[Propertalk] Draft sermon for March 21, 2010 on John 12:1-8

[Joe Parrish]

St. John's Episcopal Church
                         61 Broad Street
Elizabeth, New Jersey 07201
              The Fifth Sunday in Lent: (C) 
                        March 21, 2010
DRAFT
A Sermon by the Rev. Joe Parrish
The Holy Gospel according to
                              John 12:1-8
 
     Give us your wisdom, Lord, for we want to show our love to you.  Amen.
 
     Our Diocesan Urban Ministry Committee has set out to try to define what are the guidelines for successful community ministries.  Several churches have some sort of food pantry, soup kitchen, clothes closet, and the like, with volunteers serving the poor in their urban neighborhoods through their churches’ outreach ministries.
     And in a suburban church in another state where I preach during the Christmas holidays, the church secretary gives out gasoline cards to those who come in during the week needing transportation help—it takes a car to survive in many if not most suburban communities.  
     So each church likely has some sort of outreach to its community, and the question of what guidelines to set may be of interest to many.
     We have set one rather firm guideline in order to maximize our impact—that each community ministry project we do needs to have a religious component of some kind, especially one that may work in conjunction with a worship service.  I think we are a bit unique in that effort from what I have observed.  But in a way we ‘take off’ from today’s gospel lesson.  I recall the comment of one of my professors at seminary who was describing a nearby church which had a very large community outreach, that ‘it was probably not necessary as a church since most all of its effort was to feed the poor.  That seemed a bit heartless to me at the time, but he continued to note that the numbers of people who come to worship there was minimal.  Feeding the poor was the one driving force, and fund raising to feed the poor was the primary task of the senior pastor.
     As I reflected on that observation, I decided that we needed to try to have a clear religious component for our outreach programs here.  Each Sunday, as you know, we feed about half of the people who come here for worship, several dozen each week, but we are pretty demanding that they first come for worship if at all possible.  When we have bent that directive much, we have usually gotten into some sort of trouble.  About a mile or so away, another church has a similar feeding program but without any worship component, but due to a knife fight they have to hire a policeman each Sunday to be present during their soup kitchen.  For us, that would take up nearly our entire budget for each Sunday that we use for buying the food we serve.  But our solution has been to require each person to at least make more than a token appearance at one of our worship services, and we now monitor that by giving out food line numbers, since we learned some otherwise would just show up at the moment the food was put out on the serving tables.  One gets a number on a ticket during the afternoon worship service, at least that’s the current process.  
     Now you may think that would cause a lot of resistance, but we have designed our afternoon worship to be contemporary Vespers, using Christian karaoke songs which cost next to nothing to use, and homilies that speak to some very practical concern of folks ‘on the street’ or those nearly at that boundary.  We give instructions how to enter “Operation Warm Heart” which we helped set up to house any homeless person in the city of Elizabeth during the winters, and which also has a year round social services component that helps folks find permanent housing, welfare assistance, and just about anything else they need to survive in the ‘big city’; and for those who have contacts outside the city that would house them, we see that they get a bus to that other location after we confirm that their friend can really accommodate them.  We have sent people to Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and a variety of other places.  A few came back, but most found a way to start a new life in the new location where poverty was not so rampant as in our area.
     But the common comment is that people say they appreciate the worship service more than the food.  I am not sure most churches want the poor to worship in them, for some reason, probably mostly due to classism or perhaps racism.  But for us, we tend to think of anyone on the street as our ‘indigenous’ population.  They may not be American Indians, or any particular cultural group, since poverty knows no bounds, especially today.  We have unemployed math professors, chemists, architects, and so on.  When one’s social network frays or breaks, a person’s needs quickly outdistance their resources.  And just creating a safe atmosphere where people can form and nurture friendships goes a long way towards helping people survive the crises of life.  We have had groups of three people with minimal welfare checks become friends and go together to get an apartment that none could have afforded on their own.  Word of job opportunities spread in this friendly network, and of what are effective job behaviors, such as getting to work on time.  Of course there are those who try to stretch the bounds of Christian charity, but we manage to keep some pretty good bounds on what we can offer and supply.  We have a manageable model, we think.  But the infusion of the Holy Spirit is key to all success in sustainable community outreach we believe, and that comes in rather concentration doses in the form of prayer, preaching, and praise, the cornerstone of serving the poor just as it is for the more well to do.  The Holy Spirit does not have economic bounds, even though the average church often does.  Many who are trying their best to serve the poor often have no spiritual component, no worship service for those coming for help.  And in away, that is a bit heretical I think as we are suddenly putting ourselves in the place where God sits.  It isn’t just we as individuals who are serving, but we serve by the power given to us by the Holy Spirit.
     The alternative, just looking for volunteers who are not church attenders is probably a bit of a trap.  Now we have the high school wanting their students to do community service and even require that for graduation.  So we have high school teachers trying to find ways to help us with our community outreach.  But I still take that as a ‘Holy Spirit opportunity’, since we are now challenged to find ways for the volunteers to be involved in worship as well, what might be termed as ‘backward integration’ in business school terms.  God gets people into church in an amazing variety of ways, sometimes kicking and screaming!  We have to be aware that God is not sending these new people to us just as volunteers but as people we are to help bring into contact with the Most High God and our Savior Jesus Christ.  We have to be careful not to turn people off, as the Holy Spirit has turned them onto the needs of others at a very early age, more so than when I was in high school, at least.
      Mary in our gospel lesson for today did a very extravagant thing by pouring expensive perfumed oil on Jesus’ feet.  It was absolutely excessive in terms of monetary value, but it was absolutely essential in marking the precious three years of ministry of Our Lord.  Without it, humanity would have done almost nothing outwardly to the Son of God in thanksgiving for his life among us here on Planet Earth.  The only other gift of such magnitude was in the gifts of the magi in the birth narrative of the Gospel according to Luke, where the magi offered the Holy Child gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the same sort of myrrh that Mary used in today’s gospel lesson to mark the end of Jesus’ life on Earth, as the magi had used to mark his beginning.
     A few years ago I attended a church leadership conference in Beverly Hills, California, at All Saints Episcopal Church where my friend Carol Anderson was the Rector.  During a break in the presentations, which were excellent, by the way, I watched and slightly facilitated a homeless person get help from that church which does have a good outreach program in the midst of probably the richest neighborhood in America, one block from Rodeo Drive where each house is valued in excess of millions of dollars.  That church’s pastors spoke kindly, gently, and sincerely to the person, learned what he needed--food was at the top of the list, and helped him survive another week in a neighborhood that has more money than just about anywhere else.  With good city bus service, it is easier for many to find help nowadays.
     We here are about a dollar bus ride from Newark Liberty International Airport.  You may have heard my story about the homeless German engineer who got stranded in the airport for five months before he found his way to our church.  He was a deaf mute, but a very highly skilled engineer who had held a very responsible job in Maryland before he retired back to his native country.  When he set out for Switzerland on a vacation journey, he ran out of funds, and was picked up by the Swiss police who found his only means of identification was an American passport, so they deported him to Newark, where of course he knew no one.  He could communicate only by writing on a pad, so we learned his story in that manner; it is very difficult if not impossible for a deaf mute to communicate in our society, when you think about it; the deaf and mute cannot use telephones, and at that time, the internet was not available.  I believe he was a Lutheran, but there are no Lutheran churches near the airport, so I guess “Anglican” which is one of the words on our outside sign (Episcopal/Anglican) would catch one’s attention if they were to pass by on a bus; then there’s also our twelve story tower on Broad Street that might cause some notice!  So he disembarked the bus at our front door and came for help.  His needs were pretty unique—he needed to get back to Germany.  Indeed the cost of that would have fed a month of Sundays’ worth of starving people.  Our little Discretionary Fund is not that well heeled, but I was active in our Red Cross chapter then and was able to negotiate from the Red Cross half of his fare to get him on a very low budget flight to Frankfurt.  I spent quite some time finding an affordable flight and finally found that the Singapore Airlines flights from Newark to Singapore made one stop, yes, you guessed it, in Frankfurt!  So St. John’s was able to cover the rest of the cost of his ticket, and I drove him to JFK Airport where that particular flight departed.  Probably my time and the ticket expense were in the realm of several dozen denarii, I would estimate.  This engineer could easily have been a carpenter, I don’t know for sure, and his life could be tenuous in Germany where few would be able to understand him, but we in our own fumbling way poured a bit of myrrh on his feet to comfort him, in the form of an international plane ticket, and got him finally back home after being stranded for five long months in the Airport.
     Sometimes one has to look very carefully at those we serve, as they may look like engineers or homeless people, but maybe they are indeed the Lord in human guise.
     Amen.  
 



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://stsams.org/pipermail/propertalk_stsams.org/attachments/20100320/e02ba0d3/attachment.htm>