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.

Contaminated by Christ

Here's tomorrow's homily.  The Gospel is John 6:51-58.

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Here we are, almost at the end of what I like to call the bread line: the five-Sunday series of Jesus’ proclamations about being the Bread of Life. Last week, Kirk told us that Jesus is the opposite of boring, nutrition-free white bread. Jesus is yummy. Jesus is chewy. Next week, we’ll hear how deeply offensive many of Jesus’ listeners found this part of his teaching, so much so that many of them, unable to accept it, walked away. This week, we’re in the middle, somewhere between fighting off boredom and being scandalized.

Many of you may indeed be bored with bread by now, and we’re beginning to see the beginnings of distaste in the surrounding crowd. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Cannibalism was no more acceptable in the first century than it is now; Jewish dietary mores forbade it as firmly as everyday ethics do today. Jesus, as usual, was violating all the purity codes that allowed the religious elite of his day to feel safe, secure, and smug in their own good behavior. “My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” Even if you interpret this symbolically instead of literally -- and Christians are all over the map on where they draw that line -- this is, well, startling. Even if it’s not disgusting, it’s weird.  

Jesus’ first-century followers weren’t the only ones to recoil. I know people who’ve left the church because thinking too hard about what communion was really supposed to be made them sick to their stomachs. Those of us who stay may still be cautious about how we take the Eucharist. Many of us, me included, intinct rather than sipping from the common cup, even though chalice bearers are trained to wipe the rim of the chalice and rotate the cup so that the next person in line won’t come into contact with the previous person’s germs.

The question is where we draw the line between communion -- where two different entities merge lovingly into one -- and contamination, where one entity infects and pollutes the other. Many in that first-century crowd were worried about contamination, about both spiritual and physical illness. Ever since then, contamination has been communion’s shadow.

In the earliest days of the church, when Christians were still actively persecuted, clergy took communion before everyone else, so that they would be the ones arrested if any spies were watching the service. That changed during the AIDS era, when many clergy began taking communion after everyone else had partaken, as a way of showing that they were not afraid of catching anything from the common meal.

Years ago, I read a book called Whitebread Protestants, a social history of food in American mainline churches, and learned how deeply the fear of all kinds of contamination has shaped Eucharistic practice. Welch’s grape juice was invented as an alternative to communion wine because temperance crusaders feared the physical and moral dangers of alcohol. The practice of intinction – dipping rather than sipping -- as well as the tiny, individual plastic cups used in some Christian services, all sprang up as a response to fear of germs.

One of Jesus’ missions on Earth was to dismantle purity laws. We’ve been busy rebuilding them ever since.

I don’t mean to minimize health concerns. Alcoholism is a real and terrible condition, and it’s why many Episcopal churches offer a non-alcoholic chalice, or emphasize that the bread alone is sufficient to make us part of the Body of Christ. Wheat disagrees with many of us, which is why St. Paul’s offers a non-gluten option. Germs are real. No one wants to give a neighbor -- or get from a neighbor -- a cold or the flu, let alone anything even more serious.

But even as we maintain our emphasis on health, I think we need to remember that hygiene often masks a fear of difference. Contamination is the card many of us play when we’re scared of communion, afraid that merging lovingly with other people will force us into contact with what we’d rather not face.

Back in 2000 or 2001, St. Stephen’s, the church I was attending then, became a host congregation for Family Promise. I believe St. Paul’s participated, too. For those of you who weren’t here then, Family Promise was an outreach ministry to homeless families, parents and children. Up to four families at a time, fourteen people, were housed for a week at a time in church or temple buildings. Sunday School classrooms were converted into bedrooms; volunteers supplied meals and donated bedding. Because many faith communities took part, each congregation only had to host every three or four months. During the day, children went to school and parents went to work or to a Day Center, where a social worker helped them locate jobs and apply for low-income housing. The goal was to get these families off the streets, and it worked. The program has, sadly, since closed in this area, but it’s still active nationally.

Some people at St. Stephen’s thought Family Promise sounded like a wonderful ministry. But when we had a parish meeting to discuss the issue, the room filled with fear. Let those people stay in our classrooms, where our children spent time every Sunday? The social worker explained that the families were thoroughly screened for medical problems -- no germs; for addiction -- no drugs; and for legal issues -- no crime.

Lice. What about lice? Were the families checked for lice? Our children would surely get lice from those children. Well, no, said the social worker, there was no specific screening for lice, but if lice did appear -- which was most likely to happen at the schools the parish’s children were already attending -- they’d be dealt with.

Lice! The homeless families instantly transformed into a parade of giant, two-legged lice traipsing into our parish hall and Sunday School rooms, infecting everything in sight.

Somehow, we voted to become a host congregation anyway. The families came. We never saw a single louse. We saw a single father supporting four children, including a newborn, while his wife was hospitalized. We saw a single mother with a broken arm who’d been living in a van with her month-old baby before finding the program. We saw two-parent families, each parent working two or three jobs, struggling to get back on their feet after medical and financial disaster.  We saw kids of all ages: kids doing homework and watching movies and having fun in our playground and looking forward to dinner. We ate with the families, asked how their days had gone, rejoiced when they shared good news. They’d found an apartment. Someone was starting a new job. A child had gotten an A on a spelling test.

The program was as life-changing for volunteers as for the families themselves. Many of the people who’d been terrified of lice at the beginning grew to cherish their time with these parents and children. “They’re just like us.” The fear of contamination had given way to communion.  Fear itself had been the most dangerous infection we faced, and by the will of God -- and the faces of new neighbors breaking bread together -- it had been overcome.

I came to believe that the initial fear was, in fact, the fear of similarity.  The homeless weren’t that different from the housed. Anyone’s family, after a layoff or medical emergency, might become homeless too. Facing that reality is terrifying. But volunteering with the program also showed us that if that happened, loving neighbors would be on hand to help.

“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” Jesus says. Wherever we draw the line between the symbolic and the literal in this statement, let us remember that we are called to be one body: infected with the love of God and each other, contaminated by Christ, spreading the dangerous desire to heal the world.

Take. Eat. Begin.

Amen.

Success Story

My department chair forwarded this video to faculty. It's a very happy story about a family who's been staying in the shelter where we'll be teaching poetry. We can all use good news, so I wanted to share this with my Loyal Readers (or viewers, in this case).

Poetry in the Shelters

Shortly after classes ended last semester, one of my honors freshman e-mailed me to ask if I'd be willing to help out with a project she and a friend were working on for the Honors Program: teaching poetry in homeless shelters.

Of course I said I'd help. I was so proud of her for taking the initiative to do this! I also sent her a list of the bonafide poets in the department, folks more qualified to teach poetry than I am.

Last week, the chair of my department sent an e-mail to all faculty saying that the department, along with Americorps/Vista, is now involved in this project, and asking professors to sign up to teach one of the eight sessions. Today I went to work to hand in my annual-evaluation materials, and I signed up for one of the slots. I was only the second person to do so, probably because so many people are still out of town, but I told our administrative assistant that if there are any remaining openings, I'd be happy to do more.

My chair was in his office, so I stopped by to say hi, and we chatted about the project. The target audience is homeless families; he said he'd been shocked to learn how many schoolschildren in Washoe County are homeless. I'd known that for a while now, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population has been children. (See, for instance, this site, claiming that 27% of the homeless population consists of children under eighteen. I'm skeptical of statistics in this area, for obvious reporting reasons, but however you look at it, the numbers are scary.) My chair told me he'd been shaken to hear that schoolbuses in Washoe County make regular stops under highway underpasses to pick up the kids who live there.

He hopes the poetry program will do even a little to help these kids. So do I.

Heckuvaday, Part II

In Which We Make Unexpected Connections

After I got home from the hospital, I ate lunch, decompressed a bit, and headed off to the NAMI walk here in town. I've been intending to join NAMI, or at least get more information about it, for ages now, but this is the first time I've actually done something, thanks to a woman I met at church -- actually, at our visiting Lutheran congregation -- who announced the walk.

Because I got there late, I didn't get to do the actual walk or hear the speakers. But I did get to meet the keynote speaker, Patrick O'Bryan, a local police officer who helped start the Mobile Outreach Safety Team to serve the homeless mentally ill and addicted. O'Bryan is also the head of the Reno Crisis Intervention Team, a police unit specially trained in mental-health issues. He's a huge force for compassion in Reno, and it was an honor to talk to him.

It turns out that O'Bryan's wife is a lecturer in my department; I'd heard her name a million times, but never met her, so he called her over. She'd heard my name a million times, too: small world! We had a nice chat, and have many interests in common.

O'Bryan was also featured in an article in the February 13, 2006 New Yorker. Among other things, the article discusses the social costs of homelessless; a very small number of chronically homeless people account for most of that cost. (In other words, 10% or less of the homeless account for 90% of the ER and other costs in any given city.) To save money, a few cities -- including Denver, Washington D.C. and Seattle -- have started programs where the hardcore homeless are given free housing, no strings attached.

The hardcore homeless are those who've flunked social services, been washed out of every available treatment and recovery program, and keep showing up in emergency rooms. To get the housing, these clients don't need to be straight, sober, or medicated; in fact, they need to have proven unable to maintain consistent recovery. A social worker is attached to the building, and I think some basic healthcare is provided too, but the clients do nothing to "earn" any of this. Nonetheless, once they're in safe, stable housing, the hospital visits decrease dramatically. Society saves money: a lot of money.

Although these programs are successful from an economic standpoint, they're also very controversial. Critics object to "rewarding" people for being a social burden, and think it's wrong to help people who've repeatedly proven unable to help themselves.

As you can probably guess, I'm a huge fan of this program. The minute I read the New Yorker article, I started talking it up in the ER, which gets its share of hardcore homeless. I intensified my efforts after the infamous scapegoat episode, and even got one of our more conservative physicians to admit that it sounded like a good idea. I hadn't heard anything about a program like that in this area, though.

So today I asked O'Bryan about it. He's a huge fan of the program too, and -- yay! -- he's trying to start it here. He thinks it's possible. He's been talking to the legislature. I asked what I could do to help, and he said, "Write about it. You blog? Blog about it."

So here I am, blogging. When I get more information, I'll let you know!