How to be a Seed

Here's today's homily.  The readings are 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and Mark 4:26-34.

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Good morning, and happy Father’s Day. Hallmark holidays are always difficult preaching occasions. Current events make that especially true today, so much so that I showed Kirk this homily ahead of time. He has approved this message, but asks me to remind you that Episcopalians are not required or expected to agree. We are expected to come to the table with open hearts and minds. We’re expected to listen even when we think the other person is wrong, and to admit that we might be wrong ourselves.

This is a political homily. It may make some of you angry, and that’s okay. Most of us come to church for Good News in hard times, and I promise I’ll get there when I talk about today’s readings. But I can’t do that without first talking about this week’s Bad News. I tried; it didn’t work. I wish to God, literally, that it had. At the risk of being wrong, I don’t believe it’s ethical for anyone preaching today to ignore this week’s events, especially since it's Father’s Day.

So, the Bad News: A few days ago, the Department of Homeland Security released a report stating that in the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, almost 2,000 minor children were separated from their parents at the U.S. border. As of Tuesday, the US Health and Human Services Department said it was holding a total of 10,773 migrant children in custody, up 21% from the 8,886 in custody a month earlier. 

Because it’s difficult to imagine such huge numbers, here’s a story about one family. A week ago, Marco Antonio Munoz, separated from his wife and child when they fled to the United States from Honduras, hanged himself in his jail cell. Border agents reported that they’d had to use physical force to remove his three-year-old son from his arms.
       
On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, father of three children, used Scripture to justify separating families. Illegal entry into the US is a crime, Sessions said. He went on to cite the apostle Paul and his “clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes."   

People don’t leave home unless home has become unlivable. All of us have fathers. Some of us are fathers. How would we feel if those terrified refugee children and their parents were our families? Let me be clear: that’s a rhetorical question. Our faith tells us that the families at the border are our family, because all of us are God’s family.

The Bible is a multilayered, multifaceted document. It often contradicts itself. Our understanding of it is complicated by translation problems and the very different times and places in which it was transcribed. But one theme sounds clearly throughout Scripture: We are to welcome strangers, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. We are to extend hospitality, especially to refugees and orphans. We are to seek and serve Christ in all people. Ripping children from their parents’ arms is not what Jesus commands us to do. Wholesale destruction of families is the hallmark of other Biblical leaders: Pharoah and Herod, for instance. In a book full of colorful, complicated characters, those two aren’t the good guys. 

I promised I was going to get to the Good News, and this is where it starts. Pharoah and Herod didn’t ultimately win. In the long run, love wins, even if too many people suffer in the process. Quoting Romans 13 in support of destroying families, Jeff Sessions conveniently omitted a later verse in that same chapter. “‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” Paul tells us. “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” Our task as Christians is to live in love, work for love, and believe in love. Today’s readings offer ideas about how to do that, and how to recognize love when we see it. They tell us that the government ordained by God -- what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God -- springs from the last and the least.
 
In 1 Samuel, God has ordained Saul as king, but becomes unhappy with his choice because Saul doesn’t obey his commandments. God ordains a new government. God explains to his messenger Samuel that human ideas of merit don’t apply here: “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” God has chosen Jesse’s youngest son David, outside tending the flocks, to become the King of Israel. The new king is a shepherd, someone who guides the vulnerable creatures under his charge to richer pastures and protects them from predators. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus uses two metaphors to describe the kingdom of God. The first is that the kingdom is like someone scattering tiny seeds, which in turn create harvests abundant enough to sustain entire communities. The second example involves even tinier seeds, mustard seeds, which sprout into “the greatest of all shrubs . . . so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” The Kingdom feeds its inhabitants, however many miles they have traveled to get there. It shelters them. It offers them safe places to build homes where they can nurture their families. Welcome and sanctuary are intrinsic features of the government ordained by God. 

If you’re looking for the Kingdom of God, look for inauspicious beginnings: the youngest son, the smallest seed, the refugee child lying in a manger because there’s no room in the inn. Watch such beginnings to see how they grow. This is the part we’re likely to be comfortable with, because we live in a society that idolizes the large. We drive huge SUVs to Big Box stores and fast-food outlets selling Supersized meals. We watch modest older homes being razed to make way for McMansions. Our economy relies, often dangerously, on perpetual growth, mass markets and gigafactories. We’re fascinated by fame, wealth, and celebrity.

But not all large things deserve our reverence, and today’s readings give us specific instructions about the Godly uses of growth. Do the massive institutions we’re being asked to trust guide and protect us? Are they committed to abundance, to feeding and including everyone, or do they keep us paralyzed with threats of scarcity? Do they offer welcome and shelter? In other words, do they behave like loving fathers? If they don’t, they aren’t ordained by God.

These readings remind us, first and foremost, of the promise of little things. Many of my friends have told me that they’re feeling helpless and hopeless right now. The world’s problems seem so huge, and each of us seems so small. Every time we turn on the news or log onto Facebook, we’re buried under an avalanche of fear and suffering, no matter how many cheerful memes and cat pictures we also see. The weight of sorrow can become absolutely overwhelming. But whenever I’m tempted to use my insignificance as a reason to give up, I remember one of my favorite slogans. It was written by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulus and later borrowed by Mexican activists. It reminds us powerfully of mustard plants, refugee children, and a certain first-century political prisoner executed and placed in a tomb. “They tried to bury us,” the slogan says. “They didn’t know we were seeds.”

Here is how to be a seed: Allow yourself to rest in darkness for a while. That’s how you’ll gain the strength to grow. Send out roots to anchor yourself to community. Embrace the gifts -- nutrients, water, shelter -- your surroundings offer you. Know where you’re going: upwards, toward the light. Remember what you’ll do when you get there: expand, embrace those who seek sanctuary in your branches, flower. Produce good fruit. Make more seeds.

There are many different kinds of seeds, in this current crisis and every other. We can pray, vote, contact our representatives, protest unjust policies, volunteer at schools and homeless shelters and refugee resettlement agencies, love our children, love other people’s children. We can donate time and money and canned soup. Everything counts, no matter how tiny. Enough small seeds can and will create gardens, meadows, forests. Every act of love is one more step towards the Best Big Thing, the loving Kingdom ordained by God.

Amen.

Promised Lands

Here's tomorrow's homily. I can't believe that I haven't preached since last May, and I'm very happy to be doing so again, but Matthew 5:21-37 is a bear. The other reading I talk about here is Deuteronomy 30:15-20, a much smaller bear.

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A few weeks ago, my friend Shira asked her friends on Facebook if they’d help her teenaged daughter Valerie by buying containers of chili. Valerie is raising money to visit detainee camps on the Texas-Mexican border with a Methodist youth group. The group will meet with agencies to discuss how to help families released from the detention center. They’ll be bringing things like craft supplies and soccer balls to help them make friends with the children of these families.

This is a wonderful project, but I was a little confused. Shira and her family are Jewish. How had they gotten involved with the Methodist church? “Valerie's part of the group even though we're not members,” Shira told me. “She went with them to build in Appalachia. She went on a civil rights trip last spring break. She went to Washington to advocate for the SNAP program.” After noting that she doesn’t see any other faith organizations, Jewish or Christian, doing similar work in her area, Shira added, “It's maybe the only church I've been to where I actually feel welcome. Plus they say you can replace Jesus with love in prayers.”

This conversation reminded me of Kirk, last week, wondering what might happen if we replaced our crosses -- symbols of execution -- with glow sticks, symbols of God’s light. Would wearing glow sticks make people outside the church feel  more welcome?  

Welcome, something our own parish has been emphasizing for several years now, makes all the difference for people searching for a faith community. All of us want to find the place that welcomes us and feels like home. It’s worth noting, though, that welcome isn’t the same thing as comfort. Shira and Valerie feel welcome at the Methodist Church not because they’re being coddled or sheltered, but because they’re being challenged: to house the homeless, feed the hungry, and visit the imprisoned. Confronting and relieving suffering, our own or others’, is rarely comfortable. It involves sacrifices of time, money, and privilege. It involves looking at things we’d rather not see. In the short term, it may make us more unhappy, rather than less. That was certainly the experience of the Isrealites, whose flight from oppression involved forty years of hardship. No one reaches the promised land overnight.  

Promised lands take many forms: geographical, cultural, personal, political, vocational. Setting out for any promised land requires courage, planning, and the ability to persist without guarantees. Not all of the Isrealites crossed the Jordan. Moses himself didn’t, although his work made the journey possible for others. His exhortation in Deuteronomy -- “Choose life, that you and your descendants may live” -- reminds us that our actions affect future generations. Even when we won’t see the results ourselves, we work for a better world for those who will come after us.  

Choosing life is also, less obviously, at the heart of this morning’s Gospel, another in our continuing series from the Sermon on the Mount.  Among the “hard sayings” of Jesus, today’s are among the most difficult. I don’t know anyone who’s never been angry, but Jesus equates anger with murder.  I don’t know anyone who’s never been attracted, however briefly, to someone outside a primary relationship, but Jesus equates fantasy with literal cheating. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t sinned, but Jesus commands us to perform self-mutilation rather than continue to do wrong.  

Jesus is telling us to take God’s law to heart, to police ourselves rather than relying on other people to do it for us. He is telling us to address problems at their source. Everyone knows we aren’t supposed to murder, but Jesus’ followers also need to root out hatred and anger. Everyone knows that cheating is a terrible betrayal, but Jesus’ followers need to be as faithful in thoughts as in actions, because unchecked thoughts ultimately express themselves in action. We have to be willing to confront our darkest selves, the impulses that polite, respectable society would prefer to ignore.  

Fair enough. The problem, though, is that the lord of love and forgiveness seems neither loving nor forgiving here. I can’t imagine my friend Shira being comfortable hearing this passage in church. I’m not comfortable hearing this passage in church. There are no glow-sitcks anywhere in the vicinity. This is desert territory, hard and stony and parched. Jesus may be drawing us a map about how to reach the promised land, but getting there involves a lot of forced marching under a merciless sun.  

Next week, in the next section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus will command us to love our enemies. That’s hard, uncomfortable work too, but at least we’ll be back to talking about love.  Next week, Jesus will once again say things that sound at least somewhat comforting. But that’s not much help to us today.  This Sunday is a kind of mini-Lent, practice for the real thing coming up in three weeks. This Sunday, Jesus tells us in no uncertain terms to confront our sins -- our disconnections from God, from other people, and from ourselves -- and to do whatever we need to do, no matter how difficult, to make those relationships healthy again.  

Sometimes becoming healthy involves the agonizing process of cutting away diseased tissue. Sometimes it involves sacrificing things that mean a great deal to us, things that polite, respectable society tells us should make us happy. I suspect that everyone in this room has a story about doing that. Here’s mine. Please be assured that this story has a happy ending.

Almost exactly six years ago -- just before Valentine’s Day in 2011 -- I went through a very dark time. For fourteen years, I’d been an English professor at UNR.  I’d worked very hard to get the job, which paid nicely and gave me good benefits. I had tenure, which meant that at least in theory I had lifetime job security. I worked with lovely colleagues and taught excellent students, people I really cared about. By the standards of polite society, I should have been happy, and for ten years or so after starting the job, I had been.

But by 2011, I was miserable. I didn’t enjoy teaching anymore. I wasn’t doing the kind of service work my department wanted me to, which made me feel incredibly guilty, but thinking about doing that work made me feel like I was being crushed by boulders. My husband had given up his own lucrative job in New York to follow me to Reno, where he couldn’t do what he’d been doing before. I was supporting both of us. If I stopped doing that, we’d both be miserable, and I’d have broken my word. I felt trapped. I couldn’t see a way out.

For about five days that February, I seriously considered suicide. I had a plan, one that could have worked. That very week, the same plan did work for someone else. I saw the story in the newspaper and was instantly shaken, completely horrified. I felt sick for the person who’d died, sick for that person’s family and friends, sick that I’d been contemplating the same departure. My thoughts had almost led to a catastrophic action.

The good news is that they didn’t. Remembering that week, I’m still horrified at how close I came. But as scary as the episode was, it was also a major wake-up call: a summons not to death, but to new life. I obviously had to find another career, however difficult that seemed. After considering several other options, I hit on the idea of medical social work. For financial reasons, it’s taken me a while to translate that thought into action, but I’m now on my way. With my husband’s blessing, I’m in my last semester of teaching at UNR. I’m already taking classes in UNR’s Masters of Social Work program; this fall, I’ll enroll full time. I’m glad that getting here took only six years, not forty. And I’m grateful that my dark thoughts six years ago will help me understand clients who are struggling with their own. That terrifying time of darkness and disconnection will connect me to people who are suffering.

But while this absolutely feels like the right move, it also involves a lot of scary sacrifices. For at least the next two years, I’ll be cutting our family income by at least two-thirds. I’m trading job security and seniority to go back to square one in a poorly paid profession, in an era when healthcare and social services are on newly precarious ground. I’ll be giving up tenure, summer vacations, and quite a bit of social prestige. To a lot of people in polite, respectable society, this would look crazy.

I don’t think it’s crazy. I think I’ve chosen life. I can breathe again. So far, I feel very welcome in my new profession. I hope I reach my promised land, and I hope my journey allows me to help other people. But the process isn’t comfortable.

I’m being called to something new, and I’m on a long, uncertain road to get there. Maybe some of you are, too. In one way or another, all of us are. We can’t take comfort in any guarantee of earthly safety on these journeys, for there is none. Our comfort is in the one who walks beside us and ahead of us, showing the way:  the one who endured his own trials in the desert, and who reminds us that our true job is to find our own path to loving God, and others, and ourselves. Our comfort lies in knowing that even when our road takes us to the foot of the cross, there will still be life beyond it.

Amen.

Beloved Communities

Here's today's homily. The Gospel is Luke 7:1-10. I wish everyone a happy and peaceful Memorial Day.

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Years ago, my husband and I had a friend recently retired from an Army career. I remember him telling us about the psychological effects of military hierarchy. "You're obeying orders from your own commanding officers and giving orders to the people under you. Ideally, that chain of command keeps you humble and flexible. You're responsible to your superiors and responsible for your subordinates. The fact that there are people over you means you can't exaggerate your own importance, but the fact that there are people under you means that you can't minimize it, either."

I think of our friend every time I read about the Roman centurion in this morning's Gospel. "For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me." We've all heard far too many stories about people who use their authority -- privilege or power or money -- to exploit anyone lower on the ladder. But the Roman centurion cares for the people under him. I suspect that his own position as a subordinate plays into his compassion. If he were ill, he would want his commanding officers to seek healing for him; therefore, he will do the same for his slave. Without even meeting Jesus in person, he is already loving his neighbor as he loves himself.  

It's worth remembering that Roman centurions would not have been considered friends by many people in first-century Palestine. Yes, Jews were allowed to maintain their religion, but Romans were still the agents of oppression, occupation, and taxation, a situation that ultimately led to three major Jewish rebellions beginning in the year 66. And yet this centurion not only cares lovingly for his household slave, but has forged remarkable alliances with the Jewish community.  "He loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us," they tell Jesus.

In a setting deeply divided by military, political and religious conflict, the Roman centurion has created a taste of what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., many years later, would call "the Beloved Community," where discrimination is “replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.” In the Beloved Community, Dr. King said, disputes will be resolved peacefully, by conflict resolution and reconciliation rather than military power, and “love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred."

This Utopian vision arose from Dr. King's principles of nonviolence. We aren't there yet, and the rare glimpses we get of this ideal world generally don't last. The Roman centurion's model of love and social harmony didn't sweep first-century Palestine; if it had, the rebellions wouldn't have happened. But the centurion proves that someone entrusted with military power and posted to occupied territory can still act in the service of love and reconciliation.  

On Memorial Day, we remember those who have served, and especially those who have been lost in military conflicts, including occupations. Our country has occupied many countries over the years. All of those occupations have produced stories both of compassionate soldiers -- who loved and served the people among whom they lived -- and others who ruled, and were ruled, by fear and force. Even at its worst, though, occupation offers a chance for people from very different backgrounds to form relationships. If that Roman centurion had been a drone operator, he never would have learned to love the Jewish community.

My nephew is in the Navy, serving on an aircraft carrier. The Navy has announced that his ship will soon be deployed to the Persian Gulf. Before he enlisted, he researched military jobs and decided that being on a carrier is one of the safest, because carriers are protected by cruisers and destroyers far from combat fronts. I'm very relieved that he'll be in a relatively secure position, but I'm also troubled that he'll be surrounded by what he already knows, living in a bubble of other American military personnel. He is far less likely to die than he would be in the Marines or the Army, but he's also less likely to change his mind about other people, or have the chance to change their minds about him. All of us seek safety and familiarity, but they can become barriers to relationship, preventing the Beloved Community Dr. King described.

In fact, I learned about the Beloved Community from a book by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell, about the unexpected moments of social utopia that often arise after disasters like 9/11 or Katrina. Our media and entertainment teach us to view such events as unleashing the worst in human nature, rampaging mobs that loot and pillage, but that's rarely what actually happens. Instead, people extend helping hands and work together, often overcoming preconceptions about one another in the process.

During Katrina, my father lived four blocks from the water in Ocean Springs, a hard-hit section of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. When I visited him that Christmas, three months after the storm, everyone had a story. One of my favorites is from our friend Darlene, an art teacher in an at-risk school.  The Friday before the storm, she'd gone to school to get her classroom ready for the start of school the following week. She decorated the room with old students' artwork, to inspire her new students, and left a to-do list on one corner of her desk.

That weekend, the storm hit, and Darlene’s school became a National Guard barracks. A few weeks later, Darlene went to look at her classroom. "I thought it would be a mess," she told me.  "After all those young military guys had been staying there, I was sure the place would be trashed." Instead, everything was immaculate. The floor was swept. Darlene’s to-do list was in the same spot she had put it before the storm. And the National Guardsmen had covered the blackboard with notes telling the students how beautiful their artwork was. That occupying force, feared even though it wasn’t foreign,  truly had come to love and serve.

What does any of this have to do with us, here, today?  And what does it have to do with God?  As Christians, all of us are -- as the old Hebrew National commercial put it -- subject to a higher authority. Our service to that higher authority takes the form of loving and serving our neighbors, including anyone over whom we have real or perceived power:  our employees, our children, anyone who performs work for us in any capacity.  

Because we have not yet achieved Dr. King's Beloved Community, we also live and work in places divided by highly contested differences:  between religions, ethnicities, political beliefs, levels of income and education.  All of us are parts of chains, if not of command, then of privilege and prestige. It can be tempting to retreat into bubbles, spots of safety where everyone's like us, to try to protect ourselves from conflict. But when we do that, we shortcut the possibility of achieving, even for a fleeting moment, the Beloved Community.

Here's one last example for you, more explicitly about God. Eric Heidecker, whom many of you know, told me this story. Most of us remember the controversy surrounding the election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as the Bishop of New Hampshire. At the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in 2003, the gathering where that election was ratified, Gene Robinson needed bodyguards, because he'd received death threats.

One day during the convention, Eric arrived at the convention center in Minneapolis and saw an ambulance parked outside. He immediately feared that someone had acted on the threats to hurt Gene Robinson. But Robinson was fine. The patient was one of his bodyguards, who was having heart-attack symptoms triggered by the stress of his job. Bishop Robinson sat with the bodyguard during the ambulance ride, and stayed with him at the hospital, and held his hand, and prayed with him.  The threat to Robinson’s safety became a chance for him to embody the love of God by serving the man who was being paid to serve him.  

I wonder if Robinson thought of the Roman centurion during that ambulance journey. May all of us think of him the next time we feel a conflict between being responsible to the authorities we serve, and being responsible for the fellow humans who serve us.

Amen.

Welcome, Child

Here's today's homily. The readings are Proverbs 31:10-31 and Mark 9:30-37.

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Dear child:

There you are in Jesus’ arms. We don’t know how old you are; we don’t even know your gender.  We don’t know if you were a cherished heir, a beloved child of the family who owned that house in Capernaum, or a slave. Whatever your status, you would have been considered the legal property of your parents, not yet a person in your own right.

 

That’s also true of your mother, whether she was a servant or the “capable wife” celebrated in today’s reading from Proverbs, who acts almost entirely for the good of her husband and family.  It sounds like this wife loves her husband, and we have to hope he loves her back, because she’s his legal property too. That’s going to last a long time. Where I live, in the United States -- a country that doesn’t exist yet, in your time -- the law saying that a wife is her husband’s property won’t be declared fully unconstitutional until 1981. Where I live, so far in your future you couldn’t even imagine it, women still don’t get equal pay for equal work. My country has never had a female President. In some quarters, the view that women are people too is still controversial.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? You don’t know about any of that, don’t care about it. You’re in Jesus’ arms, enjoying the attention from his friends. They’ve just been arguing about who’s the greatest -- the most famous, the most influential -- and Jesus is using you to make a point. He’s telling them that if they really want to be great, they have to take care of you. They have to welcome you. They have to treat you like a person. He’s telling them that if they really want to be great, they have to treat you as if you’re him:  the Messiah, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace.

Jesus knows about being a child. Jesus came to Earth as a child, a baby, and even though he was a cherished heir, he was also poor. His mother wasn’t like that ideal wife in Proverbs, with her servants and vineyards. He was born in a stable because no one would give his parents a room. Some poor shepherds knew who he was, and so did some rich kings, but a lot of other people didn’t, and still don’t. The Messiah is supposed to be great and powerful. Children aren’t. A lot of what Jesus does looks upside-down to everyone else, even his closest friends. He wants them to use their power to give, not to take, but he has to keep reminding them how it works.  That’s why he’s holding you, now, and telling them to welcome you.

What do they do, I wonder? The story doesn’t tell us. Do they ask your name? Do they play with you? When Jesus puts you down again, what happens? Will you ever see these men again? What does your future look like?

Child -- boy or girl, slave or free, EveryChild -- I wish I didn’t know as much about your future as I do. Where I live, here in the United States in 2015, we still haven’t fully learned what Jesus was trying to teach his friends. We welcome some children, our cherished heirs. As I write this, my niece is about to deliver her first child, a little boy named Charlie, and our family and friends can’t wait to welcome him. But yesterday in the news I read about a five year old refugee who drowned trying to reach safety in Europe. In my own country, more than 21% of children live in poverty. That’s the highest poverty rate of any age group. In my country, the average age of a homeless person is 11, and one in thirty children is homeless. Poor children are often hungry, and hungry children can’t learn, and that puts them at risk for other problems, terrible problems happening right here within our own borders, like the sex trafficking we hear about on the news that makes us shudder and hug our own kids more tightly and thank God they’re safe.

 

Remember when I talked about women, about equal pay for equal work?  These things are connected. Women and their children bear the brunt of poverty, and income inequality is part of the reason why.  

I’m talking about politics now, and there are people who say it’s impolite to talk about politics to anyone, let alone children. In my country, we believe in the separation of church and state. But Jesus was a political figure. He’s just told his followers that he’ll die a political death, although they don’t want to believe it. He’s trying to teach them about the proper uses of power, and you can’t get much more political than that. If we’re going to welcome you, child, it can’t just be in our own families. It has to be in the rest of the world, too:  in stables and homeless shelters and hospitals, in refugee camps and war zones, and in poor and struggling neighborhoods here at home. We say we care about children in my country, but we don’t fund education the way we should.  We don’t respect teachers or pay them as if they’re important. We don’t have universal daycare to make it easier for parents to work and feed their kids, or universal healthcare to keep children and their parents healthy. Two years ago, the United States ranked 34th out of 35 countries in child welfare; only Romania ranked lower.

Please don’t get me wrong. A lot of us do try to welcome you. We donate money and volunteer and support programs and agencies that help kids. When we see a child right in front of us -- a child who’s hurt or hungry or frightened or poor -- we offer every comfort we can.

I remember a child I met in the ER where I volunteer. The little boy was a year old, maybe. A foster-care caseworker had brought him in for an evaluation. X-rays showed signs of earlier abuse:  multiple healed fractures of the long bones of his arms. A tech who had to start an IV on him asked for my help, because the baby liked women. He lay quietly on his gurney, but when he saw me, he smiled and reached out his arms to be picked up.  He played with my hair, my glasses, my ID badge. He never cried, not even when the tech started the IV.  Most children scream during that procedure. They buck and bite and kick. They have to be held down by five adults. Somewhere, this baby had learned to stay completely still and quiet.  His silence haunts me. How much pain do we never hear, because the children and adults suffering it have learned that if they cry, no one will come? How many have learned that if they cry, anyone who answers will only hurt them more?

Child, we help you when we can see you, but so often you’re invisible to us. A lot of that is political, too. Some of our leaders want us to care more about some children than about others. We need to learn to look out for all, and to act for all. We need to vote for school bonds even if we have no children in those schools. We need to support political initiatives that will help parents and children. We need to resist the lie that children from other families or neighborhoods, countries or religions, matter less than our children.  

All children are our children. That’s what Jesus was trying to teach us. All children are his children. All children are him.

Child, we don’t know your name, your gender, your parentage.  We don’t know what your life was like before Jesus picked you up, or what it will be like after he puts you down.  We don’t know if you’ll remember him when you grow up. But we know that right now, you are safe and loved, cherished and nurtured, held in the warmth of Jesus’ arms while his friends smile at you.  And for his sake, we promise to do our very best to offer that same love and welcome to every child we meet.

Amen.

Ten Years After

The Biloxi Bridge after Katrina

In 2005, my father (83 at the time) was living in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, in the Villa Maria Retirement Apartments:  a low-income senior building, a concrete high rise, that was four blocks from the water and one of the tallest things in town. He lived on the top floor, with a panoramic view of the Gulf Coast and its casinos, which often shot off fireworks on Friday nights. Villa Maria was a mile, maybe less, from the U.S. 90 bridge between Biloxi and Ocean Springs. He adored living there. He’d been even happier living on his sailboat in Biloxi, but health concerns had forced him off the boat and into an apartment. He’d had quadruple bypass in 2001, and in 2005 he often used a wheelchair and was also on a feeding tube -- which he hated; the man loved his food and especially his drink -- because of swallowing problems after a stroke.

I don’t clearly remember the sequence of events leading up to Katrina. We were all concerned about the storm, but Dad’s building wasn’t under mandatory evacuation orders, and he had no plans to leave. I remember at some point hearing that storm damage hadn’t been that bad and being relieved. We weren’t yet worried about not being able to reach Dad; we weren’t surprised phones were down. Then, on Monday morning, my sister called me and said, “Susan, New Orleans is flooding. The levees broke.”

My father was ninety miles from New Orleans, but reports from the Mississippi Gulf Coast were grim, too. That bridge I mentioned?  It’s the one everyone saw on the news, the one reduced to rubble by the storm. What were the odds that Villa Maria, so nearby and with such a high profile, hadn’t also been demolished?  “He has to be dead,” my sister said. “I just hope it was quick.”

We started a frenzied search for information. There was no getting through to anyone in Ocean Springs, but I found an online bulletin board where relatives and friends of people who lived in the Villa Maria were posting queries and sharing whatever they’d heard. No one had heard much.

Then, on Wednesday, a friend of Dad’s drove by the Villa Maria, saw people there, and realized that the building hadn’t been evacuated, as he’d assumed. He raced up to my father’s apartment, handed Dad his cellphone, and said, “Call your daughters. They’re going to be frantic.”

Dad called my sister. She heard his voice and started crying.

To hear him tell it, the storm had been a jolly romp. “They told us to go down to the lobby, so I went down there in my wheelchair with my mattress and my pillow and my Ensure and a bottle of vodka, and I poured Ensure and vodka through my feeding tube, and I was fine!” Whatever gets you through the night, Dad. Remarkably, the Villa Maria had suffered only minor roof damage, perhaps because the strongest winds had flowed around it rather than hitting it head-on. Dad was back in his apartment within a day.

We were very lucky. Millions of other people weren’t.

I flew down to Ocean Springs for Thanksgiving that year. Ocean Springs itself had been largely spared, although all of the beautiful old trees had trash in their topmost branches: clothing, children’s toys, kitchen utensils. Dad and I went for a drive along U.S. 90, the road to New Orleans, taking a long detour around the ruined bridge. Before the storm, the road had been lined with floating casinos on one side and antebellum mansions, surrounded by venerable trees, on the others. All gone. We drove through a moonscape littered with unidentifiable sticks and scraps.  A few staircases rose alone into the air for a few feet. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to tell that the area had ever been populated.

Our drive back to the Villa Maria was very quiet.

Everyone I talked to in Ocean Springs had a Katrina story. Almost everyone knew somebody who had died; many people had harrowing evacuation stories. No one had anything good to say about FEMA. No one had anything bad to say about the National Guard, hailed as heroes and saviors. One woman told me she’d complained to a Guardsman about the Meals Ready to Eat that everyone had been given. “It’s too much food! I can’t eat all that!”

“Ma’am,” the Guardsman said, “MREs are designed for the nutritional needs of soldiers in combat. You’re sitting in your living room reading a book.”

My favorite National Guard story came from Dad’s friend Darlene, who taught art at a local at-risk school where most of the students were black and very poor. The Friday before the storm hit, she’d gotten her classroom ready for the beginning of school the following week. She’d cleaned, put up student artwork from the previous year to inspire her new pupils, and left a to-do list on the corner of her desk. 

School didn’t start the following week. Darlene learned that her school was being used to billet National Guard troops, and assumed that the place would be a shambles. As soon as she could drive safely again, she went to the school and asked if she could visit her classroom. Yes, of course she could.

The room was pristine. The to-do list was still where it had been on her desk, and the Guardsmen had used the blackboard to leave notes for the children, telling them how beautiful their artwork was. I’m not sure if Darlene cried when she told me this story, but I cried when I heard it, and I’m crying now, typing it.  

The Villa Maria instituted a new policy that in the event of a hurricane, all residents would have to evacuate and wouldn’t be able to return to the building until any repairs were completed. Because evacuation wouldn’t have been feasible for him, Dad decided to leave his beloved Gulf Coast. In 2006, he moved to live near my sister in Philadelphia. On his birthday that year, he sent me $300 and asked me to research Katrina charities and send the money to the ones I considered worthiest. In 2008, he moved to Reno to be near me and Gary. He died in 2009. He wasn’t technically one of the displaced because he left shelter that was still habitable, and he didn’t apply for or receive FEMA money, but there’s no doubt that he was part of the larger Katrina diaspora. He was never as happy as he’d been on the Gulf Coast. (After he died, our plans to scatter his ashes in the Gulf were defeated by another disaster, the BP oil spill. I was glad he wasn’t alive to see that; it would have left him sickened and despairing.)

Meanwhile, in 2006, my novel The Necessary Beggar won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and I flew down to New Orleans to accept the award -- one of ten given to adult books with YA crossover appeal -- at the ALA convention. We were the first convention to meet there after Katrina, in the infamous convention center which had gotten so much press, and which was now as bland and antiseptic as most facilities of that sort. On the shuttle ride from the airport, my driver pointed out storm damage, implored us to spend as much money as we could in the city, and thanked us fervently for coming.

Everyone thanked us for coming. Shop windows displayed signs: “We love you ALA.” The city was desperate for business. Many people at the convention took storm tours of the hardest hit parts of the city; I didn’t, because I didn’t think I could bear it, but I wandered through shops, searching for anything I wanted to buy, fighting my guilt when I found only a bracelet, a Katrina memorial t-shirt, and a souvenir voodoo doll for Gary.  

For several years after the storm, I occasionally met Katrina survivors in the ER. One patient told me he was from Biloxi, and we had a long, lively conversation. “Sure I know the Villa Maria! You can see that building for miles. I’m so glad your dad was okay.” Although we’d never met before, and although I’d never actually lived in those communities, it felt like a family reunion. The patient had gone through, was going through, agonies I'd been spared; even so, both of us understood things that other people around us didn't.  

My family was very lucky. My father was in the right place in the right circumstances; even with limited income and mobility, he was less poor and had more options than many of the people (black and terrifyingly poor, left without any money because the storm hit at the end of the month) who died when the New Orleans levees broke. We were grateful for our privileges and enraged on behalf of those who didn’t share them. We mourned those who had died and gave thanks for those who hadn’t.  

I live in the desert, thousands of miles from the Gulf Coast. I know some people might challenge my belief that Katrina is part of my history, too. I’m white and affluent; I wasn’t there; the person I loved who was there made it through largely unscathed. Other people lost and suffered so much more. But I’ll always feel a connection to that terrible time, and I’ll never hear a hurricane forecast without thinking about Katrina.

God's Triage

Here's today's Gospel lesson, one of my favorites. It's from the fifth chapter of Mark:

21 When Jesus had crossed again in the boat^* to the other side, a great crowd gathered round him; and he was by the lake. ²²Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet ²³and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.’ ²⁴So he went with him.

And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. ²⁵Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years.²⁶She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. ²⁷She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,²⁸for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’²⁹Immediately her haemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. ³⁰Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ³¹And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?” ’ ³²He looked all round to see who had done it. ³³But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. ³⁴He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’

35 While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ ³⁶But overhearing^* what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ ³⁷He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. ³⁸When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹When he had entered, he said to them, ‘Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.’ ⁴⁰And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. ⁴¹He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum’, which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ ⁴²And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. ⁴³He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Below is my homily, which I delivered as a guest preacher in a Lutheran church this morning.

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For many years now, I’ve volunteered in a local emergency room, offering spiritual care to patients and families. Most of you probably know that emergency rooms use a triage system. The most critical patients are seen first.  This means that someone with a painful but non-life-threatening fracture may wait hours for treatment, while an unconscious patient, or someone with severe chest pain, is seen immediately. I spend a lot of time explaining this system to irate patients who are tired of waiting, and who don’t understand why somebody who just showed up five minutes ago is being seen first. “That means that the person who just got here is sicker than you are,” I tell them. “Believe me, you never want to be sent to the front of the line in an emergency room.”

Much less often, I spend time with the relatives and friends of patients who have been sent to the front of the line. Being first in line in an ER means that you’re probably in immediate danger of dying. It means that you’re the center of a buzzing hive of doctors and nurses doing invasive, painful things to you that you probably can’t feel, because you’re probably unconscious. If you make it out of the ER alive, you’ll almost certainly go directly to the Intensive Care Unit.

The friends and family of these patients wait in a small, private room called the Family Consult Room. The Consult Room has subdued lighting, soft couches, a phone, and several boxes of tissues. Waiting here is agonizing. A doctor will race in, ask urgent questions about the patient’s medical history, deliver a five-second update on the patient’s condition, and race back out again. If the doctor approaches the room slowly, the news usually isn’t good. There are no words to describe the tension and terror in this place. Hell is a Consult Room.

And that brings us to today’s Gospel, which – if you’re Jairus, anyway – makes Jesus look like the world’s worst ER doctor. Jairus is a leader of the synagogue, which makes him a VIP in the Jewish religious establishment. The fact that he’s willing to beg a street preacher for help shows how desperate he is. He’s already tried everything else he can think of, and it hasn’t worked. He’s prayed, made sacrifices in the Temple, and called in all the best specialists, to no avail. His beloved daughter still lies dying.

So Jairus humbles himself. He leaves behind his safe, respectable piety to seek out the renegade healer from Galilee. People do crazy things to get close to this guy, to get through the crowds surrounding him. Just last week, some people cut a hole in someone’s roof to lower their paralyzed friend into the room where Jesus was. It worked. The paralyzed man can walk now.

Right now, Jairus would give anything to see his daughter walking again, instead of lying in bed, thrashing and moaning with fever, too weak even to sip water. So he ventures into the streets to find the healer, and he grits his teeth and forces his way through the crowd surrounding Jesus. Jairus has to use his knees and elbows, and he probably wouldn’t be able to get through at all, if his social status didn’t make him an object of respect and a little bit of fear. Finally Jairus reaches Jesus, and asks him for help, and Jesus says, “Yes, of course I’ll come to your house.”

Jairus has made very clear to this slightly disreputable street preacher that his daughter is dying. If Jesus were a good ER doctor, Jairus’ daughter would immediately go to the front of the line. Everyone else can wait. But Jesus doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. It’s incredibly hot, and the crowd stinks of sweat and bodies. Jairus feels like he’s going to be sick, and his daughter has no time to spare. Can’t Jesus walk any faster? But he doesn’t walk faster: he stops. And then he turns around to ask, “Who touched me?”  

“Are you kidding?” his disciples ask. “In this crowd? It could have been anybody. Jesus, what are you doing? Come on. We have to go to Jairus’ house.”

But Jesus is still standing there. He’s talking to somebody, a gaunt, filthy woman who’s kneeling in the street, weeping and babbling. She tells Jesus that she’s been bleeding for twelve years – that’s as long as Jairus’ daughter has been alive -- and Jairus can’t help but wrinkle his nose and take a step back, because according to Temple law, bleeding women are unclean.

Jesus keeps talking to her. She was the one who touched him, and the minute her fingers brushed the fabric of his robe she felt the bleeding stop, felt herself healed, and Jesus felt something happen too, which is why he turned around. And now she’s kneeling there, telling Jesus the entire twelve-year saga of her symptoms and sufferings, while Jairus’ child lies at home, dying. This no-account woman has already stopped bleeding. She’s not dying. She can wait. But Jesus just stands there, and listens to her.  

Take a moment now to imagine what Jairus must have felt as Jesus stood there listening to the bleeding woman. Imagine what Jairus must have wanted to say.

Well, probably Jairus did say all that. He probably yelled a number of things we don’t feel comfortable even whispering in church.  It’s entirely likely that he started tugging on Jesus’ sleeve, at the very least.  But Jesus didn’t budge; he stayed there, listening to this woman with no money and no social status, who until a little while ago also had no hope. Yes, she was already physically cured. Her bleeding stopped the moment she touched Jesus’ robe. But healing and cure are two different things. Healing takes longer, and goes deeper. Jesus listened to her until she’d told “the whole truth,” Mark tells us, and then he pronounced her well, and Jairus must have let out a huge sigh of relief and thought, “Finally!  Now we can get moving!”

But that’s the moment when the messengers come to tell Jairus that his daughter is dead.

I’m not going to ask you to imagine what Jairus must have felt then. I don’t think we can begin to imagine it unless we’ve been there.  Jairus didn’t have the privacy of a Consult Room: he had to go through hell in public.  He must have thought, “If only Jesus hadn’t stopped to listen to that unclean woman who’d already stopped bleeding, my daughter would still be alive.” When Jesus said, “Do not fear, only believe,” Jairus must have wanted to punch him. How could he believe? What was left to believe?

We know how the story ends. It’s the happiest ending, the child raised from the dead. But I wonder if Jairus ever really recovered. How do you ever get over hearing that your child is dead, even if she’s then given back to you? How do you ever get over seeing her dead, even if a few minutes later, she’s skipping around the room and munching on a piece of bread? What lessons about God do you take away from this heart-breaking, terrifying episode?

Some of the lessons are obvious. The first and most important, I think, is that God wants all of us to be whole and healed. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. Like a good ER doctor, God treats everyone, both nameless outcasts and the children of the rich and famous. The lesson also reminds us that healing takes different forms for different people, and – just in case we’ve forgotten – that God’s time and priorities aren’t ours. How often, in extremity, do we abandon our illusions of power and control and beg God to help us, please help us, but God, you have to do it now, because there’s no time left! And how often, when God doesn’t answer on our timetable, do we rage and curse and despair?  

But another obvious lesson here is the value of perseverance. Both the bleeding woman and Jairus are stubborn and fiercely determined, pushing through huge crowds towards the One they know can help them.  Both of them have to wait: the bleeding woman for twelve years,Jairus for probably less than an hour. Neither of them likes waiting, but neither of them gives up and goes home before being treated, as I’ve sometimes seen angry ER patients do.

All of us can probably see ourselves in one of these characters, either the bleeding woman or Jairus. All of us need healing from something. And important as physical healing is, our afflictions and suffering take many, many other forms. The bleeding woman’s joy when she is healed is the joy, this week, of every gay couple in this country who has waited so long for marriage equality. It’s the joy that people of color – still facing violence, discrimination and institutionalized racism – can still only hope to feel, someday, when we finally manage to overcome our racial schisms.  Activists of all stripes need tremendous faith to believe that such joy is possible. That kind of perseverance takes more energy than many of us can imagine; anger, exhaustion and despair are ever-present temptations. Many of my friends, both gay and straight, never thought they’d see marriage equality in their lifetimes.  

But today’s Gospel offers another, subtler lesson. Because it’s so easy for us to hear this as a story about competition for apparently limited resources, we may overlook the fact that it’s also a story about people being pulled out of their usual social circles, out of their comfort zones, and into a space of common humanity. The bleeding woman, stigmatized and untouchable, normally wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a leader of the synagogue. Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, normally wouldn’t have anything to do with such a woman. Their pain and desperation lead them to the same place. For a few moments, they are visible to each other.

The Gospel doesn’t tell us if they acknowledged or spoke to each other. The Scripture story is about Jesus’ relationship with each of them, not about their relationship with each other. But that story happened centuries ago.  Here and now, our faith calls us to be Christ to, and to see Christ in, everyone. We are Jesus in the crowd. To paraphrase St. Teresa of Avila, “Christ has no body now on earth but ours, no hearts but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion looks out on the world. Ours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good, and ours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.”

Our world, like that of the Gospels, is filled with all kinds of pain and tragedy: with people who need life-saving care in the next ten minutes and with people trying to overcome decades, if not centuries, of oppression. Seeking healing, we often wind up side by side with people whose own pain has made them desperate. How do we respond? Do we shut them out, or do we listen to them? Do we seek healing only for our own pain, or for everyone’s? Do we view our unexpected glimpse into other people’s lives as a startling gift, or as an unwanted curse?  Do we ignore those other stories, or learn from them?

ER waiting rooms are some of the most diverse and democratic places in the United States. On any given day, at any given hour, they are filled with people waiting in agony and in hope, the rich side by side with the poor, everyone desperate to be next in line. In the waiting room, and in the ER itself, I’ve seen predictable and saddening acts of selfishness: people cursing those who are seen before they are, threatening the staff, accusing doctors and nurses of every kind of favoritism.  But I’ve also seen acts of compassion and humanity: strangers from different walks of life giving each other cabfare, watching each other’s children when someone has to go to X-Ray, and – maybe most importantly -- listening to each other’s stories. I can’t tell you how often an ER patient, when I offer prayer, has said, “I want to pray for the person next door, who’s dealing with so much more than I am.” In the name of the One who wants all of us to be whole and healed, let us go and do likewise.

Amen.

Good Stewards

Here is today's homily.  The readings are Psalm 19 and  Matthew 21:33-46

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Today we talk about stewardship.

This subject takes a number of forms. You’ve all received new pledge cards in the mail, because today is the beginning of our annual parish pledge drive. Making a financial commitment to St. Paul’s allows the vestry to draw up a budget for the coming year. Having a workable budget allows us to keep the lights on, pay salaries, and continue our outreach ministries, our small but crucial efforts to contribute to the care and healing of our community.

Today is also the day when we observe the Feast of St. Francis, the beloved thirteenth-century saint who embraced poverty and loved nature. Echoing the psalm we heard today, which affirms that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” Francis’ ecstatic Canticle of the Sun celebrates all of the ways God’s creation sustains us:

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which You give Your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom You brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Because Francis especially loved animals, our 5:00 service today will feature our yearly Blessing of the Animals, although most of the people who bring their dogs and cats and ferrets and turtles and guinea pigs and lizards to be blessed would probably agree that the pets we love bless us more than we could ever bless them. Honoring St. Francis, we remind ourselves to be caring, responsible stewards of our beloved planet and of everything that lives on it.

And, finally, our Gospel lesson today is also about stewardship, although these are bad stewards rather than good ones. The tenants in this story refuse to acknowledge their landlord or pay what they owe him. They’ve made the crucial mistake of forgetting the difference between stewards and rulers.

A steward is someone who looks after and manages someone else’s property. Stewards do not rule or own that property; it is not theirs to use as they wish, and certainly not theirs to waste or ruin. They are subject to the rules imposed by the owner of the property, not the other way around.

The tenants in today’s parable aren’t the only people who’ve gotten confused about this distinction. Faith communities, and Western civilization in general, have only recently started to grasp the difference. In our own Book of Common Prayer, Eucharistic Prayer C -- the most environmentally conscious of the Eucharistic prayers, with its beautiful description of “the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home” -- still contains the line, “You made us rulers of creation.” I wince whenever I hear this; I cheer whenever the priest says, instead, “You made us stewards of creation.”   Even St. Francis, writing in 1224, recognized that our “sister Mother Earth . . . feeds us and rules us,” not the other way around. Maybe the next edition of the Prayer Book will do better.

We do not rule nature. We don’t understand half of what happens even in our own bodies, those astonishingly complex organisms. Physician Lewis Thomas once wrote, “If you were put in charge of your liver, you’d be dead in a day.”

And there’s a real question now about how many days remain to human civilization, how many more editions of the Prayer Book we’ll survive to see. By all accounts, we’re in the middle of an ecological cataclysm, fueled largely by human intervention, that could lead to widespread social collapse within the lifetimes of people in this room. Pollution and habitat destruction change weather patterns, which create drought and famine, which fuel social instability – economic crises, wars, migrations -- which lead to more destruction of the natural world. Species are dying off; the last four years alone have seen the extinction of the Eastern cougar, the Western black rhinoceros, the Formosan clouded leopard, and the Japanese River Otter. Lonesome George, the last surviving Pinta Island Tortoise, died in 2012.

We are people of resurrection, and we have faith. But while some forms of life will surely survive all this, there’s a real question as to how many humans will be among them.

Many people are trying to be better stewards now. A friend of mine at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City tells me that museum biologists, acutely aware of the rate of species extinction, are creating tissue banks of as many species as possible to try to preserve their DNA. On September 22, more than 300,000 people marched through the streets of New York City, demanding swifter government responses to climate issues. “Reduce, reuse and recycle” has become a familiar catchphrase.

The problem is so huge, though, that it’s easy to swing back and forth between despair and denial. Despair tells us that there’s nothing to be done; denial says that nothing needs to be done. Either stance allows us to continue with business as usual – but that’s what landed us in this mess. I think the important thing is to remember that any action, however small, can help.  Perhaps the most useful thing we can do is to change our perspective, to stop seeing ourselves as rulers and start seeing ourselves as stewards.

Author and activist Joanna Macy tells the story of visiting a friend, a young Buddhist monk, in India. They were drinking tea when she realized that a fly had fallen into her cup. Her friend saw the change in her expression and asked what was wrong. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a fly in my tea.” Embarrassed, she didn’t want the young man to think that she, an experienced traveler, was squeamish about insects.

Crooning softly in concern, Macy’s friend rose from his chair, inserted a finger into Macy’s tea, lifted out the fly, and left the room. When the monk came back, Macy reports, “he was beaming.  ‘He is going to be all right,’ he told me quietly. He explained how he had placed the fly on the leaf of a branch by the door, where his wings could dry. And the fly was still alive, because he began fanning his wings, and we could confidently expect him to take flight soon.”

Macy had told the monk that the fly was “nothing.” Her friend knew otherwise, knew that the fly, however small and humble – or even despised – was a beloved and cherished part of creation, with its own role to play. He acted as a good steward.

What will become of our vineyard, “this fragile earth, our island home”? Installed as tenants, we have grievously mismanaged the property. We killed the landlord’s son the first time he showed up. The question now is whether we can mend our ways quickly enough to regain the trust of the landlord, or whether our irresponsibility will cause us to be replaced by other, more respectful tenants. As much as God loves us, God also loves the rest of the creation, the oceans and forests and jungles and everything that lives in them. Let us love them too, saying with St. Francis, “Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures.”

Amen.