The Word Among Us

This past Sunday at Second was the annual NEP worship service. The four of us were responsible for planning and leading the entire service. We each split the sermon time, and talked about where we had found God in our experiences this year. Tara and Patrick's families were in attendance (Chasie and I have

family coming next weekend), and I was happy to see several of my co-workers in the second (which of course means the front) row. I think they probably like seeing their names in print, so thanks to Maggie, Rachel, Mary, Anneice (and daughter/mayoral candidate Cheryl), Martina, and June for coming.

We all enjoyed having special music by Second's Celtic ensemble. They accompanied our last hymn, one of our favorites from the YAV orientation at Ghost Ranch, "Canticle of the Turning," giving new meaning to the musical term "prestissimo." We also sang the spiritual "I'm Gonna Live So God Can Use Me" with some fairly swinging piano accompaniment by yours truly, which included a little glissando action. Who knew I would include so many musical terms in this post? The service also included a favorite song of mine as the response to the assurance of forgiveness, "Goodness is Stronger Than Evil," which is from the prayerbook of Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, and set to music by John Bell of the Iona Community in Scotland. I hear there is a recording of the service out there, so if I can figure out how to do it, maybe I will be able to put audio of the service on here.

Here are a few of our sermons from last Sunday's NEP service, based on Micah 6 (What does the Lord require of you?...) and James 2 (faith without works is dead...):

PATRICK:

He has shown you, O people, what is good and what the Lord requires of you;
But to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.

Show me your faith apart from your works, and by my works I will show you my faith.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

“Mr. Patrick, can I get on your back?”
“Yeah, but we have go to reading.”

For the past ten months I have witnessed the faithful, God-inspired dreams and actions of volunteers and children alike at Preston Taylor Ministries. At PTM, our ministry is to provide free-of-charge, a faith-rooted, educationally-based after-school and summer program for the children of the Preston Taylor public housing community. Over the last 10 months I have succeeded and failed at inspiring God’s children to reach outside of themselves and brush back all the influences that want them to fail. God calls us to “walk humbly,” something that’s easy to say, but harder to put into practice.

When you walk humbly with your Lord, you might wind up in some interesting places, like among the swirling entropy that is 75 children in a converted fellowship hall who aren’t entirely sold on the idea they’ve gathered after school to improve their academic skills. Further along this walk you develop relationships with children who are growing up in an environment that was completely foreign to you during your own upbringing. You wonder where your walk is going and sometimes you might even lose sight of God. But God doesn’t lose sight of you.

Eventually you realize that walking with God means walking with these children, helping them however you can. In the 10 months I’ve worked with PTM, I’ve seen us open up a new building, expand our lunch mate mentoring program, and grow our after-school program to serve over 75 children. The difference we make doesn’t just show up in improved reading scores, it shows up in positive attitudes, and a better outlook on life. I get the privilege to see new, healthy friendships formed among the children, better report cards, and big wide smiles when come in holding their science fair trophies saying “Look Mr. Patrick, I won… my project got first place!” However, the hardest part of my job is dealing with the fact that I probably will never know what happens to most of children I serve. I just do the best I can while I’m here… I pray for the children… and I have to trust the rest to God.

Places like PTM are successful because they are blessed with a wealth of volunteers that come from churches like Second that are answering the call spelled out by God through prophets and apostles like Micah and James: The call is to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.

I’m glad my walk brought me here, to Second Pres, and to PTM.
When I tell people I meet that I’m working with a church mission program, a logical follow-up question for them to ask is, “So are you going to be a minister?”

The truth is that we are the ministry, all of us together, whether we’re in the pulpit or in the pews. Consider this your friendly reminder that we are all charged to be ministers and to live out our call as children of the resurrection.

What does your ministry look like?

CHASIE:

Good morning. This year I have been working at the Martha O’Bryan Center. This congregation supports MOB in many ways, so many of you are familiar with it, but for those of you who aren’t it is a Christian community center in the middle of Nashville’s oldest and largest public housing development. My time there has been divided two ways. I work with adults in the GED class in the mornings and then help with the after-school program for youth in the afternoons.

One of the ways in which I have seen God at work this year has been through the people I work with at MOB. I came into this year straight from having worked in the emergency room at a county hospital the summer before. Optimistic to begin with, I had been excited about my job as what they called a critical care representative. One of the biggest parts of the job was to care for families in the waiting room as they waited to see their patient. What an opportunity for God to use me to comfort others in a time of need. And how wonderful to be working with other people trying to do the same thing.

I quickly came to realize, though, that although my coworkers had good intentions, the 12 hour shifts and the weight of working in such a fast paced and stressful environment for years had changed the way in which they interacted with people. I was disappointed and upset to frequently see how employees had lost their patience and/or empathy for the people there.
In order to keep things under control and orderly in the waiting room, certain rules had to be enforced. I saw these rules being enforced with no attention to the specific situation or person being helped, which, of course, defeated the purpose of what critical care representatives were supposed to be doing. People waiting to be seen became just another patient with the same old symptoms that we had seen day after day, and families became just another group of demanding people to deal with.

I left this experience not knowing how in the world you could work in such a place and not become so cynical and hardened. I began to think that my optimistic belief that people could be treated on a case-to-case basis was naive and unrealistic and that real business could not be run that way.

Coming to MOB, though, I noticed a difference in attitude from the first day I was there. Not only did I see volunteers listening to clients, but everyone from the COO was involved in even the simplest tasks like getting a person a bus pass.

It may seem like an odd comparison to make, but MOB is actually similar to the emergency room. You never know who is going to walk in. The problems presented each day tend to be very similar in nature. And there is always someone new in need of help.

It would be simple and understandable for the teacher of an adult education class to drop a student from the role for, at best, sporadic attendance. After all, there are always people waiting to enroll in the class and everyone seems to have an excuse for why they haven’t shown up.
Even in situations that seem as simple as this, though, I think Christ asks us to live differently, and I saw this in the teacher of the adult education class, Judy. She is the only teacher for a class of about 30 adults, and she will tell you that after working with the class for an extended period of time, the issues that students bring to class with them do not seem new or unusual. But she would also tell you that to help students be successful you have to take the time to listen to their individual stories. For example, it may be unacceptable for a woman to miss a week of class unexcused. But when she comes back and explains that she, as an 18 year old single mother of one child and pregnant with twins, has been living in a house with 13 other people where she sleeps on the floor, you begin to see that her situation isn’t so simple. Because she feels suffocated and like the place she is living isn’t sanitary enough to bring twins home to she is trying to find her own housing. All this at the same time as trying to get her GED because she is afraid she won’t have time after the children are born.

So, yes, she could be dropped from the class, and no one could argue, but Judy takes the time to hear her story and see what she can do to help make it possible for her to get to the center and reach her goal before her children are born.

Cases such as this may seem extreme and like they clearly deserve to be an exception. There are many others, though, that are not, and still I have watched as Judy loves each person. The student who is dismissed from class for starting a verbal fight is welcomed back the next day for another chance at learning. The student who disrespects the teacher and then quits the class re enrolls a year later and is greeted with the same enthusiasm and respect.

This way of doing things requires more time and energy, and it is often unclear as to what the appropriate action is to take. But this is what Christ asks us to do. He tells us to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. When we humbly ask for God’s guidance, God gives us the wisdom and perseverance to love others as Christ would.

JEFF:

A few weeks ago, I had my annual consultation with the Committee on Preparation for Ministry from my home presbytery. At that meeting, where they were eager to hear how my year as a Young Adult Volunteer working with the homeless at the Campus for Human Development had gone, I was asked a question. It was asked by the same pastor who asked that first basic question to me two years ago in my initial meeting with the CPM, “Why do you feel called to ministry?” Then, after my long, flowery response, she said, “I notice you didn’t mention God at all in that answer.”

This time, she asked, “how has your image of God changed this year?” The answer I gave to that question has really worked as a good way of summing up the experience that I have had over the past ten months.

A year ago, I was finishing up my tenure as a college student and a church music director. My image of God was basically the result of my involvement in the church and my ministry of music. It had a lot to do with community, and a lot to do with majesty. I was also big into social justice as a concept, although I really had experienced very little direct contact with the poor of this world, which has a lot to do with why I wanted to become a Young Adult Volunteer.

Now that my daily life is filled with talk of food stamps, government checks, free lunches and day labor – and that I’ve seen things I had never seen: the horrifying decay of bodies from drug use, men hitting their girlfriends right in front of my eyes, and people dumped by hospitals with no place to go and no resources to provide for their own health – and that I’ve experienced things I never thought I would: breaking up fights, consoling a grieving partner of a man who died from a drug overdose, and even intercepting a drug deal or two – my picture of God has changed.

One day in November, just after the beginning of the Room In The Inn season, we were sitting in the day room at the Campus, and a crowd was really starting to grow. As is often the case, there was a lot of noise and chaos. In the middle of the room sat Leonard, a man who was with us for only a few weeks. Leonard, who dressed in green camo pants and jacket, complete with an orange vest, fuzzy hat and sunglasses, suffered from severe mental illness, and often talked to the staff about he was going to go hunt for owls in Montana. He took special care, and sometimes after a long day, a conversation with Leonard was the last thing I wanted to provoke. That afternoon, as more and more people crowded into the day room, Leonard raised his head and spoke in a loud voice, “Jesus? Is Jesus Christ in this room? Is Jesus Christ in this room?”

The whole room went quiet for a few seconds, and then everything went back to normal, with a few people laughing at what was a clearly mentally ill man. I laughed too, because it was the last thing I was expecting anyone to say. But, it was a question that has stayed with me in my experience this year.

The answer to Leonard’s question is yes. Jesus Christ was in that room, and I have met Jesus Christ in many unexpected places this year.

I always feel the presence of the suffering Christ on that walk to The Guest House, where we allow publicly intoxicated people to come for a warm bed and a meal.

Christ has been there in internet class, when people have reestablished contact with loved ones after learning the skill of e-mailing.

Christ is there when I hear stories from the men in alcohol and drug treatment who tell of experiencing feelings and emotions that they haven’t felt for years, having smothered them for too long with substance abuse.

I see the Christ whose only bed was a feeding trough on early mornings when I see people sleeping on the ground in rolls of thrown-out carpet scraps.

God has become, for me, one who meets us in the alley: a loving creator who still walks among us in what Jesus called “the least of these.”

* * * * * * * * *

About 5,000 times this year, we in NEP have been confronted with Fredrick Beuchner’s definition of vocation. He says, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

When God calls us, it is not always to comfortable sanctuaries like this one, it is not typically to mountaintops where beautiful sunsets speak to us like burning bushes, it is not to minister among those who have it all. Rather, we are continually called to the table where bread and wine bear witness to the sacrifice that was born to fulfill the world’s deepest hunger. We are called to a simple dinner table, where deep gladness abounds between its guests, many of whom we’ve met this year:
those who are hated for the cultures and races to which they belong,
those who do work for long hours and little pay,
children whose parents are too young and too absent,
single mothers who struggle to put food on the table,
those trapped in the bonds of mental illness and addiction,
families torn by violence,
those whose language makes them second-class,
and women and men who sleep on cardboard in downtown alleyways.

It is at this table of God, where distinctions between those who are served and those who are serving blur and disappear, where we are called to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with the God who lives among us in one another. To this table we are called, this table where God is turning the world as we know it on its head, where the reign of God is in the here and now. Thanks be to God. Amen.