Good morning! It’s a pleasure to be with you today. Many thanks to Skip and to Peter for giving me this opportunity to preach and to thank you for your support. Last summer, you helped to make the B-SAFE program happen at Holy Spirit in Mattapan, one of our six sites. It’s only through the participation and support of our partner churches that we’re able to make this program possible for so many young people across the city of Boston and in Chelsea. Thank you for being willing to share in this ministry with us. We’re grateful that you’ve already signed up for a week at Holy Spirit again this summer.
In January, I travelled with millions of others to Washington, DC to witness the inauguration of our new president. I went with my dad, an Obama supporter from early on, who wanted to be there to see the inauguration in person. And I must say that it was inspiring to experience an event which most of us never imagined was possible: a Black man becoming President of the United States. As Barack Obama noted in his address, his father could not have been served lunch in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. as a young man, and now he was becoming our nation’s leader. A similar sentiment was expressed over and over again last Saturday as many of us from across the Diocese gathered to observe the twentieth anniversary of the consecration of Barbara Harris, the first woman bishop in the Anglican Comunion. Even when the first women were ordained priests in Philadelphia in 1974, the idea of a woman bishop seemed out of reach.
These events, the fulfillment of dreams, the coming to fruition of long and deeply held hopes, call to mind God’s promise to Abraham, as we heard in the first reading this morning. Abraham is an old man – ninety-nine years old! His elderly wife was never able to have children. And then, God comes to Abraham, saying, “This is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you.” (Gen. 17:1-7,15-16). This is an outrageous statement! It’s absurd! It’s outlandish – beyond the limits of possibility. Sort of like the idea of a Black president, or a woman bishop, even a woman Presiding Bishop would have been not so many years ago. But as the angel said to Mary, the Mother of our Lord, as she gave voice to the impossibility of what God was saying to her, “Nothing will be impossible with God.” (Lk. 1:37).
The outlandishness continues in our reading from the Gospel this morning, expressed by our hapless friend, Peter. Jesus has just named him the rock on which the Church will be built, and that in itself must have seemed unlikely enough to Peter. What kind of church could be built on the rock of a poor fisherman from Galilee? But now Jesus goes a step too far. He begins to teach them – and he speaks to them words that are outrageous: “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days he will rise again.” (Mk. 8:31). It’s hard to know which part of this statement would have offended Peter’s sensibilities most. Was it the rejection? The suffering? The being killed? The Messiah was not supposed to suffer or be rejected or be killed. Or maybe it was the rising again. Had Jesus lost his grip on reality? How could someone who had died, who had been dead for three days, how could that person rise again?
“Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” Abraham asks, laughing at God. “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” an astonished Mary says to the angel Gabriel. And Peter takes the Lord aside and rebukes him for his crazy ideas. How hard it is indeed for us to trust God. God’s promise is often more than we can grasp. Perhaps this is our work during Lent. Perhaps these are the new and contrite hearts God wants: hearts that can trust. Hearts that can believe. Hearts that are not afraid to hope in God’s promise. Hearts that can hear those powerful words: “Nothing will be impossible with God” and not begin to recite the litany of reasons why they can’t be true. Perhaps this is our work during this season of Lent: to open ourselves to the possibility that is God.
When I came to St. Stephen’s as vicar in October of 1999, we were just about the smallest church in the Diocese. We were a dying church. We had nothing but problems. I have to tell you that many people in the Diocese discouraged me from taking the job. And after about a month, I was convinced that I should have listened. Today, St. Stephen’s has the fourth largest budget of any church in the Diocese. And we spend 92% of our money directly on outreach. Last year, we brought fifty congregations together to provide high quality educational summer programming for 530 children and teens – the largest church based program in the city of Boston. We’re the Mayor’s largest partner for teen summer jobs. With our summer program and after school programs, we provide for young people from poor neighborhoods almost every day of the year. All of the reasons why what we do could never work, still exist. And I still lie awake at night on a regular basis worrying about all the same things I’ve always worried about – mostly money, to be frank. But God has done something no one thought possible. God has taken the least likely and built it up for his purposes.
As we go about telling the story of what we do at St. Stephen’s – telling it to potential funders and supporters, we often use statistics. And those statistics are usually about violence – about the amount of violence our kids in the city are exposed to, about how many acts of violence there have been in the neighborhoods we serve. And we talk about the work we do as an antidote to the violence. We keep kids safe. We give them a safe place to be after school and during the summer, so that they are less likely to witness acts of violence, so that they are less likely to be victims of violence, so that they are less likely to be involved in any way. A place where they can learn non-violent ways to solve conflict. This is an important part of the work we do. In fact, our work was born for this in many ways. I started these programs because I saw so many children hanging out after school and on summer days in the park behind the church, a park in which drugs are being sold and in which many young men have died. My own son was in his classroom at the John F. Kennedy School near my home in Jamaica Plain a couple of weeks ago when a man was murdered just across the street from my son’s classroom window at 1:30 in the afternoon, so I have a firsthand picture of the effects of violence on children.
But I heard a statistic recently that I found in some ways more disturbing than any fact I’ve ever heard about violence in our city. The Boston Foundation and the Boston Private Industry Council tracked down the group of young people who were in ninth grade in the Boston Public Schools in the year 2000. Now most parents in Needham, I imagine, who had ninth graders in the year 2000 would have expected to attend their college graduation last spring. But with the exception of the comparatively small number of students who attend Boston’s three exam schools, the Boston Foundation and the Private Industry Council discovered that only seven percent of the students who were in the ninth grade in the Boston Public Schools in the year 2000 graduated from college last year. Seven percent! Can you imagine sending your child to school in a district in which only seven percent of the students make it through college? To me, this is an outrage. Here, in Boston, the Athens of America, a relatively wealthy city, the home of some of the finest schools in the country, we can only get seven percent of our public school students through college? This is a gross example of neglect.
In addition to being an outrage, this is also a very difficult statistic to change. And it’s only going to get harder. Budget cuts are decimating the system. The cards are stacked against our kids: poverty, racism, teen pregnancy, the prevalence of guns and drugs. The lack of economic opportunity even before the recession hit, the lack of positive role models, the soaring cost of a college education. The Boston Foundation and the Private Industry Council, like the rest of us, take a long hard look at this situation and find it appalling, but we can’t find easy answers to change it. In fact, we look at it and mostly come up with a lot of reasons why it can’t easily change. But what was it the angel said to Mary? Nothing will be impossible with God.
Hasn’t God proved it over and over? Nothing is impossible. It was crazy to think that old Abraham could become a father, let alone the ancestor of a multitude of nations. It was outlandish to think that Jesus could be killed and rise again on the third day. It may be silly to think that St. Stephen’s can make a difference in the college graduation rate of students in the city of Boston. And yet we have to try. We have to believe in God’s promise. We have to have new hearts that can trust God and ready hands that can go to work. And the fact is that if people in Needham help us, if people in Needham and Dover and Wellesley, and Winchester and Lincoln and Concord, if people in Hingham and Chestnut Hill join together with people in Mattapan and Roxbury and Dorchester and the South End, if we all join together with hearts that trust in God’s promise and hands that are ready to work, perhaps we can make a real difference.
One of our newest program components is called the College and Career program. Through it, we’re pairing up our juniors and seniors with volunteers from our partner churches to help students negotiate the college process. On average, the Boston Public Schools provide one guidance counselor for every 350 high school students. On top of that, many families have never been through this process before. We can step in and play the role guidance departments should but can’t play, and help families support their children. For example, I’m working with a senior, the son of a single mother who is an immigrant from South America, who actually got his applications out and passed the MCAS with a high score which qualified him for the John Adams State Scholarship. And so I said to him, “Have you done your FAFSA?” “What’s a FAFSA?” he said. No one had told him that he needed to complete the federal financial aid application to be eligible for any kind of aid. Sometimes in small ways we can make a big difference. With this College and Career program in place, we can now say to an incoming six year old in our program, “We’re going to be here for you, year round, from now until you get through college.” And as some of our students begin to get through school, they’re going to show others that it’s possible. They’re going to be role models in their communities. If we can establish some places in the city where thirty, or forty, or fifty percent of the students get through college, imagine the impact that could have.
But, we must put our faith and trust in the sometimes unseen work of God. That fact is that God works in and through us. I don’t know how many teen pregnancies we may have prevented over the years. I don’t know how many kids haven’t tried drugs or witnessed acts of violence because they were involved in one of our programs. But I do know that a recent Harvard University study showed that kids are most likely to try drugs for the first time or have sex for the first time or become involved in gang activity during the after school hours and during summer vacation. And I know that young people in Boston spent more than 200,000 after school and summer vacation hours engaged in educational and enrichment activities through our programs last year alone.
God is at work. I ask you to believe in God’s promise. I ask you to consider this Lent how God might be leading you to believe, and how God might be inviting you to put your hands to work. I am convinced that together, the people of our Diocese can change many lives, and maybe even change the culture that has led to the unacceptable conditions our children and teens face in the city. We need your help to do it – through B-SAFE, through our after school programs, by building relationships across the barriers of race and class which have separated us from our brothers and sisters, with volunteer time and financial support and of course, prayer. Together we can overcome obstacles and take important steps in the direction of the kingdom of God.
Will anything be impossible with God? Not if it has to do with justice. Not if it has to do with fairness. When Jesus was beginning his public ministry, he went into the synagogue and picked up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of site to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Lk. 4:18-19). And the people looked at each other said, “Who is this guy? Is not this Joseph’s son?” In fact, it was. Joseph’s son, who just happened to be the Messiah, the king of kings and Lord of Lords. The one who died and on the third day rose again. Nothing is impossible with God. God’s promise, as outrageous as it may seem at times, is from everlasting. It is the promise of a kingdom of justice and peace in which we all are invited to live. Let us, during this Lent, cleanse our hearts from doubt and fear and believe – believe not only in what God is doing, but in what God can do in and through us. Amen.
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