Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Groaning (Proper 11, Year A, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith)



We humans groan. It is part of what makes us human. It can be when the evil Dodgers score a home run off of Tim Lincecum. We groan.

There are deeper groanings: We get bad results from the lab tests, we lose a job or a relationship, we fall back into an addiction. There was another fatal shooting yesterday morning one block from this church. In such moments, we groan. How can we not?

Our world groans: 298 people in a Malaysian jet shot down from the sky this week, more people killed in Gaza in a war that seems endless, 52,000 unaccompanied children fleeing Central America, many of them traumatized, arriving at our border. About this last tragedy, even the pope lamented and groaned from his own heart.

How can we not groan in such moments? It is the human thing to do.

There are different understandings of this groaning we do. Pop culture offers a few understandings--we capture these understandings in bumper sticker phrases: “Life sucks” and “[BLEEP] happens”. These are some of the more glib--and not very hopeful--understandings our culture offers us for why we groan.

Paul has another take on our groaning, he uses another metaphor:
We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
Did you catch his metaphor, his understanding of what this groaning of ours is all about? “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains…”

Something is being born, a new creation, a fuller and deeper life. And our groanings, from the personal losses we go through to the death of a child in Gaza--all our groanings are in some way part of these labor pains, a necessary and inevitable part of bringing this new creation, this new life to birth. For Paul, when we groan, it doesn’t mean that life sucks. No, it means we are in labor.

Scripture uses other metaphors to make sense of our groaning. You remember the story of when Peter realizes he has just denied Jesus for the third time, a moment of profound betrayal and abject moral failure. In that moment of recognition, he sobs profusely. He groans.

But note that, as he is hunched over in tears, as he groans, a rooster is crowing. That very moment when he recognizes and feels the shame and sadness of his own abject failure is also the dawn of a new day. A rooster is crowing. A new day is being born.

Groaning. It is labor pains; it is the darkest hour of the night giving way to the dawn. For us resurrection people, our groaning is a necessary and inevitable phase in a story that ends in joy. To paraphrase another line from Paul, we do not groan as people who have no hope--which is to say that we do groan--as people who do have hope, like a mother in labor.

Today I have some groaning of my own to do. I spent part of this week in El Paso, Texas where much of the current crisis of the children at the border is being played out. This is a story about what groaning in labor feels like.

Let me start a few days before I went to El Paso, when I learned about Gilberto Ramos, the Guatemalan teenager found dead in the desert just a short distance from the Texas border. Like many teenage boys from the poorer regions of Central America, he had left his mountain village to come to the United States to make money. His mother had epilepsy; he wanted to help pay her medical bills.

When they searched Gilberto’s body, they found inscribed under his belt buckle the phone number of his older brother waiting for him in Chicago. Around his neck they found the rosary his mother had given him when she hugged him goodbye in Guatemala.

This story haunted me because my own son, one year younger than Gilberto, was born not far from him, in the mountains of Guatemala, in a house like his with a dirt floor, no running water, and a corrugated metal roof. It was not hard to imagine that things could have been different, that this could have been my kid.

So when I was invited by the PICO National Network to accompany a national group of Latino clergy to the El Paso detention center, how could I say no?

It is to this detention center, known as Station 1, that record-breaking numbers of captured immigrants, most of them children, are flown from the Rio Grande Valley to be medically examined and have their basic data collected. From there they are bused to various centers to begin deportation proceedings.1

For clergy, the purpose of the visit was to provide any pastoral support we could to these no-doubt exhausted and likely traumatized moms and their kids. We also wanted to get a clearer picture of how communities like ours can prepare to receive folks like them should they arrive at our doorsteps in coming days.

After several weeks of conversation with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we finally arrived at the center to some unexpected news: By some coincidence, the families had just been processed and removed from the center. We would not have the chance to visit them after all. Instead, we would be given a public relations tour by congenial officers of a squeaky clean facility devoid of any immigrants, no photos allowed.

The officers showed us cupboards with newly purchased clothing and disposable diapers and toiletries, the garage where the buses arrive with incoming detainees, the tables where immigrants are fingerprinted and photographed and their data collected, the holding cells in which they spend most of their time, the makeshift cots they sleep on, and the medical examining area where doctors regularly visit. We heard about the challenges in moving the recent influx of immigrants through the many bureaucratic hoops within a mandated 72-hour timeframe. (Just since May 2014, this facility alone has processed 2700 immigrant families.)

Would the immigrants have had their own perspective on what they experienced in this center? We may never know.

To escort us on this public relations tour, DHS sent the Rev. David Myers, the Department’s liaison for faith-based and neighborhood partnerships. Myers said he understood our frustration, both with the Immigration system and with our not being able to visit the families. Unfortunately, he could not assure us that the kids and their families would be given a fair chance to receive asylum in this country.

In the conversations prior to our visit, NALEC leaders had suggested to DHS that, instead of visiting the El Paso center, we take the bus north to the newly opened detention center in Artesia, New Mexico. No, they had been told, there would be no families there either, and besides, that center was so new staff wouldn’t be up-to-speed to receive us.

As we later learned from two sources, this was not true. In fact, at the very moment we were getting our PR tour in El Paso, the Artesia center was filled with 400 women and children. And that center had just received a delegation from DHS, including Secretary Jeh Johnson himself who chose his visit there to announce the newly opened facility’s real purpose: “This facility ... represents proof that indeed we will send people back.”

Artesia, a small town with not nearly enough lawyers to help the detainees with their cases, was already becoming the site of what one immigrant rights veteran called “a deportation mill.” It was not just clergy, but also other professionals and the media who were being shut out.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the Department’s lack of transparency. Back home in San Francisco immigrants had told me of family members being virtually “disappeared” in immigration detention centers, sometimes for months. More recently, immigrants have told me about the hilieras, the “ice boxes” that are now getting media attention. In these ice boxes they were held, sometimes for days, in very cold temperatures with their fingers and lips turning blue, their skin cracking from the cold. To date, no independent party has had sufficient access to the detention centers to verify these stories. Some have described it as a blackout.
We left the detention center and headed to Annunciation House. This Catholic refuge for immigrants has made El Paso a welcome alternative to other cities on the front lines of the border crisis.

Because of the lack of facilities for holding families in deportation proceedings, immigration officials recently began releasing them on their own recognizance with a notice to appear at a later date. But then, in cities like Tucson and Phoenix, they reportedly left those families stranded at a local bus station. Indigenous immigrants who could speak neither Spanish nor English were especially lost.2

But in El Paso things turned out differently. At the beginning of the surge, instead of simply dropping newly released families at the bus station, the El Paso Border Patrol wisely asked Annunciation House for help.

Annunciation House now teems with young mothers watching their lively children play games, read, and do art projects. They have good meals and showers and cots in a comfortable and clean temporary shelter.

Annunciation’s director, Ruben Garcia, relayed a few stories he’s heard from the recent guests. He mentioned the sign posted on an elementary school telling the teachers that unless they handed over their annual bonus checks to the local gang, one child would disappear each day. And there was the Honduran mom who told him “In the last 10 days, they’ve killed ten children in my barrio. The youngest was eight years old. How can we live this way?”

Garcia added that, because many families in these dangerous situations have themselves received no direct threats from the gangs, they do not legally qualify for asylum in the U.S. Immigration simply deports them back to the dangerous situations they fled.

At the end of the day, at a spirited worship service at a large Latino church, one of the Evangelical clergy preached about Esther, the Jewish queen willing to risk her own secure position, even her life, to rescue her people. Then, after praying for Gilberto and other victims of this crisis, this preacher paraphrased an ancient Rabbi, posing a question to the gathering: “If not now, when? If not you, who?”

With these words he invited us to keep breathing, keep bearing down, keep pushing, keep groaning as we must. This, too, is part of a new creation being born, a world in which children fleeing for their lives will not be turned away, will find shelter and welcome.

And so today, we, along with these children and their families, we groan.

Monday, July 7, 2014

Sabbath Rest; Proper 9, Year A; July 6, 2014; by the Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith



(On Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30)

This is a great gospel reading for a lazy summer morning in a long weekend. It talks about rest. ”Come to me, all who are labored and heavily burdened,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.”

It’s a special kind of rest he’s inviting us into here. Not simply a matter of extra time off from work, but sabbath rest. This is the rest of the seventh day when God, like a good Jewish carpenter, saw that all was finished, all was good, and he rested. This is the sabbath rest Jesus is inviting us into. It is something we can enjoy now even as it is something we anticipate.

Because creation is a work in progress. As Jesus once said, “My father keeps on working, and so do I.”  Creation is not yet finished, God is still working to bring us and all of creation to completion.

Our spiritual ancestors invited us into a certain rhythm of life: to spend one day each week both enjoying what God has already made and anticipating how it will be when this amazing world is complete, when we are complete:

No more worry or pain or tears
no more hunger or violence
no one left out or homeless.

On the sabbath, we are to enter with our imaginations into how this new world will be, how it will look and feel when it is complete.

We Christians enter this sabbath rest when we gather at this table for the eucharist where everyone has a place, everyone is fed. Here we remind ourselves and the world around us of what the world can be. Here, to use Gandhi’s words, we can be the change we hope to see in the world, the change we anticipate when creation is complete.

This sabbath eucharist s a subversive act, because it overturns the order of things as we know them. It sets our agenda for the rest of the week.

If in the fullness of God’s creation there will be no more violence, no more moms and dad mourning the loss of their kids, then we let the weapons fall from our hands now and work for peace.
If in that new day there will be no more tears or sadness or death, then we wipe the tears from each other’s eyes now.
If in that sabbath rest, no one will go hungry and no one will be left out because of who they are, then we reach out our hands in welcome now.

The future sabbath that we look forward to sets the agenda for how we live now.

But even as it sets our agenda, this sabbath gathering for eucharist also invites us to rest, to chill, lighten up, loosen our jaws, relax our grasps.

For some of us, this invitation into sabbath rest can be a challenge.

Because we are responsible people who know that our decisions about how we spend our time counts. We have to carefully weigh what we do. Simply trusting that everything will come out alright can be an abdication of our responsibility. This is, of course, an obvious truth.

But only a half truth. Life at its deepest level is not only a conscious project but also an unsolicited gift.

The task of healing--both ourselves and those we love--means not simply trying with all our might to employ our best skills and strategies. Healing is first and foremost the work of God, a gift from the Creator, something we open ourselves to receive.
Bringing about a more just society--from immigration reform to an end to the violence and the devastation of the planet--this, too, is not simply a matter of grit and endurance. We can take ourselves and all our noble work so seriously. But a just society is ultimately a gift from God, something God does. As one bishop once wrote:
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master
builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
This is the paradox in which we live: struggling with all our might for healing in our lives and in our world, working to build our community, to bring about justice…

...while at the same time chilling, relaxing our grasp, knowing that it is all God’s work. All is grace, all is God’s gift.

Some philosophers call this an existential tension, a paradox at the center of being human. As one theologian writes, We are like dancers who in a single moment must kick the world away from us with an airy grace, and yet, in that very same moment, press it to our hearts. A paradox at the center of our very human lives.

Sabbath rest: something we enjoy even now, something we strive with all our energy to bring about for us and for all people, something we know to be our future, something that is, ultimately, a gift of the Creator.

It’s summer, and I hope in these lazy days we’re all getting a taste now and then of this sabbath rest, time to chill with family and friends, take a hike on the beach, have an extra beer--that is, if you haven’t had two or three already.

Simply allowing life to carry us without worry or strain on our part.

The poet D. H. Lawrence, obviously a cat person, seemed to understand something about this sabbath rest into which Jesus invites us. Let me close with one of his poems:

All that matters is to be at one with the living God
To be a creature in the house of the God of Life.

Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the
mistress
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.
Sleeping on the hearth of the living world,
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of a master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.

Maybe Jesus’ invitation to sabbath rest means learning the lessons of our cats.