Companion Relationship

I came on this trip to Honduras partly with my own agenda, and partly in response to a call.  With the opportunity to take three months away from my regular duties, I was determined to do something that would not be possible to accomplish in less time, and the first that came to mind was to return to Central America, a part of the world in which I have had life-long interest.  Added to the allure of the region was the possibility of studying Spanish, which has been a hobby for almost ten years, in an immersion experience.  When my wife decided that she would like to come too, and bring our daughter, the plan was set in motion.
Then I began to think about the official companion relationship that exists between my Diocese of Northern California and the Episcopal Diocese of Honduras.  I'd met Bishop Allen of Honduras and the Rev. Olga Barrera when they attended our diocesan convention perhaps six years ago.  I also had heard over the years from my clergy colleagues Ed Howell and Andrea Baker about their experiences there.  When I let my Bishop, Barry Beisner, Andrea McMillin, the Canon to the Ordinary know that I was thinking about maybe working a visit to Honduras into my sabbatical plans they responded very enthusiastically.  They informed me that Bishop Allen was going to be attending our convention again in November 2016, and promised to introduce me to him.
I did indeed get to chat with Bishop Allen at the convention.  I told him I was thinking of going to Honduras during my sabbatical, and gave me a brief summary of the different kinds of work going on in the diocese and his message to me was, essentially, "Yes, do come.  We'll be happy to welcome you; we have a place you can stay in San Pedro Sula, and from there you can go wherever you want."  I felt sufficiently encouraged by our talk to begin planning in earnest to include Honduras in my sabbatical plans.  Taking into account my family's various work, school, and vacation schedules I put some approximate dates on the calendar, and roughed out an itinerary that would include two weeks of Spanish-language school in Guatemala with my family, mixed in with some sight-seeing and vacation, followed by three weeks of solo travel, visiting the Episcopal Diocese of Honduras.

What form that visit ought to take was still unclear to me; I spoke with Andrea Baker, who had been a missionary for a year, assisting Rev. Olga Barrera at the Holy Spirit Bilingual School in Tela, and she encouraged me to spend my three weeks there.  Ed Howell described for me his more free-ranging experience, going all over the country on his motorcycle, staying in the homes of diocesan clergy, or sometimes in hotels.  My confusion about what to do while I was there stemmed in part from not knowing how our diocesan companion relationship between Northern California and Honduras works, or how my visit might help develop it.
In January I received an email from the Bishop of Honduras, forwarded on to the seven regional deans of our diocese by Bishop Beisner, of which I am one.  It included a request that someone represent Northern California at the annual convention of the Diocese of Honduras in late May.  I offered to be that representative, thinking that an introduction to the diocese in that capacity might help better understand the companion relationship, and plan my sabbatical visit accordingly.  (I also liked the idea of doing a little reconnaissance before arriving sight unseen with my wife and daughter.). As it turned out, the convention was also attended by Bishop Greg Brewer of the Diocese of Central Florida.  Central Florida has had a companion relationship with Honduras for over 25 years and a member of the Honduras Commission of the diocese accompanied the bishop.
This
highly developed and institutionalized form of companionship is unusual.  With some time on my hands back in San Pedro after the convention, I did some looking into the websites of other dioceses of the Episcopal Church listed on the Diocese of Honduras website as having a relationship with them.  Of the ten or so listed I found evidence of a diocesan-level commitment on three or four.  What seems more common is that a handful of people within a diocese, often in a single town or congregation will have a continuing commitment to a particular locale, or project in Honduras.
Now that I have been here for two weeks and have had a first-hand look, it appears that this is how it works in Northern California. The relationship established by Olga Barrera, Connie Sanchez, Bishop Allen, and other Hondurans who have visited us, and by Kent McNair, Ed Howell, Andrea Baker, and
others who have visited them, has resulted most recently in a particular connection to Holy Spirit Bilingual School in Tela.

First day of classes, Holy Spirit, Tela

And in the week that spent there I was pleased to discover that our retionship ishaving a real impact.  There is tangible evidence of it everywhere, from the beautiful liturgical vestments given be St. Barnabas, Mt. Shasta, to the security camera system from Aa Saints, Redding, and from the remodeled school library, easily the largest and best-equipped of any I have seen on my tour, supported by the Milennium Development Goals Fund of the Diocese of Northern California and Faith Church, Cameron Park.  This same partnership has produced a beautiful new art room on the school campus.

New art classroom

A group from Faith Church went to Tela in June to lead a vacation bible school, and their rector, Rev. Sean Cox, was so impressd with the students from Holy Spirit who assisted with the program that he is inviting some of them to Cameron Park tnext summer to help lead a bilingual VBS there.  Holy Spirit is the beneficiary of other companion relationships as well.  A St. John's in Alabama has been sending medical mission teams to Tela for fifteen years and there gear has a permanent storage space in the shower stall in the school director's office bathroom.  St. Michael and All Angels, in the Diocese of Dallas helped build the school cafeteria.  The needs in Honduras are many, and I am excited to see how the growing relationship of mutual-assistance with Faith, Cameron Park will impact the mission of Holy Spirit in Tela. At the same time, I wonder how much more of an impact this companion relationship could have ifmore connections o like this were to develop.  How would it be congregations across our diocese were partnering with a bilingual school, acongrgation, or a social service project of the Diocese of Honduras, so our companionship became truly diocesan in scope?  How might our Trinity Cathedral, for instance, benefit from a relationship with the cathedral El Buen Pastor in San Pedro Sula, for example, and vice versa, of course.  How might an expanded relationship, and the personal exchanges and transformationds it would entail, empower the development of bilingual and multiculfural ministries to Latinos/-as in our  diocese, something the Board of Trustees has recognized as a strategic priority?

Now that I have been here, I can say that, whatever form it ultimately takes, our companion
relationship with Honduras will grow by the proliferation of direct contacts between the people of our two dioceses.  I believe that it is by encouraging these contacts, through exchanges such as the one that Faith Church is planning, short- and long-term mission trips, and the like, that  relationships will be forged that grow into alliances , with a transformative impact in Honduras and Northwrn California.  A further benefit of expanding our involvement in Honduras would be the opportunity to work in partnership with mission-minded Episcopalians from other dioceses,many of whicom represent a more "conservative" and "evangelical" strain wthin the Anglican Communion.  There is important work of reconciliation for us to do there, which will contribute to the spiritual growth of all concerned.

The way to freedom

Isaiah 65:17-25
Canticle 9
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19

On the morning of Wednesday, November 5, 1980, I met with a half-dozen of my friends outside our high school before first-period band.  We passed around black strips of cloth and safety pins and helped each other fasten them around our upper arms, as signs of mourning and protest.   Because the night before our hopes had been dashed, our hopes to come of age in a world moving toward peace, equality, and justice.  A right-wing extremist had been elected President of the United States.   

Over the next several months, I wrote a paper for my honors U.S. History course about the prospects for dictatorship in our country.  The first part was a summary of a classic work on the rise of Fascism, Escape from Freedom, by Erich Fromm.  Fromm, a psychoanalyst, was not interested in political history so much as in social psychology.  He proposed that human beings have an innate and existential need for freedom, a kind of spontaneous solidarity with others in love and work, not on the basis of primal ties of family and race and tradition, but as creative individuals.  But, Fromm argued, modern social and economic conditions sometimes frustrate and prevent individuality from developing in this way.  At the same time, these conditions tear apart the primal bonds that used to make us psychologically secure.  Hanging suspended in the void, between stunted individuality and the loss of primal ties, people find freedom too much to bear.  So they give it away to an authoritarian figure.  Relieved of the burden of freedom, they experience it vicariously through the strongman, the one who alone is magnificently free to say the unthinkable, and do the unspeakable.

My paper continued with a historical account of populist demagogues in the United States during the period of the Great Depression, and then went on to a survey of contemporary society.  I described economic decline and the resulting alienation and resentment, in the small towns and the industrial working-class.  I noted the resurgence of nationalism and militarism, the manipulation of public opinion through misinformation and propaganda, and the rise of a reactionary political movement.  And I concluded my paper, not with a prediction, but with a warning, of a situation taking shape that could lead to the end of our democracy. 

After last Tuesday night more people than ever are feeling that this is a real possibility.  And it is not hard to see why.  Even as he calls for national unity, the President-elect has yet to pledge explicitly that he will defend the constitutional rights of the vulnerable groups he threatened and bullied during his campaign.  He has not even condemned the wave of celebratory hate crimes that has followed his election.   But as troubling as this is, I would urge us not to misunderstand.  The majority of voters, who cast ballots for Trump did not do so because they are more racist or misogynistic than the rest of us.  They are not longing for a Fascist dictatorship.  They disliked the same aspects of his message and his personality as others did. 

But they were willing to hold their noses and vote for him because they are desperate for social and economic change.  They have feel humiliated and afraid because of the long, relentless withering of their future prospects and their communities while, as Americans, they believe it is their birthright to be free.  Theirs was not a partisan decision--millions of them would have been happier to vote for Bernie Sanders.  But, given the choice they had, Trump was the more revolutionary option.  For all the symbolic significance of her sex, Clinton was the candidate of more of the same.  And here we have to be completely honest.  Under the leadership of the Clintons and Obama some of the most troubling signs of our country’s drift toward totalitarian rule—the fusion of government and corporate power, the expansion of state secrecy and mass surveillance, the continuation of a state of endless war, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, the militarization of the police, and the criminalization of the poor—became the policy of the Democratic Party.

Of course, they are Republican policy too, and this is where Trump’s less rabid supporters are deceived.  The new President will quickly learn the limits our Constitution places on his power.  And even if he truly desires, which I suppose he might, to somehow turn back the clock on neoliberal globalization, the leaders of his party in the Congress do not.  Unlike him, they have a legislative record, which shows how slavishly they do the bidding of the corporate elite.  And this raises the prospect of a truly precarious moment that is still to come—now that Sanders and Trump have raised the flag of revolution, what happens in the vast sections of our country sinking into the red, when folks realize that they’ve been fooled again? 

Jesus of Nazareth lived in a time of seething popular unrest, of repeated cycles of revolutionary violence, and even more violent reprisals and repression.  And he wasn’t especially optimistic about the future of his nation.  As he presciently said, “the days will come when not a stone will be left upon a stone.”  But under these conditions, for a brief time, Jesus carried out a public campaign; a campaign to show the world for all time what it looks like when the Spirit of God has set someone completely free.   And because Jesus was free--of hate and fear, of greed and self-pity, of the desire to dominate or submit, free of misgivings about the goodness and compassion and wisdom of God, and free of illusions about human beings, he was the most dangerous man alive. 

Jesus was hated and feared by the authorities.  And for good reason, because the people who became Jesus’ disciples, who believed what he said and followed him to hear more, began to see that they also could be free.  They also could come alive with the Spirit of God, and become new people, free and spontaneous individual agents of God’s new creation of the world.   It wasn’t going to be easy.  It’s never easy to let go of old identities, old ties to family and tribe, and old religious certainties.  It’s not easy to give up on social climbing, on grasping after wealth and prestige, and the other things that make us feel superior to others.  It’s not easy to write off the debts we think that we are owed.   

It is not easy to have faith that we are sons and daughters of God, who provides for our every need, and will not allow one hair of our head to perish.  It is not easy to trust that we are brothers and sisters, meant to live together in repentance, forgiveness, and mutual love.  It’s not easy to share all things in common, and to give equal respect, and equal value, to our very different talents, and backgrounds, and needs.  No wonder so many people didn’t get it.  No wonder they preferred to think that following Jesus meant championing a strongman who would make Israel great again. 

But instead Jesus died.  He died to pay the cost of freedom for others, which is what the word “redemption” means.  He rose again and sent his disciples in his Spirit, to continue his public campaign of demonstrating what freedom is.  As the decades went on, and the political violence went from bad to worse, the Jesus movement refused to take sides in it, and for that they were despised by everyone.  They rejected the demand to honor earthly rulers in the place of God, and for this they were hunted.  But it’s not like they didn’t have political power—in a strange and unprecedented way, they did.   It came from a promise that Jesus had made to his disciples not long before he died: the promise that, even surrounded by enemies, even standing, accused, before kings and governors, they would not be alone: “I will give you words,” said Jesus, “and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.”  They might be in chains on their way to execution, but speaking Christ’s words, they would have power.  They would be free.  

I wish you all could have been with me in Sacramento last weekend at our church Convention when the youth of our Diocese got up to speak.   Their adult and college-age leaders went first, but then, one after the other, the fourteen and fifteen-year olds came up to the mike.  They were hesitant at first, but seemed to draw confidence from each other, as they gave their testimony.  They had gone on pilgrimage last summer, some to South Africa, others to Tule Lake here in Northern California, and in a vast hall, in front of hundreds of their elders, they spoke passionately and persuasively of what they had seen and heard and learned. 

They bore witness to the scars left on bodies and communities, and on the land, by violence and injustice.  They testified to the persistence of pain, and the suffocation of denial, and of the truth-telling and acknowledgment of wrong that is the first step toward forgiveness.  They spoke of the new life that flows from reconciliation.  They spoke of being changed, of wanting to change, of wanting to make change happen.  And believe it or not, they spoke of the church--of how much it meant to them to be encouraged by their church to explore and discover the Gospel as the healing power of the Spirit in the world, the power to create community, and to be free.  

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Excluded by wealth

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

I got grants and loans to help my parents pay for the elite private college I went to.  But I had to earn the money for my personal expenses by working at a campus job.  In the public schools I’d attended in Indiana and Vermont, my family’s income was somewhere in the upper half of the broad tier of those of us who knew we weren’t poor, but weren’t rich, either.  Which included almost everyone I knew.   But when I got to college I grasped for the first time that there are some people who are rich.  Not rich like we are all in this country relative to peasants in the underdeveloped world, but really rich.  Like, children of middle-eastern despots or Wall Street hedge-fund managers kind of rich.   And I found being in the same world as them to be intimidating.  I was lucky, in that I was spared the humiliation of wearing a hairnet and slinging hash in the dining hall.  My job was in the library, re-shelving books.  And it’s funny to me now to think back on the embarrassment I felt wheeling my book cart past my fellow-students as if there were something shameful about being on a scholarship. 

But one Saturday evening in my sophomore year, a friend invited me to party with a friend of his in the next dorm over from mine.  This friend of a friend was someone every on our small campus recognized, because his last name was on, not one building on campus, but an entire quadrangle of science classrooms, and laboratories, and faculty offices.  And after I’d been hanging out for a while, feeling kind of awkward, I asked our host if I could play a record from his collection.  (Side note here--I’ll never forget how Bob Marley’s Babylon by Bus album sounded on his unbelievably awesome stereo).   And in his eager response to my request, I perceived something that had not occurred to me before.  Which was that he was deeply lonely and almost pitiably eager to be liked.  In that moment I saw that his privilege was an isolation cell, keeping him from ever knowing the freedom of being just an ordinary guy.  

The fellow named Zacchaeus who features in today’s Gospel lesson is not the only one in Jericho eager to see Jesus.  The crowd that lines the road through the town is so dense that a little guy like Zacchaeus can’t see over it.  The people in the crowd know who Zacchaeus is—everyone does—and if he had any friends among them, they might have moved aside a little and let him push his way through to the front.  But they all detest him, this rich tax collector, who hardly needs another privilege granted him.  So they stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, with their backs to Zacchaeus, while he jumps behind them, trying to get a glimpse of the man everyone’s talking about. 

But Zacchaeus is nothing if not resourceful.  He runs through the back alleys, to get ahead of the parade, and clambers up a sycamore tree to get an obstructed view.  And when Jesus gets there he looks up and greets Zacchaeus as if seeing an old friend.  “Hurry down from there, Zacchaeus.  I need to stay at your house tonight.”  And with touching eagerness, Zacchaeus scrambles down from his perch, and welcomes Jesus to be his guest.

Now where the point in the story where we learn that Zacchaeus is driven to try to see Jesus by something more than idle curiosity.  And maybe this is only just dawning on Zacchaeus, too.  But when Jesus recognizes him and calls him down out of the sycamore tree, and tells him he is worthy to take Jesus under his roof and be his host, Zacchaeus suddenly understands what he was really looking for— to put things right in his life.  He sees what he has to do to be restored to wholeness, and he finds the resolve to do it.  “I will give half my possessions to the poor, Lord, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay it back four times over.” 

Now Jesus confirms that Zacchaeus has got it right.  He says it there, in the street of Jericho, in front of the whole crowd, so everyone can understand, that no matter what kind of person Zacchaeus has been in the past, no matter how his wealth, and his manner of getting it, have alienated him from them, today Zacchaeus belongs again to the community.  He is once again truly what he has always been in his essence, a member of the family of Abraham.   Because today he sets out on a new path, the path that Jesus call everyone to follow, no matter their history, or station in life, the path of integrity, and generosity, and compassion.         

This is the story of the call of a disciple, the final such story in the Gospel of Luke, and Luke’s is the only Gospel that includes it.  Mark and Matthew tell of a different encounter that Jesus had in Jericho, which also turned into a call to discipleship.  And Luke tells that story, too, right before the one about Zacchaeus.  It is the story of a fellow who also wants to see Jesus but can’t, not because he is short, but because he is blind.  Like Zacchaeus, he is marginalized, kept at the back of the crowd because he cannot see.  But he cries out “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” and the more those in front of him tell him to shut up, the more he shouts it out.  And as with Zacchaeus, Jesus stops, for the one that others tried to exclude; he asks the blind man “What do you want me to do for you?” and he asks to receive his sight.  Jesus tells that his faith has saved him, and immediately he is able to see, and goes after Jesus, praising God.

In one sense the rich tax collector could not be more different from the blind beggar by the roadside.  But by adding in the Zacchaeus story, Luke sets up a parallel which seems to suggest that they are really much the same.   They share the same determination to make a connection with Jesus in spite of the disapproval of the crowd.  In both cases, Jesus takes notice of them, and initiates a conversation.  In both cases, the result is healing and transformation.  And yet the differences are also significant.  The beggar asks for and receives a gift from Jesus, the physical restoration of his sight.   While for Zacchaeus the restoration is social and moral, and it begins with giving Jesus what he asked for—the hospitality of his house.  The one man goes off to follow Jesus, on the final miles of the journey to Jerusalem, but Zacchaeus is to stay put and set things right with the folks in Jericho.  

It might help us understand what Luke was trying to say here if we consider that this is not the only place in his gospel where wealth is a wedge dividing people from each other—think of the rich man who feasts while Lazarus lies starves at his gate, or the younger brother who squanders his inheritance, and is too ashamed to go home.  The strange parable of the dishonest steward is a story, only found in Luke, in which ill-gotten wealth, like that of Zacchaeus, becomes a means of reconciliation.  All of which suggests that Luke was wrestling with a problem that wasn’t much of an issue for Matthew and Mark, namely how to bring people of unequal economic status together in the same community. 

Luke’s says nothing to soften the warnings we hear in the other Gospels against making an idol of wealth.  And, if anything, he makes an even stronger case for what modern theologians have called God’s “preferential option for the poor.”  But when Jesus calls Zacchaeus to come down from his high place, and join the rest of us, he adds nuance to this picture, a nuance sometimes missing from our contemporary debates about inequality.  We see a growing awareness nowadays of how destructive our grossly unequal distribution of wealth is to the poor, and even to the endangered middle-class, how it is corrupting our public institutions, and eroding social solidarity.   But the gospel reminds that it hurts the rich, too, who in their own way are excluded from the unity God wants us to share.  Like people marginalized by disability or poverty, or ethnic or sexual prejudice, they need a way to be reconciled and restored to communion.  They are called to a path of discipleship.  And the example of Zacchaeus provides it, a path that, like the struggle of the oppressed for liberation, requires courage and sacrifice.  It begins with redistribution and reparations.