House of Hope – San Bernardino

We are living in most interesting, and terrifying, times.  Isn’t that the ancient curse — May you live in interesting times?

Recently, I placed on my Facebook page a post from my friend Ravi:

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be going to a bank with a mask on asking for money.”

To which another friend, Philip, who bills himself as having been a consumer of the State of California Department of Corrections’ services, replied: “Been there – done this before it was socially acceptable. How times have changed.” Yes indeed, how times have changed.

Indeed, times have changed.  One change I’ve noticed is that people, especially our young folks are demanding much more of our institutions.  The church for instance.

You remember that old song mocking easy religion?  “Plastic Jesus?”  “I don’t care if it rains or freezes long as I got my plastic Jesus glued to the dashboard of my car.”  It reminded me of our seminary’s spring show of tacky religious art.

This Sunday, in many churches, is what is known as Thomas Sunday.  Thomas wants to see Jesus before he will believe.  And how will he know that the one he gazes upon is the real McCoy?  By the wounds in his hands and feet.  By the gash in his side where he was pierced by a Roman spear.  He wants the real thing.  By his wounds – and that is exactly how he will know.

We will know the authentic representation of Christ – for the Church is the Body of Christ incarnate – when we see the wounds.  Authentic Christianity enters into the struggle, the heartache, of “the least of these.”  It bears the wounds, the worry, of the homeless, the incarcerated, the addicted and the defeated. 

If it’s only raffles and bingo, it’s something else.  But certainly not the body of Christ.  I love beautiful music and good liturgy as much as any Episcopalian, but all of it is offal and rubbish if doesn’t then lead into the streets and lanes, into the farmlands, into the villages and cities where God’s people are mightily suffering.

That is the question of the skeptic inside and  outside the community of faith.  How will I recognize the authentic Body of Christ in this time of COVID19?  Does the Church have anything at all to say?  

Saccharine sweetness of Easter lilies and scented candles is certainly not what I’ve been seeing lately on the evening 6:00 O’clock News.  What I’ve been seeing is my wounded Lord.  He is the face of thousands.  You know him.  His face is that of your neighbor, maybe a family member.  Mary Ellen, who always sits on the other side of the pew from you Sunday after Sunday.  It’s Fred, your insurance agent.  It’s Dorothy and Ramon who clean the office after you’ve left at five O’clock. All, whose lives have now been turned upside down.

On Holy Saturday I posted on my Facebook page a rendition of the Wounded Christ of the Coronavirus Ward. In this portrayal, his virus-ravaged body is being lowered from a gurney by doctors, nurses and paramedics.  Attached to his chest are still the leads of a heart monitor.  He wears a face mask and little else to hide his nakedness.  This modern Pieta is not a pleasant picture.  Not what you’d want for your living room décor.

One woman wrote back, not so much in disgust or indignation – but what seemed an honest question, “Why did you post this?”  I explained that as a follower of Jesus, I felt we need to be aware – I need to be aware –of the wounded humanity Christ serves yet today.  He took upon himself their exhaustion.  Their helplessness. Their sorrow. He bore it all.  And does today.

This portrayal of suffering is reminiscent of the sixteenth century Isenheim altar piece by Grunewald.  On it, Christ bears not only the agony of crucifixion but also the suppurating sores of the Black Plague which had killed almost one half of Europe’s population.  That work of art is the answer to Thomas’s demand to see.

The true and authentic sign of the Jesus Movement is those places where his followers are to be found.  Not sitting on comfortable pews, but on the streets passing out food.  In the hospital corridors with the sickest of the sick.  In the halls of Congress lobbying for more funding.   Christ’s followers will bear the exhaustion of spent ambulance drivers and nurses in their own psyches.  The faces of the dying will haunt nightly dreams after they’ve fallen exhausted into bed.  Christ’s followers will admit Our Lord’s pain into their being. 

Unless I see the wounds…  There is your answer, dear Thomas.  It is an answer to be found in devastated nursing homes and ICU wards.  It is to be found in our prisons where we warehouse so many whose only crime was the inability to afford a decent lawyer or to make bail.   

One of the questions in the baptismal covenant of my church is: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?”  This is now put-up-or-shut-up time.  There’s virtually something that each one of us is called do.  No plastic Jesus beckons, but the real McCoy. 

I can’t believe the text message I received the other day from a group called California Volunteers.  They were summoning retired nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists – anybody but anybody who might lend a hand to tend the sick.  Even an old, very old, Army Medic whose skills are now some fifty years out of date.  I responded that I was engaged in this effort in other ways – and I prayed that that was true.  But thanked the caller for thinking of me.  I so wish I had had the health and youth to have said yes.  My heart said yes.  But my mind told me that I would be more of a liability than help.  And my wife would have thought I was crazy.  She’d have me in the Memory Care Unit before I could hitch up my pants..

Our streets now throng with thousands upon thousands who bear the wounds of Christ. Fear and want distort their visage.  Can I be tested?  Where’s the money to pay the rent?  To buy food for my family?  I think I have symptoms, am I dying?  What will happen to my kids?  I’ve just finished three eighteen-hour shifts in a row.  How do I go on? 

Not all wounds are visible to the naked eye.  One of my trusted columnists, David Brooks, asked his readers how their mental health was holding up in this time of disease, job loss and isolation.  He asked them to send in anything they wanted to share with David’s readership.  Thousands of letters poured in bearing grievous testimony to the wounds of Christ in our land.

Hear the heartfelt anguish of one senior, a woman living in Fresno, California:

“I am normally a very positive person, outgoing, happy, energetic. Definitely a glass half-full. However, lately I cannot get through a day without tears, often sobs. I am terrified for myself and my family and everyone in the world. All the things I love to do, I’m now afraid to do. …”[1]

Here’s the letter from a college student at Pennsylvania State College.  At first this young man thought the quarantine would be a “lark.” He would be relieved of some onerous responsibilities.  But now it’s a gray, washed-out living hell:

“I’ve been gripped by a deep depression. My appetite is very low. I’m sleeping far too much to feel as lethargic as I do.”

“My future, which seemed so bright a few months ago as I anticipated graduating in May, now seems bleak and hopeless: How will I find a job with the economy tanking? How will I pay hundreds of dollars per month when my loan bills kick in during August?”[2]

These are no less the wounds of Christ, just because they can’t be seen.  I salute David Brooks for having the compassion to enter into these searing tales.  David is the sort of Christian I would aim to be.  Thomas, do you yet see our wounded Lord?

And each day, people of faith and no faith, behold the wounded Christ and join with others to apply salve to those wounds.

I think of the taxi cab drivers in one city who have volunteered to deliver thousands of meals to the shut in.  I think of that dedicated public servant who has gone far beyond any reasonable expectation, processing unemployment claims beyond quitting time.  Folks, he is not part of the “deep state.”  He is a dedicated public servant, one who ministers to the Christ of the destitute.  You’ve seen the lines at a San Antonio food bank that stretch beyond what the eye can see.  You’ve seen those volunteers laboring side by side with the National Guard to deliver boxes of groceries to families who never in their wildest dreams thought they’d have to ask for free food. 

I ask the skeptic in all of us – that doubting Thomas – might you, in a blind leap of faith, join these, your fellow Americans, on the distribution line?  At the homeless shelter?  Sewing face masks?  Christ awaits you.  Might now be the time to put aside your niggling hesitations and lend a hand?  We need you. The living Christ needs you.  You are his hands, his heart, his soul.

The blessing to be found is to be beyond measure.  It is to be counted as a smidgen of Life Eternal.  I guarantee it.  Oh, Thomas, see the imprint of the nails, the lance.  Touch. Feel.

Oh, and my friend Philip?

My friend Philip now has many years of long-term sobriety and is a credit to his church and to his community. He’s one of those positive people who daily makes a difference. Recovery is real!  As real as the ever lovin’ Grace of God.   Amen.

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[1] David Brooks, “The Pandemic of Fear and Agony,” New York Times, April 9, 2020.

[2] Ibid.

Dear friends in Christ

April 19, 2020
 2 Easter

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 20:19-31

“Unless I See …”

“When leaving his surgery on the morning of April 16, Dr. Bernard Rieux felt something soft under his foot.  It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing.

On the spur of the moment he kicked it to one side, and without giving it a further thought continued on his way downstairs.”[1]

So, Camus begins his narration of the pestilence that was to shortly overtake a most ordinary town on the Algerian coast in his novel, The Plague.  On the most ordinary of spring days.  Life would soon be completely disrupted, all its daily patterns and conventions. 

This is what COVID-19 has done to America, and to the entire world.

This Holy Week, we remain sealed up in tombs of fear.  It is serendipitous that Passover began this evening at sundown.  Passover celebrates the liberation of the Hebrew people from the land of slavery.  It is often through the scourge of plague and calamity that God frees.  Yes, stuff happens.  But as Rahm Emanuel is fond of saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  This monumental crisis has laid waste our health care system; it has killed hundreds of thousands, and has devastated economies across the globe.  We turn this tragedy to good as we pull closer together as a nation, as one planet.  As we relearn our commonality with one another and with the natural world.  Might we relearn the wonder of clean air in our cities.  There is no Planet B.

Friends, Easter is not just a rumor.  Easter is now.  This pestilence will subside.  The Angel of Death will pass us by.  The boulder will be rolled away.   

We now catch a few splinters of that glorious Easter morn.  Like the touching letters of thanks from all across our nation – letters thanking the nurses, doctors and other hospital staff who have put their lives at risk to care for the ill. 

One letter read, “I am so grateful for the few hours out of the week we were able to be huddled together as the core of the family — all you did to console my fears and assure me that we’re going to get through this.  Thank you for being the amazing mother and nurse that you are.  I love you, your daughter, Tina.”

And another letter to a doctor. “These shields were made with love and appreciation by myself and my children, ages 10 and 8.  We cannot express our care and concern enough for you.  Keeping you in our hearts and prayers.”

These messages, and so many more, are the truth of Easter this year.  Can’t you feel the growing warmth on your face?  Expressions of thanks to our nurses, doctors, grocery store clerks, sanitation workers – all who are the incarnation of God’s message of hope.  They are God’s Easter glory. 

Friends, the stone of this tomb of darkness is ajar.  It may be many more weeks before we will finally emerge from COVID-19, but Easter is here.  For people of hope, it is always the “FIRST DAY OF THE WEEK!”

Let us wholeheartedly proclaim this Sunday, “Alleluia.  Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.  Alleluia!”

Happy Easter to all.

Fr. John

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[1] Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: The Modern Library, 1948).

Dear friends in Christ

April 12, 2020
Easter Day

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 20:1-18

“On the First Day of the Week”

Today the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles met together by Zoom with our bishops.  Bishop John has requested that we not distribute palm crosses, as our usual custom for Palm Sunday.  Furthermore, we will not even be gathering as a worshipping community this Palm Sunday!  Folks, we are in ecclesiastical lockdown.  Need I remind you of the church that recently met for worship in Florida against all common sense.  I guess they thought they could “pray away” the virus.  The upshot was disastrous – a new cluster of COVID-19 cases.

We will be missing the Renewal of Vows service at St. John’s Cathedral, Easter music, our floral cross Alicia and her helpers always prepare.  I’ll miss the Stations of the Cross lead by Deacon Pat.  I miss it all, and it sucks!  Gathering gloom.

More than that, what really sucks is the growing number of cases and attendant deaths now consuming our nation and the world.  It is scenes of exhausted nurses and doctors who’ve done all they could to save a COVID victim, only to helplessly witness another tragic death as the result of their frantic efforts.

Governor Cuomo of New York was pained to inform his citizens that that state only has enough ventilators for six more days until their stockpile is exhausted.  No governor should ever have to deliver this sort of news to his or her people.  Hearts across America are breaking. Gathering gloom to be sure.

And yet, in some places we frolic about as if it’s eat-drink-and-be-merry time.  Let’s have a drink, go to the beach.  Many are behaving like the ill-fated passengers aboard that ocean liner in Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools.[1]

With no national procurement policy, states are bidding up the price of priceless medical equipment, sometimes to over fifteen times the usual.  Price gouging in times of emergency used to be punished with heavy fines.  Even jail time.  I dare not even mention what President Lincoln did to war profiteers.  Now, it’s let the good times roll in our sacred free market. There’s a buck to be made.  Yes, gathering gloom.

Many who danced about and waved palm branches at Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem would shortly be shouting, “Crucify.  Crucify.  Crucify,” at his trial later that week.  The sky would darken and rain beat down on the sodden stragglers.  Gathering gloom, indeed.

And as Bishop John reminded those of us “zoomed in,” God’s resurrecting work is not contingent on our diminished hopes.  God’s resurrecting promise may for a time seclude itself in a tomb of our ephemeral emotions and fears.  Neither life, nor death, height nor depth, coronavirus nor transient despair shall separate us from the love of God and our faith in the Christ Jesus.

There will be an Easter.  Count on it!  When Governor Cuomo put out the call for volunteer doctors and nurses this week, an entire relief battalion, 20,000 strong, answered from all corners of America.  Easter People, indeed!

Though we not be together for joyous Alleluias, yet an Easter will rise up in our hearts.  A spiritual and efficacious Eucharist awaits, though we gaze not upon the elements.  Taste and see that the Lord is good.  We will persevere as the Holy Feast itself.  We are God’s Easter.

May the Lord richly bless you as we move through Holy Week.  We long to hear each other’s voices and clasp familiar hands.  Peace, my sisters and brothers.

With love and affection,

Fr. John

[1] Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966)

Dear friends in Christ
April 5, 2020, Palm/Passion Sunday

The Rev. John C. Forney
Matthew 21:1-11, 26:36-27:66

It is most fortuitous that our Gospel lesson for today from John is the story of Jesus raising up Lazarus.  Mary attempting to dissuade him from having the stone rolled away from the entrance to the tomb, cautions, “Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.”

Our health, our economy, our equanimity – they have all been dead for over four days.  There is a great fear about in the land, not of one but of many.  Some of us aren’t sure from where our next meal is coming.  The vast majority of Americans could not some up with funds to meet a $500 emergency.

These fears are real.  And it stinks to high heaven.  We needn’t have been so ill prepared.  We needn’t have botched this.  But where we are, is where we are.  And it stinks, especially for those on the margin.

But as Jesus reminds Mary, “Did I not tell you that you would see the glory of God?  And friends, that is exactly what we have seen.  Early on in the unfolding of this pestilence, a young woman pulled into a supermarket parking lot in Bend, Oregon.  As she left her car, she heard someone call out for help from her car.  “I walked over and found an elderly woman and her husband. She cracked her window open a bit more, and explained to me nearly in tears that they are afraid to go in the store.”[1]  Rebecca Mehra took the woman’s list and money.  As she did, the woman, her eyes welling up with tears, explained that she and her husband were in their 80s and very afraid that they would catch the virus.

After Rebecca had returned with the couple’s groceries, the woman told her that they had sat in their car for over forty-five minutes, waiting for the “right person” to come along.

Hold on, now – we’re getting to what my friend Ed Bacon calls a “Glory Attack.”

On arriving back home with her own items, Rebecca told her boyfriend what had happened at the store.  He urged her to write this up and send it out on Twitter.

“I know it’s a time of hysteria and nerves, but offer to help anyone you can,” Mehra tweeted as part of the viral thread. “Not everyone has people to turn to.”

 

 

By Monday, her story was just about everywhere. Her original post had been retweeted almost 107,000 times and she was featured on cable news and online outlets.[2]

 

And that, my friends is the full, unadulterated Glory of God!

 

There’s a lot about this virus that stinks.  And some of our bad behavior in the midst of at all reeks with self-centeredness.  Like the Fox News host, Ainsley Earhardt, who was so distressed that women couldn’t get their nails done during this lockdown. Woman, get over yourself.  There are people who have been evicted, Whole families, living on the street and you’re worried about your nails???  Let’s have a little self-transcendence.  This virus is not about you.

 

But back to Rebecca and that older couple waiting on the kindness of a stranger in a supermarket parking lot.

 

Beyond the stench of however many days this virus will have us sealed up in our tombs of quarantine, can’t you smell something beyond the rot?  Just a little?  Can’t you smell something that seems a bit like lilies?  Easter lilies, maybe?  If so, what you have a whiff of is the Glory of God.

 

And that’s what we bring in our days of waiting to one another.  Who knows how long we may be sealed up in this coronavirus tomb?  But I tell you, Easter is a coming. And when we can again see one another’s faces and hold each other close – that will be the best GLORY ATTACK ever.

 

John

 

 

[1] Samantha Kubota, “Young Woman Helps ‘Terrified’ Elderly Couple Get Food, Inspires Others to Pitch In”, Today, Mach 17, 2020.

 

[2] Op. Cit.

 

Dear friends in Christ
March 29, 2020

The Rev. John C. Forney
John 11:1-44

In 1935 the British writer Graham Greene and his cousin Barbara Greene set off into the heart of Liberia, Africa.  As one might imagine, it was a rather harrowing journey with Graham almost dying as he neared its end.  His goal was to leave civilization and find “the heart of darkness.”  One of the maps he had consulted had a blank, empty space representing the interior of Liberia with the words written across it, “cannibals.”  He was forced to rely on local guides and porters to traverse this great unknown.  In 1938 he published his notes and memories as a book entitled, Journey Without Maps.

 

Journey without maps – a most intriguing description of the journey of faith.  Maybe most of our journeys – at least the ones that count.

 

You may remember my childhood friend Dan – yes, the one I got in trouble with for his comment about our balding junior high math teacher, Chrome Dome.

I happened to run into Dan several years later at Cal. State Long Beach.  Dan had asked me how things were and did I have much of a love life.  Actually, I had broken up with a girl over a couple of years previous and had to admit that I was a little lonely.  He invited me to the Methodist student religious club on campus, but I told him that I had had it with the church.  Our local church had the most reactionary, egotistical pastor one could imagine.  I wasn’t going back.  Ever!

 

His response to my reaction?  “Well, we have some mighty fine-looking women who attend.”  Throwing aside all scruples, I responded, “Oh?  What time do they meet?  Where?”

 

That conversation began a deep dive into the Christian journey I had abandoned when I dropped out of my fourth grade Sunday school class.  Soon the campus pastor had introduced me to some of the twentieth century giants of the faith:  Bultmann, Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother Richard.  Also, the great Jewish mystic Martin Buber.  Later, that spring break, in Lincoln, Nebraska, I would encounter Martin Luther King, Jr. at a student conference.

 

That campus fellowship, long, long ago, has been the beginning of a life-long journey.  Certainly a “journey without maps.”  Now that I’m approaching the end of my journey, I wouldn’t have traded it for anything in the world.  In the process I’ve found spiritual meaning that has given shape to my life.  I’ve acquired probably more books than our local library.  There was that minor detour as an Army medic, stationed in San Francisco.  Along the way, I met a wonderful wife and now have two fine sons.  One of whom has started me on my new venture to begin an opioid recovery center.  Certainly, a journey without maps.

 

Sometimes, though, a twist of fate opens up a journey we would never have chosen.  I read in the paper this morning of the devastation that has overtaken Tennessee as tornadoes swept through the state.

 

On Tuesday morning 73-year-old Jean Gregory was sleeping soundly in her bed.  Suddenly her husband yanked her to the floor and flung himself on top of her as their entire house began to shake.  For six, maybe seven minutes the deafening roar blotted out consciousness of her surroundings.  Later, when they emerged from the wreckage of their house, they discovered that many of their neighbors had it much worse.  Their entire neighborhood of trailers and modest homes was devastated.  One tornado that cut a swath of destructor through the middle of the state had remained on the ground for some fifty-five miles, ripping through the center of Nashville.  Multiple tornadoes struck elsewhere.  For the people of Tennessee, this is indeed a most fearsome journey without maps.  Where to pick up the pieces?  Ahead are days of shock and numbness as rescuers search the wreckage.

 

One of the oldest confessions of faith is found in the book of Deuteronomy: “A wandering Aramean was my father; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien.” On the day Abraham packed up the station wagon and left with Lot and the rest of the clan, he had not a clue as to where he was going.  All he could tell Sarah was that God had told him to pack up and leave this land and your kindred.  I’m sure, her thought had been, “What have you been smoking?”  He’d said crazy stuff before but this beat all.  If ever there was a journey without maps, this was it.

 

I still remember that call which came around 4:30 in the morning.  “Hello, is this John Forney??”

 

I’m Ed Stanton, the United Methodist Superintendent of Alaska.  Are you still wanting to come up to Alaska?”  All I could think of was to stammer, “I think I’d better talk to my wife.”  And so, began a most wondrous journey without maps.

 

Today, each of us sitting here in church because of a journey of faith that probably began years earlier.  At our age, no one is making us come to church.  Those days of fourth grade mandatory Sunday school are long past.

 

I remember the church planner Lyle Schaller at a conference noting that much of the white he saw from the plane window as they descended into Anchorage was not snow.  He said that all the white he saw on the mountains was actually torn up letters of church transfer that people had thrown out the plane windows as they approached the Anchorage International Airport.

 

Alaska had one of the lowest church attendance rates of any state in the union.  In Alaska, no one has a mother or father looking over a shoulder to make sure they don’t miss church.  At least if you are an adult, if you’re sitting in a pew, it’s because you wanted to be a part the community of faith.  You are there as a result of a journey begun much earlier in life.  Even if you came to the faith later in life – it’s voluntary.  When your journey of faith began, something drew you in — as had that campus minister and his wife drawn me into that student community of faith.  Coming from a pretty dysfunctional family, I came out of the “dark night of the soul.”

 

In our story of Nicodemus, the gospel of John presents the tale of one who has grown up in the religious community.  He is an esteemed scholar and revered teacher.  But something is missing in his life. Not wanting to be seen associating with this disreputable rabbi, he approaches Jesus in the dead of night.

 

An aside – all significant spiritual truths are revealed in the still of darkest night.  Always.  As with Nicodemus, the spiritual journey is from Darkness to Light.  We all begin in darkness.  Like Nicodemus, we know nothing.  We come in our darkest night.  Out of our deepest need.

 

Nicodemus, attempting to flatter Jesus, acknowledges that the things Jesus is reputed to be doing could only be the result of God’s presence with him.  Jesus brushes aside this flattery.

 

Jesus then tells him the secret.  To perceive such things, one must be born from above.  That is, one must have a spiritual awakening.  Though Nicodemus, is reputed to be a great teacher, he answers, “Huh?”

 

Jesus tries again, and Nicodemus rebuts him, “How can one already old be born again?  Can he reenter his mother’s womb?”  As the discussion progresses, it would seem that Nicodemus becomes more obtuse.  He understands NOTHING.  And he is a such a renowned teacher?

 

Is this not the beginning of each of our spiritual journeys?  From the bare rudiments of faith, from those stories we learned in Sunday school, or at our mother’s knee, we begin a grand journey.   Or our venture is still-born, only, perhaps, to be born again later in life.  It is always a journey without maps.  Sometimes it’s begun with a call at 4:30 in the morning.  Sometimes begun with an invitation to a campus religious group that may have some “good-looking women.”  Or it may have begin with a spiritual search that begins at midnight.  No maps, but always moving towards the Light.

 

Maybe it was an inchoate summons to pick up and leave familiar surroundings and clan.  That’s how the Forneys ended up coming through the Port of Philadelphia in 1767 from Germany.  That’s the chance one of my mother’s ancestors took when she up and married a Jewish peddler who had come through a small Iowa town with his wagon of sundries, pots and pans.

 

However the journey begins, it is not necessarily destiny.  When begun in disaster and trauma, people who care can make a difference.  We can promote programs that hold out promise for those who have lost their way.  We, in the Christian community, can either be part of the problem, mere bystanders, or part of the solution.  Christ continually invites us into the Light.

 

The way I look at it, we’re only here but for the twinkling of an eye.  Living to the full, making a difference, means walking with others on their journeys.  Sharing the load.  Speaking words of wisdom and encouragement.  And sometimes warning.

 

Towards the end of their book Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn tell the journey of Drew Goff, son of Ricochet (since deceased), a citizen of Yamhill who had seriously lost his way through alcohol and drugs.  Maybe no cannibals, but every bit as perilous a journey.

 

Sheryl and Nick had kept up with Drew even during the years he had served time in prison.  But now he was out on probation and avoiding drugs.  Though he had lost custody of his two other children, he was caring for his infant son Ashtyn.

 

He had been an addict since the age of twelve when he began using alcohol, pot and crank, a cheap form of methamphetamine  He swears that though he loved his father, he didn’t want to end up like him.  But, like his father, he had been in and out of prison.  He had now grown tired of that life – sick and tired.  It held nothing for him anymore.  No future at all – he had achieved a record of over twenty convictions.

 

What changed for Drew was a program, “Provoking Hope”.  It had given him a foundation of friends who surrounded him with sobriety.  He hasn’t touched drugs in over a year – the longest he has been sober since when he was twelve.  He now has a relationship with his young son Ashtyn and does not want to jeopardize that.   He absolutely loves that little boy.  He plays with him, talks with him so he will learn words.  Drew reports that the parenting classes he has received through Provoking Hope have made him a decent dad – the sort of dad he didn’t have.  He says that he and Ashtyn are now shooting for two hundred words.

 

Judge Collins, of Yamhill County, who sees many in his court like Drew and Ricochet, empathizes that it is such mentorship that can break the intergenerational cycle of drug use and crime. Programs like Provoking Hope and Friends of the Children can “make a huge difference, because at-risk young people often come from dysfunctional families without a good role model.”[1]

 

Ricochet had been pushed out of school in the eighth grade by a principal annoyed by his truancy.  Years later, his son Drew, was also expelled in the eighth grade.  And even when kids like Ricochet and Drew attend class, they often go to weak schools with no access to vocational training.  Even with a diploma, many cannot pass the qualifying exam for the armed forces.  Without a high school diploma, these young adults are destined for sporadic employment in marginal jobs.  Low pay, erratic hours, no benefits, first fired.

 

This is the challenge before us, America.  If we are to be in any sense “Great,” we need to bring along all our people.  We cannot keep failing our own.  Superintendent Cline of the Yamhill Carlton School district says they are getting more and more kindergarteners whom he would describe as “feral.”  One principal says more kids are “biting, screaming, kicking and throwing things.”  Superintendent Cline knows what these kids are going through.  His father spent three years in the state penitentiary for drug abuse.  It was only the military that provided an escape.  After his chaotic home life of neglect and abuse, basic training felt like a “vacation.”

 

Each of us can make a difference, as a teacher, a grandparent, a mentor.  I remember going to the “Renewal of Vows” service to which our bishops invite all clergy during Lent.  Afterwards, there is often a side meeting for retired clergy.  While I usually avoid those things like the plague, I decided one year to attend.  There were about forty or so of us in a circle eating our lunch.  So many spoke of being bereft of anything meaningful to occupy their days now that they had no sermons to write or parishioners to visit.  They were completely at loose ends.

 

After a dozen or spoke of the emptiness of their lives — I thought, “My God, are there no children to read to?  Are there no teachers needing some help in their classrooms?  What gives, here?”  I wondered if I should pass around a sign-up sheet and put them to work.  There are Big Sister and Big Brother organizations just begging for some folks with the training clergy have.  Urban re-foresting organizations?  The local food bank?  Meals on Wheels?  Folks, your journey is not yet done.  Let’s get to work!

 

I remember the young people who flocked to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  I would imagine that hundreds will now again be heading in droves to Tennessee to join folks like Jean Gregory and her husband.  They will need encouragement and accompaniment as, late in life, they embark on a new “journey without maps,” seeking to rebuild from the rubble.  Young and old, all are invited.  And they will heed the summons.  Many of those heading to join the Gregorys and the other victims of this disaster will be people acting out of the best values of their faith traditions.  I would hope that some might also be a few of my retired colleagues in the clergy.

 

The most important journeys we take are “without maps.”  Look back at the twists and turns of your life.   As in a jazz riff, we are forced to improvise.  But if we keep with the beat and mind our step, we seize the blessing to be had.  We find a God ever willing to walk, to dance, with us.  The journey into neighbor is the journey into God.

 

That is what my haphazard journey has taught me.  It’s not over until it’s over. Friends and guides along the way are essential.  Yes, there be dangers ahead.  A motto of the twelve-step movement is key: “Make a friend.  Be a friend.”  And your journey along the way will be blessed – as will another’s journey.  Amen.

[1] Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Tightrope (New York: Knopf, 2020), 239.

 

Preached at St. Francis Episcopal Mission, San Bernardino

March 8, 2020

 

 

Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 3:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17
First Sunday in Lent

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney