Here, though are the twin explorations from February 5th, 2012, the beginning of "Justice Month."
Elizabeth
Breeden
In the late 1800’s the mathematician,
Frances Galton, went to a county fair.
There you could guess the weight of an ox and if you guessed it you won
a half/penny. The fellow was writing the
people’s guesses on a slip of paper. Sir
Galton was sure these simple country people could not guess correctly and
certainly it was a rare person who came within the range necessary to win a
prize. At the end however, he asked the
carnival fellow for the slips of paper, went home and found the average and realized
that it was indeed within one pound of the actual weight of the ox. Sir Galton
concluded (and reaffirmed by many, many studies of college sophomores) that we
are together much smarter that any one of us alone. As some of you already know, Sir Frances
Galton is considered the father of Eugenics, a science trying to describe
humans in better and worse paradigms which has taken us so sadly awry in awful
decisions about sterilization but even thoughtfully in discussions about “best
embryos.”
But, I’m not going there. I’m stuck in the idea that together we are
smarter than any one of us. I think and
I believe that that is true. Of course,
Jesus said it slightly more viscerally saying we are all one body and if your
finger hurts, your whole body hurts, and how can we ignore our mangled finger.
So how do we regard the whole arc of our
community, rich and poor, educated and not so educated, weird and plain,
entertaining and boring, disabled and powerfully able as US? How do we make sure we are ALL taken care of,
not enabled, not given a fish but taught to fish? How do we create an atmosphere that makes
THOSE doors FEEL open…welcoming. WE are
a place that is helped by your presence, no matter who you are.
On Friday we are unloading the trucks,
the place is brimming over with folks sitting around the edges of the room
watching other folks work, walking 2 tons of food up that ramp, watching the
food go into 108 bags, hauling 1000 lbs of potatoes, and… I mess up the
chocolate pudding, mistaking it for jello because they both come in the same
size boxes and they both say “jello” on the side. What I want more than anything is for this
room to feel like it is WE, not church people and
we’re-so-bad-off-we’re-sitting-in-a-food-bank people, who are putting out this
food and taking it home. So the Chocolate pudding is all put in the last row of
bags and the folks sitting watching us (many of whom are tearing down boxes
too) get it right away. Luckily one of
the ladies who is helping put out food and is very strong and forceful, starts
to straighten it out by laboriously trading jello for pudding, bag by 108
bag. The mood in the room starts to
smooth a little and then (I don’t see this only the results are clear) one of
our main, hard working, there early family helpers has stashed extra pudding in
the first bags because she always gets the first bags and the strong forceful
lady will have none of her (but I can do it because I’m special) and makes all
of the puddings even, fair, equal for all.
Did you really think I was talking about pudding? No, it’s about the feeling that we all should
treat each other fairly and actually the worker who gets there early doesn’t
necessarily get more special treatment. (oops that’s a jesus story too) I think this is the part where everyone is
heard. Everybody in the room hopes to be
there for the same bags of food and potatoes and I want us all to be working up
a sweat to make sure we are all honoring that endpoint.
Most of all, I don’t want us all to be
the same. I am willing to look like
I work harder if I know the poet is gazing at the geese crossing the sky, the
hermit is walking in the woods and the engineer is inventing another darn screw
that will have a different head and length because it is stronger in some
indecipherable way. I know that we
reward folks who go to school successfully in outlandish ways, but god save us
if we start to believe that it makes them better, because frequently they are
not much fun to live with. I want to be
part of the stew and you can be the meat and even the potatoes and salt and
especially the water but, well, I want
to be the corn or the pepper.
So here we are after our first night
hosting PACEM. If we were a truly warm,
welcoming, socially just church our guests would not be able to resist being
among us this morning. I don’t think we
know how to invite them. I think we have been doing this for 6 years. Most of the churches where the guests are
sheltered have begun to have conversations about the deeper issues we realize
after this experience. It is not enough
to offer a band aide of winter shelter without thinking TOGETHER (where we are
smarter than any one of us) about the ways to welcome into our congregation
those with addiction issues, those who have been shoved out of any system of
care for mental health issues, or how to assure there are hopeful steps to
homefulness for those who have fallen into economic hardship. I know that it should feel like collaboration
and not competition. I know that it
should feel hopeful. Us is them, we are us, our doors must be found open. Because we all know, they don’t change, we
change. We are in this soup together.
Social justice…it’s not about giving, it’s about receiving.
Erik
Walker Wikstrom
Last week, as part of the service, we
lit candles while naming some of the many things that we’re doing here at TJMC
and beyond our walls. This morning, as
we begin our month-long exploration of the theme of justice, I’d like to read
part of that list again:
Adopt-a-highway,
Chalice Lighters, Children’s Worship Collections, Emotional Wellness Ministry,
Environmental Action – Green Sanctuary, Food Pantry, Gay/Straight Alliance,
Giving Tree, Guest at Your Table, Hospital Food Packets, IMPACT, Marriage
Equality, PACEM, Partner Church(es), Peace Action - UNO, Refugee Partnerships, Social
Action Collections, Soup Kitchen, Undoing Racism, Unitarian Universalist
Service Committee, our Youth’s work in relationship building with the residents
of the Cedars. (And beginning next week
our children and youth will be introducing us to the Standing on the Side of
Love campaign that’s spreading like wildfire throughout our movement.)
These things are all in
different stages of activity at the moment, but they present a good picture of
the social action efforts of this congregation.
We’re doing a lot. How many of
you have been involved in one or more of these things – either as a
leader/organizer or as a participant? I
can’t say why y’all chose me, but I know that this list is one of the reasons I
chose you.
We’re doing a lot. We’ve done a lot. There’s a lot here to be proud of.
And yet . . .
And yet, this week I
received an e-mail from Kip Newland, chair of our Social Action Council. He wanted to be clear that this wasn’t a
critique, just an observation, but he noted that as the Worship Weavers
prepared to engage the congregation in a month-long exploration of the theme of
justice no one had reached out to the Social Action Council. No one sought – or maybe even more apropos,
no one thought – to engage the Social Action Council in the planning for this
month, to elicit their thoughts about what we could say, to get their feedback
on what our congregation needed to hear.
I replied that this was a very important observation. Very telling.
To be honest, I also noted
that the themes of the year have been known since September and that the fact
that February was going to be “Justice” month had long been public knowledge
and that no one on the Social Action Council had made an invitation for the
Worship Weavers to come visit and get to know the goings on of the SAC in
preparation for this month’s worship. We
agreed that a real opportunity had been missed.
The overarching theme of
this year, as set out in that wonderful joint Leadership Development/Board of
Trustees retreat at the beginning of the year, has been “cultivating
connections.” And by this we haven’t
just meant making connections among us as individuals. We meant cultivating the entire web of
connections that makes this place what it is.
As I said, I see this as a missed opportunity – the folks focusing on
social action and the folks focusing on worship could have used this as an
opportunity to deepen the connections among these often-seen-as-separate
spheres.
One reason that’s been
suggested by some for why no one thought of this is that the Social Action
efforts of the church can sometimes feel like more of a collection of
individual’s particular passions than a coherent, organic, integrated social
action program of the church. The Social Action Council, then, can seem
like a coordinating body more than a collaborative co-creator of one of the
ministries of our congregation. What,
then, does the SAC, as a whole, have to say to or for the congregation? What is its voice? What is its place in the ongoing conversation
of who we are and who we want to be?
To the extent that any of
this rings true, this points to another place where connections could be
cultivated. How do our various Social
Action efforts relate to one another and to the mission, the ministry, and the
message of TJMC? I’m planning on
attending the SAC’s February 22nd meeting, and I’m really looking
forward to this seeing where this conversation will take us.
One thing that might help
guide this conversation – or, perhaps, galvanize it – is the question that
Elizabeth told us that the folks involved with PACEM have begun to ask. It is well and good that temporary shelter is
being provided for our unhoused sisters and brothers during the coldest months
of the year, but what comes next? Where
do we go from here? Having opened the
door between the two worlds of the housed and the unhoused, what would it look
like to go through it?
Some of you may remember an
illustration I used earlier in the year.
It comes out of the writings of John Dominic Crossan, and is his way of
trying to capture just how radical was (and still would be) Jesus’ practice of
“open commensality.” For those who don’t
remember, “open commensality” is the anthropological jargon for, “he’d eat with
anybody.” Prostitute or Pharisee or
Priest, it didn’t matter to Jesus. We’re
told that he made no such distinctions between people and blurred the lines
that society had so carefully constructed.
To vividly illustrate this,
Crossan suggests that you imagine that you’re having a dinner party. Someone rings your doorbell, and when you
answer it you see a poor family that’s been living under the bridge just down
the road. They’re hungry. And you, at this point, have several possible
responses.
·
You could send them away, saying that you’re too busy to be
bothered. (And you might or might not
offer them a little cash to help tide them over.)
·
You could invite them around back where you’d give them some food
and then send them on their way.
·
You could invite them around back and then into your kitchen so
that they could both eat and warm up.
·
You could invite them to come into your dining room and join the
party.
·
Or you could invite your guests to gather up all the food and
beverage and dishes and head out together to the bridge, bringing the party
where, perhaps, it’s needed most.
Lots of options, but this
last, Crossan argues, is Jesus’ way. I
would argue that we’re called for it to be our way as well. Because only in this last scenario is the
encounter the catalyst for real transformation . . . of everyone. The people under the bridge have their
humanity reaffirmed, are reminded that even in their current circumstances they
are worthy of a party (if you will). And
the original dinner guests are reminded that their china and their cutlery and
their pate d’ foie gras doesn’t make them any different than these other
people, just more delicately fed. Only
in this last scenario is the essential “only-us-ness” of the universe fully expressed.
So some of us roll up our
sleeves and feed a good meal to some unhoused women and men twice a year. And some of us, while working with also talk
with and joke with and get to know a bit the women and men who come to our food
pantry each month. Good. Important.
But what can we do to blur the boundaries even further? What can we do to help more of these women
and men get into their own homes so that they don’t need to go church to church
to church in the winter? What can we do
to raise the standard of living around here so that folks don’t need to get their
groceries in paper bags from the floor of a church social hall? And what can we do to more fully realize a
community, a world, in which “us and them” is replaced with “just us”?
That’s right. As I said in my newsletter column this month,
I believe that the true heart of all work toward justice is the deep and
abiding conviction that it’s “just us.” Just
us. Yet the world in which we live seems
to predicated upon anything but. There
are so many ways that we make distinctions and differences between and among
ourselves, and from these grow injustice.
So what, of all the things
that cry out for attention, should we – the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church –
what should we be putting our particular attention toward? At the beginning of this sermon I named a lot
of wonderful things that we’ve done and are doing, yet I have to ask the same
question that PACEM’s asking – after opening up these doors, what comes
next? And to answer that, as a
congregation, I think we also have to answer the question what is our unique
calling in this community? What is our
true voice? What can we offer that is ours to say and do?
These aren’t just questions
for a Social Action Council, or the Worship Weavers, or even for a collection
of dedicated activists among us. They
are questions for us all because the answers depend upon the connections among
us all, and among us and those “Others” out there with whom we are truly one.
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