A Sermon by Thomas Ward, April 10, 2011

Here's what we got from Thomas (at right in his Bell ower study) after his vibrant and powerful sermon on April 10. Savor it!

Sermon for the last Sunday in Lent

10 April 2011

Ezek. 37:1-14 * Ps. 130 * Rom. 8:6-11 * John 11:1-45

· Intro: Undoing the lectionary

o Lectionary is based on the principle that events in the Old Testament prefigure those of the New Testament. Whether typologically (Isaac/Christ) or in terms of prophecies (Isaiah, “and a little child shall lead them.”) NT as fulfillment.

o Pairing of Ezekiel with Lazarus story asks us to understand this prophetic vision in terms of the Christian Resurrection.

o However: note in New Oxford Study Bible: “This vision has no direct connection with the Christian doctrine of resurrection.” à The rationalist/historicist in me would say: “of course not”: this is a Hebrew book written by someone who lived 500 years before Christ. So what would it mean to take it on its own terms?

o I want to start, somewhat heretically, by thinking about what we loose when we understand Ezekiel’s amazing vision only in the light of the Lazarus miracle, or even the Christian Resurrection more generally.

· Valley of dry bones as metaphor

o Jerusalem sacked late 6^th century BC. Ezekiel is speaking to Hebrew exiles who are loosing hope: this is explained clearly in the last section of the reading: “these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.’”

o Earlier Ezekiel berates the Israelites for following false gods, and, indeed, their spiritually skeletal state could be attributed to their sinfulness. But it’s not only that: God appears to be absent from their lives: they are on an alien soil—or a soil that has been made alien to them.

o What are bones?

§ Memento mori (fleetingness), yet enduring

§ We say “I feel it in my bones,” but bones themselves are strange, seemingly dead things within us: reminder that our bodies are not our own.

§ Metaphor for empty cultural forms (?)

o All that remains of the Israelites is some kind of dead thing:

§ Some kind of bare essential thing that exists in a society that makes it recognizable as a society.

§ Perhaps it is language itself: the Hebrews still have their language, but it is as if they are forgetting how to put the words together in a way that allows them to remember that they are God’s people.

· First prophecy

o It is language itself—Ezekiel’s language—that causes the bones to come together: he prophecies to them.

o The bones cannot have been completely dead: they can still hear.

o Bones come together but still not fully alive

§ Aaron Todd’s elbow: put back together by doctors but still had to exercise.

§ Israelites: first step is to assemble them: reconstitute them as a community: separated they can do nothing. But this is not enough.

· Second prophecy

o “Prophesy to the breath, O mortal.” I don’t know what this means. It’s mysterious.

o Question in science about what makes something living: unanswerable.

o Perhaps (and this is just a guess) “prophesying to the breath” is purposefully mysterious: means something like “acknowledge the existence of something unavailable to the means by which we traditionally establish certainty: something fundamentally intractable to our desire to circumscribe the mysterious forces of the universe through knowledge… The breath, or the spirit, is, after all not something we can constrain—it does not require a lapse into Christian teleology to acknowledge as true Jesus’s words to Nicodemus when he says that the wind goes where it pleases.

o To speak to this uncontrollable spirit: prayer: to embrace the wild, uncontrollable love of God: to even call it “love” is, perhaps, too constraining.

· Summation of the vision:

o Easy to see why this would be paired with Lazarus and why we read it right before Easter, but

o The danger of reading Ezekiel only in terms of the Christian Resurrection is that we might not realize exactly what it is the text is trying to get us to realize: that the graves Ezekiel refers to are not those in which the Israelites will one day be buried, from which, in some kind of grisly spectacle, their corpses will one day in the future arise and be reconstituted: rather, they are the graves God’s people already inhabit—the graves we inhabit—right now, even as we live our lives.

o The kinds of graves that cause us to see each other not as living members of one another, but as alien and dead.

o Broaden this to include what is traditionally taken to be the ecological, even the “non-living” world.

o Reading Ezekiel’s text poses a challenge—and a danger—for us: we can take it two ways

1. It is a literal vision of some kind of future, supernatural event—like the seventh voyage of Sinbad—where skeletons get up and walk around. I would suggest that this reading trivializes it, makes of it a kind of fairy tale that finds its Christian analogue in cartoonish notions of an afterlife of clouds, pearly gates, harps, etc. This is the version painted on the walls of the Sistine Chapel which, as beautiful as it is, suggests that the resurrection and the eternity toward which we strive are things that are to come, things outside of time rather than (as I believe Ezekiel intends it) a potential that exists radically within the deepest core of every moment of our lives. Something for which we were best not sit around waiting.

2. Rather, Ezekiel’s vision is a call to arise from the graves where we are, even as we speak, rotting away and will continue to rot for as long as we placate ourselves with the same fairy-tale notions I have just given. As such, ironically enough, Ezekiel’s text itself can become a potential grave insofar as it offers itself to us as an end rather than a beginning—as a story we might trot out once a year without allowing ourselves to enter into it or it into us. When we arise from that grave, it is not just we who come alive, but the text also; or rather, we find that we are the text and that it is we and that we are alive in one another.

· The kind of resurrection Ezekiel is talking about is an invitation into a mystery, not an answer to a question. The moment we allow it to ossify into the latter is the moment we cease to participate in it.

· This is not just about how to read the Bible. The modern world we live in offers a capitalist parody of resurrection—the fetishism of commodities—whereby dead, material things seem to be brought to life as substitutes for the real relationships we ought to be having with one another as a community.

· Here I’m reminded of something Frank Innes told me about the Pepsi slogan, “Pepsi makes you come alive” being mistranslated for an African ad campaign as “Pepsi will raise your ancestors from the dead.”

· The point is, the world is full of things that masquerade as resurrection stories that, insofar as they encourage us to be passive and complacent and merely accept them as such, actually become the very death from which Ezekiel calls us to arise.

o Revision of original statement that we loose something by understanding Ez. in terms of the Christian resurrection

o For Ezekiel is equally dead if we lock his text into its own historical moment: to refuse to read it as anything other than a metaphor for a particular tribe of exiled people in the 6^th century BC.

o One of the challenges the Lectionary has for us who, after all, call ourselves people of Christ and the Ressurection is to understand how Ezekiel lives in our own stories: but also how our own stories live through it.

o In fact, if there is a danger of taking Ezekiel too literally, there is also the danger of reducing it to mere metaphor—metaphor too can have a distancing effect, unlike the intimacy of entering into an act of faith.

o I think this is just what the Gospel calls us to do. John’s words are much less metaphorical: unlike the abstract valley and the anonymous bones of Ezekiel’s vision, John’s story has a place (Bethany) and people with names (Mary, Martha, Lazarus, Jesus). In fact, it’s very hard to read this passage and imagine that John didn’t mean us to take it absolutely literally.

§ There’s even a moment where Jesus must correct what the disciples take to be the figurative language of Lazarus “falling asleep.” “No,” he tells them “plainly,” “Lazarus is dead.”

o How do we understand this? From what depths of our will power can we, realistically, ever summon the suspension of disbelief that would be necessary to take John’s story (written down a long time after it was supposed to have happened) as evidence for a bodily resurrection?

o To be honest, I come up against this passage in the same way I encounter Ezekiel’s prophesying to the winds: utter confusion. I don’t know what to say (elaborate on this).*

o The story itself offers us several models of faith:

o Good old Thomas who seems to give up right away: “Let’s go and die too.”

o Martha, always the diligent student, says she knows that Lazarus “will rise again in the resurrection, on the last day.” Like Martha, we could hold out hope that it really is possible for the dead to rise again on the last day. Interestingly Jesus responds, “I am (present tense) the Resurrection and the life.”

o Mary seems more real somehow: although she repeats Martha’s words when she tells Jesus that if he had been there her brother wouldn’t have died, she significantly falls short of echoing Martha’s faith that “even now she knows that God will give him whatever he asks.”

o And then there’s Jesus’s response—the shortest verse in the entire Bible—in which words themselves fail and he simply weeps.

o Here is really where my sermon should end because I think this failure of words might be just the point. We spend a lot of time talking about what we believe, in the hopes that by talking, we might understand. But there’s the danger that by understanding—of being certain—what we believe might stop being alive—a matter for continual engagement. Being certain is, in a sense, about controlling.

o Some words by Thomas Pynchon:

Doubt is the essence of Christ. Of the Twelve Apostles, most true to him was ever Thomas. … The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty. His become the centrall subjective fact of Faith, that risks evr’ything upon one bodily Ressurection …. Wouldn’t something less doubtable have done? Some few tatters of evidence to wrap our poor naked spirits against the coldness of a World where Mortality and its Agents may bully their way, wherever they wish to go…? (Thomas Pynchon, Mason Dixon, p. 511).

o Belief isn’t just a matter of what we tell ourselves. One of my favorite scholars, Juliet Fleming, talks about the massive and confusing changes in religious doctrine in seventeenth century England, which was a world in which people didn’t always know what they believed, but (she says) this was “not because they were confused, but because belief might be lodged in practices beyond or beside our knowledge of it.”

o Niels Bohr and the horseshoe

o Living “as if.”

o This final time before Easter is, I think, a time not so much for awaiting the certainty of an eventual resurrection but, rather, throwing oneself into the radical uncertainty that might just be the resurrection: not a closing down, but an opening up: not an end, but a beginning.

End with one more vision of the Resurrection:

">At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood. (John Donne, Holy Sonnet 7)

Scott Ordway's Festival Mass to Premier at Easter

Dear Friends,

I sure hope you'll join us this Saturday and on Easter Monday when our Composer in Residence, Scott Ordway, unveils his latest composition for us, Festival Mass, written as part of our fabulous program called New Music for Sacred Places. We'll hear part of the Mass during the Easter Vigil on Saturday. The New Fire will be kindled and the Vigil begin at 8 PM. Then on Easter Monday, again at 8 PM, the entire Mass will be heard in a full evening's performance at our neighbor, Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral. More information follows below.

World Premiere Performances of Scott J. Ordway's Festival Mass

St. Mary's Church, Hamilton Village and Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral are pleased to present the world premiere performance of Philadelphia composer Scott J. Ordway's Festival Mass, a new, large-scale composition for soloists, choir, organ, and chamber orchestra. The evening-length work will be conducted by the composer himself and feature the Choir of St Mary's Church, the Choral Scholars of the Philadelphia Cathedral, and players from the Curtis Institute of Music. Soloists Sara Ann Mitchell (soprano), Julia Teitel (mezzo-soprano), and Ricardo Torres-Cooban (baritone) will travel from Boston to sing the premiere.

This exceptional collaboration among local and regional artists both amateur and professional takes place under the auspices of the New Music for Sacred Spaces Project, a program created and operated by St Mary's Church, Hamilton Village, the Episcopal Church at Penn. The program aims to encourage and support composers and performers to collaborate in creating new music for use in Philadelphia's architecturally and sonically remarkable sacred places, often (as is the case at St. Mary’s) by the congregations and in the context of liturgical practice.

In fact, the Festival Mass was written specifically in the context of the Great Vigil of Easter, an ancient liturgy that begins the Easter season for Episcopalians. Pats of it will be sung in St. Mary’s Vigil in its historic sanctuary on the Penn campus on Saturday, April 23, beginning at 8 PM.

The Project has created a major new avenue for the commissioning and performance of new works, five thus far. Ordway's evening-length Festival Mass marks the end of a highly successful inaugural season.

In 2010, New Music for Sacred Places has been supported by the American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter, the University of Pennsylvania, Partners for Sacred Places, Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, and St. Mary’s Church Hamilton Village.

From the composer:

It is a great privilege, but perhaps a greater challenge to compose a full setting of the Mass in the twenty-first century. In addition to the myriad technical challenges attendant upon any large-scale work, one must inevitably reckon with the communicative aspect of the text itself and all of its far-ranging implications. Regardless of one's own spiritual background, the Mass is one of western philosophy's great texts of supplication, of yearning, of hope, and of redemption; its familiar lines contain the language of a great universal aspiration to know better how we might live.

My response to this immortal text reflects my struggle to understand its meaning, its implications, and its place in our culture. The work is highly dramatic, at times quite intense and at others very meditative. In the breadth and scope of its expression, it might better be described "an opera about god".

Scott J. Ordway (b. 1984, Santa Cruz CA) is an American composer and conductor of contemporary music. His works have been performed and broadcast throughout the United States and in Europe and he has conducted more than 30 world premiere performances in recent seasons, most by young American composers. His output is diverse, including his two symphonies, numerous chamber works, and sacred and secular vocal music, as well as experimental or improvisatory pieces in collaboration with sound and video artists and live music for film. From 2007–2008 he was music director of the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, and from 2008–2009 was in-residence at the Boston Conservatory as Associate Conductor of the Juventas New Music Ensemble. He is presently a Benjamin Franklin Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Ordway has worked with members or graduates of the Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music, Opera Boston, New York City Opera, and Oregon Bach Festival. He is a published James Joyce scholar and the recipient of grants or awards from the American Composers Forum, American Music Center, Oregon Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, University of Pennsylvania, University of Puget Sound, and University of Oregon.

He graduated with high honors in composition from the University of Oregon (MM, 2008), and in English literature at the University of Puget Sound (BA, 2006); he has studied conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music and at the University of Oregon. His composition teachers have included Samuel Adler, David Crumb, Robert Hutchinson, Robert Kyr, Jim Primosch, and Jay Reise. He presently lives in West Philadelphia.

A vey brief history of antiracism work in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania

Dear Friends,

Several months ago, my colleague and friend, the Very Rev. Renee McKenzie Hayward, with whom I share leadership of the Antiracism Commission of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, asked me to join her in a presentation about our work to the Episcopal Church Club, a venerable institution that meets monthly here in Philadelphia. We decided that I would try to establish a little historical context for the work we are doing; and then she would talk about that work itself, and our future. What follows are my remarks, delivered today, which uncharacteristically I wrote out and which I thought might interest some of you who have been companions and/or observers of this ministry over the years. This is also being sent out to St. Mary's Constant Contact List by email. If you'd like to be on that list, email Doug Watts at St. Mary's, st.marys@verizon.net.

I'll be happy to read and respond to, if I have time, any comments you may have.

Be well. Blessings in this Holy Week.

Jim Littrell

Remarks to the Episcopal Church Club

The Rev. James H. Littrell

Vice-Chair

The Antiracism Commission of the Diocese of Pennsylvania

April 19, 2011

For the memory of Paul Washington, Margaret Moore and Mamie Wiggins, and in gratitude for the life-giving spirit of the women at the Church of the Holy Apostles and the Mediator in Philadelphia, who at a time when I was wounded and tired invited me in, knew me, loved and cared for me, and finally healed me.

One thing alone I charge you, as you live, believe in Life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the Great End comes slowly, because time is long.

--The last instruction of W.E.B. Du Bois

Good afternoon, my friends.

Thanks for your hospitality and for your dedication to the important work of educating Episcopalians and our friends about much of the important ministry that goes on under the extraordinarily broad rubric of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. I especially want to thank Penny Cutler for her invitation to my colleague and friend, Dean Renee McKenzie-Hayward, to speak to the Club today about the work of the Anti-Racism Commission of the Diocese and Renee for her invitation to me to share this podium with her.

I have never in my life more enjoyed and learned so much from a collegial partnership than from the one I have shared with Renee in the leadership of the Commission for the last seven years. It’s just as safe to say that Renee’s work in the Diocese has created a new, vigorous, and prophetic path for all of us in relation to that thorniest and most difficult of American issues, race and racism.

Our idea for today is that I, being much Renee’s senior, will give a brief but pithy overview of the development across time of the work of anti-racism in the Diocese. Many of you share that kind of seniority with me, and so will remember, no doubt, our prophetic predecessors in the work, and all of the ups and downs, steps and missteps, rough places and plain, that constitute, I believe, the slow and painful progress we have made as a diocese toward becoming an anti-racist diocese—we say that is our mission as a Commission and an essential part of our mission as a diocese—over the last half century. None of us exists or works in a vacuum—historical or ontological. There is much to remember and learn from our history, and I’m going to aim especially at the last half century, beginning about 1962.

Before that, of course, there were markers of change in our common life. We remember and celebrate the determination toward freedom, equality, and self-determination that led to the establishment of what we now know as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794 and the ordination eight years later of Absalom Jones as the first African American priest in the Episcopal Church. (It’s important to remember, lest we be subject to a mistaken sense of false progressive pride for the prophetic vision of our forbearers, that not until 1864—a full year after the Emancipation Proclamation—were African Americans in general and the St. Thomas delegation specifically given a vote in our Diocesan Convention.) In the Commonwealth, as Lorene Cary reminds us in The Price of a Child and historical markers throughout Philadelphia attest, agents of the underground railroad were powerful, courageous witnesses against the evils of slavery, which persisted all around them. Born in 1868, W.E.B. Du Bois—in my own view the most powerful analyst of and voice against racism ever heard in our nation—became a model and challenge for all of us who would, however haltingly, try to do this work. Though some of his views (particular his early notion of a ‘talented tenth’ in the Black community) changed and evolved over time, the findings and related assertions in his first ground-breaking book, The Philadelphia Negro, researched and written during the two years he lived in our city in the mid-1890’s, are as cogent and challenging today as they were more a century ago. Of the role of the black church in American society, Du Bois said, in a remark that provides important context for the angry conversation that is going on in the Diocese right now—all these years later—that blacks who attended church went for a social gathering first and religion second. Du Bois said that church “introduces the stranger to the community, it serves as a lyceum, library, and lecture bureau—it is, in fine, the central organ of the organized life of the American Negro.” This is exactly the assertion, or at least part of it, that my friend and colleague Jane Cosby and others make in their passionate argument for sustaining the black parishes of our diocese even when they cannot and may never be fully self-sustaining. Paul Washington, about whom more in a moment, used to say the question was not whether the Diocese could afford such parishes but whether the Diocese could afford not to have them.

In Du Bois’s Wikipedia article, his biographer David Levering Lewis is quoted as saying, “In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism—scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity.” We who work toward a diocese that is actively anti-racist continue precisely that enterprise. I remind people over and over that the work of changing the institutions that mark and sustain racism in our diocese will take all of us the rest of our lives, and then some. Ours will not be the quick turn-around or the two- or three-year transformation. And yet…

I arrived in the Diocese, a wayward Quaker-Presbyterian hybrid recently become an Episcopalian, by way of the welcoming and imaginative invitation of a bishop some of you may remember, Robert L. DeWitt. Let’s move quickly, then, to 1962, that year I mentioned earlier. Remember that the ‘Philadelphia Negroes’ of DuBois’s time were now a much larger part of Philadelphia’s population, thanks to the great northern migration of the 30’s and 40’s, during and after which a deep-rooted civil rights movement had birthed and become a powerful voice for racial justice here in the city of brotherly love. All that powerful witness is detailed in a great book I commend to you called Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia by Matthew Countryman.

As I came into the Diocese, Paul Washington’s prophetic ministry at the Advocate was just three years old. He, David Gracie, Sue Hiatt, Mattie Humphrey, Barbara Harris, John Elliott Churchville, Bishop DeWitt and others became a powerful team; but the captain of the team, at least in our Diocese and in the Episcopal Church, was Paul. His is the voice I first heard and still hear, at any rate. DeWitt provided him, and me, and many others, with his increasingly wise counsel and unwavering support. But it is the face of Paul I see in subsequent years, though often side by side with DeWitt. Paul asked the important questions that moved Bob DeWitt from a pastor to the privileged to a prophet and pastor to the disenfranchised. So it is Paul who is the chief marker for me for the last fifty years, as the Diocese, led by a series of often unwittingly prophetic bishops and laity, engaged and re-engaged with the ugly realities of a racist church and society.

Here are the names of some of the people and chapters that for me mark that long and continuing Diocesan struggle: CORE. SNCC. Chester. Girard College. The Jungle. The1964 Race Riots. ESCRU. The Black People’s Unity Movement. Jesse Anderson. The Union of Black Clergy and Laity. Mohammed Kenyatta at the Church of the Holy Trinity. The Black Economic Development Conference. Freedom Schools. Black Panthers, herded by police, naked against a wall. Frank Rizzo. Reparations. The Restitution Commission. Barbara Harris. Women Ordained at the Advocate. MOVE. Wilson Goode. Lyman Ogilby, Brooke Mosely, Jane Cosby, Allan Bartlett, Frank Turner. Curtis W. Sisco, Margaret Moore, Mamie Wiggins. The Committee to Combat Racism.

The struggle and the work that I’ve witnessed and participated in these last 50 years has been halting and often exhausting. From time to time it has been nearly dormant, mostly I think because of exhaustion. Yet… the work has always continued. Remarkably, too, the work has mostly focused on what I believe to be its most tenacious and deceptive form, the racism that’s embedded—often hidden—deep in the very fabric (and in their underlying assumptions, the threads of that fabric, as it were) of the institutions that shape and define us: our Constitution and Canons, our governance and governing processes, our assumptions about and requirements for ordained ministry, our hiring practices, our parish self-definition and life, an ancient history that constantly reaches into the present moment, determined sometimes it seems to drag us back, the shape of our political life, and even perhaps in our most cherished diocesan programs: DCMM, a coalition almost frozen in time that we use to define and institutionalize aided parishes, for instance, or the rural and romantic ideal of a diocesan camp planted in the southern border country, not long ago a Klan wilderness. But also embedded in our core faith and its documents are other fundamental institutional values—justice, compassion, our mutuality as God’s children. In our baptismal vows, our creed, in the Eucharistic feast we all share, in the scripture which is the living Word of our God—are vital pointers to our future, and to the immense unflagging work we still have to do.

After the 1960’s and 70’s, I recused myself in many ways from antiracist work and turned my attention and then my ministry to the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights and then to a 14-year ministry in the epidemic world of HIV/AIDS. (Though it’s important to know that all these struggles contained embedded racism and had in common a determination to seek just and love mercy.) I returned to active, organized work against racism in the Diocese at the invitation of Richard Smith, who was in the early years of the last decade chair of what had come to be called the Committee to Combat Racism. We were a small, aging, often disheartened group, but we struggled on as best we could. Then there arrived this remarkable person among us. The Rev. Renee McKenzie Hayward had come to the Diocese to be Rector of Calvary, Northern Liberties, a parish that many of us had pronounced dead, quite prematurely, as it turned out. For most of her life a Baptist, she came to us with a Ph.D. from Temple, from the Diocese of New Jersey, which (in spite of the destructive internal turmoil that then marked that Diocese in some of the same ways our Diocese is marked today) had made huge, concrete progress in its work to create what Renee called “an anti-racist diocese.”

She brought us energy, new focus, and a passion for what we were up to, and suggested an engaging model for doing that work. From her energy and passion, we supped! Soon I was sent with two other Committee members to New Jersey to investigate and experience this model at work. We reported back, renewed and excited, from that transforming experience; and so we embarked. The last six years have moved us into new territory. That is the story Renee will tell you. There could be no better successor than she to the powerful witnesses whose mantle she has taken up, and I will go to my grave a better man and a better priest for her company with me on that way.

A short bibliography for these remarks:

W.E.B. Du Bois The Philadelphia Negro.

Paul Washington with David Gracie. Other Sheep I Have: The Autobiography of Father Paul M Washington.

Randall Kenan. Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.

Lorene Cary. The Price of a Child.

Matthew Countryman. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia.

Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Alice Walker. Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthlng Poems, 1965-1990.

June Jordon. Directed by Desire: Collected Poems.

Thomas J. Sugrue. Sweet Land of Liberty: the Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.

The history page of the website of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, http://www.aecst.org

The website, The Black Past, remembered and Reclaimed, http://www.blackpast.org

A Sermon by Tsitsi Jaji

Tsitsi Jaji:
Nicodemus Long After Dark
A sermon preached at
St. Mary’s Church, Hamilton Village
The Episcopal Church at Penn
March 20, 2011

Texts: Genesis 12: 1-4a; Psalm 121: 1-8; Romans 4:1-5 & 13-17; John 3:1-17

One of the things I learned from the readings this week was that just because one is late does not mean one is too late. Abram and Sarai in their seventies were not too old to be immigrants and parents. Nicodemus long after dark was not too late to have a conversation with Jesus that night. And as the beautiful poem, Psalm 121, says so eloquently it is never too late for God, “he who watches over you will not fall asleep”.

I’ve often thought of Lent as a period of penitence, and self-denial, but at this year’s Ash Wednesday service something shifted as Father Jim talked about washing the ashes off as part of completing this sacrament. I started to saw this as a period of being drawn closer and closer, a process of forgiveness and welcome, getting free, rather than self-indulgent mourning. Today’s texts have me thinking about grace, about getting another chance. The figure in our readings that I most identify with is Nicodemus so I’m going to talk most about him, but first a few things about Abram.

The Genesis account about the calling of Abram is fundamentally an origin story and, as a literature professor, I’m interested in it as a narrative that a people told to make sense of their beginnings, and as the pretext for later writings reflecting back on it. It is an origin story we share with our Jewish and Muslim cousins, and in the version passed down to us, Abram receives this incredible proposal: leave your country, your kindred, your father’s house, in effect all that would provide security and the conditions for a rewarding life…and travel to some unspecified land where “in you and the families of the earth shall be blessed. Paul parses this story, counting on it being as familiar as family lore. […did you hear the one about how great-great-great grandpa Abram the wanderer dragged poor ole grandma Sarai and young nephew Lot out of their hometown, Ur…?] As a former legal scholar (Pharisee) like Nicodemus, Paul loves getting into the nitty gritty of the logic in his argument. He insists on the fact that if something is “reckoned” it is different from what is owed, and that the righteousness of faith is a gift graciously extended, rather than earned.

Abram did an incredibly hard thing, he gave up all that was comfortable, familiar, reasonable, and accepted a call to wander around on the promise of fertile land and family life. Ten years later he would still be (at 85 years of age, as the story goes) a childless man. And he had to wander around without a map or a concrete sense of what was coming. The story paints a vivid picture of a terrifying adventure, and the wonder of Abram’s patience and courage in its midst. I think of the lesson of Abram and Sarai as an invitation to leave what we know and go towards God, to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. What comforts might we be called to let go of, as we turn, repent, to enter the kingdom of God, and to cultivate the habits of living that are a blessing to all?

Nicodemus is a character I immediately identified with. As a professor, I understand his devotion to study, attention to details, intention to stay up to date on the most reputable and influential schools of thought. This is a guy who is still working at the end of the day, haunted by the imposter’s syndrome that many of us suffer, the fear that he doesn’t know quite enough. The fact that Nicodemus comes at night seems less to indicate shame or secretiveness, than diligence. He’s interested enough in what Jesus has to say that he comes to seek him out at the end of the day. If Nicodemus is anything like Penn faculty, he thinks of himself as affable, approachable, the exception to the stereotype of pretentious snobby Ivy League types. He earns a very comfortable living and he is aware of the cachet of his prominent position. Nicodemus expects, perhaps, that Jesus will respond warmly and generously when he discovers that such a prestigious interlocutor recognizes his authority. Instead, Jesus cuts abruptly to a rather cryptic formulation: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

It was so easy for me to identify with Nicodemus frustrated reaction here. For a scholar of the humanitie this is a hard saying indeed. It’s often translated as “be born again” and I can tell you that in my field of work there are few better ways to cast doubt on your reasoning capacities than to admit to being anything that remotely resembles a “born again Christian.” Nicodemus objects because it is also not logical. You don’t have to be a Greek poet like Heraclitus to know that water does not flow past twice, and time does not flow backward. How can an old man be born again? What Jesus has thrown at Nicodemus, and at us, is a metaphor. A metaphor is simply a way of conveying an idea by means of another idea, image, comparison. It literally means to carry over, and I think here we see Jesus carrying over the understanding of the call of Abram, no longer physical aliyah or immigration into (someone else’s) territory, but instead a kingdom of God with a fundamentally new ethic of human and spiritual relations, an ethic of sacrificial love.

What I love about this metaphor is that it evokes the womb, women’s bodies and the incredible sacrifice of pain that a mother makes to give birth to a child. Nicodemus gets that part of the image very viscerally; he asks “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” However he doesn’t quite grasp (at least not yet) the significance that being born is a passive activity. If physical birth is an event that occurs through the agonizing contractions of a mother’s uterus, this other kind of birth, in the spirit, is one that also comes through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Jesus seems to break it down for him, “Don’t be astonished that I say to you, you must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses…it’s always in motion, you don’t know its origins or its destination…and that is how it is with those born in the Spirit.” It seems to me that this Spirit-birthing is also an act of sacrifice, the passion that we celebrate in communion, but one that is always ongoing. The wind, the ruach, the spirit of God is always blowing, always birthing us from above. Certainly we cannot birth ourselves. This is one time the passive voice is absolutely essential. We must be birthed. We must be born. From above.

Jesus spells this out for Nicodemus and it runs so counter to Nicodemus’s commitments at this moment in his life that he finds Jesus unintelligible. Jesus seems to scold him, almost to shame him. How can one of the most educated and respected scholars of Jewish thought in his day be stumped by this country teacher’s metaphors? Metaphors are funny things. They are prisms that allow us to see things differently, to shift our sight and our insight in new directions, new angles of incidence and encounter. As someone who loves poetry, music, stained glass, I’m so thankful for the ways that God speaks to us through these indirections. In an academic environment suspicious of religious conviction, I am often full of doubt, and ashamed of the harm done in the name of the gospel. It is in fact often the testimony of metaphors, parables, and beauty that allow me to “believe” (if by belief we mean inspiration, a breath that gives the courage to move into new and unmapped territory like Abram, Sarai and Lot).

The last two verses of the gospel are familiar to the point of cliché. Reading this week, I particularly notice the word “world”. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The story of Nicodemus is a story about shifting perspective. God is not after due diligence, per se. We aren’t called to stay up ‘til 3am working on a paper about “Repetitive Birth as a Mechanism of Salvation.” We are invited to set aside the questions of who’s good and who’s bad, who’s good enough, and who’s slacking and instead, to join the Abrahamic tradition, the tradition in which Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. And to live inspired, continually birthed by the Spirit. Inspired to do what?

Well I want to dip into a reading that isn’t part of our lectionary for today. One of my favorite sayings is from Deuteronomy 26, and it is an example of something God asked the Israelites to do multiple times…remember their identity by telling their story. They are told to institute the festival of first fruits, which will include presenting the tithes of their harvest by announcing to the priest, “My Father was a wandering Aramean and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous.” In other words, God commanded them to learn to tell a good story. What really struck me as I looked at this moment grounded in the story of Abram the wandering Aramean was that the tithed produce was to be given to “the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow.” The Levites, of course are the lineage of priests, and as such are people of privilege and prestige. And here they are put on the same footing as the alien, the orphaned, the widowed. Regardless of how or why, these are people who are not in a position to earn their living on the land or to build up security, and God calls for his offering to be redistributed to them. When I remember that Paul wrote in his epistle to the Hebrews that we have a high Priest in Jesus, this passage begins to resonate for me with Jesus’s teaching that whatever we do for the least among us we do for him.

So who are the least among us? Much has happened in the last week since we were here together, and there are many spectacularly vulnerable people in the news…the people of Japan…of Libya…of Bahrain. And there are the people whose suffering is ghostly in its absence from our news. The people of the Ivory Coast... of Haiti…the one in six Americans unemployed or working part-time while they seek full-time employment. Hydro-fracking recently approved here in Pennsylvania is threatening the clean water supply of millions, and funding for our public universities was just eviscerated this week. We live in Philadelphia, which, according to a 2008 Pew Research Study has the highest rate of incarceration in the country that has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Nationwide, 1 in 9 African American men in my age range (20-34) is behind bars, compared to 1 in 106 white men. We live at the epicenter of the crisis of racially unjust mass incarceration. It’s hard to know where to begin…beyond prayer. **One book I’d recommend for more information on this is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

I’d like to use a graphic that showed up on several of my friends’ facebook pages these past couple weeks as an icon for such prayer (and prayerful action). When I went to hunt down it’s source I was amazed to discover that it apparently originated with a group called the “Christian Left” (http://i.imgur.com/tlG0Y.jpg.) I won’t read the whole chart, but I think a few lines will capture the ethos of this statement. One column listed the cost of various government programs at risk, and the other column listed the value amount of specific tax breaks for the wealthy.
$11.2 b (Early childhood programs)
$11.5 b (per year cost of recent tax-cuts for millionaires’ estates)

$8.9 b (Low income housing programs)
$8.9 b (cost of allowing mortgage interest deduction for vacation homes est. 10-yr cost)

$2.5 b (Low income Home Energy Assistance LIHEAP grants to poor families)
$2.5 b (Tax breaks for oil companies (write offs for drilling and oil well costs FY 2012))

The chart ends by comparing the $44 billion cost of all programs at risk combined with the $42 billion lost by extending one year of Bush tax cuts top tax brackets in FY 2012.

It is not my place to prescribe any particular political position, although it’s clear where my own leanings lie. That notwithstanding, I do think this chart poses a question that we as people of the Abrahamic tradition, justified by grace, cannot afford to ignore. If we live in a society that has abandoned its most vulnerable members to poor schools, poor nutrition, poor legal defense, and poor health care, our experience of God’s grace demands that we act decisively and adventurously for justice.

Nicodemus makes two more appearances in the gospel of John. When Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus speaks up reminding his colleagues that their laws demand a fair hearing for anyone charged with a crime. He is shouted down and heckled as one of “those Galileans.” While his efforts to speak up for justice before the judicial structures of his time was ignored, Nicodemus took civic action impelled by his encounter with Jesus. His were halting steps in a similar direction to twentieth century believers like Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, and Daniel Berrigan.

By the time Jesus was crucified Nicodemus had understood what it meant to be birthed from above. Witnessing the death pains of Jesus our brother he saw what I imagine Julian of Norwich would call the birth pains of Jesus our mother. And he understood that he had an opportunity to draw near to Jesus by joining with Joseph of Arimathea to take Jesus’s body and bury him in a tomb Nicodemus had purchased. What other acts of mercy Nicodemus was born into we don’t know. What we can and must discover, however, are the acts of justice and mercy that Christ has inspired us, who are continuously born anew into his body, and through his spirit, to begin. It is never too late to start figuring out what part of the project of justice we are called to, one halting step at a time. There is always time to begin to be with Jesus, the Word incarnate. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

Tsitsi Jaji earned her Ph.D. (2009) in Comparative Literature from Cornell University with concentrations in African, Caribbean and African-American literature in English, French and Spanish. Her dissertation was entitled Africa in Stereo: Comparative Black Acoustic Imaginaries In Poetry And Film From Ghana, Senegal And South Africa, and she is currently building on this material towards her first book. She has published articles and/or book chapters on Nafissatou Diallo, Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and most recently Keorapetse (Willie) Kgositsile (Comparative Literature Studies 46:2), as well as a handful of poems in obscure but treasured small press journals.

Originally from Zimbabwe, Dr. Jaji has conducted fieldwork throughout Southern and West Africa, with generous support from the TIAA-CREF Ruth Sims Hamilton Fellowship, and has been a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a Society for the Humanities (Cornell) Mellon Graduate Fellow, and a member of the Telluride Association.

Tsitsi considers teaching and mentoring important ways to return the tremendous support she has received along the way.

Her primary research interests continue to be transnational black cultural relations and exchanges, the relationship between music and literature, theorizations of listening, and Africana expressions of feminism. On occasion she revisits a former self as an Oberlin-trained pianist, and she helped herself through university as a church organist and musician and as a jazz pianist and singer; however her primary commitment is to literary studies, which she believes can be transformative by training the imagination and powers of observation and empathy.

DOUG'S WORD OF THE WEEK

hagiolatry / hag-ee-OL-uh-tree, hay-jee- / noun: 1. The worship of saints.
2. Treating someone with undue reverence.

Notes & Etymology: From the Greek hagio- (holy) + -latry (worship). First recorded use: 1808.

Usage: “To quote Constantino: Dr. Jose Rizal will still occupy a good position in our national pantheon even if we discard hagiolatry and subject him to a more mature historical evaluation. "
John Nery; Falling for the American Trap; Philippine Daily Inquirer (Manila, Philippines); Jun 22, 2010 .

Use this word in conversation at least twice in the coming week (just try it!!), and it's yours forever!
For more great words visit Wordsmith.org

DOUG'S WORD OF THE WEEK

pharisaical/ far-uh-SAY-uh-kuhl / adjective: 1. Characterized by hypocritical self-righteousness; putting emphasis on strict observance of rituals unrelated to the spirit or meaning of the ceremony.

Notes & Etymology: After the Pharisees, a Jewish sect during 1 BCE - 1 CE, whose members were noted for strict observance of rites and rituals, and felt superior because of it. The word is derived via Latin and Greek from Aramaic prishayya, plural of prish (separated).

Usage: “Then we have the pettiness and hypocrisy in the loud and pharisaical condemnation emanating from the media and the public. "
Garth George; No Credit to be Found in Card Debacle; The Daily Post (Rotorua, New Zealand); Jun 18, 2010.

Use this word in conversation at least twice in the coming week (just try it!!), and it's yours forever!
For more great words visit Wordsmith.org

DOUG'S WORD OF THE WEEK

ivory tower / EYE-vuh-ree TOU-uhr / noun: 1. A place or state of privileged seclusion, disconnected with practical matters and harsh realities of life.

Notes & Etymology: From a translation of French tour d'ivoire, from tour (tower) + de (of) + ivoire (ivory). The term was first used in the figurative sense in 1837 by literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869). The term is often applied to academia for its supposed preoccupation with lofty intellectual pursuits. While the term in its figurative sense is first attributed to the French critic Sainte-Beuve, it is found in the Song of Solomon 7:4 in a literal sense: "Your neck is like an ivory tower."


Usage: “In a democratic system, the true leaders have to remain constantly in touch with, and reach out to, the people and not remain like a king in an ivory tower. "
C L Manoj; The Agony of the Hereditary Turks; The Economic Times (New Delhi, India); Aug 9, 2010