Good News: A sermon for January 24, 2010

Today's lessons provide the perfect context for a deacon's sermon. We deacons are called to be a prophetic voice that works the territory between the church and the world, bringing the needs of the world to the church and leading the church in responding to those needs.

Today's passage from Luke is the story of Jesus in the synagogue reading from Isaiah and declaring himself to be "good news to the poor." If we are to follow Jesus, we too must be good news to the poor and the suffering of the world.

Likewise, the First Corinthians lesson is all about the fact that we are the body of Christ in the world. Many sermons could be derived from that passage, but certainly one of them is that as the body of Christ, we continue Christ's ministry to the poor and suffering of the world, each according to our talents and skills.

But a couple of days ago I received a letter from Fr. Jean-Monique Bruno, whom I met a few years ago on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic. Fr. Bruno is Haitian, but has served in Santo Domingo in the DR for the last 12 years. He continues to carry on a ministry in Haiti through Bethlehem Ministry, which has a large school, a clinic, and an agricultural project in the northeastern Haitian town of Terrier Rouge.

Fr. Bruno's letter conveys more clearly than anything I could say what it means to be good news to the poor and suffering. It has the additional value of providing a point of view that media coverage, however important it is, cannot provide. This is Fr. Bruno's letter:

Terrier Rouge, Haite, 19 January 2010

Dear friends,

First of all I want to praise the Lord who has allowed me to make the trip to Port-au-Prince and be back to Terrier Rouge. Thank you to all of you for your prayers and generosity. Thank you for accompanying the people of Haiti in their moment of trial. We urgently need your continued help.

I left Terrier Rouge on Sunday the 17th at 5:00 am with a truck loaded with food for 250 families affected by the earthquake and 10 young volunteers. After eight hours on the road we arrived at the capital of Haiti. Immediately we started our relief work by visiting the most affected areas.

I could not believe what I saw. The city where I grew up does not exist any longer. The Holy Trinity Cathedral, the church attended by my family, the temple that witnessed my ordinations, was completely destroyed. My primary and high school where I had my education was leveled. Most of the government buildings including the National Palace either were severely damaged or do not exist any longer. One cannot describe the scene. One has to be there. TV coverage shows only part of the devastated Port-au-Prince.

I went to one of the Episcopal high schools, named College St. Pierre, to see the Bishop and saw the damages. This school, which was the pride of the Diocese for its academic performance, fell down and killed a lot of students. In the courtyard, the sisters of St. Margaret, the Bishop and two other priests along with more than a thousand people took refuge. They live under camping tents. 

The Bishop was not there but I visited with the two priests. One of them was the Dean of the Seminary, the Very Rev. Oge Beauvois, who explained to me that they do not have the means to feed the people there. I promised him that I will send food for them this coming Friday.

Everywhere in Port-au-Prince people live in the streets or they use any park or space they can find. They sleep under the stars. Their temporary shelters are made of sheets some of them have recovered from the ruins. Praise the Lord, it is not raining. Tears came down as I was walking between the bodies of the dead who were still laying on the pedestrian walkway waiting to be picked up by the truck to be buried in a common grave.

As I was walking, I visited a community of 300 families gathered together on a small property without water, food and so on. They are practically dying. I stopped and was watching them. One guy who happens to be their leader approached me and talked to me. He asked me for help for those people. I agreed to provide food to them. 

Immediately he gathered the community and we discussed how we will proceed. They formed a committee for the distribution. The next day we drove the truck there and they received the food that was going to be distributed. I gave them food for two hundred people but they told me that everybody will find something. They started reducing the packages we had prepared in Terrier Rouge, so instead of 200 families, 300 may have something to eat. They show a real concern for everyone.

The remaining 50 packages were distributed in the area where my family lives to the neighbors. With the volunteers we participated in the recovery of the bodies of my cousin and her granddaughter who were under the rumblings. After we found them, we buried them not too far from their destroyed home.

The needs are countless. I felt since the moment of the tragedy that I had to intervene in one way or other to bring my support to fellow citizens. Families are leaving the capital and moving to the country. I am helping also in this area. On our way back the truck was loaded with people from Terrier Rouge we brought back to their families.

What we are doing is very small compared to the massive aid that the international community is pouring on Haiti. But it is very significant in the sense that in distributing our help we do not need an army to protect us. We use the channel of community leaders. We do it with discretion. Nobody has noticed that we were transporting food for the victims. There was no fight, no riot and everyone we reached received something. Neither I nor the volunteers ever felt threatened; on the contrary, we did our work with joy trusting in the Lord's power for protection.

When I had to leave Port-au-Prince, there was no gasoline in the whole country. I crossed the border and talked to the DR authorities in Dajabon and they allowed me to buy the quantity of fuel that I needed for the whole trip. The food also is bought there. So I do not have any problems getting food to Port-au-Prince.

[Here's] an idea of what I took to Port-au-Prince: rice, beans, corn, charcoal, oil, spaghetti, matches, cassava, bread, biscuits, candles, dry fish and water.

I am going back to Santo Domingo this Saturday after sending the truck again and will come back next week to make another trip to Port-au-Prince.

I urge you to be part of this relief work. You can give to any organization of your choice, but believe me, any penny that you give our Organization Esperance et Vie through Bethlehem Ministry will go right away to the suffering people.

For the time being school is closed in the whole country. As I was writing this report, we have received an aftershock in Terrier Rouge and this happened from time to time. Last night, the people in Cap-Haitian experienced the same phenomenon. People are still living in a panic situation. They do not want to take any chance to stay in their homes. We continue to count on your prayers and generosity.

Please forgive me the length of this report. This comes with the assurance of my prayers.

Your servant, JMBruno+

Amen.

Feasting: A sermon for January 10, 2010

Christmas, Epiphany, the Baptism of our Lord. What an extraordinary sequence of events. It’s like eating not one, but three rich desserts, one right after the other.

And just as our taste buds and digestive systems have a little trouble handling so much richness all at once, so our hearts and minds struggle to remain receptive, attentive and comprehending of this series of feasts in the church year.

We’ll be back in what we call “ordinary time” for the next five Sundays. But today, we have the undeniably delicious but daunting task—not only of celebrating the baptism of our Lord—but also sort of tying up loose ends by looking at the relationships among these events.

Christmas we also know as The Incarnation: God’s gracious decision to become human and live among us. We celebrate the baby Jesus in the manger.

Epiphany we might also call “the showing forth.” The wise men have made it to the manger. They who came from afar to worship are stand-ins for all the peoples of the world. God’s showing forth in the person of Jesus is recognized by humankind.

And now, rather suddenly, Jesus the grown man is being baptized. Of course, we love the story of Jesus baptized, because we too are baptized. It’s another thing we share with him and another way we follow him.

Barbara Crafton is an Episcopal priest who writes an online meditation. She connects these three feasts in a particularly valuable emphasis. “This is what the Incarnation means,” she writes. “Even the most secular of our moments is soaked with holiness. Every last moment of our moments. There's no getting away from it -- God is with us.”

What an interesting emphasis! We so often think of God as elusive. We often plead and even beg for God to be with us. But the Incarnation is irrevocable. God is here, plain and simple, in every moment of our moments, regardless of how remote God seems to us at times.

Crafton continues: “And here is what the Epiphany means: Anyone who wishes to see this can see it. Absolutely anyone. God is not hiding from us, nor is God closed to any of us. We can all walk a path that will reveal the divine presence to us. For most of us, this happens gradually throughout a life.”

In other words, God is here for everyone. The three wise kings are truly stand-ins. Their path to the divine presence was to follow a star over some great distance, we know not how far.

Our paths to the divine presence among us are as varied as we are. For each of us, it is the people, the events, the opportunities and obstacles of everyday life. When we walk those paths faithfully, we will come to see God in all of those places, moments and situations of our lives.

We all have moments of great clarity, when we see or comprehend something in a particularly fresh, compelling or unmistakable way. And it is no surprise or mystery that we call such moments “epiphanies.”

But I think Crafton is correct when she says that, by and large, our awareness of and ability to see God in the every day, more typically happens gradually throughout a lifetime. Indeed, I often am able to see God’s presence in my life, and more importantly to discern between things from God and my own willfulness and imagination, only in retrospect.

“And here is what the Baptism of Christ means,” says Barbara Crafton. “[It means] the inmost heart and utter wisdom of God is participant in our process of beginning to learn. The very same stumbling journey we make, a journey in which most of the learning that takes place happens through the challenge of learning from our mistakes, is undertaken by the Son of God...”

In other words, Crafton invites us to think of baptism—both our Lord’s and our own—as the beginning of a process of discovery and learning and living into our identities and ministries as people of God.

One aspect of Luke’s account of the baptism of our Lord merits special consideration but often does not get mentioned. Notice how Luke emphasizes that Jesus was baptized as one of many.

“Now when all the people were baptized,” says Luke, “and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying…” (NRSV: Luke 3:21) then the Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove.

When all the people were baptized… and Jesus also, only then is Jesus revealed as the Son, the Beloved.

Two points I would make of this. The first is that Jesus’ baptism is a continuation of the “showing forth,” the revealing of God among us, that began at the manger to the angels and shepherds, and was made available to everyone with the epiphany of the wise men from afar.

And so our baptism is a showing forth, "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace" (BCP, p 857*). It proclaims that God is among us and within us. Think of it: your baptism, my baptism, each and every baptism... a mini-Epiphany.

The second point is this: God showing forth among us and within us in the form of baptism is never earned, and it is never ours alone. Baptism is a communal event. It is a communal gift and a communal responsibility.

Now, we can all hear the words “community” and “communal” and be quite comfortable. We might even get warm fuzzes from hearing those words, for “community” like “family” is a good, solid middle class value.

But I venture to suggest that we are comfortable with these terms because we have in mind a pretty small and relatively homogeneous community—a good, solid middle class community a lot like the one in hundreds of Episcopal churches across the country on a given Sunday morning.

But that is not what God has in mind. God claims all. God’s vision as revealed to us through, for example, today's lesson from Isaiah, blows my limited human imagination of the scope and richness of God’s people right out of the water.

Each time I walk mentally through this sequence of events—God become human in the Incarnation, God revealed to absolutely anyone who elects to see in the Epiphany, God entering into human community and the process of human spiritual growth and learning through the baptism of our Lord—every time I walk through these events, then go back to Isaiah and read again the magnificent scope of God’s claim of that human community, I am stunned into silence.

Read it with me again:
"Do not fear, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
I will say to the north, ‘Give them up’,
and to the south, ‘Do not withhold;
bring my sons from far away
and my daughters from the end of the earth—
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.'" (NRSV: Isaiah 43:5-7)

It’s an epiphany. A moment of clarity in which I grasp the utterly vast sweep of God's view of human community. And then it's gone. I can only hold on to it for a moment, then my human brain gets stuck in the details of our human differences and hostilities and simple disagreements. And the struggle to comprehend God's vision and desire for humankind begins again.

So be it. Amen.

Epilogue: Recently I came to the same place this homily ends by a drastically different route. I visited Edward Steichen's "Family of Man" exhibit in Clervaux, Luxembourg. See Who are we in relationship to each other? on my main blog, Coming to Terms.