Great Depression.  “By Faith…”

“By Faith…” Might we be receptive on this July 4th to the stirring of God’s Holy Spirit.  Indeed, “The times, they are a changing.”  Might this nation embrace this fresh opportunity to live out its creeds and promises.  A new birth of common purpose.

“By Faith….” let each take hold of the opportunity to begin anew.  Then, and only then, do we embark on a journey towards greatness – a destination never reached, but approached from afar with starry eyes.

“By Faith…”  We’re still Coming to America.  Today.  Today.  Today.

 Amen.

---

[1] Caroline Randall Williams, New York Times, “Sunday Review,” June 28, 2020., p. 4.

[2] Ibid.

Dear friends in Christ

July 5, 2020

Independence Day Weekend

“We’re Coming to America”

The Rev. John C. Forney
Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Hebrews 11:8-16; Matthew 5:43-48

My first parish assignment at a little town in the upper Mojave Dessert.  There I met a number of wonderful, faithful Christians.  Yes, the town was little.  My wife would have said infinitesimal.  When we first arrived to be interviewed, in all of about one minute we had passed through the entire downtown section and crossed the railroad tracks back into open desert.  My tearful wife said with a quaver in her voice, “Is this all there is?”  Later she would tell friends that we were centrally located, “One hundred fifty miles from nowhere.”  She was certain that the End of the Earth was only four blocks past the local schoolhouse.  Or was it two?

One of the wonderful members of that church was Bill, our Lay Leader.  Bill’s father had been a Methodist pastor, and it was his father’s example that led Bill to strongly insist that the church should be involved in its community.

One day Bill told me the story of his father’s involvement in the early Civil Rights struggles in Florida.  Tensions had been building and Bill’s father had an idea of how the church might bridge the gap and promote understanding.  He went across town to see an acquaintance who was pastor of a Black Baptist church.  He proposed a plan whereby the two children’s choirs might do an exchange on an upcoming Sunday.  The two pastors agreed on a date.  The Baptist kids would spend Saturday night over at Bill’s father’s church, getting to know their kids.  Then, on Sunday morning they would preform a couple of numbers for the eleven o’clock service.  Bill’s father had decided that since race relations were so raw, he ought to spend the night at his church with the kids and their chaperones.

Around 9:00 p.m. there was a banging on the church door, and when the pastor opened it, he was confronted by an armed mob of fifty or sixty.  A man with a shotgun stepped forward, “Preacher, you best send those kids out here now.”  Bill’s father told the man in no uncertain terms, “They aren’t coming out.  And if you want them, you’re only get to them over my dead body.”

Everybody got really quiet.  After what seemed like an hour, Bill’s dad being silhouetted by the light of the open doorway and the belligerent armed men facing him, there was the faint sound of shuffling feet.  A few around the edges began to peel away, then others.  Sounds of some more car doors closing and engines starting up.  After a few more minutes most had gotten back in their cars. The mob had quietly dispersed.  They’d gone home.

That is an indelible story Bill would take to his grave.  It is a story of Christian courage and discipleship when it was all on the line.  The Baptist kids remained unaware of what had happened that evening as they sang to the delight of that Methodist congregation Sunday morning.  Given the emotionally charged experience, so fraught with potential for tragedy, the Methodist kids never made their reciprocal visit to the Baptist church across town.

In our passage from John’s gospel, we are given fair notice that this Jesus Movement stuff will not be a walk in the park.  Most everybody will hate and despise you.  Your ways are foolishness.  Un American.  Communist!  Jesus’ way will tear up families.  If daughters-in-law were not be getting along all that well with the in-laws, Gospel values will make things exponentially worse.  This is going to go way beyond kitchen turf conflicts and how to raise the grandkids.  And who makes the best meatloaf.

One’s not going to need to heed Civil Rights leader, Congressman John Lewis’s call to get into, “good trouble, necessary trouble.”  It’s going to come knocking at your doorstep.  In spades!  Neighbors will shun you.  You will be beaten in city streets by hostile policing authorities.  Some of your neighbors will burn down your church. Tear gas, pepper spray.  It’s all coming at you.  I can testify from personal experience.  You are about a most inconvenient truth THEY don’t want to hear.  You will be fired and sidelined if you work for a government agency.  Your career’s toast.  Nobody wants to hear it.  Go away.

During the recent mass rallies, the Los Angeles Times has reported on the ugliness peaceful demonstrators have encountered in rural, mostly white, California.  Protestors encountered pure ugliness.  They were beset upon by threats of violence and malicious rumors.  Two teenagers from Angels Camp spoke of horrible abuse.  Angels Camp – remember the home of the “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain.[1]  That Angels Camp.

One seventeen-year-old Black student in rural Quincy has been spat on by white students at her school and called the N-word.  The torment got so bad, she finally had to transfer to another school — a move that would cost her a scholarship and the captain position of the cheer squad.  God may love all, but not so much some of the residents of Quincy.  

In Tuolumne County some angry folks threatened to bring guns and dogs into town.  Large dogs.

In Shasta County an unauthorized “militia” of armed men in tactical gear threatened to show up at the protest at Oakdale.  Not at all what local law authorities wanted.  The word the sheriff used?  “Counterproductive.”

One mixed race citizen, Camereon Medico, began a one-man protest with a sign board in Susanville.  He was assaulted with racial slurs and curses, “We don’t like your kind around here.” And “Black lives don’t matter.”  Some on Facebook denizens threatened to bring guns and “run over” protesters.  In spite of the hate and threats, a white neighbor and then others soon joined the man’s protest.  Yes, there’s going to be “trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Standing for justice and equity – standing for the ideals Jesus preached is not easy.  “If this stuff was easy, we’d have already done it a long time ago,” President Obama is fond of saying.  It this stuff was easy, Jesus would have had it wrapped up during his earthly ministry. 

My first work while in seminary was in community organizing.  Trained seminary interns in teams of two were sent to clusters of churches who had invited them in to help them work on white racism.  Vic and I ended up at Temple City, California, hosted by a cluster of five congregations.  We called it Project Understanding, though there often wasn’t an abundance of understanding.

Our work there took shape as an ecumenical fair housing council.  Temple City was a bedroom community for Los Angeles and it was in housing patterns that racism was expressed.  Talk about lack of understanding!  I remember our first meeting with the city manager.  His opening words, “This is a nice, peaceful (read white) community and I intend to keep it that way.”  Our first client was Italian.  For some reason, the owner of this rental property hated Italians.  Why?  Go figure.

Members of our project were sent out to investigate, or check out complaints, to confront hostile apartment managers and owners.  To secure the just rights of minority clients, they were often castigated as “trouble makers” and worse.  Called all sorts of names.  Jesus was right.  His message of love put into action would not be popular.  Justice is the public form of love, and it’s not often popular because it means giving up power. 

The last time I visited the church that had hosted our office, was on the occasion of a memorial service for the woman who had followed me as director of Project Understanding,  Now, Temple City was overwhelmingly Asian.  Communities change.  But it was “nice and peaceful.”

“They will deliver you up to councils, and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake…”  Tough stuff.  Not easy, indeed!

“Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.”  Yes, indeed if this stuff was easy, we’d have done it a long time ago.  And, if you try — yes, you too, will end up in deep doo-doo.

“What I tell you in the dark, utter in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim upon the housetops.  Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul…”

Cinch up your belt.  Get your game face on. There’s work to do if we’re going to build a Promised Land.  It’s about the risk to love.

Dante Stewart alerts us to risk as the costly expression of faith.  “Sympathy feels bad about a situation. Solidarity joins in as a co-laborer to change the situation. Sympathy calls for love without risk. Solidarity calls for risk as love. Sympathy centers the comfort and timetable of those who benefit from a system of difference. Solidarity calls for a revolution of value in a system in which we build a loving and just common life together.”[2]

Solidarity, as corporate love, is costly.  It demands something.  It demands risk.  It is easy to march with thousands of like-minded people in Los Angeles or in any other large, mostly progressive city.  To make that witness in a small, rural setting is costly.  One will quickly reach the “unrepentant heart.”  Fearful and damaged persons will react out of that fear and reject you and your message.  The challenge then, is how might one creatively engage and disarm that fear.  Move beyond it.  I can’t say we interns in Temple City were often that successful.  Too green, most of the time.

But understanding is possible.  Or maybe just tolerance.  We did have some small victories.  We did host a number of community symposiums on the fair housing laws and how to follow them.  When managers and owners heard that if a Black family would rent a unit, the rest of the tenants would not move out.  Why?   Because people hate to move.  If the new family could afford the same rent the others were paying, they would keep up their unit in pretty much the same fashion.  And this was the case.  Most people want to do the right thing.  Soon neighbors got to know one another and the neighborhood’s heart grew one size bigger.  In the years I ran the project, we never actually had to sue anyone. 

For those brave Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians and Disciples of Christ members of Project Understanding, this was costly love.  Faith, being put to the test, grew beyond measure.  In the work, Jesus became real like he had never been for many of our investigators.   They tasted a smidgen of Life Eternal.

Our nation, we sense, is at a crossroads.  The Rev. William Barber calls our time a Third Reconstruction.  Lately I have been moved to pick up a book of Martin Luther King, Jr., Where do we Go from Here:  Chaos or Community?[3]

In one of his last works, Dr. King lays out his hopes for a better America.  It is a vision firmly rooted in the promise of our Constitution and founding documents.  But he knew that the continued pressure of mass demonstrations, supported with strategic organizing and policy proposals would be essential.  Just as now.

Love, if it is to amount to anything in the public sphere, must be disciplined and tenacious.  Just as now.

“Mass nonviolent demonstrations will not be enough.  They must be supplemented by a continuing job of organization.  To produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power.[4]

Building up what King called “The Beloved Community” is tough stuff. It’s about changing the power dynamic.  And power makes no concessions.

If this stuff was easy, it would have been done a long time ago.  It is sort of like of weeding or housework.  It’s never done.  Those of us who marched in the sixties thought we’d gotten voting rights, civil rights, fair housing, LGBT rights, women’s rights and a city worthy of the Beloved Community.

Far too many of us rested on the accomplishments of a past day.  When we awoke, we woke to racism and discrimination every bit as virulent as when we had begun so many years ago.  We woke up to intolerance, economic despair and voter suppression.  Crap schools and dilapidated housing.  Thousands sleeping on the streets and rampant addiction.  Gangs and disaster neighborhoods.  Did I mention global warming, mass incarceration and a pandemic?  And an America with no direction, a nation adrift?

I’ll give Dr. King the last word here before we pull the covers up over our heads.

   “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.  We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.  In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.  Procrastination is still the thief of time.  Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with lost opportunity…We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.  This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”[5]

“I set before you the ways of life and death,” says God.  “Choose life.”

Thousands, Black and White marching in solidarity through America’s streets, are choosing life.  Two brave teenage protestors in Angels Camp, California, are choosing life.  City mayors and police department chiefs confronting legacies of abuse and misconduct are choosing life.

Tough stuff indeed, but more precious than much fine gold!

As Anne Lamott has written in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, “Hope begins in the dark…” 

Amen.

---

[1] Brittny Mejia, Hailey Branson-Potts, “Some in Rural California take up racial justice cause,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2020.

[2] Dante Stewart, “Verse and Voice,” Sojourners, June 16, 2020.

[3] Martin Luther King, Jr., Where do we go From Here: Chaos or Community?, (Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 2010).

[4] Ibid, p. 139.

[5] Ibid, 202.

June 21, 2020

Pentecost 3, Proper 7

  “If This Stuff was Easy…”

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 9:35-10:8

Over fifty years ago I distinctly remember being lined up with a bunch of other guys in a dingy, depressing room, downtown L.A., and raising my right hand and swearing to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.  We then stepped across a line painted on the floor and, instantly, I was no longer a civilian.  For the next two years I would be a U.S. Army medic.”

As part of that induction ceremony, we all were given a list of “General Orders.”  These were the duties we are to be about if there is no officer to direct us, if we got separated from our unit.  “General Orders” are the common sense actions one would take in any emergency: secure government property, protect life, report to the first officer that one might encounter.

You are part of the Church because you have been inducted into the Jesus Movement.  In this day and age, no one is making you be here.  You are here because you were Spirit-called.  In the Jesus Movement our General Orders are to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind, and your Neighbor as yourself.”  That simple.  Common sense.  Gospel sense.  Gospel orders.

At the beginning there were twelve inductees.  “…first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.”

Then he sent them out.  Their mission?  To heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.  You received without paying, give without pay.”  And why?  “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  And travel light.  Common sense General Orders.

The “Kingdom of Heaven” – what our brother Martin Luther King called “the Beloved Community” is at hand.  This is the inbreaking reality where all are valued for who they are.  Sort of like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  We’re here as citizens to fulfill its promise and celebrate its joys.

But there are those who would pain the Beloved Community.  Do it great harm.  And we are called to action.  General Orders time.

This week, the summons came through those agonized words: “I can’t breathe.  I can’t breathe.”

In today’s world the first assignment to those of the Jesus Movement is to remove the knee.  Communities of color need to breathe.  The scab has been ripped off four hundred years of oppression in America.    As George had a knee on his neck, we all have a knee on our necks.  Remove the knee!  None of us can breathe.  It begins with #BlackLivesMatter.

To those disbelieving souls who would object, “Well, don’t all lives matter.”  There are some who just don’t get it.  Some who don’t know our American history.  Some having an appalling lack of empathy.  Back to the Penalty Box.  You’re not ready for this discussion if the first words out of your mouth are, if your first thought is, “Yes, but…”  Best sit down, be quiet and listen.  “I can’t breathe.”  Do you hear him?  Listen to the agony.  Humility is the order of the day for you.  Those are your “General Orders.”

In another sense, yes, you are right.  For the forty percent of Americans who live in poverty and near poverty, your lives matter every bit as much.  The lives of the impoverished and left out do indeed matter. Those who live day by day working a gig job with no future, laid off at an economic whim – your life matters.  Those downsized, outsourced and abandoned —  your communities matter.  

Some insight into our common economic and political disenfranchisement might, hopefully, lead you to realize that at the root, you have much more in common than you think with your sisters and brothers of color.  Maybe that’s why the crowds in the streets these past weeks are so diverse.  Everyone’s marching.  We all have a stake in this.  The knee on George Floyd’s neck is also on yours.  And on your children’s.

The call to us in the Jesus Movement is to tend the sick, lift up the downtrodden, and give hope to those abandoned by this idolatrous, so-called Free Market.  Folks, there’s a big fat thumb on the scale.  A thumb larded up with billions and billions in bribes to the political elite.  This is not partisan.  Both parties are equal opportunity grifters.  That’s one thing Mr. Trump got right.  The system’s rigged.

We can’t breathe.  We need a platoon of disciples from the Jesus Movement to remove the\knee.  George Floyd couldn’t breathe.  Trayvon Martin couldn’t breathe. Folks in abandoned communities all across America can’t breathe.  The citizens of the Inland Empire who have suffered decades of political corruption can’t breathe. 

Our charge is to remove the knee.  We are now all George Floyd.  “I can’t breathe,” is our desperate cry.  Maybe our dying cry.

While a citizen army of hundreds of thousands mobilized in the streets and boulevards of our cities all across the land, too many of our elected officials mobilized to be scarce.

“I’m not going to criticize other people,” was the lame excuse of one.  “I’m late to lunch,” the response of several. Silence.  Crickets, the response from others as they passed by reporter Kasie Hunt on the “Walk of Shame” to the Senate Dining Room.  Remind me again, what are we paying these folks a salary for?

Unfortunately, a criminal element, we now know, was organizing to use these massive demonstrations for their own nefarious purposes — outright looters and arsonists.  Others were acting out of their varied pathologies.  And a few were political subversives – yes, we have evidence of their being egged on by the same malefactors who conspired to manipulate our elections in 2016 to great effect.  What a delight the internet can be.  For fun, profit, organizing, and election rigging.

The best, the majority inducted into these marches and rallies across the land, they were exemplary of the values of the Jesus Movement – Spirit recruited,

What gives me hope this time, what is different from the demonstrations of the ‘60s of my era is the portrait of this crowd.  This is the most diverse group of people ever to come out into the streets of our nation.  Those standing in solidarity with George Floyd’s family, those raising the cry for decency, sisterhood and brotherhood – those called to good purpose have been the most diverse group of Americans ever to take to the streets to say, “Enough.”  We can’t breathe.  They could be Peter, John, son of Zebedee and Bartholomew.  Or Alice, Manuel, Serena, Jamil, or Alex.  And cast out demons, do they ever!  We’ve got whole new batch of ugly demons to confront in American:  racism, poverty, dysfunctional politics, a decrepit health care system, hate, a collapsed economy – just to name a few.

We don’t need to worry about boredom and nothing to do.  Did I mention a raging pandemic?  People dying like flies?  Another of our ills needing healing.

The work of those in the Jesus Movement is most contagious.  We saw multiple scenes of members of the police, even chiefs and mayors taking a knee in solidarity.  It is said that Hope is the evidence of things unseen.  We’ve seen some beautiful evidence of Hope on the streets of America.

In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 82% of Americans support the peaceful protests as a legitimate response to what has happened.  Retired generals and admirals have finally spoken up against use of the military against peaceful protesters.  The military is not a plaything.  It is not a collection of toy soldiers that can be shuffled about as in a game.

All this protest is born of the values and teachings of the Jesus and the prophets.  These enduring values are enshrined in our Constitution and common norms of decency.

We are inducted to raise our voices to high heaven over the injustice and oppression done to the “least of these.”  

Because we are not bystanders in this democracy, but have power as citizens, it is up to each of us to pull our nation back to our higher ideals.  It is up to all of us, in the face of the travesty of justice done to George Floyd to raise his voice, ‘I CAN’T BREATHE.”  To raise the voices of all in the face of pandemic, racism, economic collapse and in the threat of a politicized military: “WE CAN’T BREATHE.”  That is the commission of our induction into the Jesus Movement. 

At the conclusion of his eulogy for George Floyd, the Rev. Al Sharpton asked the question.  If time’s up for injustice, what are we going to do with the time left to each of us?  Will we fritter it away with sitcoms and mindless consumerism?  Will we just go to sleep or indulge in various addictions?  Or expend it for that which endures?  Kingdom building.

Will we use it to perfect our fragile union?  Will we use it in acts of unselfish solidarity?  For a cause greater than ourselves?

After I completed my service as a medic I became a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  I received my copy of their paper, The Veteran with updates on events, reunions, and projects.  Often included are articles on the early history of the organization and the early protest against that war.  Laurel Krause wrote of her sister Allison, one of the four students killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State on May 4, 1970 – fifty years ago this month..

One piece that caught my eye as I skimmed the paper.  “The Little Girl at My Door.”  On his way from Landing Zone Andy into the Vietnamese army base at An Loc, Jack Mallory noticed a group of several children.

“Something wasn’t right, and I told my jeep driver to head over there.  Half a dozen kids were gathered around a young girl, maybe 10 years old, lying under a tree.  She wasn’t visibly injured, but pale, motionless and dead.”

“Through my interpreter, her friends told me she’d been up in the tree gathering branches for firewood.  She had triggered a booby trap set up by the local Viet Cong.  A grenade, without pin, had been placed in a tin can with a wire strung across the road.  They had hoped that the antenna on an American vehicle would hit the wire, yank the grenade from the can, detonate it over the vehicle.  A few minutes earlier, however, the little girl had detonated the grenade herself.  She was apparently untouched, except for a small hole not much bigger than my thumb nail, right in the center of her chest.  She had bled out internally.  Not my fault.  Not, directly, our fault.”[1]

No not our fault, directly.  Much of the racist history in America, not our fault, directly.  Most do not scream racial slurs or expressly oppress.  We would be horrified to have thought that it was our knee on the neck of another, snuffing out the last remaining seconds of life.  Surely, we would have reacted to those dying words, “I can’t breathe.”  This is what we learned as inductees into the Jesus Movement.  It’s what we would have been taught in most any of the great religions of the world.  Yet, collectively, our knee has snuffed out the breath of too many.  Like that tragic event around a tree in a Vietnamese countryside, blame for the tragedy of that war is complicated. 

Regardless of fault, and the American foreign policy of that time was surely complicit, how do we move on?

Vietnam Veterans Against the War’s answer has been to build links of people-to-people connection with the citizens of Vietnam.  Approval has recently been received from the headmaster of a village school, Binh Thanh, to begin he construction of a future VVAW library.  Many of us have donated to its construction.  This last March was the organizer, Chuck Theusch’s fifty-third trip on behalf of VVAW. 

Will this library bring back that little girl?  Will our efforts to transform policing and our criminal justice system bring back George Floyd?  No, that pain will endure — but goodwill and friendship can triumph over evil and death.  Empathy and amends are tokens of Grace.

We are the incarnation of love that trumps hate.  We in the Jesus Movement, by the power of the Pentecost Spirit, we usher into reality a New Heaven and a New Earth.  “On earth as in heaven,” are our orders.

Just how did we get signed up?  Over what line did we cross into this Jesus Mission?  It was when the Holy Spirit got into our hearts and grabbed up our imagination.  In that instant, we knew that Love is the Answer.  My friend Ed Bacon says that each morning we wake up, we have a choice.  Will we live in the House of Love or the House of Fear?  The Spirit prompts our better angels.  Most of us.  Most of the time.

Presbyterian pastor and writer, Frederick Buechner, tells us of our duty in the Jesus Movement, in the Life Movement – it is our Vocation.  Which is?

“Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

For many our vocation has been to be out in the streets. Wearing your facemask.  Keeping proper social distance.  It has been to labor in crowded hospitals tending to the sickest of the sick.  It has been in a newsroom.  It has been keeping folks safe on the streets (Yes, there are good police who actually care).  It is that teacher attempting to figure out technology in order to reach out to her students.  It has been to mourn George Floyd.

Our vocation is where we are placed.  It is where “our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”   It is our commission.

Our commission is to speak truth in a time of lies and violence.

When peaceful demonstrators were summarily rousted by clouds of teargas, chemical agents and flash bang grenades from Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, for a militaristic photo op, while our Secretary of Defense thought they might be walking to the park only to “inspect the restrooms,” some of the better angels of our retired military saw the danger of this spectacle.  They found their voices.  Senator Mitt Romney, unlike so many other senators, was not out to lunch.  When our president made a travesty of our Christian heritage, waving about a Bible as if hawking a frozen steak on the Home Shopping Network –desecrating our church — religious leaders, the Catholic Archbishop and my bishop, spoke out against this tawdry spectacle – even the Rev. Pat Robertson and other Evangelicals – leaders often quiet on political matters, raised their voices.  Our vocation is often to speak out, to exorcise the demons of racism, of hate and the perversion of Jesus message of peace.  God is not a plaything.

In the end, our commission, our vocation, General Orders if you will, is summed up in a poem by the Jesuit brother Peter Byrne, “We are Simply Asked.”

We are simply asked to make gentle our bruised world,
To be compassionate of all, including oneself.
Then in the time left over to repeat the ancient tale,
And go the way of God’s foolish ones.[2]

Amen.

---

[1] Jack Mallory, “The Little Girl at My Door,” The Veteran, Spring 2020.

[2] Peter Byrne, “We are Simply Asked” as set to music by Jim Strathdee, “Light of the World,” Caliche Records, Ridgecrest, CA, 1982. Words copyright 1976 by Peter Byrne, S.J. Music by Jim Strathdee, copyright 1981. 

June 14, 2020

Pentecost 2, Proper 6

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 9:35-10:8

Inducted

Four bishops gathered over the five days of the Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in Southern California.  From various local denominations, Episcopal, Roman Catholic and African Methodist Episcopal churches, they were invited to speak at the United Methodist Bishop Charles Golden’s, maiden Annual Conference that year in Southern California. On a hot, stifling afternoon, the Episcopal Bishop Fred Borsch was the first.

As the body quieted as Bishop Borsch settled into the pulpit, an air of expectancy filled the cavernous chapel at the University of Redlands.  Fred took one last glance at his notes and waited until he knew he had the attention of all.

“Fire, Fire, Fire, everywhere.  Except in the hearts of Episcopalians,” he began.  For a second, I feared we might have a stampede out the doors, but Fred quickly continued. Yes, indeed!  He certainly had our attention.  “Fire everywhere except in the hearts of Episcopalians.” 

Fire!  I had thought a few days ago that my sermon was well on its way to competition.  Add in some bits to carry the theme through the text, maybe a humorous story to keep interest alive, and I would be done.  Ready to send it in to Faith, our Administrator at St. Francis, have her mail it out for those not having internet.

Fire!  They say be careful what you wish for.

Now the whole country seems of fire – literally, as well as metaphorically.  I’m taken back to the tragic days in Los Angeles after the assignation of Dr. King.  I was a young deacon at an inner-city church in the Pico-Union Neighborhood.  Not a one of us was untouched by the grief of our community.  Fortunately, in our community, cooler heads prevailed.  We gathered in the church for prayers, singing, the sharing of memories and outrage.  And when it seemed that what needed to be said, the anger and grief expressed, when the tears had been choked back, we all drifted back to our homes.  Each wondering if hope could ever be restored.

St. Augustine of Hippo said, “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”

If we are going to heal this nation, we must first address the anger.  Some are angry at those looting, burning and causing wanton mayhem.  I get that.  There is the 10-80-10 rule that pertains to disasters. 

Ten percent of those affected will step up.  Their minds will be focused on what needs to be done.  They are the ones who will begin immediately, once their safety is secured, to look after their families and then their neighbors.  They provide the necessary leadership for recovery. 

Eighty percent, whether in shock, or by natural inclination, will wait for leadership to emerge and then pitch in.  They will begin taking neighbors to medical facilities, they will grab their chainsaws and begin removing fallen trees to clear the streets for emergency vehicles.

And then there are the remaining ten percent.  These folks will use most any calamity to act out their sickness and perversion.  They are the arsonists that went from store to store with containers of gasoline and matches.  These are the ones who are the profiteers.  And I hope they are stuck with boxes and boxes of worthless toilet paper when all is said and done.  These are the rumor mongers, those spreading the lie that some of the officers were wearing “Make America White Again” hats.  These are the people that necessitate the summoning of the national guard.

Our nation now needs that first ten percent and the next eighty percent.  We need these folks fired up with compassion and clear minds, strong arms and open wallets.

This morning when we look around and gather our wits, there is much to do.  First, we need to get a grip.  We need those disciplined national guardswomen and men to clear the streets.  To send everybody home.  Arrest, if need be,, that last ten percent who will use the killing of George Floyd for their own demented ends. 

We need our houses of worship and spiritual leadership to help us mourn and express our grief about all that has happened.

The righteous anger folks felt upon watching the life slowly being choked out of George Floyd needs to be acknowledged.  We need to realize that this anger did not materialize overnight.  This nation has witnessed black men and women disrespected and murdered under the cover of state authority now for years.  Some would say four hundred years in America.  It was only one generation after that fabled first Thanksgiving that the sons of those first Pilgrims were committing genocide on the same people their mothers and fathers had broken bread with.  Now we are only left with a trail of tears and broken promises. 

The anger of Broken Knee, Watts, the James Pettis Bridge, Ferguson…and Minneapolis…We need to get our arms around it all and grieve with those who grieve.  We need to cry, to scream and shout, to hug one another – to do what ever is necessary to give voice to the pain we feel.

Tweets of bluster and threat do not improve the situation.  They will not heal.  We need an adult in the room who can acknowledge our collective grief and hurt. We need leadership to point a way forward out of this present chaotic, helpless moment, if our nation is to have any chance of healing.

That beautiful daughter of anger needs to be heard.  Her voice is cleansing fire that will weld us back as one.

“We all feel as if there’s a knee on our neck,” mourned Andrea Jenkins, vice president of the Minneapolis City Council last night.  There is a knee on our collective neck, but is not just the knee of police authority. 

This pandemic has been a window to another knee on the neck of America.  Those who have gotten sickest, those who have died are not distributed randomly across our cities and nation.  The dead are the poorest, those with no health care.  They were already the sickest because their diabetes and coronary issues were left untreated.  These victims of coronavirus are a window to the stifling poverty stalking our land.

These victims are those who never received any PPP check.  Nothing!  Because all the Big Boys cut the line at our large banks.  Their anger has been festering since the 2008 Great Recession.  They are the discarded and ignored.  Of course they’re mad.  As always, almost all the recovery went to the top one percent, the top one tenth of one percent.  They are the ones who still had to pay when the bankruptcy laws were jiggered and those who owned towers in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., got bailed out and stiffed their workers.

Yes, we need healing and consolation.  We need each other to wrap our hands around one another, to remind one another how we have gotten through such national trauma before.  That is what our faith is about.  It’s also about this second beautiful daughter of hope. The courage to change. 

That is the entire lesson for the Day of Pentecost.  We must acknowledge the fire that burns in so many disrespected hearts, in our hearts.  And we must remind one another of the courage and hope inspired through our walk with Christ.  Courage as infectious in the Jesus Movement as that of a virus on our unmasked streets and grocery stores.  Every bit as infectious.

This is our scriptural heritage.  It is the testimony of those who have gone before us.

If ever the Church needed a wake up call from the Holy Spirit, now is the time.  But what is the nature of this summons.  Our three texts appointed for today are spot on.  Tell the story!  Tell that old, old story!

There was a sound like the rush of a mighty wind.  The tongues as of fire appeared on the heads of the disciples and they began to speak in the languages of the gathered crowd.  Partians, Elimates, Cappadocians – they all understood.  Those from Medes, Pontus and Cyrene and visitors from Rome.  They all understood, each in their own language.

Where did we have the referent of this story?  Come on, biblical scholars, here’s a hint – Genesis.  Okay, another – the word babel.  Oh, you’re getting warmer.  Yes!  That’s it.  The confusion of languages of those building the Tower of Babel.  The end result of such hubris was that no one understood any of their coworkers anymore.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  That chaos looked like that of the streets of Minneapolis and some of our other major cities last Thursday night. 

The miracle is that out of confusion and chaos God’s will is for reunion and understanding.  Unity over tragic division is the miracle.  And what do they all hear?  What is the life-giving Word?  Love one another as I have loved you.

Paul speaks of the many gifts of the Spirit, all working together to bind us into one.  This is also Pentecost Fire.  Unity out of diversity.  To each is the suitable gift for building up the whole, each one needed.  All are baptized into the Body of Christ.  All Christians are given this one same Spirit and charge.

In the Gospel of John, the words of the Risen Lord with the gift of the Anointing Spirit are, “Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  And then this enigmatic charge, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 

Friends, we are not meant to luxuriate in these sins.  We are meant to forgive them.  We are meant to be “repairers of the breech.”  To bind up the sorrowful and lend a hand up to the fallen.

On the Day of Pentecost, the Church is commissioned to be the body of restoration.  It is to be the repairer of the breach.   And if you forgive the sins of any?  Folks, that is our job.  Sin is separation   Our job is to forgive, to restore.  That is our power we have in Christ.  That is the Pentecost miracle. 

Looking at where we are now, I think the best we can say is that this commission is a work in progress.  We’re so far from it.  In many ways.

Last Sunday, the New York Times featured on the entire first page one thousand of the nearly hundred thousand lost to the coronavirus.  One commentator would give voice to the sadness in his spirit, “Jesus wept.”

Accompanying each of the names was a short piece:  Audrey Malone, 68, Chicago, sang gospel music as a member of the Malone Sisters.  Clara Louise Bennett, 91, Albany, Georgia, sang her grandchildren a song of the first day of school each year.  William Helmreich, 74, Great Neck, N.Y., sociologist who walked New York City.  Johnnie D. Veasley, 76, Country Club Hills, Illinois, teacher’s aide.[1]  Would that the tragedy of this disease might have pulled us together.  The opposite has been the result.  This scourge has become so politicized.  We’ve substituted opinion for science, rumor and conspiracy theory for facts.  Wishful thinking for action.  Jesus wept indeed.  Unity is the gift of the Spirit.  Unity in respect – wearing facemasks, in social distancing, in following our God-given intellect.  Follow the science.  God gave us a brain, let us use it to the God’s glory, for heaven’s sake!

All this death needn’t have been so.  Had we begun, even one or two weeks earlier, taking the necessary measures rather than blaming and denying, upwards of some 60,000 names might not have been on this list. 

O Lord, give us the courage for the needed change.  Cast aside our hesitations.  Cast aside the battalions of lobbyists we willingly suffer with suitcases stuffed with money (campaign contributions).  Give us righteous anger at our pay-to-play politics of greed.  Give us courage for change.  So many deaths needn’t have been so.  So many.

The tragic truth is that the fire has gone out of too many of our churches.  Pierre Burton wrote much earlier, in 1965 a damning indictment of comfortable, laid-back Christianity, The Comfortable Pew.  If ever we needed that strong voice and example of unified purpose from our faith leaders, this is the time.  Fired-up moral leadership is what we need from our faith communities.  Like the Rev. Dr. Barber of “Moral Mondays” down in Goldsborough, North Carolina.  Like our friends at Urban Mission in Pomona, California. 

There’s a story told of the 2008 presidential primary.  It comes out of Greenwood, South Carolina.  On an uncomfortable sultry evening, rain pouring down, the dispirited and weary Obama campaign pulled into the parking lot of the civic center.  As then Senator Obama and the campaign staff slogged through the downpour into the center there was a small bedraggled group of about thirty who had come out to hear the candidate.

When the grandmotherly, African-American organizer, Edith Childs, saw the downcast look on the candidate’s face, she belted out, “Fired up.”  And the room came to life.  “Fired up,” echoed back the response.  Edith continued, “Ready to go.”  Again, the chorus responded in full voice, “Ready to go.”  In future rallies, with thousands in various auditoriums across the country, this became the signature chant of the campaign.  “Fired up.”  “Ready to go.”  Now and then, Edith would be invited onto the stage to lead the crowd.

Christians, we would do well to appropriate that chant.  The world needs us fired up and ready to go.  This nation needs that fire in our hearts and minds. Though the night be long and oppressive, it yearns for folks fired up for unity, fired up for common cause, fired up for justice.  And ready to go.  Our nation needs us ready to go right now.

Some have been in the trenches for weeks battling this virus.  In hospitals and food distribution lines, in prisons and in community centers.  Fired up?  We’re needed.  Ready to go?  It’s time for the second team to get in the game.

The new Scientific American arrived in the mail the other day.  The entire issue is devoted to various aspects of this pandemic.  One section featured the stories of those healers on the front lines in our overcrowded hospitals.

Most exemplify the dedication of many who went into the health professions.  Though many have been beaten down by the inhuman hours and incessant days of duty, a subdued idealism is still driving these people.

Roxy, an emergency room nurse from Dallas, Texas, talks about how the stress and worry has consumed her.  She is torn in her conflict between the duty to her nursing vocation and the duty to her family.  “It was so hard to stay away from my family and even harder to stay away from my work, which I love.  It felt like punishment, like I was losing my mind.  I’ll admit that I was drinking more than I ever do.  In early April I decided to start staying in a hotel so not to accidentally bring the virus home to my husband and two kids, who could also spread it to my immunocompromised dad, who helps with child care.” [2]

Where Sin did abound, Grace did much more abound.  Yes, as George Floyd’s life was snuffed out and the pandemic death toll passed one hundred thousand, Eric Trump could tweet, “GREAT DAY FOR THE DOW!!”  To which one of America’s compassionate souls responded, “Not a great day for the 100,000 Americans who died of coronavirus.”  Sin and Folly does ever abound.

Not a great day for the citizens of Minneapolis.  Not a great day for the meat packers stuffed in contagion-filled plants in Sioux Falls, South Dakota or Perry, Iowa.  Not a great day by a long shot.

Each is given a gift of the Spirit to heal, to restore.  To come to our senses.  It’s all in that prayer repeated meeting after meeting in twelve-step recovery groups – the Serenity Prayer.

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference. 

This prayer leads us to those two lovely daughters of HOPE:  Anger and Courage.  Straight from the heart of God this prayer comes.  A blessed Day of Pentecost to you and those you care for, those you serve.  And don’t forget RED. It’s Pentecost Sunday!   Amen.

---

[1] New York Times, “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” Sunday, May 24, 2020.

[2] Jillian Mock and Jen Schwartz, “How the Healers Feel,” Scientific America, June 2020, p. 38.

Dear friends in Christ

May 31, 2020
Day of Pentecost

The Rev. John C. Forney
John  20:19-23, Acts 2:1-11, I Corinthians 12:4-13

Fired Up.  Ready to Go.

Well, You Didn’t Get it Here!

George Regas is fond of telling the story of a man who, one Sunday, wanders into a large, cavernous Episcopal sanctuary.  Think of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  You’ve seen it.  It is where many state funerals are held.  You saw all of the living presidents assembled on the front pew at the service for President George H. W. Bush.  The music was solemn, the liturgy stately.  Iridescent light filtered from the majestic stained-glass windows played over the assembled congregation.  The guys are all wearing ties and many women have hats on.  Its business formal attire for both men and women.

The scene is set.  You’ve got the picture of our High-Church Episcopal tribe.  A visitor who has ambled in, takes a seat on the center aisle.  He’s not well dressed, but acceptable.  This is Southern California, remember.  He seems not very versed with the prayer book and is unfamiliar with any of the hymns.  Remember this is an Episcopal service.  We have aerobics at worship.  Stand. Sit. Kneel – but no push-ups necessary.

As the preacher moves into his sermon, the fellow perks up.  This preacher knows how to hold a congregation.  A few minutes into the sermon the visitor is responding, “Amen, brother.  Preach it.”  Heads are beginning to turn as people wonder who this unseemly fellow is, who it is that’s carrying on so.  Soon, an usher discretely taps him on the shoulder and quietly whispers, “Sir, you need to be quiet.”  The visitor says he’ll try to restrain himself.  “Sorry,” he mutters.

The preacher hasn’t gotten much further before the visitor again, is unable to sit quietly and blurts out, “Amen. Lord have mercy. Sweet Jesus have mercy.”  He’s half way out of his seat.  Again, heads are turning and some nearby are shushing him.  This time the usher is a bit more forceful in his admonishment to maintain decorum.  And again, the visitor assures him that he’ll try to restrain himself.

A third time into the sermon, the visitor is completely overcome and jumps up, shouting, “Praise Jesus. Praise his name.  You preach it brother.  You’re on the glory road.”  This time a very stern usher tells him in no uncertain terms that he will have to be still or leave.  To which the visitor responds, “Sir, I just can’t help it.  I’ve got the Spirit.”  “Well,” the usher huffs, “You certainly didn’t get it here.”

Episcopalians, you know, the Frozen Chosen, have always been a bit skittish about emotion in our services.  If any is to have a divine revelation, they best do it quietly.  Especially in the National Cathedral.

Some of us used to get a bit edgy as the church moved into Pentecost Sunday.  Please, no carrying on for us.  With this Sunday’s appointed gospel reading from John, we move ever closer to the Day of Pentecost as Jesus promises to send a Guide, an Advocate, the Spirit of Truth.  Remember, these are Jesus’ farewell instructions to his followers.

“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.  This is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees or knows him…I will not leave your orphaned…”

It is said that Truth is the first casualty of war.  It seems to also have been a casualty of this pandemic.  Truth certainly seems in short supply as we move through this national coronavirus debacle – every state for itself.

For those of us in “shelter-in-place” orders, or “lockdown” as we call it, the reality of this virus has been a very “Inconvenient Truth.”  I’m reminded of an Ed Bacon quote, “Yes, the Truth will set you free, but first it’s going to hurt like hell.”

We Americans have great difficulty with such stubborn realities.  We are not an overly patient people.  After the Civil War the North quickly tired of Reconstruction.  The many signs of progress for both whites and African-Americans were soon short lived.  The KKK which had its origin shortly after the surrender at Appomattox, had spread through the Old South by 1870. By the 1920s and ‘30s it was active in many northern and some western states. 

The KKK had virtually taken over the Democratic Party. Jim Crow laws stripped rights from not only African Americans but others.  The KKK didn’t like Jews or Catholics all that much either.  FDR was unable to get a national anti-lynching law through the Democratically controlled congress. This last May 14, America acknowledged the stain on Old Glory of voter suppression — on that day in 1955 NAACP member, the Rev. George Lee, was fatally shot by a member of an angry white mob for attempting to register to vote in Mississippi.  On May 15, 1916 a mob of whites burned alive African American teenager Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas.  The History of Racial Injustice Calendar reminds us on virtuallly a daily basis just how far we have to yet come for many Americans to redeem the promise of citizenship  — a promissory note, as M.L. King said, that has been returned marked, “insufficient funds.”  These are the most egregious inconvenient Truths.  They hurt like hell.  For too many attempting to exercise the promises of democracy, they are turned away with the rebuttal, “Well, you didn’t get it here.”  And this is not just a blot on the Old South.   A few years ago at All Saints, that congregation was besieged by a howling mob of so-called Christians hurling insults and profanities at those attending a day long conference sponsored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council.  If Jesus had behaved like these people, nobody would have been saved.

This Spirit of Truth was sent to bolster up those of the Jesus Movement to keep his teachings.  And the core of those teachings?  Love of God and Love of Neighbor – NO EXCEPTIONS.  One and the same.  Remember, “God is Love and those who abide in Love abide in God and God in them.” 

The work of this Spirit of Truth is the power to acknowledge and heed the challenges of our time.  It is to come to grips with the difficulties of living together and to claim the blessing that comes through active love.  This Spirit of Truth moves us through the trials and difficulties.  It has nothing to do with magical avoidance of inconvenient realities.  No, this virus will not just “magically go away.”

The Spirit of Truth leads in this time of COVID-19 beyond the bunkum conspiracies swirling around our current health crisis.  No, COVID-19 was not a made-up story to hurt Trump.  No, it’s not some Chinese bioweapon.  No, COVID-19 deaths are not FAKE News.  Some internet personalities have gone so far as to urge their followers to take cameras into hospitals to film the empty rooms.  To show that there are no real patients.  Nobody’s dying. 

The Spirit of Truth will guide us out of this conspiratorial fog into the sunlight of reality.  Unfortunately, it takes a while.  And for some folks, it will hurt like hell.   As the adage goes, “A lie will have gone halfway around the world before truth has its pants on.”  These theories are stubborn, like devil grass.

But, eventually, truth will out.  No, the moon landing was not a hoax filmed in somebody’s garage.  The Spirit of Truth upholds competent social scientists like Professor Joseph Uscinski, the epidemiologists, and medical experts like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx.[1] 

Aw, you mean nothing really happened at Roswell? There’s no spaceship?  But I have my top secret parking permit for Area 54.  I like my space alien friends, my space chums.  Next, you’re going to tell me that Bigfoot is also a made-up story.  But there are sightings!   I saw it on the internet.  Agent Scully and Mulder were on the trail.  Don’t forget Obamagate – “a slogan in search of a scandal,” as one commentator quipped.  

Enough, okay.  It’s time to hear it for the Spirit of Truth and Politifact.  Yeah, I guess — the “X-Files” is only a TV show. So, please, debunk with sympathy and kindness. 

The Spirit of Truth leads us into “engaged compassion” and to healing justice.  It allows people of faith to confess the reality of sin and repent.  Old fashioned words for some, yes…  Sin is our separation from God, from one another, and within ourselves. The acts we call “sins” are what flow from that tragic separation, from our insecurities. This separation is part of the burden of being human.  It is our existential condition.  As certain as “the sparks fly upward.”

This was the great enlightenment of theologian Paul Tillich. 

But Tillich didn’t stop there.  He went on to elucidate another, stronger reality, Grace.  As St. Paul proclaims in Romans: “Where sin did abound, Grace did much more abound.” Dr King put it this way, “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  Jesus, to those hapless disciples who all ran away in the end – the men, that is – to them he sends an Advocate, the Spirit of Truth to lead and to guide.  Grace always trumps fear.

These past weeks we have been overwhelmed by the tokens of Grace breaking through the fear and hate engendered by this pandemic.  We can’t go through a day without a newsflash of sacrificial love, neighbor caring for neighbor.  This is the work of the Spirit.  Just turn on the TV.  Open the paper.  Look at the pictures of those staffing testing stations and stocking shelves at food banks.  And out in the streets, this Spirit is most contagious.   These days it may wear a face mask, which is to say, I care enough about you that I’ll risk looking maybe a bit silly, I’m willing to endure some inconvenience, so I don’t make you sick.  Such compassion is a highly contagious truth that saves lives.  I hope you did get that Spirit here.

In most any church you can catch that Spirit.  It may lead to spontaneous outbursts of affirmation.  Now even acceptable and encouraged in some Episcopal Churches.  But more than that, this Spirit of Truth will grab you up by the hand and lead you into gospel service.  Some of us it may need to grab the scruff of the collar – but by whatever means, this Spirit moves to get us into gospel action.  As our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says, it’s to “turn the Jesus Club into the Jesus Movement.”

Another reality of the Spirit of Truth is that we are not left comfortless.  Through neighbor, spouse, child, grace – Love – does abound.  Where factions abound, the Spirit of Democracy has the power to bind together. 

As bad as racial hatred and strife became after the Civil War – a war still being waged in many hearts – it was both black and white together who waged the Second Reconstruction to mend the rent in our national fabric.  Both black and white were set upon by angry mobs at lunch counters in both North and South.  It was blacks and whites who joined in chorus on long bus rides and in Montgomery jails singing “We Shall Overcome.”  It was both blacks and whites whose tortured, mutilated bodies were found in shallow graves throughout backwoods fetid swamps.  Black and white together, they died.  Now joined by Mexican immigrants and Native Americans ==  the incarcerated, the aged, veterans, the homeless, all disproportionately killed by COVID-19 — all victims of a failing health system, evidence that our racial and income disparities remain deadly. First, the Truth will hurt like hell before it sets free.  America, it’s “mend-thine-every-flaw” time.  Overdue!

Let our prayer be that this mighty Spirit of Truth blow through our ravaged land to make new, to make us a more generous people, a more unified people. 

This Spirt of Truth is a mighty friend, not a false friend that flatters.  Not a fickle friend that sugar-coats reality.  This friend does not abet conspiracy theories and lame excuses.  It is a genuine friend that fortifies.  Yes, with facts and sound reason.

The Spirit of Truth is the sort of friend that sends companions to guide us on the way through this perilous infection.  It is a comfort to the bereaved.   It has the power to bring out our best.  This friend has the power to restore.  It has the power to inspire repentance and amendment of ways.  It has the power to cause us to see the stranger as our neighbor, as a friend.  It’s motto?  “Get over yourself – life is at hand.”  In its most Inconvenient truth, you’ve got a friend.

Randy Newman, got it right in that great gospel hymn that could be sung of the Spirit of Truth, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me:”

You’ve got a friend in me

You’ve got a friend in me

When the road looks rough ahead

And you’re miles and miles

From your nice warm bed

Just remember what your old pal said

Boy, you’ve got a friend in me

You’ve got a friend in me

You’ve got a friend in me

You’ve got a friend in me

You’ve got troubles, well I’ve got ’em too

There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you

We stick together and we see it through

You’ve got a friend in me

You’ve got a friend in me…[2]

If it’s not in your hymnal, it ought to be.  It’s about the kind of friend this Spirit is.  You can get it most anyplace.  Seek and it will find you.

 It is said of this one and same Spirit, it’s like the wind.  You hear the sound of it but it blows where it blows. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.  Yeah, you might even catch it in a stogey Episcopal Church or in a church of some other flavor.  But God’s too savvy to place all the money on the church.  It’s let loose, out there.  This Spirit of Truth often is highly inconvenient.  Can hurt like hell and then some.  AND, regardless the pain, this Spirit of Truth is Life and Blessing. It is Restoration. It’s for our guidance and edification.  It’s what will make us suitable for human consumption.  It frees from the penalty box.  It bridges the tragic separation of the races and the sexes.  It’s Baby Baluga in the deep blue sea, counting on you and me – our vital connection to the natural world.  It makes of us “repairers of the breech.”

In this time of COVID-19 may the Spirit of all Truth bend the national arc of these challenging times towards justice.  This Spirit of Truth — I pray to God we all get it in the days ahead.  We need it.  America needs it.  We’ve got a friend,

Amen.

---

[1] Joseph Uscinski, Conspiracy Theories: A Primer (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2020).

[2] Randy Newman, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from Toy Story 4, Walt Disney, Pixar Films, April 12, 1996

May 17, 2020
6 Easter

The Rev. John C. Forney
John  14:15-21

Let’s hear it for neutrinos.  No, they are not some new dietary supplement or weight loss pill.  They’re all around you – billions of them, moving through the walls of your house and your body every second – “like moonlight through a screen door.”[1]  Left over from the Big Bang.  They’re the flimsiest of all atomic sub-particles, with a mass of almost less than nothing.

Now, here’s the thing.  In the chaos of the first instant of creation, out of the Big Bang, a quirky thing about these particles may be the reason we’re all here.  Why there’s something rather than nothing.   Scientists in Japan have recently found that in the resultant primordial atomic soup the universe, in those first nanoseconds of existence, we were left with a few more neutrinos than antineutrinos.  Between matter and antimatter, we “wound up with an excess of matter: stars, black holes, oceans and us.”

All due to neutrinos, a particle almost less than nothing.  God works in mysterious ways splendid wonders to perform.

So, I say we ought to have a National Neutrino Week to celebrate.  Certainly, more weighty than National Pickle Week!

“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you.”  Yeah, God seems to have started with neutrinos, almost less than nothing.  Marvelous to behold.

Louis Armstrong nailed it when he crooned, “I see trees of green, red roses too.  I see them bloom for me and you.  And I think to myself what a wonderful world.”  Creation is God’s wonderful mansion, a wonderful world.  Spacious rooms for all of us here.   O\n this earth and beyond.  Room for trees of green, and for you and me.  Room for all in God’s neighborhood.  Each one precious.  Ask Mr. Rogers.  He knows the neighborhood.

Jesus may not have known anything about neutrinos, but in giving last instructions to his followers, he certainly knew the Heart of the Compassionate One.  “I go to prepare a place for you.  And how do we find that place, Thomas asked.   It is a place in the heart of God.  Jesus is the way.  What is his way?  Thomas, it is the way of gentleness, peace, humility, and a generous love for everything that is the gift of God – that is the way to this wonderful gospel dwelling.  That is the way to a bright, blessed day.  The dark sacred night – oh, so many splendid rooms.  And when our race is run, and we’re enfolded into the heart of God, might we sing with Louis Armstrong, “What a Wonderful World.”  I want to be in that choir.  No audition necessary I hear.

Even in the midst of COVID-19, we dwell in a wonderfully crafted house of many rooms.  God bless those sneaky neutrinos.  Hedgehog, robins, jumping spiders, too.  Ferns and even the God-blessed devil grass.  What a wonderful world!

Lately, I suggested that those disrespecting the rest of us by congregating in violation of “shelter-in-place” orders – these disrespectful folks might accept the responsibility for their actions.  As my friend Susan said, “Liberty does not give you the right to shoot a hole in the side of the boat we’re all in.”  Should such come down with COVID-19 as a result of their foolish actions, might they refrain from using our free (socialist???) medical services.  As our hospitals are already overwhelmed and medical staffs are exhausted, might they, perhaps, consider dying quietly at home instead of needlessly using up scarce PPE?  Just saying.

This proposition set off a lively debate that went on for hours on my Facebook page.  Most came down on the side of personal responsibility.  Some, however, thought those who dared to propose such just didn’t like the president and wanted to make him look bad.  Anyway, masks are just for liberals and wimps.  A few were downright nasty.

We arrive at the first room – the Room of the Penalty Box.

In the Lord’s house are many rooms, for many varied opinions.  Yes, we will disagree, but needn’t be disagreeable.  Our Father’s/Mother’s house has rooms for all, and a special room for those when unfit for human consumption. A space known as the Room for Nasty – yes, the Room of the Penalty Box.  It is a place for fearful, angry folks to come to their senses.  Rejoin the human family.  It is that place for all of us to come into the calming embrace of all that is holy and just, as the kids would say, hyper down. 

Some took umbrage at President George W’s call to unity last Sunday.  As photos of medical workers and ordinary Americans wearing masks, elderly and the young flashed before the screen — In a very moving montage to inspirational music in the background, Dear Old W urged us to take hold of what binds us together, our commonality as Americans.

“Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat. In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together and we are determined to rise.”[2]

One curmudgeon, reading this, referred to the President W. as “satanic.”  No, this wasn’t an angry Democrat.  The writer also used the same epithet for Clinton – not sure which one he was lambasting.  I was afraid to ask.

All of us wondrous people with a room for each – it all began with those blessed neutrinos.  In this time of COVID-19 there is a room for us when we are completely out of sorts – the Room of the Penalty Box where we might contemplate our place among God’s neutrinos as they stream through our bodies and practice gratitude.

Yes, let them, sometimes all of us, froth at the mouth and distort the truth.  Let all canons of reason be tossed aside.  Maybe call this essential space of time out the Room of the Penalty Box.  Cry.  Curse.  Jump up and down.  Stamp our foot.  And when done, satiated and exhausted, come to our senses.  There’s a room in the Lord’s house to calm ourselves.  This niche also known as the Calming Room. There our Lord awaits us with the salve of peace and sweet reason.  He awaits to enfold us in his arms and assure us that we are loved and accepted just as we are.  It will all be okay.  In the words of Julian of Norwich, “And all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.” 

The Room of Gratitude awaits for those of thankful heart.  It’s a room of warm embrace for those who reach out in gratitude.  An attitude of gratitude goes a long, long way to brighten up God’s Wonderful World.

This last week we had a “Social Distancing Parade of Love and Support” of students who wanted to let their teachers know how much they were loved and appreciated in Claremont.  Students, with their families, piled into cars and showed up at one of the local elementary schools.  It was the first time in months that teachers and students had seen one another face to face.   Teachers stood in front of their school, spaced six feet apart, as a line of cars stretching half a mile drove by honking with students at the windows waving and shouting appreciation.  This parade of love and affection went on for over half an hour.  There is in God’s house a very special room for those who give encouragement and lift up.  President George W, that is your room.  Just down the hall to the right.

There is a room for all who lend their shoulder to the task.  Doctors, nurses, therapists we know.  I’m also thinking of the grocery store worker who at night stocks the shelves and those who check us out.. 

There’s a special place in God’s heart for a farmer who is saddened at the sight of a mountainous pile of unsold potatoes in his field.  Then comes a flash of Gospel brilliance, sacred inspiration.  Hours after a call to the local food bank, a smile crosses his face.  He stares at the place where before, there had been a huge pile of disappointment.  All that is left and was the scattered  remains of the few spuds no one had grabbed.  Well done, Farmer Brown.  Well done, Farmer Elaine.

There is a Room for those who Hunger.  Hunger never went away in America, that demon yet abounds, now more rampant than ever.  It is reported that, with millions now struggling to provide food for their families, there are those who would strangle the food stamp program.  What?  Let them eat dirt?  In the Great Recession, even the most tight-fisted agreed to a raise of fifteen percent for food stamp recipients.  But now?  Not so much.  There’s a room in God’s heart where the hunger pangs of children with empty bellies are acknowledged.  A room where some of our political leaders and food bank volunteers rush to meet the need.  They step up, while others slink shamefully away saying, “Not my problem.”  Yes, for those unwilling to help, go back a few paragraphs to the Penalty Box Room.  Those with a few hours to spare, a few dollars to spare, enter into the delight of God and these families.  Jesus heads up the serving line.  Welcome, all God’s children and their anxious, frazzled parents.  For those who hunger, yes, they shall be fed.  We are God’s hands and wallet at service.

There’s the Room of Education and Enlightenment for the Stupid and Dull of Heart.  A place for all of us who, from time to time, make dumb choices, and sometimes make a career of dumb choices.  A special room for those who refuse to see what is going on about us – who haven’t a clue.

 It’s the room for the quack doctor who thinks we might cure this disease by injecting Lysol or Clorox.  It’s for the ill-informed who think COVID-19 might be eliminated by inserting ultraviolet lights into our bodies in places where the sun tends not to shine.

This is the room for national healing.  Justice John Paul Stevens admonished: “A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.”  Needed, a room for those too blinded to understand what they inflict on our precious democracy.  Lord, do we ever need some enlightenment!

This is the room for those a DJ referenced when he quipped, “The man on the news said at the end of the day what’s going to keep you safe is common sense.   Some of y’all in trouble…”  Or those of whom Mark Twain spoke, “No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.”  For these, God has the Room of Remediation.  Don’t shove, don’t crowd in, folks.  It’s a mighty big room, more space than you can ever imagine.  It had to be.  Make sure you have your mask secured and keep your social distancing.

“In my Father’s house are many rooms.”  It may all have been through the miracle of those infinitesimally tiny neutrinos and how they sorted themselves out that were here.  All in the blink of an eye, that God fashioned this marvelous mansion of many rooms.  A room for all, no matter our disposition.  It’s a Wonderful World, blue skies, green trees, starry night and all.  It’s the very first gift of God’s grace – the gift of creation itself.  Something rather than nothing.  You and I.  And rutabagas.

As we move through these days of COVID-19, as researchers mightily strive for a vaccine, as nurses and doctors comfort the dying, I offer a smidgen of a prayer an anonymous someone offered up – thoughts that came from the Room of Gospel Heart.  Thomas, this prayer will get you close along The Way.

May we who are merely inconvenienced

remember those whose lives are at stake.

May we who have no risk factors

remember those who are vulnerable.

May we who have the luxury of working from home

remember those who must choose between their health or paying their rent.

May we who have the flexibility to care for our children when their schools close

remember those who have no options.

May we who have to cancel our trips

remember those who have no safe place to go.

May we who are losing our margin money in the tumult of the economic market

remember those who have no margin at all.

May we who settle in for quarantine at home

remember those who have no home.

As fear grips our country

let us choose love.

During this time when we cannot physically wrap our arms around each other let us find ways to be the loving embrace of God to our neighbors.

Now, let’s all safely celebrate National Neutrino week.  Safely socially distanced, of course.   Amen.

---

[1] Dennis Overbye, “Neutrinos At Heart of Matter?”, New York Times, Science Times section, April 28, 2020.

[2] President George W. Bush@TheCalltoUnite

May 10, 2020
5 Easter

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 14:1-14

“National Neutrino Week”

Life is an incredible road trip.  Look through the milestones of your life.  Who would have imagined some of them.  In retrospect, it’s been quite a journey filled to the brim with chance, sadness, friends, surprises and glory.  As the protagonist reminisces in the final act of Eugene O’Neil’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, “It’s a late day for regrets...”  In the meantime: It’s on the Road Again.” – loved that song!

I think my awakening, real awakening to the larger world around me came in junior high.  From the seminal events of that time I can say I became aware of the larger journey on which I, my family, and our society had embarked.

The Yankees were at the top of the American League and almost always a shoo-in to make the World Series.  Back in the 50s I knew most of the lineup.  Those of us who were fans couldn’t wait for the power to come to bat – Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Roger Maris.  We devoted fans knew that Casey Stengel had put together one of the best lineups in baseball history.  Add into that, with Whitey Ford on the mound and our team was invincible. 

The Broadway musical later made as a film, “Damn Yankees,” added a bit of titillation to fandom for prepubescent boys as Gwen Verdon shimmied across the stage belting out the torch song, “Whatever Lola Wants Lola Gets.”  We knew that Tad Hunter was a goner.  I sure was.

With President Eisenhower in the White House and prosperity right around the corner, everybody I knew at my school liked Ike.  I still have my “I Like Ike” buttons. My dad, being a successful dentist, you bet we liked Ike a whole bunch.  Our family would watch both national conventions from gavel to gavel.  And with the Interstate Highway under construction, one could soon drive from one end of the country to the other. However, I did think it a great loss when the town of Hell, California, out in the Mojave Desert, was wiped out by the freeway bulldozers.

But there were hidden fault lines that we as children knew little of.  Oh, there were a few boys we were not to play with.  They were the wrong color, lived in the “projects,” or were “dirty.”  Our family had moved from Compton because there were beginning to be too many of this sort of people coming in.  Blockbusters, my dad called them.

But for an upwardly mobile middle-class family, we were doing okay.  My mom got a new Chrysler 300 D.  A turquoise convertible that could really haul when Dad punched it.  Our nation had a sense of purpose – to keep those Commie (you-know-what) from taking over the world.  And pumping fluoride into our drinking water to poison America.  Yeah, there was a big billboard about that plot on the vacant field at Atlantic and Willow.  My dad said it was put up by a bunch of Kooks.  Being a dentist, he heartily approved of fluoride.

Fault lines began to appear.  I knew nothing of the rural poverty in West Virginia that my father had escaped during the Great Depression.  I knew nothing of the poverty-stricken ghetto in Willowbrook just to the south.  I had never even seen a black person.  I did know something of the poor white kids from the projects in North Long Beach.  And the kids from the blue-collar families on the other side of Orange Avenue whose fathers worked at Douglas Aircraft.  Hidden fault lines.

Those fault lines have now grown to a great chasm of unrelenting hostility and suspicion.  Yes, most everybody in our neighborhood went to church.  The Methodist Church or Catholic Church by our school.  Or the Presbyterian Church over by the new shopping area.  And virtually everybody in my church was just like me and my family.  White.  Prosperous.  And Republican.

Then came the Fair Housing initiative.  People began choosing up sides.  A black dentist and his family were flooded out of their home by our white neighbors while off on vacation.  I was aghast that some of my neighbors would do something like this. 

Soon thereafter,r in the 60s, came the Vietnam War.  In college I was beginning to learn more of the world.  There were the Beatniks.  My dad was terrified that I would be politically seduced by these no-account Commie bums.  Little did he know!  Gospel verities were beginning to seep into my spirit.  My journey began to take a spiritual flavor.  “What’s It All About, Alfie,” became my theme song.  In all the social ferment my road brightened.

I had discovered the Social Gospel – our aim being not so much to get to heaven, but to bring a piece of heaven down to earth.  “On earth as in heaven,” the prayer went.  Social justice.  Racial harmony.  Labor’s right to organize.  Yes, and Fair Housing.  The road I was on with my family was becoming very bumpy.  Full of potholes. 

In the meantime, I was discovering this Jesus and his friends who were constantly on the road.  Their journey was an overflowing blessing, a bit of eternity.  My faith journey began to take shape and substance.  It was about unmerited grace, life brimful and overflowing.  It was about peace and justice for the “least of these.”  It was about the gift of community.

Now, in the midst of this greatest challenge, we seem to have lost any sense of national purpose.  No Walter Cronkite to tell it like it is.  We have a hundred channels, each with their own version of reality.  Their “alternative facts.”  We aren’t going to the moon.  Until a few weeks ago, we weren’t going much of anywhere on L.A. freeways, mostly turned parking lots.   Now they’re empty and we still aren’t going anywhere. 

We’re sealed off, one from another behind different versions of reality.  There’s no wider prosperity to be had.  Even the last federal stimulus for small businesses went to only a small percentage of the larger firms at the top.  Shop keepers and the owners of the Mexican and El Salvadorian restaurants of my old Pico-Union neighborhood, those up and down Broadway in East Los Angeles – they’re still waiting.  The small boutique shops in Claremont?  For most – Nada.

In the midst of all of it is that luminous journey yet beckoning seekers.  Its riches and mystery can be found in many of our communities of faith.  This journey, the same that Jesus daily traveled with his friends, is still the true North Star.

On the road again, after that first Easter, a couple of dejected followers glumly made their journey to a little village called Emmaus.  As they walked, another joined them.

“Why the long faces, fellows,” he asked.  They couldn’t believe this.  Didn’t this guy know what had happened these last few days?  How could anyone be so dense?  “Don’t you know — the things that have taken place?”  “What things?” he asked.  They proceeded to explain to him the recent events concerning Jesus – how he was a great prophet of God, how he healed and was mighty in deed and word.  How he was condemned by the authorities and was crucified.  “You don’t know these things?  You haven’t heard?” incredulously they asked.  “Where have you been?  You must be the only one who doesn’t know!”

At that point, the stranger interrupted them.  “Oh, you foolish men, slow of heart to believe the testimony of the prophets.”  He explained the scriptures concerning himself but they did not recognize him.

As they neared the town, the stranger made as to leave and go his way, but the travelers pressed him to join them for supper, for shadows were lengthening and night was neigh.  That evening, as he broke bread and blessed the cup their eyes were opened.  And he had vanished from their sight.  As they discussed what had just taken place, one spoke truth.  “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he revealed the meaning of the scriptures?”

On the road again.  That is where we shall ever meet him.  As bread is broken in his name and we join in prayerful study of his Word – he is yet among us.  The mountains may tumble and the sea may dry up.  But, as the old hymn says, “What a Friend We Have….”  A companion on the way.

Into this ragged journey, God continues to send those touched by angelic messengers, whose who announce, “Peace to all of goodwill.”  Fearful neo-Nazis may parade the streets with their torches, and message of hate, but the Jesus message is deeper and shall endure.  We of good will shall endure.

Men and women of Good Will continue to grace our journey through these days of COVID-19.  There is Dr. Peter Hotez, Dean of the School of Tropical Medicine of Baylor College of Medicine.  His daily journey begins sometime around four in the morning.  He’s back again at his lab beginning another twelve-hour day working on a vaccine.  Hoping to beat that eighteen-month window.  Christ is surely on that journey with the good doctor.

We think of those teachers who saddle up their vans and autos to caravan through the neighborhoods of their students.  Honking and waving.  Cheering them on in their studies.  Christ indeed travels the streets with those teachers.

What godly companions now join our journey through this disease ravaged land indeed!  We and they certainly are on the road again – the Glory Road.  And that’s the road I want to travel. 

These days, the cup we bless is full to the brim with tears, those of Dustin’s family and friends in West Virginia while they keep vigil as he struggles for each breath on a ventilator.  Yes, even on that perilous journey – as friends and family join together in prayer – join all across the internet – the Risen Christ is as present to them as he was to two unknown travelers on their way to Emmaus –present as a faithful companion to sanctify and to bless.

We can only do so much in this life, but the Lord in solidarity blesses our hands and minds for the task at hand.  And when it’s done.  It’s done.  No regrets.

The evening prayer from the New Zealand Book of Prayer says all that needs to be said for me each evening.

Lord,
it is night.

The night is for stillness.
Let us be still in the presence of God.

It is night after a long day.
What has been done has been done;
what has not been done has not been done;
let it be.

The night is quiet.
Let the quietness of your peace enfold us,
all dear to us,
and all who have no peace.  

The night heralds the dawn.
Let us look expectantly to a new day,
new joys, new possibilities.

In your name we pray.
Amen. [1]

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[1] This prayer in “Night Prayer” of the New Zealand Prayer Book, p. 184.

April 26, 2020
 3 Easter

The Rev. John C. Forney
Luke 24:13-35

“On the Road Again”

We are living in most interesting, and terrifying, times.  Isn’t that the ancient curse — May you live in interesting times?

Recently, I placed on my Facebook page a post from my friend Ravi:

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be going to a bank with a mask on asking for money.”

To which another friend, Philip, who bills himself as having been a consumer of the State of California Department of Corrections’ services, replied: “Been there – done this before it was socially acceptable. How times have changed.” Yes indeed, how times have changed.

Indeed, times have changed.  One change I’ve noticed is that people, especially our young folks are demanding much more of our institutions.  The church for instance.

You remember that old song mocking easy religion?  “Plastic Jesus?”  “I don’t care if it rains or freezes long as I got my plastic Jesus glued to the dashboard of my car.”  It reminded me of our seminary’s spring show of tacky religious art.

This Sunday, in many churches, is what is known as Thomas Sunday.  Thomas wants to see Jesus before he will believe.  And how will he know that the one he gazes upon is the real McCoy?  By the wounds in his hands and feet.  By the gash in his side where he was pierced by a Roman spear.  He wants the real thing.  By his wounds – and that is exactly how he will know.

We will know the authentic representation of Christ – for the Church is the Body of Christ incarnate – when we see the wounds.  Authentic Christianity enters into the struggle, the heartache, of “the least of these.”  It bears the wounds, the worry, of the homeless, the incarcerated, the addicted and the defeated. 

If it’s only raffles and bingo, it’s something else.  But certainly not the body of Christ.  I love beautiful music and good liturgy as much as any Episcopalian, but all of it is offal and rubbish if doesn’t then lead into the streets and lanes, into the farmlands, into the villages and cities where God’s people are mightily suffering.

That is the question of the skeptic inside and  outside the community of faith.  How will I recognize the authentic Body of Christ in this time of COVID19?  Does the Church have anything at all to say?  

Saccharine sweetness of Easter lilies and scented candles is certainly not what I’ve been seeing lately on the evening 6:00 O’clock News.  What I’ve been seeing is my wounded Lord.  He is the face of thousands.  You know him.  His face is that of your neighbor, maybe a family member.  Mary Ellen, who always sits on the other side of the pew from you Sunday after Sunday.  It’s Fred, your insurance agent.  It’s Dorothy and Ramon who clean the office after you’ve left at five O’clock. All, whose lives have now been turned upside down.

On Holy Saturday I posted on my Facebook page a rendition of the Wounded Christ of the Coronavirus Ward. In this portrayal, his virus-ravaged body is being lowered from a gurney by doctors, nurses and paramedics.  Attached to his chest are still the leads of a heart monitor.  He wears a face mask and little else to hide his nakedness.  This modern Pieta is not a pleasant picture.  Not what you’d want for your living room décor.

One woman wrote back, not so much in disgust or indignation – but what seemed an honest question, “Why did you post this?”  I explained that as a follower of Jesus, I felt we need to be aware – I need to be aware –of the wounded humanity Christ serves yet today.  He took upon himself their exhaustion.  Their helplessness. Their sorrow. He bore it all.  And does today.

This portrayal of suffering is reminiscent of the sixteenth century Isenheim altar piece by Grunewald.  On it, Christ bears not only the agony of crucifixion but also the suppurating sores of the Black Plague which had killed almost one half of Europe’s population.  That work of art is the answer to Thomas’s demand to see.

The true and authentic sign of the Jesus Movement is those places where his followers are to be found.  Not sitting on comfortable pews, but on the streets passing out food.  In the hospital corridors with the sickest of the sick.  In the halls of Congress lobbying for more funding.   Christ’s followers will bear the exhaustion of spent ambulance drivers and nurses in their own psyches.  The faces of the dying will haunt nightly dreams after they’ve fallen exhausted into bed.  Christ’s followers will admit Our Lord’s pain into their being. 

Unless I see the wounds…  There is your answer, dear Thomas.  It is an answer to be found in devastated nursing homes and ICU wards.  It is to be found in our prisons where we warehouse so many whose only crime was the inability to afford a decent lawyer or to make bail.   

One of the questions in the baptismal covenant of my church is: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?”  This is now put-up-or-shut-up time.  There’s virtually something that each one of us is called do.  No plastic Jesus beckons, but the real McCoy. 

I can’t believe the text message I received the other day from a group called California Volunteers.  They were summoning retired nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists – anybody but anybody who might lend a hand to tend the sick.  Even an old, very old, Army Medic whose skills are now some fifty years out of date.  I responded that I was engaged in this effort in other ways – and I prayed that that was true.  But thanked the caller for thinking of me.  I so wish I had had the health and youth to have said yes.  My heart said yes.  But my mind told me that I would be more of a liability than help.  And my wife would have thought I was crazy.  She’d have me in the Memory Care Unit before I could hitch up my pants..

Our streets now throng with thousands upon thousands who bear the wounds of Christ. Fear and want distort their visage.  Can I be tested?  Where’s the money to pay the rent?  To buy food for my family?  I think I have symptoms, am I dying?  What will happen to my kids?  I’ve just finished three eighteen-hour shifts in a row.  How do I go on? 

Not all wounds are visible to the naked eye.  One of my trusted columnists, David Brooks, asked his readers how their mental health was holding up in this time of disease, job loss and isolation.  He asked them to send in anything they wanted to share with David’s readership.  Thousands of letters poured in bearing grievous testimony to the wounds of Christ in our land.

Hear the heartfelt anguish of one senior, a woman living in Fresno, California:

“I am normally a very positive person, outgoing, happy, energetic. Definitely a glass half-full. However, lately I cannot get through a day without tears, often sobs. I am terrified for myself and my family and everyone in the world. All the things I love to do, I’m now afraid to do. …”[1]

Here’s the letter from a college student at Pennsylvania State College.  At first this young man thought the quarantine would be a “lark.” He would be relieved of some onerous responsibilities.  But now it’s a gray, washed-out living hell:

“I’ve been gripped by a deep depression. My appetite is very low. I’m sleeping far too much to feel as lethargic as I do.”

“My future, which seemed so bright a few months ago as I anticipated graduating in May, now seems bleak and hopeless: How will I find a job with the economy tanking? How will I pay hundreds of dollars per month when my loan bills kick in during August?”[2]

These are no less the wounds of Christ, just because they can’t be seen.  I salute David Brooks for having the compassion to enter into these searing tales.  David is the sort of Christian I would aim to be.  Thomas, do you yet see our wounded Lord?

And each day, people of faith and no faith, behold the wounded Christ and join with others to apply salve to those wounds.

I think of the taxi cab drivers in one city who have volunteered to deliver thousands of meals to the shut in.  I think of that dedicated public servant who has gone far beyond any reasonable expectation, processing unemployment claims beyond quitting time.  Folks, he is not part of the “deep state.”  He is a dedicated public servant, one who ministers to the Christ of the destitute.  You’ve seen the lines at a San Antonio food bank that stretch beyond what the eye can see.  You’ve seen those volunteers laboring side by side with the National Guard to deliver boxes of groceries to families who never in their wildest dreams thought they’d have to ask for free food. 

I ask the skeptic in all of us – that doubting Thomas – might you, in a blind leap of faith, join these, your fellow Americans, on the distribution line?  At the homeless shelter?  Sewing face masks?  Christ awaits you.  Might now be the time to put aside your niggling hesitations and lend a hand?  We need you. The living Christ needs you.  You are his hands, his heart, his soul.

The blessing to be found is to be beyond measure.  It is to be counted as a smidgen of Life Eternal.  I guarantee it.  Oh, Thomas, see the imprint of the nails, the lance.  Touch. Feel.

Oh, and my friend Philip?

My friend Philip now has many years of long-term sobriety and is a credit to his church and to his community. He’s one of those positive people who daily makes a difference. Recovery is real!  As real as the ever lovin’ Grace of God.   Amen.

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[1] David Brooks, “The Pandemic of Fear and Agony,” New York Times, April 9, 2020.

[2] Ibid.

Dear friends in Christ

April 19, 2020
 2 Easter

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 20:19-31

“Unless I See …”

“When leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot.  It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing.

On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side, and without giving it a further thought continued on his way downstairs.”[1]

So, Camus begins his narration of the pestilence that was to shortly overtake a most ordinary town on the Algerian coast in his novel, The Plague.  On the most ordinary of spring days.  Life would soon be completely disrupted, all its daily patterns and conventions. 

This is what COVID-19 has done to America, and to the entire world.

This Holy Week, we remain sealed up in tombs of fear.  It is serendipitous that Passover began this evening at sundown.  Passover celebrates the liberation of the Hebrew people from the land of slavery.  It is often through the scourge of plague and calamity that God frees.  Yes, stuff happens.  But as Rahm Emanuel is fond of saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  This monumental crisis has laid waste our health care system; it has killed hundreds of thousands, and has devastated economies across the globe.  We turn this tragedy to good as we pull closer together as a nation, as one planet.  As we relearn our commonality with one another and with the natural world.  Might we relearn the wonder of clean air in our cities.  There is no Planet B.

Friends, Easter is not just a rumor.  Easter is now.  This pestilence will subside.  The Angel of Death will pass us by.  The boulder will be rolled away.   

We now catch a few splinters of that glorious Easter morn.  Like the touching letters of thanks from all across our nation – letters thanking the nurses, doctors and other hospital staff who have put their lives at risk to care for the ill. 

One letter read, “I am so grateful for the few hours out of the week we were able to be huddled together as the core of the family — all you did to console my fears and assure me that we’re going to get through this.  Thank you for being the amazing mother and nurse that you are.  I love you, your daughter, Tina.”

And another letter to a doctor. “These shields were made with love and appreciation by myself and my children, ages 10 and 8.  We cannot express our care and concern enough for you.  Keeping you in our hearts and prayers.”

These messages, and so many more, are the truth of Easter this year.  Can’t you feel the growing warmth on your face?  Expressions of thanks to our nurses, doctors, grocery store clerks, sanitation workers – all who are the incarnation of God’s message of hope.  They are God’s Easter glory. 

Friends, the stone of this tomb of darkness is ajar.  It may be many more weeks before we will finally emerge from COVID-19, but Easter is here.  For people of hope, it is always the “FIRST DAY OF THE WEEK!”

Let us wholeheartedly proclaim this Sunday, “Alleluia.  Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.  Alleluia!”

Happy Easter to all.

Fr. John

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[1] Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: The Modern Library, 1948).

Dear friends in Christ

April 12, 2020
Easter Day

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 20:1-18

“On the First Day of the Week”