On
Thursday I went to the home of a neighbor here in Petaluma, where I’d been
invited for lunch. A smiling woman met
me at the door and showed me into her beautiful home which was painted in warm primary
colors and decorated with Mexican folk art.
There were two other people already there, and two soon more soon arrived. They were a couple of young community
organizers from Santa Rosa, and a fellow I’d met before from the Unitarian
Universalists, a folks from St. Vincent’s Catholic parish, and me, and we ate
squash soup and bread and salad, and talked about the critical shortage of
affordable housing in Petaluma, and what our faith communities might come
together to do.
You
don’t have to look outside of this room to find persons of low- or moderate-income
who are at the mercy of rising rents and vacancy rates that are vanishingly low. Several of our members have already had to
move, some of them out of Petaluma, because a home was sold out from under them
and the new owner jacked up the rent, or because they wanted to buy a house and
found that they could not afford to do so in their home town. And I get regular calls in the parish office from
people asking for help, who’d been just scraping by until a lay-off, or an
illness, or a car crash, brought them to the brink of homelessness.
So this
is a problem that concerns me professionally and pastorally, but also
personally. It wounds my conscience. So much insecurity about something as basic
as having a home can’t be what God intends for her people, and something needs
to be done. And yet I didn’t go to that
meeting on Thursday feeling certain that I know what that “something” is. Which I found to be a great relief. So often in my daily work I feel like I’m the
one who’s expected to know what we’re all supposed to do. But at this meeting I could sit back and
listen to the conversation and learn about who these people were, and what they’re
passionate about, and what they see happening in Petaluma, and what they’d like
to see.
Which
was kind of the same thing we were talking about doing in the meeting, only on
a wider scale. As I understand it, what
was being proposed was to select a couple of precincts in town where there are
a high density of renters, and voter turnout is low. And the participating churches would divide
up those neighborhoods and send out volunteers in pairs, each with at least one
Spanish and English bilingual member, to go door to door. And affordable housing might be a good place
to start a conversation, one that might come around in time to the upcoming
election and whether folks were eligible and planning to vote. But the focus wouldn’t be to convince them to
adopt an opinion, or to promote a candidate or political party. It would be to ask questions and to listen,
to what is on the minds of our neighbors.
It would be to build relationships of common interest and concern.
But
when we got to the end of our meeting on Thursday, and it came time to plan the
next one, I had to say that I couldn’t commit to being there. With everything else I’m already engaged, the
Russian River Deanery, and the College for Congregational Development, the
Living Legacy Storytelling Events, the Interfaith Sustainable Food
Collaborative and the Interfaith Springtime Fellowship gathering that’s coming
up on Trinity Sunday, I just don’t have the “bandwidth”, as they say, to be out
in front of an effort like this, so if St. John’s is going to get involved it
will depend on other folks in the congregation.
If you’re interested, speak to me later.
Of
course it’s likely you don’t have the extra time and energy either. We still have our hands full developing our
capacities in basic areas of congregational life, like liturgy and music, and inviting
and welcoming newcomers, and stewardship of our buildings and grounds, and teaching
our tradition to the children. But I
like the idea of doing this voter
engagement. I’m intrigued by the
possibility of receiving training from experienced community organizers, and
joining in the effort with other congregations in a discrete project with a set
timeline and a modest goal. I like to
think that within with this supportive context some of us could take a step
toward acquiring new skills and confidence in the art of engaging strangers in
conversation, and listening for common ground, of building relationships across
the barriers of culture and language, and religion and class.
And it’s
fun to imagine that one day I’ll the time for this kind of thing. It’s not that what we’re already doing isn’t
worthwhile. As I left that meeting on
Thursday, our host told me that she’d attended labyrinth walks at our church
and said how much she loves what we’re doing at St. John’s. But as I drove away I reflected on how good
it had been to have a brief break from doing the work of the church, to be able
to break out briefly of my ceaseless thinking and working and praying only about
what I can do to strengthen this congregation, and care for its members, to
spend an hour as one citizen among other citizens talking about the welfare of
the place where we all live—it was refreshing, and it made me wish for more.
Because
even as we are making a mighty effort to rebuild the internal fabric of this
church community, powerful economic, technological, and ideological forces are
tearing the wider community around us apart.
Our national politics display, to a frightening degree, the breakdown of
civility and mutual respect, or any pretense of concern for the common good; but
the same thing is happening on the local scale as well. The eviction of elderly renters is a symptom
of the same progressive, potentially terminal disease. And it is not only the poor and marginal who are
suffering. As Mother Teresa of Kolkata
said, forty years ago, in a famous interview:
“You,
in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness.
They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical
sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than
money, yet they don't know what it is. What
they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”
And
I think we all know that when we are estranged from each other, when we are
trapped in structures of social interaction that pit us against each other and
make us vie competitively for our own narrow self-interest or that of our
group, we aren’t really free in relation to God. When Mary of Bethany takes a pound of perfume
worth a working man’s pay for a year and anoints Jesus with it, she is
acknowledging the supreme value of that living relationship. Judas complains about the waste and indulgence,
but Jesus affirms the gesture that Mary has made. When he says, “you always have the poor with
you, but you do not always have me,” he is not saying to be indifferent to the
plight of the less fortunate, or fatalistic about their prospects for
relief. He is pointing to the essential work
that he has come to do, of breaking down the barriers we put between ourselves
and each other, which are really barriers to God. He is saying that without this work, we are
all in poverty, a poverty that is absolute.
The
energy of Jesus’ work is reconciling love.
Without it, we are like Judas, whose appeal on behalf of the poor is
just another self-serving scheme. With it, we dare hope that God can open every prison
of separation that keeps us bound, even the prison of death. Mary of Bethany has seen Jesus free her
brother Lazarus from that prison, for love of her family, and she repays him her
own extravagant gesture of love. The
fragrance of her outpouring fills whole house.
But
she is, as Jesus says, anointing him for his burial. She pours her perfume on his feet, the feet
that will carry him away from her and the intimate circle of her family home, away
to complete the work he came to do. They
will carry him into the city, to the temple in the midst of the Passover
crowds. They will carry him to the place
of public execution, and there the soldiers will drive a spike through the feet
that Mary caressed with her hair. Because the reconciling love of God isn’t for
Jesus’ particular friends. It isn’t for
the rich, and it isn’t for the poor, for sinners or for the righteous. It’s for us all.
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