by EDOW | Mar 30, 2017
The Diocese of Washington will be well-represented when advocates gather in Chicago next month for Unholy Trinity: the Intersection of Racism, Poverty and Gun Violence, a three-day conference grounded in scripture, liturgy and theology and sponsored by Bishops United Against Gun Violence.
The Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, Susan D. Morgan Distinguished Professor of Religion at Goucher College in Baltimore and canon theologian at Washington National Cathedral, will be part of the conference’s “three-note” panel, and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde will join with Bishop Mark Beckwith of Newark to lead a plenary session on community organizing.
Workshops at the conference are devoted to helping participants work with police, young people, legislators, anti-violence advocacy groups and other constituencies to reduce gun violence.
“I hope to come away from the conference with concrete ideas and suggestions for reducing gun violence, especially the gun violence that continues apace below the radar of broad public consciousness,” Budde says. “I’d like to move my work and advocacy closer to the ground, in neighborhoods, communities, and among people for whom gun violence is a given in their lives.
“I’d also like to learn ways to speak with people of faith across the spectrum of political views regarding guns and gun violence, so that we can have a real conversation.”Budde is sponsoring the participation of the Rev. Rob Schenck, a conservative evangelical minister who has alienated some of his political allies by speaking out against the gun culture in the United States. Schenck and Lucy McBath, the mother of an unarmed teenager who was murdered in Florida, are the subjects of Abigail Disney’s documentary, “The Armor of Light.” McBath will join Schenck in presenting a workshop.
Budde said she felt strongly about including Schenck in the conference. “He has deep pastoral relationships and a leadership role in the branches of Christianity that most support gun rights,” she says. “His story is a testimony of courage and determination to help influence those most resistant to changing gun culture. He sees gun violence not only as a public health crisis in our country, but a spiritual one as well.”
Douglas, the author of “Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God,” will be a member of the conference’s three-note panel along with the Rev. Julian DeShazier, senior minister of University Church in Chicago and hip-hop artist; and Natalie Moore, South Side reporter for WBEZ and author of “The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.” The Rev. Gay Clark Jennings, president of the House of Deputies, will moderate the panel.
“We can’t see gun violence in isolation from some of these issues like race and social economic justice,” Douglas says. “Until we bring those three things together, I don’t think we are going to resolve issues of gun violence. So I think the conference is approaching it in the right way.”
Holding the conference in Chicago, which has become synonymous with urban gun violence and last year had the eighth-highest murder rate in the country is also important, Douglas says. In January, President Donald Trump tweeted that he might “send in the Feds,” if the city could not “fix the horrible carnage.”
“This new administration has given attention to Chicago in a way that I think is not helpful,” Douglas says. “It focuses on the violence that actually is a consequence of the systemic and structural violence which has created a culture that actually nurtures death and not the ‘abundant life’ which God promises to us all. In order to curb the gun violence that has impacted the lives of various neighborhoods in Chicago, one has to address the violence that is the realities of social economic injustice.”
But reducing gun violence in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods and others like them is not the only gun violence issue challenging the country, Douglas says. “We’ve got to get these guns out of the hands of various people who feel threatened every time they see a black body on the street. Because the threat to black life is not just going on in what I call these ‘enclaves of death.’”
Douglas says Trump’s presidency has raised both racial tensions and the awareness of racial tensions in the United States. “Such awareness perhaps will help even more people to understand the realities of racism that actually contribute to issues such as gun violence, and began to understand that these issues do not exist in a vacuum,” she says. “It is my hope that we will began to recognize the disproportionate impact that gun violence has on communities of color does not result from violent people, but rather violent systems. Far too often we focus on the people as if something is wrong with them—playing into racist narratives—when in fact our focus should be on the situations and conditions in which people are forced to live—which themselves are products of racism. We have to begin to name the violence that is white racism.”
by Bishop Mariann | Mar 26, 2017
But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
1 Samuel 16:1-13
As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. . .”
John 9:1-41
Good morning, friends of St. Paul’s, Rock Creek. It is a blessing to be with you.
My sermon topic comes straight from the Scripture texts we have just heard, with their many variations on the theme of blindness and sight.
A few questions to start us off:
How do we experience/ interpret blindness? And for the word “blindness” feel free to substitute any other hardship of human experience, any form of suffering, disability, or limitation. What does it feel like, and equally important, how do you and I interpret what’s happened to us? Is it our fault? Is someone else to blame? Are we being punished?
Here is another constellation of questions:
What is it like for us to realize that we’ve been blind in some way and we didn’t know it, that our vision had been distorted or blocked and we had no idea? There are so many things that affect our sight apart from well our eyes see. What’s it like to acknowledge, as we sing Amazing Grace, “I once was blind, but now I see”?
Exploring these questions is our task this morning. It’s a lot of ground to cover, but your rector assures me that you are intelligent people, and the texts for today give us amazing material to work with.
Let me give you my bottom line before we begin:
Judging our blindness, or that of others, is a waste of our time.
God invites us to see ourselves and others through his eyes.
Jesus invites us to see and experience him as the light of the world and source of abundant life. It’s an invitation we are free to accept or reject.
Let’s start with the matter of judgement, or blame.
We’re all predisposed to seek explanations when bad things happen. We want to make sense of our experience, and yes, to find fault. Because if we know the source of our pain, we can correct it. And if we know who is responsible, we can hold that person–ourselves or someone else–accountable. Truth be told, there is plenty of fault to go around for most of the suffering we experience.
But hear again what Jesus says in response to the question about the man blind from birth. “Who sinned?” the disciples want to know. “The man or his parents?” And in this instance, Jesus replied. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” No one was at fault. It simply happened that the man was born blind.
A teenage boy loses both his legs to cancer.
A child is born missing a limb.
A hurricane devastates a village.
It may be someone’s fault, I suppose. But sometimes things happen–hard, terrible things–without a satisfying explanation. We wish it were otherwise and so, I believe, does God.
Let’s look at the gospel passage printed in your bulletin. There is an important difference of biblical interpretation that hinges, believe it or not, on punctuation. Punctuation is a relatively new addition to biblical texts, and is subject to debate.
Find the part that begins with the question the disciples asked Jesus: “Who sinned?” Several of the biblical scholars I consulted this week suggest that there is a misplaced period in Jesus’ answer: The text before you reads: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” I take that to mean that it wasn’t the result of sin that the man was born blind, but in order that God might be glorified by Jesus’ miracle.
Now read the same sentences this way, as other biblical scholars suggest: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind. So that God’s works might be revealed in him, we must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
This way, neither the man nor his parents are at fault. But nor is it true that he was born blind so that Jesus could work a miracle and God be glorified. Instead, Jesus is saying, because I am here now, God’s love and healing can be revealed here, for him, for his sake. We must work the works of him who sent me while I am here. Do you hear the difference?
Because Jesus is the light of the world, he wants to heal the blind man. Jesus is the light of our world, and he wants us to be healed. Through his love, we can experience healing, not always the kind of healing we want, for healing is a process beyond our understanding.
It is not easy to accept suffering as a part of life; to accept conditions we would not choose for ourselves or wish on anyone else. We want to stop suffering, prevent it if we can; prevent those who cause suffering, and be restored to the fullness of life. That’s what Jesus wants for us, too. But for reasons that we can never fully understand, healing begins with acceptance of whatever it is that we’re struggling with or against. Healing begins with acceptance and letting go of judgment.
I do not say this without some appreciation of how hard this is. I, for one, need God’s grace and the experience of his presence with me in suffering to reach that place of acceptance. And my capacity to accept suffering fluctuates: some days I’m better at it than others. Some days the best I can do is ask for help in that first task of acceptance. But the healing part is nothing less than miraculous, no matter what form the healing takes.
Sometimes amazing grace results in full healing of body; surely we all want that. Sometimes it takes the form of strength and the capacity to find joy despite one’s limitations and even through them. Sometimes it takes the form of intense commitment to spare other people suffering that we’ve endured, so that our wound becomes a source of healing grace for others, as the light of Jesus shines in and through us.
Now let’s turn to second set of questions, that have to do with, “self-inflicted blindness,” or being blind and not knowing it, which is the most dangerous form of blindness of all.
As with every story in the gospel of John, there are several things going on at the same time in the story of the man born blind. It’s helpful to remember that the purpose of the Gospel of John, from beginning to end, is to demonstrate beyond any shadow of a doubt that Jesus is the Son of God, the way, the truth, the life and the light for all people; that he came from God to reveal to us the true nature of God and to show us how to live in God’s ways, which are the ways of love. The great sin in the Gospel of John is to reject Jesus, which is exactly what we hear the Jewish religious authorities doing in this story.
Before going any further, let me point out something that you may well know but bears repeating, especially as we get closer to Holy Week and the stories of Jesus’ crucifixion: in some passages, particularly in the Gospel of John and sometimes in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ adversaries are referred to as “the Jews.”
Referring to all Jesus’ adversaries as “the Jews,” is like referring to all of America’s adversaries as ….. “the Muslims.” The people in question were most certainly Jewish, but it is a mistake of tragic proportion whenever Christians hear in these references a condemnation of all Jews, which has happened, and has justified horrific acts of anti-Semitism throughout Christian history. Remember that Jesus himself was Jewish, as were all his disciples and most of his early followers. “The Jews” at issue here were the religious authorities of his day, who saw Jesus as both a nuisance and a threat. They apparently particularly hated it when he healed people on the Sabbath day; and he hated it when they judged him for it, because for him, the Sabbath was made for humankind as an expression of God’s love for us. What better day to heal in the name of a loving God?
But rather than dwell further on the sins of the Jewish authorities, let’s use their example as instruction, as a reminder of how dangerous we can be when we choose not to see. Theirs is a blindness of the heart, a condition to which none of us is immune. With heart blindness, not only are we oblivious to what we cannot see, but a part of our identity requires us to be blind in certain ways.
Anthony de Mello tells a story about a monk who died and was buried by his fellow monks in the tradition of their monastery, in a crypt on the back wall of the chapel. After the funeral service, the other monks heard noises from the other side of the wall. They re-opened the crypt, and the monk who died rose from the coffin and told them of his experience beyond the grave, which contradicted everything their tradition taught them about life after death. So they put him back in the wall.
Are there ways we are blind to what we choose not to see, to be, like Jesus’ adversaries, heart blind? Of course. Are there ways to strengthen and amplify our heart’s vision? I think so. Perhaps the most important thing we can do is tend to our hearts. My husband and I spent a week in Ireland several years ago and as we were leaving, our guide, urged us to pay attention to how we spend our time. Ponder things worthy of your hearts he said. Read more poetry and watch less television. Spend more time in silence and less surfing the Internet. Particularly for those of us entering our elder years, he said, cultivating silence and spending time in prayer becomes more important.
That leads me to my final word on this broad spiritual theme of blindness and sight, going back to the marvelous story from the First Book of Samuel. In the search for Israel’s King, Samuel follows God’s lead and seeks out God’s chosen among the sons of Jesse. The line to remember, perhaps commit to memory from this story: The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. God invited Samuel, God invites us to see as God sees, to see ourselves as God sees us; to see others with God’s eyes. This is the most amazing grace of all, and it takes effort on our part, a willingness to suspend our vision and invite God to open our eyes. For me, that’s a daily practice: each day, I pray for the grace to see as God sees, and capacity to love as God loves.
You don’t need me to tell you that there’s a lot of collective blindness in the country right now. But we can each do our small, but vital part, whenever we consciously seek to see with God’s eyes, when we invite Jesus, as the light of the world, to illumine our path, and when we accept, without judgment, suffering as part of life, and open ourselves to healing grace.
Let me end where I began and say once again:
Judging our blindness, or that of others, is a waste of our time.
God invites us to see ourselves and others through his eyes.
Jesus invites us to see and experience him as the light of the world and source of abundant life. It’s an invitation we are free to accept or reject.
May I pray for us:
Gracious, heavenly Father, we are all blind in so many ways. Help us to accept the suffering that is ours, not as a sign of punishment or source of blame, but as part of the mystery of life in this broken world. Open us to your healing presence, Jesus’ healing light and love. Heal us from heart blindness, Lord, all the ways we choose not to see. Give us your eyes with which to see, eyes of the heart to see to the heart, that we may live guided by your compassion and mercy. With your light, illumine our path. In Jesus name, we pray.
Amen.
by Bishop Mariann | Mar 21, 2017
Bishop Mariann spoke outside the White House as part of Sanctuary DMV‘s launch event. The following is her statement.
In US law, there is no provision for “sanctuary,” no legal grounding upon which to stand for those who wish to stand in solidarity and support for our immigrant friends, neighbors, and members of our faith communities who fear deportation for themselves and their loved ones.
For us sanctuary is grounded in the love we are called by God to offer one another. It is, for our faith communities, a matter of pastoral care.
Yet we also deeply lament the ways in which the national debate on immigration has been compromised by false characterizations and prejudice against immigrants, and in particular immigrants of color. The criminalization of undocumented status, the stoking of fear and resentment, and unwillingness to consider comprehensive reform of our immigration laws is creating fear and separating families.
Therefore, sanctuary is also our witness in our communities and to our political leaders: as a nation we are always at our best when we welcome immigrants, and our worst, when we fear and criminalize their place in our land. We, as people of faith and citizens of this nation of immigrants, believe that we can turn back from the dangerous path we’re on and live as welcoming people, celebrating diversity, and showing compassion to those who have come here, as many of our ancestors did, seeking peace and safety for themselves and their children.
I give thanks for all who are standing compassionately and courageously with our immigrant neighbors, and encourage everyone to consider how you might learn more about what our immigrant communities are experiencing right now. If you’d like to learn more about the breadth of possible ways of supporting immigrants under the umbrella of sanctuary, please visit Sanctuary DMV’s website. For those who want to stand with Veronica as she faces her next check-in, mark your calendars for April 4th. And may we all do what we can in every circle of influence we have to change the tone, tenor and direction our national conversation on immigration.
Learn more about the diocese’s involvement in the sanctuary movement
by Bishop Mariann | Mar 21, 2017
Bishop Mariann spoke outside the White House as part of Sanctuary DMV‘s launch event. The following is her statement.
In US law, there is no provision for “sanctuary,” no legal grounding upon which to stand for those who wish to stand in solidarity and support for our immigrant friends, neighbors, and members of our faith communities who fear deportation for themselves and their loved ones.
For us sanctuary is grounded in the love we are called by God to offer one another. It is, for our faith communities, a matter of pastoral care.
Yet we also deeply lament the ways in which the national debate on immigration has been compromised by false characterizations and prejudice against immigrants, and in particular immigrants of color. The criminalization of undocumented status, the stoking of fear and resentment, and unwillingness to consider comprehensive reform of our immigration laws is creating fear and separating families.
Therefore, sanctuary is also our witness in our communities and to our political leaders: as a nation we are always at our best when we welcome immigrants, and our worst, when we fear and criminalize their place in our land. We, as people of faith and citizens of this nation of immigrants, believe that we can turn back from the dangerous path we’re on and live as welcoming people, celebrating diversity, and showing compassion to those who have come here, as many of our ancestors did, seeking peace and safety for themselves and their children.
I give thanks for all who are standing compassionately and courageously with our immigrant neighbors, and encourage everyone to consider how you might learn more about what our immigrant communities are experiencing right now. If you’d like to learn more about the breadth of possible ways of supporting immigrants under the umbrella of sanctuary, please visit Sanctuary DMV’s website. For those who want to stand with Veronica as she faces her next check-in, mark your calendars for April 4th. And may we all do what we can in every circle of influence we have to change the tone, tenor and direction our national conversation on immigration.
Learn more about the diocese’s involvement in the sanctuary movement
Interested in learning more about sanctuary? Attend our upcoming event Stand with Immigrants: Understanding Sanctuary.
by EDOW | Mar 16, 2017
By Kathleen Moore
On April 1, the Center for the Study of Faith in Justice will host The Police are the Public; The Public are the Police – Repairing the Breach. Speakers include Wesley Lowery, a reporter for The Washington Post and author of “They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and the New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement.
“This conference is an opportunity to make a real change in policing,” says the Rev. Gayle Fisher-Stewart, founder of the Center for the Study of Faith in Justice at Calvary Episcopal Church and retired captain with the Metropolitan Police Department. “For me, if we’re going to be serious about the Jesus Movement, it needs to affect every aspect of our lives, to include how American policing affects people of color. I truly believe that with a few people we can start making connections with law enforcement agencies. If we start small and get commitments to meet the police face-to-face, it’s going to be the relationships that change policing.”
The day-long event will include presentations from Fisher-Stewart, author of “Community Policing Explained: A Guide for Local Governments”; the Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, distinguished professor of religion at Goucher College, canon theologian at Washington National Cathedral, and author of “Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God”; Brian K. Jordan, chief of police and executive director for safety and security, Howard University and co-author of “A National Conversation on Police and Community Relations on HBCU Campuses”; the Rev. David Couper, retired police chief of Madison, Wisconsin and author of “Arrested Development: A Veteran Police Chief Sounds off about Protest, Racism, Corruption, and the Seven Steps Necessary to Improve Our Nation’s Police” and Tim McMillan, lieutenant with the Garden City, Georgia police department whose Facebook post following his experience pulling over a young black man went viral.
Fisher-Stewart, who spent twenty years working as a police officer, believes the church has a key role to play in the work of police reform. “To repair this breach, it needs a theological direction, because the races have never been one in America if we look at it from a secular perspective,” she says. “The only way we can look at it is through a theological lens where God created one human race that human beings then divided. That’s the only way we can get back to reconciliation. Because if we look at the races in America, they’ve never been one, so how can you reconcile what’s never been one in the first place?”
This racial divide created a police force in the United States that “has never really been about serving and protecting everybody,” Fisher-Stewart says. “So it’s time to fix the breach, and I think that the church is in a better position to do it, because that is what the church is called to do: the reconciling work of Jesus Christ.”
Fisher-Stewart believes the Trump administration has created even more urgency around the need to take action toward repairing the law enforcement breach. “If we don’t do something, nothing is going to change,” she says. “And most likely, it’s going to get worse now that we have a ‘law and order’ President again. We know what ‘law and order’ means in this country – it means mass incarceration. Trump said the other day to the major city [police] chiefs, ‘You don’t have the weapons you need.’ Weapons? Are you going to war? And if you’re going to war, who’s your enemy? And if the community is the enemy, that’s a problem. And it makes it dangerous for civilians and the police.”
The conference will provide attendees with concrete tools to engage in this work toward change. “There is so much to do that you can get paralyzed with inaction because you don’t know where to start,” Fisher-Stewart says. “This conference is a way to start, because the church is about relationship. And if everybody who comes to this conference makes one contact with the chief of their jurisdiction face-to-face, then we start seeing each other as human beings as opposed to enemies.”
“The Police are Public; The Public are the Police – Repairing the Breach” will take place Saturday, April 1 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Grace Episcopal Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. The free event is limited to 200 participants. Breakfast and lunch will be served. Register online by February 28.
