Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene
Proper 28B: 24th Sunday after Pentecost (November 19, 2006)
1 Samuel 1:4-20
Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25
Mark 13:1-8
Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.
It’s been a long birth, longer than anyone ever expected. The labor of which Jesus speaks has been endless: 2,000 years, give or take. When will the reign of God finally be born? When will it stop being “near at hand” and be finally here?
Jesus said, “The meek will inherit the earth.” Well, I say, the meek are ready. They’ve been ready, for quite some time now. The t-shirt says, “Jesus is coming back. Look busy!” But most of us have a question for him. “Where the hell have you been?”
My sister Leann’s first child—my first nephew—was born after a day’s hard and exhausting labor. She had been determined not to have a Cesarean birth, but finally she could take it no longer, and we could hear her from the hallway, “OK, get it out of me!”
Some days feel like that in this long birth of the kingdom of God, don’t they? Only, there’s no Cesarean option. You can create as many watershed moments as you want—you can win the lottery, re-elect the Democrats, finally retire, whatever—and the birth pangs go on. Sometimes you can take a little break from them—go on vacation—but even then sometimes they have the audacity to follow you to Bermuda and, if nothing else, they’ll be guaranteed to be waiting for you when you get back.
There will be “wars and rumors of wars…nation will rise against nation…there will be earthquakes…famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” It is not the most popular of Jesus’ promises to his followers, but perhaps the one that has turned out to be most consistently true.
What are we to do in this long, hard age of the birth pangs?
By the time whoever it was sat down to write the letter to the Hebrews, he or she (I’ll call her she—why not, since the metaphor of the day is birth?) knew that we were in this for the long haul. She writes eloquently, movingly, in the chapter that follows our passage from this morning, of the saints who glimpse the reign of God, but only get to glimpse it.
All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them. (Hebrews 11:13-16)
Her answer is, “Keep seeking a homeland. Keep desiring a better country. And know, most of all, that, no matter what, God is not ashamed to be called your God.”
This is easier said than done when we are in hard labor. That is why previously, in the passage we heard this morning, she set the vitally important context for this seeking and desiring and clinging to the “not ashamed” God.
Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Provoke one another. Meet together. Encourage one another. There are some wonderful words there.
Provoke one another. “Provoke” is a great English word, even though I first learned it as a negative. My paternal grandmother was frequently “provoked about something,” and I needed to take care not to be the one who “provoked” her. The word means literally “call forth.” And here it is not something to avoid but to do, and urgently. Provoke one another; call forth from one another love and good deeds. That it what we mean when we say we are a “school for justice,” by the way. We are committed to provoking one another to love and good deeds.
Meet together. The interesting word here is not in English but in Greek: episynagogein. "Synagogue" is a Greek word for a meeting. It became the word for meetings of Jews who lived in the diaspora, away from worship in the Temple. It is a particular kind of meeting, what I would call a “formative” meeting that is much about identity. Meet together. Maintain your identity. Don’t forget who you are and whose you are.
I think this links directly to the writer’s later exhortation to cling to the God who is not ashamed to be your God. There is the profoundly important insight here that this only happens together. The God we can supposedly meet on the golf course is a different God, at least a less robust God, than then the God who is present when we meet together. And this can be tied to our desire to be “a welcome Table for all,” where we consistently meet together the God who is not ashamed to be called our God.
Encourage one another. I have probably gone on about “encourage” before—one of my favorite words, one that does not even need much explanation. Give courage to one another, and courage is certainly what we need in these long days of the birth pangs. “Hang in there” is a trite response to someone who is troubled, but it is one of the most important things we can enable one another to do in this world. And this ties to that third phrase we use about ourselves: “a healing place for souls.” How we do the healing is largely by encouragement.
Provoke one another. Meet together. Encourage one another. And all these during the birth pangs, as we “see the Day approaching.” “The Day,” the consummation of the dream of God, the day that we Christians have to admit after 2,000 years may never come, and yet, we stubbornly persist in our watching and waiting, because they are what keeps us alive. And God is stubbornly and persistently giving us glimpses of it—especially the one so very important to us in our tradition, this weekly gathering around this Table, our meeting together to be provoked and encouraged to life by the One we call God, and Savior, and Friend.
It should be obvious this morning that the tone of the readings and this sermon move us toward Advent, as they always do as the church year draws to a close. Advent is that time when we remind ourselves as Christians that watching and waiting for the glimpses of God’s reign is what we do. Hope is what we are about as a people. Despair is what we struggle against most ferociously as believers in the God of Hannah and followers of Jesus who taught us about the never-ending birth pangs.
Hope for Christians is never any kind of cheap optimism. It is painfully won in the midst of the birth pangs. It is provoked by one another and encouraged in one another as we meet together. It is a conscious and stubborn choice to believe that there is a God for everyone, a God who is not ashamed to be called their God.
The “holidays” we are approaching can be joyous, life-giving times, but they can also be difficult, death-dealing times, mostly because the life they try to sell us, the faith and hope and love they try to sell us, is cheap. There is no depth to them, they are throw away commodities like most everything in this world, and so it is no wonder that so many people get the impression in this “most wonderful time of the year” that they are just “throw away” people, and that things like faith and hope and love are mostly useless drivel.
Let us struggle against these things. Let us be people of Advent through these days, trained at something deeper and more lasting than tinsel and mistletoe, the real, deep faith and hope and love that we provoke and encourage in one another, the ability to see glimpses of God’s reign even in the endless pangs of birth in our lives and in the life of the world around us from our own city streets to the streets of Baghdad. There is a God who is not ashamed to be called our God.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Saturday, November 04, 2006
It's a Girl!
Michael W Hopkins
The Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene
November 5, 2006: All Saints’ Sunday
Ruth 1:1-18
Hebrews 9:11-14
“It’s a Girl!”
Who would have ever believed it? A girl is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church!
For any of you who have not been paying attention, we have lived through an extraordinary fifty or so years in the Episcopal Church. A little history is important for us to review today.
In 1952, a change in the constitution of the Episcopal Church was presented to the General Convention (our church-wide decision-making body that meets every three years). It proposed to change the word “layman” to “lay deputy, man or woman” in setting forth the qualifications for being elected a deputy to the General Convention.
The resolution failed.
Eight years later, in 1964, a report was issued showing that it was still not possible for a woman to be elected to a parish vestry or a diocesan convention in half of the dioceses of the Church, 39 out of 77.
Resolutions to change these restrictions failed again in 1958, 1961, and 1964. Finally, the 1967 General Convention changed the word “laymen” in the constitution to “laypersons,” and in 1970 the first women were seated as Deputies to our General Convention.
The same Convention, in 1970, allowed women to be ordained as deacons. In 1973, however, a resolution allowing for women to be ordained priests failed. The first women were ordained priests “irregularly” in 1974. The General Convention of 1976 approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and, technically, to the episcopate.
It was not until 1989, however, that the first woman was consecrated a bishop, the Rt. Rev. Barbara Clementine Harris as the Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts. Today, 17 years later, 12 women have served or are serving as bishops in the Episcopal Church (and four in two other provinces of the Anglican Communion, three in Canada and one in New Zealand).
And now we begin to pray for “Katharine, our Presiding Bishop.” It has been an amazing journey for which we should be grateful to God.
How wonderful that we are given the story of Ruth on this Sunday when we are celebrating this milestone: How wonderful, and how ironic. Ironic because, of course, it was the Bible itself that was used to prop up a male-dominated church and a male-dominated society. It seemed that women were meant to be in a lesser and subjugated role right from the very beginning with the story of Adam and Eve.
Burt the wonderful thing about the Bible is that it contains significant “minority reports” that have frequently sowed the seeds of its own subversion. If the story of the Bible was itself male-dominated, there was always present this minority report, including the Book of Ruth, which said to anyone who had eyes to see and ears to hear that it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded or as clear-cut as it looked.
One of my favorite examples of these seeds of subversion is the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel where somewhat inexplicably three women appear: Tamar, the daughter of Judah (one of the sons of the patriarch Jacob), Ruth the grandmother of King David, and Bathsheba, David’s wife and the mother of Solomon. And it is even more extraordinary that these three women were all marginalized in ways that women typically have been through the ages: Tamar was the victim of rape; Ruth was a foreigner, an outsider, who helped an all-female household survive; Bathsheba, like a piece of property, was stolen from her husband and claimed by David as his own.
These women, along with many others—Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Esther, Judith, Mary, Mary Magdalene—to name a few, have always been there in the Bible writing the minority report over the centuries that is finally being noticed on a significant scale in our own day. May God continue to bless and prosper the ministries of women, including our new Presiding Bishop.
Because of this blessing and prosperity, women in our day and, more importantly, in the future, do not have to wonder if they are among “the saints,” or, if they are, only as shining examples of obedience and virtue. The holy ones of God are folk like Katharine, and Arlene, and Jacquelyn, and Mary Ann, and Maame Esi. They are loved the same by God and as any man was ever loved and they have the same ministry as any man who ever ministered.
And this is good news for all of us, male and female alike, because it means that what is important to God about each and every one of us alike is simply our being, our created-ness, none of which is any better than anyone else’s.
We continue to get it quite backward in the Church on this “saints” thing, you see. We continue to think that the saints are saints because of something they have done or are doing. That is not the truth. The saints are the saints simply because they are loved by God, and having been loved by God, that love changes them.
It is said quite wonderfully by Eugene Peterson in his translation of the portion of the Letter to the Hebrews we heard this morning:
Through the Spirit, Christ offered himself as an unblemished sacrifice, freeing us from all those dead-end efforts to make ourselves respectable, so that we can live all out for God.
Perhaps the only qualification for sainthood is that one “get” that all efforts at “making ourselves respectable” are foolishness in the eyes of God, who has been head over heals in love with us from the time our being occurred in her imagination.
So today we celebrate Katharine, and the remarkable ministries of women in our Church which have finally been allowed to flourish in our day, and we give thanks for the God who has declared us saints, holy ones, beloved, whether we deserve it or not, so that out of that freedom we can join in the progress of freedom that is God’s dream for the whole creation.
It is this dream to which Katharine herself called us yesterday, and I will let her finish the sermon this morning.
In Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost said that "home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in." We all ache for a community that will take us in, with all our warts and quirks and petty meannesses - and yet they still celebrate when they see us coming! That vision of homegoing and homecoming that underlies our deepest spiritual yearnings is also the job assignment each one of us gets in baptism - go home, and while you're at it, help to build a home for everyone else on earth. For none of us can truly find our rest in God until all of our brothers and sisters have also been welcomed home like the prodigal.
There's a wonderful Hebrew word for that vision and work - shalom. It doesn't just mean the sort of peace that comes when we're no longer at war. It's that rich and multihued vision of a world where no one goes hungry because everyone is invited to a seat at the groaning board, it's a vision of a world where no one is sick or in prison because all sorts of disease have been healed, it's a vision of a world where every human being has the capacity to use every good gift that God has given, it is a vision of a world where no one enjoys abundance at the expense of another, it's a vision of a world where all enjoy Sabbath rest in the conscious presence of God.
Shalom means that all human beings live together as siblings, at peace with one another and with God, and in right relationship with all of the rest of creation. It is that vision of the lion lying down with the lamb and the small child playing over the den of the adder, where the specter of death no longer holds sway. It is that vision to which Jesus points when he says, "today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." To say "shalom" is to know our own place and to invite and affirm the place of all of the rest of creation, once more at home in God.
You and I have been invited into that ministry of global peace-making that makes a place and affirms a welcome for all of God's creatures. But more than welcome, that ministry invites all to feast until they are filled with God's abundance. God has spoken that dream in our hearts - through the prophets, through the patriarchs and the mystics, in human flesh in Jesus, and in each one of us at baptism. All are welcome, all are fed, all are satisfied, all are healed of the wounds and lessenings that are part of the not-yet-ness of creation.
That homecoming of shalom is both destination and journey. We cannot embark on the journey without some vision of where we are going, even though we may not reach it this side of the grave. We are really charged with seeing everyplace and all places as home, and living in a way that makes that true for every other creature on the planet. None of us can be fully at home, at rest, enjoying shalom, unless all the world is as well. Shalom is the fruit of living that dream. We live in a day where there is a concrete possibility of making that dream reality for the most destitute, forgotten, and ignored of our fellow travelers - for the castaways, for those in peril or just barely afloat on life's restless sea.
This church has said that our larger vision will be framed and shaped in the coming years by the vision of shalom embedded in the Millennium Development Goals - a world where the hungry are fed, the ill are healed, the young educated, women and men treated equally, and where all have access to clean water and adequate sanitation, basic health care, and the promise of development that does not endanger the rest of creation. That vision of abundant life is achievable in our own day, but only with the passionate commitment of each and every one of us. It is God's vision of homecoming for all humanity.
You go girl! And we’ll go with you.
The Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene
November 5, 2006: All Saints’ Sunday
Ruth 1:1-18
Hebrews 9:11-14
“It’s a Girl!”
Who would have ever believed it? A girl is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church!
For any of you who have not been paying attention, we have lived through an extraordinary fifty or so years in the Episcopal Church. A little history is important for us to review today.
In 1952, a change in the constitution of the Episcopal Church was presented to the General Convention (our church-wide decision-making body that meets every three years). It proposed to change the word “layman” to “lay deputy, man or woman” in setting forth the qualifications for being elected a deputy to the General Convention.
The resolution failed.
Eight years later, in 1964, a report was issued showing that it was still not possible for a woman to be elected to a parish vestry or a diocesan convention in half of the dioceses of the Church, 39 out of 77.
Resolutions to change these restrictions failed again in 1958, 1961, and 1964. Finally, the 1967 General Convention changed the word “laymen” in the constitution to “laypersons,” and in 1970 the first women were seated as Deputies to our General Convention.
The same Convention, in 1970, allowed women to be ordained as deacons. In 1973, however, a resolution allowing for women to be ordained priests failed. The first women were ordained priests “irregularly” in 1974. The General Convention of 1976 approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and, technically, to the episcopate.
It was not until 1989, however, that the first woman was consecrated a bishop, the Rt. Rev. Barbara Clementine Harris as the Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts. Today, 17 years later, 12 women have served or are serving as bishops in the Episcopal Church (and four in two other provinces of the Anglican Communion, three in Canada and one in New Zealand).
And now we begin to pray for “Katharine, our Presiding Bishop.” It has been an amazing journey for which we should be grateful to God.
How wonderful that we are given the story of Ruth on this Sunday when we are celebrating this milestone: How wonderful, and how ironic. Ironic because, of course, it was the Bible itself that was used to prop up a male-dominated church and a male-dominated society. It seemed that women were meant to be in a lesser and subjugated role right from the very beginning with the story of Adam and Eve.
Burt the wonderful thing about the Bible is that it contains significant “minority reports” that have frequently sowed the seeds of its own subversion. If the story of the Bible was itself male-dominated, there was always present this minority report, including the Book of Ruth, which said to anyone who had eyes to see and ears to hear that it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded or as clear-cut as it looked.
One of my favorite examples of these seeds of subversion is the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel where somewhat inexplicably three women appear: Tamar, the daughter of Judah (one of the sons of the patriarch Jacob), Ruth the grandmother of King David, and Bathsheba, David’s wife and the mother of Solomon. And it is even more extraordinary that these three women were all marginalized in ways that women typically have been through the ages: Tamar was the victim of rape; Ruth was a foreigner, an outsider, who helped an all-female household survive; Bathsheba, like a piece of property, was stolen from her husband and claimed by David as his own.
These women, along with many others—Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Esther, Judith, Mary, Mary Magdalene—to name a few, have always been there in the Bible writing the minority report over the centuries that is finally being noticed on a significant scale in our own day. May God continue to bless and prosper the ministries of women, including our new Presiding Bishop.
Because of this blessing and prosperity, women in our day and, more importantly, in the future, do not have to wonder if they are among “the saints,” or, if they are, only as shining examples of obedience and virtue. The holy ones of God are folk like Katharine, and Arlene, and Jacquelyn, and Mary Ann, and Maame Esi. They are loved the same by God and as any man was ever loved and they have the same ministry as any man who ever ministered.
And this is good news for all of us, male and female alike, because it means that what is important to God about each and every one of us alike is simply our being, our created-ness, none of which is any better than anyone else’s.
We continue to get it quite backward in the Church on this “saints” thing, you see. We continue to think that the saints are saints because of something they have done or are doing. That is not the truth. The saints are the saints simply because they are loved by God, and having been loved by God, that love changes them.
It is said quite wonderfully by Eugene Peterson in his translation of the portion of the Letter to the Hebrews we heard this morning:
Through the Spirit, Christ offered himself as an unblemished sacrifice, freeing us from all those dead-end efforts to make ourselves respectable, so that we can live all out for God.
Perhaps the only qualification for sainthood is that one “get” that all efforts at “making ourselves respectable” are foolishness in the eyes of God, who has been head over heals in love with us from the time our being occurred in her imagination.
So today we celebrate Katharine, and the remarkable ministries of women in our Church which have finally been allowed to flourish in our day, and we give thanks for the God who has declared us saints, holy ones, beloved, whether we deserve it or not, so that out of that freedom we can join in the progress of freedom that is God’s dream for the whole creation.
It is this dream to which Katharine herself called us yesterday, and I will let her finish the sermon this morning.
In Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost said that "home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in." We all ache for a community that will take us in, with all our warts and quirks and petty meannesses - and yet they still celebrate when they see us coming! That vision of homegoing and homecoming that underlies our deepest spiritual yearnings is also the job assignment each one of us gets in baptism - go home, and while you're at it, help to build a home for everyone else on earth. For none of us can truly find our rest in God until all of our brothers and sisters have also been welcomed home like the prodigal.
There's a wonderful Hebrew word for that vision and work - shalom. It doesn't just mean the sort of peace that comes when we're no longer at war. It's that rich and multihued vision of a world where no one goes hungry because everyone is invited to a seat at the groaning board, it's a vision of a world where no one is sick or in prison because all sorts of disease have been healed, it's a vision of a world where every human being has the capacity to use every good gift that God has given, it is a vision of a world where no one enjoys abundance at the expense of another, it's a vision of a world where all enjoy Sabbath rest in the conscious presence of God.
Shalom means that all human beings live together as siblings, at peace with one another and with God, and in right relationship with all of the rest of creation. It is that vision of the lion lying down with the lamb and the small child playing over the den of the adder, where the specter of death no longer holds sway. It is that vision to which Jesus points when he says, "today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." To say "shalom" is to know our own place and to invite and affirm the place of all of the rest of creation, once more at home in God.
You and I have been invited into that ministry of global peace-making that makes a place and affirms a welcome for all of God's creatures. But more than welcome, that ministry invites all to feast until they are filled with God's abundance. God has spoken that dream in our hearts - through the prophets, through the patriarchs and the mystics, in human flesh in Jesus, and in each one of us at baptism. All are welcome, all are fed, all are satisfied, all are healed of the wounds and lessenings that are part of the not-yet-ness of creation.
That homecoming of shalom is both destination and journey. We cannot embark on the journey without some vision of where we are going, even though we may not reach it this side of the grave. We are really charged with seeing everyplace and all places as home, and living in a way that makes that true for every other creature on the planet. None of us can be fully at home, at rest, enjoying shalom, unless all the world is as well. Shalom is the fruit of living that dream. We live in a day where there is a concrete possibility of making that dream reality for the most destitute, forgotten, and ignored of our fellow travelers - for the castaways, for those in peril or just barely afloat on life's restless sea.
This church has said that our larger vision will be framed and shaped in the coming years by the vision of shalom embedded in the Millennium Development Goals - a world where the hungry are fed, the ill are healed, the young educated, women and men treated equally, and where all have access to clean water and adequate sanitation, basic health care, and the promise of development that does not endanger the rest of creation. That vision of abundant life is achievable in our own day, but only with the passionate commitment of each and every one of us. It is God's vision of homecoming for all humanity.
You go girl! And we’ll go with you.
Toward a New Vision of Urban Ministry in Rochester
Remarks to the 75th Convention of the Diocese of Rochester, October 29, 2006
Last year’s Diocesan Convention passed a resolution asking for a Task Force to be set up to examine the Diocese’s response to a growing epidemic of violence in the City of Rochester, particularly among young people. The Bishop asked me to chair that Task Force with the staff support of Canon Steve Lane.
I wish I could report to you that the Task Force had worked hard and had a list of concrete action items to present to you, as the resolution envisioned. Representatives of many Rochester and Monroe District churches met on three occasions and began a conversation. A variety of factors prevented us from continuing our work.
Unfortunately, the violence continues. We have just had another extraordinarily violent summer in Rochester. More young people were shot, although fewer of them died than in 2005, which has meant less media attention.
One of the deaths, however, was a young man named Rodnell Hartzog, the father of a 3 year old member of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, and the grandson of a longtime active member. Rodnell’s life and his death typified in many ways the culture of despair that is epidemic among young people in Rochester. He had been in and out of prison and was what many would dismiss as a “gang-banger.” But Rodnell was also a child of God who I buried in the section of Mt. Hope Cemetery owned by several of our churches.
We cannot allow ourselves to succumb to the temptation that Rodnell’s life and death did not matter. If nothing else we must question our own values that insist that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on our security at airports and next to nothing in comparison to keep little children safe in our city neighborhoods. The message, whether we intend it or not, is that black kids are expendable to us. If that statement shocks or offends you, than you ought to demand that the church (at least the church) become a major force in raising the issue and solving the problem.
So I, for one, am not willing to let go of this issue. Despite the lack of action, I do think that we learned several things in our conversations that point a way forward. Four, in particular:
• Many congregations are doing a variety of important ministries in the City of Rochester, although they are being done largely in isolation and even ignorance of one another’s efforts. This is not helpful.
• Despite these efforts, and partially because of their isolated existence, the need before us is for a cross-parish strategy for urban ministry. Unless we do this, we can only be do-gooders and not problem-solvers.
• We cannot be problem-solvers either as parishes or a diocese if we are not consistently engaging the issues of race and class privilege that underlie the problem of violence and the culture of despair. We must re-engage anti-racism work and we need to engage economic justice. The truth is that we are significantly ambivalent about taking up this work, but we also must come to terms with the fact that our ambivalence signals our effective abandonment of the city and the majority of its people who do not, by and large, inhabit our churches. And if we don’t think there is a direct connection between our ambivalence about anti-racism and economic justice work and who populates our churches, we are greatly deceived.
• The Rochester City churches of our Diocese need to take responsibility for any renewal of urban ministry on a diocesan level. This is not to re-create an old divide between urban and suburban that has been ameliorated by the joint functioning of our Rochester and Monroe Districts. It is to say that there are distinct urban issues, about which the city churches need to get clear in order to engage effectively the rest of the diocese, including the suburbs, where there is a natural ambivalence about urban issues.
To this end, Canon Lane and I are asking the Bishop and Diocesan Council to support a summit of the leadership of Rochester District Churches to determine whether a cooperative urban ministry strategy can be developed and implemented. We are also asking the Bishop and Council to renew the diocesan Anti-Racism Committee and consider implementation of anti-racism training that has been required by the General Convention since 2000. I personally pledge several members of my own parish to help in this effort, as we ourselves are in the process of re-engaging anti-racism and reconciliation ministry.
I hope those of you in the other Districts of the Diocese are aware of the importance of these efforts not exclusive of issues in your own areas of the Diocese. As most of you know, I am a son of the Southern Tier, and I am here to tell you that unless we begin to get a handle on the culture of despair and violence among our young people in the city, your towns and villages are next. Most of you are probably already seeing signs of this where you live, as I am in my hometown of Avoca.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, to reach outside of our comfort zones and let the world know that young people like Rodnell Hartzog are not only children of God but should be treated as if they are. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage to push ourselves to be more than good deed doers. Let us be problem solvers, so that no more children of God have to die in our own city.
Last year’s Diocesan Convention passed a resolution asking for a Task Force to be set up to examine the Diocese’s response to a growing epidemic of violence in the City of Rochester, particularly among young people. The Bishop asked me to chair that Task Force with the staff support of Canon Steve Lane.
I wish I could report to you that the Task Force had worked hard and had a list of concrete action items to present to you, as the resolution envisioned. Representatives of many Rochester and Monroe District churches met on three occasions and began a conversation. A variety of factors prevented us from continuing our work.
Unfortunately, the violence continues. We have just had another extraordinarily violent summer in Rochester. More young people were shot, although fewer of them died than in 2005, which has meant less media attention.
One of the deaths, however, was a young man named Rodnell Hartzog, the father of a 3 year old member of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, and the grandson of a longtime active member. Rodnell’s life and his death typified in many ways the culture of despair that is epidemic among young people in Rochester. He had been in and out of prison and was what many would dismiss as a “gang-banger.” But Rodnell was also a child of God who I buried in the section of Mt. Hope Cemetery owned by several of our churches.
We cannot allow ourselves to succumb to the temptation that Rodnell’s life and death did not matter. If nothing else we must question our own values that insist that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on our security at airports and next to nothing in comparison to keep little children safe in our city neighborhoods. The message, whether we intend it or not, is that black kids are expendable to us. If that statement shocks or offends you, than you ought to demand that the church (at least the church) become a major force in raising the issue and solving the problem.
So I, for one, am not willing to let go of this issue. Despite the lack of action, I do think that we learned several things in our conversations that point a way forward. Four, in particular:
• Many congregations are doing a variety of important ministries in the City of Rochester, although they are being done largely in isolation and even ignorance of one another’s efforts. This is not helpful.
• Despite these efforts, and partially because of their isolated existence, the need before us is for a cross-parish strategy for urban ministry. Unless we do this, we can only be do-gooders and not problem-solvers.
• We cannot be problem-solvers either as parishes or a diocese if we are not consistently engaging the issues of race and class privilege that underlie the problem of violence and the culture of despair. We must re-engage anti-racism work and we need to engage economic justice. The truth is that we are significantly ambivalent about taking up this work, but we also must come to terms with the fact that our ambivalence signals our effective abandonment of the city and the majority of its people who do not, by and large, inhabit our churches. And if we don’t think there is a direct connection between our ambivalence about anti-racism and economic justice work and who populates our churches, we are greatly deceived.
• The Rochester City churches of our Diocese need to take responsibility for any renewal of urban ministry on a diocesan level. This is not to re-create an old divide between urban and suburban that has been ameliorated by the joint functioning of our Rochester and Monroe Districts. It is to say that there are distinct urban issues, about which the city churches need to get clear in order to engage effectively the rest of the diocese, including the suburbs, where there is a natural ambivalence about urban issues.
To this end, Canon Lane and I are asking the Bishop and Diocesan Council to support a summit of the leadership of Rochester District Churches to determine whether a cooperative urban ministry strategy can be developed and implemented. We are also asking the Bishop and Council to renew the diocesan Anti-Racism Committee and consider implementation of anti-racism training that has been required by the General Convention since 2000. I personally pledge several members of my own parish to help in this effort, as we ourselves are in the process of re-engaging anti-racism and reconciliation ministry.
I hope those of you in the other Districts of the Diocese are aware of the importance of these efforts not exclusive of issues in your own areas of the Diocese. As most of you know, I am a son of the Southern Tier, and I am here to tell you that unless we begin to get a handle on the culture of despair and violence among our young people in the city, your towns and villages are next. Most of you are probably already seeing signs of this where you live, as I am in my hometown of Avoca.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, to reach outside of our comfort zones and let the world know that young people like Rodnell Hartzog are not only children of God but should be treated as if they are. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage to push ourselves to be more than good deed doers. Let us be problem solvers, so that no more children of God have to die in our own city.
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