Lent IV - Skip Windsor

Num. 21:4-9; Eph. 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
Let us pray:
O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered, be with us now and give us the Spirit of Christ. Amen.
In Tracy Kidder’s best selling book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, about the life and work of Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti, there is a quote by Dr. Farmer that frames this morning’s meditation:
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat and I am not going to stop because we keep losing. I don’t dislike victory… We want to be on the winning team, but not at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”
This morning, I would like to invite you to reflect with me on the meaning of the long defeat and how this idea relates to our Christian life and faith. As many of you know, who have read Mountains Beyond Mountains, Farmer is borrowing the phrase from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings when the Lady Galadriel tells the hobbit Frodo Baggins about the long struggle against the evil forces of Sauron saying, “Together through the ages we have fought the long defeat.”
Explaining what he meant by these fatalistic words, Tolkien stated in a letter that he was a Christian and so he did not expect “history” to be anything but a long defeat – though it contains some samples or glimpses of final victory. For Tolkien and for Farmer and, as a matter of fact, for many Christians, the term “The Long Defeat” implies to those who use it that since the battle appears hopeless, any progress, or even a single life saved, can be viewed as a victory. The expression is used in some circles to denote the struggle against the ill effects of poverty and injustice and that is where I want to begin.
As most of you know, I returned last week from Haiti. I went with thirteen other parishioners and friends who brought their medical skills and education to many of the least, the last, the lost and the lonely. During the week, our International Mobile Medical Team saw upwards of 800 men, women and children.
While we were there, several women were seen who were very ill with pre-eclampsia, a child with whooping cough was diagnosed and referred, a man who was recovering from a gunshot wound to the head was learning physical therapy to move his arm again, and an elderly woman was given better sight because of the eyeglasses we brought. In Lazile, where our parish partnership is located, a child came to our clinic whose nearly severed finger was re-attached because of the skills of one of our young medical residents. Looking back, I could not help but think of these Haitian lives that were affected because our doctors were there.
Each time we go to Haiti from Christ Church, the truth of Farmer’s thoughts about ministry and mission among the poor as a long defeat seems more apt. The problems in Haiti are enormous. It is hard to know where to begin. I think most of us know a little bit about this country that is so close to the United States:
It is a nation of about 9.8 million people. It’s GNI (per capita per person) is $560 per person – or less than $2 dollars a day.
The wealth gap is enormous with 1% of the population owning 50% of the country’s resources.
Life expectancy for men is 59 and for women it is 63.
Out of 10,000 births, 620 women die compared to 11 in the United States.
Less than 25% of the water supply is drinkable. Less than half can read a word.
The list goes on…
So much of the United Nations Millennium Development Goal’s are focused on eradicating extreme poverty by 2015 in places such as Haiti, Africa, and other less developed countries. To review, these goals are:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
2. Achieve universal primary education.
3. Promote gender equality and empower women.
4. Reduce child mortality.
5. Improve maternal health.
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.
7. Ensure environmental sustainability.
8. Develop a global partnership for development.

Looking at Haiti and how far they still have to go, it does seem like a long defeat with such lofty global goals seeming further and further out of reach. And, yet, while we were there seem to be these small glimmers of victory. We saw men and women with the Roman Catholic Twinning project helping to construct a school, manage a medical clinic and build a clean water well and irrigation system. We found out that the hospital where we stay in Leogane is going to re-open in April with 40 beds. We learned about the national immunization program through UNESCO to help fight measles. Some of us met an American Fulbright Scholar who teaches at Yale who will come to Haiti this summer to execute a strategic plan for effective hospital administration for the Leogane hospital. This list goes on as well. Different people from diverse places are all taking a piece of the problem in order to make a difference where they can and when they can in Haiti.
In our gospel lesson for this morning, we heard some of the most well known and beloved lines in scripture from John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that all who believe in Him will have everlasting life.” Martin Luther called these words as the “gospel in miniature” because it says it all about God’s purpose in the world through Jesus Christ.
I think I saw the numbers “316” once on the scoreboard at a Broncos football game in Denver. The area code for Kansas is 316. But, despite its popularity, what is not so well known is the context in which these words from John 3:16 are spoken.
They are spoken at night. They are words spoken by Jesus to Nicodemus. They are words of power to a powerful man too afraid to be seen by his peers. But, before Jesus says those well-known words, He talks about healing and refers to the ancient story of Moses and the disconsolate Israelites in the desert who have become disheartened and hopeless. Jesus reminds Nicodemus about how God told Moses to make a brass icon of a snake and place it on a pole so all the people could see it and become healed from the bites of venomous snakes.
Just as the snake was lifted up for healing, Jesus says, so must the Son of Man be lifted up for all not only to heal but also to save; and God will do this because God so loves the world. Later on, Nicodemus will come to understand this divine love and will risk his own life to ask for the body of Jesus so that it may be placed in the tomb of Joseph of Arimithea.
Along with countless other people around the world who go to Haiti to help assist and heal, we carried aloft the healing arts of medicine; but, more importantly, we found among the people of Haiti an inspiring faith in the midst of so much poverty. Holding up the Cross of Christ, the Haitian people are giving hope back to us who live in the United States to re-commit ourselves to the work of ministry and mission. It is their hope that gives us hope. On this trip, I found my faith renewed by the extraordinary acts of generosity the Haitian people give to one another.
On our last day in Haiti, we went to an orphanage of 73 children. A Haitian woman and her Argentinean husband founded their orphanage eight years ago. They moved back to Haiti from Argentina in order to help make a difference in her hometown of Port au Prince. Little did they know how they were going to give back.
Several weeks after they arrived they brought home a baby who had been left in a trashcan. Three weeks later several babies were left on their doorstep. Since then, this remarkable couple has taken in numerous babies and children to feed, cloth, and shelter-seeking funds for food from where ever God will provide.
I am reminded of the story of St. Theresa of Avila who told some businessmen that she was going to build a convent with ten pennies. The men scoffed at her saying she couldn’t build anything with ten pennies. She replied with ten pennies and God’s help she could build anything.
It may be true that to counter poverty and illness in the world is a long defeat; but, if we can carry in solidarity with the people of the world -- where there is no America, there is no Haiti, there is no Africa, where there is no China or Iraq – a hope for healing and reconciliation among all people then, perhaps, the dream of the MDG’s can be met. It begins where we are. We start from where we are. It starts here. It is here at the foot of the cross. The cross is where the long defeat will end in victory – victory over poverty, victory over illness, victory over sin and victory over death.
Thanks Be to God.

Lent III - Peter Tierney

“For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

I’m not sure what place wisdom has in the world we live in today. I don’t see many signs that our society values wisdom very highly. You certainly don’t hear the word mentioned very often—I rarely hear public figures described as wise in a serious way. At best, it’s used as a compliment--“Thank you for your wise words--without much serious consideration given to what actually qualifies as wisdom. And when was the last time you turned on the news and heard the anchor say, “And now, to help shed some light on this subject, we’ve invited Dr. So-and-So, a very wise person, to join us.” No—who do we hear from on the news? Experts! We live in a world that values expertise over wisdom, and woe to the expert who makes a mistake or turns out to be wrong! Is there anyone more readily condemned and ridiculed than the mistaken expert? After all, the expert isn’t supposed to make mistakes, they are supposed to have complete mastery of their field—that’s what makes them an expert! And I think this is the chief difference between wisdom and expertise: what makes somebody wise is knowing what they do not know; what makes somebody an expert is knowing everything about something. The wise person doesn’t expect to know everything, but the expert has to, because the moment you slip up, you cease to be an expert.

Now if I am right, and our world does value expertise more than wisdom, then that means that we have a particularly low tolerance for failure. The expert is not allowed to fail, and if they do, then we’d better find a better expert to solve our problems or answer our questions! Failure is not an option in the world of experts. There is no mercy for the expert, there is only the relentless demand for accuracy and success. We see this manifested in so many ways—in the demand for excellence in education, in the unforgiving expectations we have for healthcare; in the standards that govern workplaces.

Now, this situation should strike all of us who have come here to a Christian church this morning as very peculiar, for a couple of reasons. First, if you search through the Bible, you will find it chock-full of references to wisdom—praising wisdom, talking about the wisdom of God, holding up wisdom as a great virtue—but the only experts you will find are experts in war, and the attitude toward them is ambivalent. The Bible doesn’t have much use for experts, and it doesn’t ever suggest that expertise in anything is a virtue more valuable than wisdom. Second, and more importantly, we are gathered here to remember and celebrate a colossal failure. Jesus, the reason we are here today, ends his life on a cross. Jesus’ death on the cross is the central fact of his life—he doesn’t establish a school to preserve his teachings as many teachers do; he doesn’t lead a social revolution that successfully installs lasting justice and peace; he doesn’t successfully expel the Roman soldiers from the Jewish homeland, as many of his followers wanted him to do. Jesus doesn’t do any of the things one might reasonably expect a savior to accomplish; instead, he dies a criminal’s death on a cross.

There are some people who would like to make Jesus into some kind of expert. Some want him to be a religious expert: if we could just get into the same kind of groove as Jesus, then we can find our way to God. Others want to think of him as a moral expert: if we could only follow Jesus’ teachings, we could make the world a better place. These approaches fly in the face of what St. Paul says, “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” The approaches to Jesus that turn him into an expert have no place for the cross, because they forget that Jesus’ relationship with God and his teachings led him into a confrontation with the religious and political powers of the world—the experts of his time—and that confrontation ended in his death. Following Jesus doesn’t mean that the world is going to snap into focus and resolve all of its problems. We follow Jesus because we see in his death and resurrection the clearest instance of God’s overwhelming love for the world despite its cruelty, its failures, and its weakness, and we cannot help but dedicate ourselves to telling people about that love.

No wonder Paul calls this proclamation foolishness. When someone comes to the Church asking what we have to offer them that they cannot find anywhere else, we are compelled to point to a 33 year old man nailed to a cross and say, that’s what we have. To a world of experts, this is indeed foolishness. But to those who value wisdom, who understand that they do not already have all the answers, they may see that the foolishness of the cross has something to offer them, that the message of Christ’s death and resurrection contains the power and wisdom of God, that God’s foolishness, written large on the cross, is wiser than what human wisdom can devise for itself.

The message of the cross is that God does not despise the weak, or the foolish; the sick or the helpless; God does not have contempt for failure or for the people who fall short in life. Instead, God chooses to become one of those people; God chooses failure, by the world’s standards, and makes it into the way of salvation for the world that rejected him.

The world of experts has no place for foolishness and weakness. Every problem must be solved, every ignorance banished, every sickness cured. The world of experts is a world that will settle for nothing less than perfection right now. But in the Gospel of Jesus Christ we have been given a message of hope that runs counter to the message of the experts; and we have a duty to proclaim that message. Through the cross, God tells us that the world is not first a problem to be fixed, but a place filled with people who need to be loved—and if we love the world despite its weakness and its failings, then that love will do more than our expertise and our human wisdom can ever hope to accomplish.

There is a place for experts in the world; they make valuable contributions to our society, and their work is necessary for advancement and achievement. But we must not allow the principles of expertise to be the only way we view our world, and the people in it. We need the foolishness of the cross—the foolishness of God’s merciful and compassionate love—which is wise than human wisdom, and stronger than human strength.

Lent II - Tim Crellin

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.