Called to Freedom

October 28, 2012

Joe Collier's portion

Gal. 5:13-15

13  For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14 For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." 15 If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.

            I am delighted to introduce my fellow teacher and preacher, Dee Dee Parker Wright. Dee Dee has been the Executive Director of Jubilee JumpStart for one and three-quarters years, though it probably feels like 16. She comes to us from Oklahoma via Houston, so she brings knowledge of the heartland and of the challenging culture of Texas. She grew up in the MYF – Methodist Youth Fellowship – as I did, and we share its nurturing spirit and commitment to justice. She is an amazing gift to us.

            I am grateful to be with you again. I am increasingly clear that I cannot make it on this journey without you – both in relation to Jubilee JumpStart and in our broader ministry. In relation to Jubilee JumpStart, Gail Arnall is our Board Chair; Ann Barnet is a founding and enduringly creative and generous Board member; Kate Lasso has managed our accounting in a generous way; and Dixie Bosley-Smith has provided a nursing intern for several years. And as a congregation you have supported Jubilee JumpStart financially in critical and bighearted ways. For me as co-pastor of Friends of Jesus Church you have provided a model of membership that we have adopted, have offered encouragement and support, and in the context of the Servant Leadership School have given generous leadership and fellowship.

            Last night at the Festival Center fundraiser Rose Berger referred to the poetry of Adrianne Rich. I was grabbed especially by these lines:

            “In America we have only the present tense.

             I am in danger.

             You are in danger…”

I found Rich’s poem on the internet. She was riffing on book burning as it wipes out “knowledge of the oppressor” and the oppressor’s burnings – Joan of Arc, napalm…she might have mentioned Nero’s burning of Christians and American burning of lynched black people. (James Cone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, quotes Richard Wright, “It had been through books … that I had managed to keep myself alive … [and that] had evoked in me vague glimpses of life’s possibilities.” (p. xiii))

            I have a black friend whose daughter told my friend that she might not vote. She was struggling with the question, originally from Ronald Reagan but asked again now: “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?” For her financially she felt that the answer is “no.”

            I received a flyer from Americans for Prosperity, a “non-profit” political action committee (PAC), addressed to “the Collier family.” It complains about “wasteful Washington spending” over the last 4 years and focuses on the “stimulus package” as the source of debt; but the underlying code message is against social and economic support programs that keep the 99% from sinking deeper. As well I received robo-calls from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and from Phyllis Schlafly, known for her opposition to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution that would benefit women. I have never gotten such messages before, since I’m not in the population they would normally target. That I am receiving them is a sign of how much money they have, enough to target every registered voter.

            All of these messages are in the present tense. They depend on short-term memory, or no memory at all. They don’t ask:

• "Might I have been worse off if previous policies had continued in these last four years and there had been no stimulus?”
• “Were the “stimulus package” and the economic and social support programs really the primary source of the debt? How about two un-budgeted wars and reduced taxes for the wealthy?””

            I have a friend in Fairfax County who was handing out the Democratic “sample ballot” in early voting in my swing state of Virginia. One man breezed by, refusing the sample and saying “I don’t vote for black people [though he used the term that begins with ‘n’].” Another said, “I don’t vote for baby killers.” Obama signs have been burned. An Obama sign was removed from a car and replaced by a note saying something like, ‘I did you a favor; you can’t be stupid enough to support that bum.’ In early voting, poll monitors have given erroneous information to confused minorities about what identification is required to vote. In central Virginia, a man has the President’s chair (from the Clint Eastwood scene) hanging in effigy and refuses – in the name of free speech – to take it down.

            How can we both understand and deal with this hostile, violative, self-righteous behavior only in the present tense? How can it not, in isolation, put you and me in danger? Must we not be grounded in a community with historical memory that helps us understand where this all comes from and helps us discern what, if any, poweroffers hope?

            I believe we are grounded in such a community. Two stories we’ve been dealing with in our broader community offer us such understanding and hope.

            In the Servant Leadership School, Tim Kumfer, Joe Deck and some Friends of Jesus folks have been studying a new understanding of the historical context of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. In Re-Imagining Galatians, Brigitte Kahl – a New Testament scholar at Union Seminary in New York – follows in the spirit of Wes Howard-Brook by interpreting the letter in relation to its Roman Empire environment.

            In our passage from the letter, Paul says, “If…you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.” He is talking to the messianic communities he has nurtured into life in Galatia, but his message strikes at how the imperial Roman culture around them was infecting these communities … and it helps us see the imperial spirit that infects our culture and endangers our messianic communities today.

            In Paul’s time the province of Galatia ran vertically down the middle of what is now Turkey. Most of its people were blonde, curly-haired people from tribes that had threatened Rome and its growing territories for centuries. Linking them with tribes of Gauls across the stretch north of Rome from what is now Spain, France, Britain, and Switzerland, across eastern Europe down into the Anatolian peninsula (today’s Turkey), Rome had incorporated them into its imperial mythology as the primal enemy, the primordial Other.  Before Paul’s time, Rome had  conquered them and incorporated them along with other defeated peoples (NT: ‘the Gentiles’)into the Pax Romana (Roman Peace) – its system of political, religious and social control.

            Three aspects of the Pax Romana are important to understanding the Galatians letter and its resonance with our situation:

• It was based on military victory (based on death of the non-Roman Other), and incorporation of defeated militaries into the Roman system. As Josephus, the Judean general who joined the Romans during the Judean rebellion of 66-70 C.E., told the rebels, ‘It was God who had given the worldwide rule over the nations to Italy. A basic law (nomos) firmly established both among animals and humans requires the weaker to “yield to the stronger” and to acknowledge that power and rule belong to “those pre-eminent in arms.” [quoting Kahl’s summary in Re-imagining Galatians, p. 293] Fo
• It required submission to the divine Caesar, including worship of Caesar as Savior from the chaos of conflicting peoples, and incorporation of the gods of defeated peoples under the Roman pantheon. The worship included participation in temple sacrifices and festivals to Caesar and other Greco-Roman gods, as well as attendance at fight-to-the-death “games” in Roman-built arenas.
• It involved the perpetuation of competition among the defeated peoples, to divide in order to conquer and to maintain its domination.

            Centuries earlier, a pre-Roman ruler had sent a lot of Jews to the Anatolian area to help maintain the peace there. Under Roman rule their successors had negotiated an accommodation that exemption from participation in much of the Roman religious and cultural system in exchange for offering daily tribute to Caesar in the Jerusalem temple. But the accommodation remained tense:

• The Jewish God was invisible and could not be displayed in Roman monuments as subservient to Caesar and the Roman pantheon.
• The Jewish exemption resulted in communities within the imperial system whose orientation was toward Jerusalem, not Rome.
• Resistance to the Roman burden on the territories of historic Israel (including Judea, Samaria and Galilee) was persistent and growing, leading soon to the destruction of Israel in 70 C.E.

            Amazingly, into the midst of this broad political and cultural situation, Paul has brought a gospel of freedom that challenges the Roman imperial system and calls together alternative communities that includes Galatians, probably other defeated peoples, Jews, and even Romans in opposition to that system. (Kahl emphasizes that Paul opposed the system, not the people in it.)

• He proclaimed a crucified Savior…One who came from and represented the poor and the defeated, not a crucifying Savior who slaughtered and enslaved the poor.
• He called for submission to a liberating God, who called them to an egalitarian table banquet and to withdrawal from temple sacrifices and celebrations for Caesar.
• He brought news of anew law that called people not to competition and “games to the death” among themselves but to enslavement to one another¸ that freed them to love, serve and suffer for one another and enjoy a true peace.

He called them to what Rose Berger joined Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to call a beloved community.

            In his letter to the Galatians, Paul is dealing with a problem in the Galatian churches. The Jews in the communities could rely on their circumcision to show them as Jews and so to excuse their withdrawal from the Roman cultic and cultural system. The non-Jews had no such excuse and so were exposed to the danger of persecution and death. Some in the churches were pushing the non-Jewish Galatians to get circumcised so they would appear to have become Jews. They would try to “pass” as Jews.

            Paul declared this proposal a desertion from their true Savior, their true Father, and the true Spirit who freed them to serve one another in peace. It was an accommodation to the Roman system and so idolatry. That was the real danger they were exposing themselves to. They would fall back into conflict and lose all grounds for hope of a new community of justice and peace.

            That brings us to the other story that helps us understand our dangerous current situation. Both The New Jim Crow and Witnessing Whiteness refer to Bacon’s Rebellion in Jamestown, VA, in 1675 as an effort that united white and black bond laborers and slaves to demand that the extremely wealthy elite landowners end their servitude. That cooperation of blacks and whites was, in my view, a sign of God’s work, despite its ‘secular’ origins. The rebellion was put down, but it and others like it alerted the elite to the danger that blacks and whites together could overwhelm them. The elite quickly began a process of intensifying black slavery and providing marginal favoritism to the white poor in order to divide them and maintain their dominance over them both.

            The forces at work in the events these stories tell are still at work:

• Concentrated wealth and power, now in the hands of global financial manipulators
• Idolatrous religion grounded still in that ‘basic law (nomos) firmly established both among animals and humans requires the weaker to “yield to the stronger,”’ now in the form of the “invisible hand of the market,” American exceptionalism, and, alas, the superiority of “whiteness”
• A focus on competition that sees the “other” as one to be defeated, if not militarily then financially … a defeat that can be, insidiously, more destructive.       

            But the God of Abraham, Jesus and Paul is yet at work. The diversity and mutual service and the prophetic witness of our little churches are both a statement of faithfulness and a sign of what God is doing to call and hold together the kind of inclusive community that Paul was suffering to hold together in Galatia. “Baptized into union with him, you have all put on Christ like a garment. There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for you are all one person in Christ Jesus.”

           

            Jubilee JumpStart aims to be that kind of community as well…a beloved community.

            During our time for prayers of confession at Friends of Jesus last week, I found myself feeling a bit like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. The House of Representatives proposal to dramatically cut programs that provide economic and social support for the poor and near poor has been justified by the expectation that churches and other voluntary organizations should make up for the cuts. One commentator noted that every church in the nation would have to provide an additional $50,000 in services to do that. Many could not; and many that could would not. That is a major danger we face. My confession: I fear such cuts because I do not want to have to deal with the additional pain of the people who would lose services. We have too much already. We will do it if we have to. But I do not believe God wants that additional pain.

            Jubilee JumpStart deals constantly with the tension of having to spend time raising the resources we need to carry out our mission instead of actually carrying out the mission. Again, we’re so grateful for your help with that. Dee Dee deals with it daily, as she will share.

Dee Dee Parker Wright’s Portion of Sermon

Jubilee JumpStart is an early childhood education center located here in the heart of the Adams Morgan neighborhood, surrounded by several other ministries of the Church of the Saviour.  We have been serving young children between the ages of 6 weeks and 5 years for just over three years.  We were born of great love and vision and nurtured by several people here and this church community since before we were born.  Our center is focused on repairing injustice that has happened or been happening for generations in the lives of our families. So we know to be patient but still are anxious to create a different future for our children and their parents by providing a different present.

Any good early childhood education program will provide a stimulating and safe environment, solid educational experiences, and warm, loving caregiving.  Jubilee JumpStart certainly does all of that!  When Joe Collier and Ann Barnet and others designed our program, they specifically intended to make the most of the short time early childhood provides for maximum impact on brain development.  They also knew that the relationships children experience with their parents and caregivers are critical to these early years.  Jubilee JumpStart is extra special and powerful thanks to emphasizing the connections and attachments of those relationships and supporting our parents and teachers in them.  We have amazing partners such as Teaching Strategies and the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis who support both.  The other element that makes Jubilee JumpStart special is being located right in the community where our families live and need us.  We know that our work makes the greatest impact where there is the greatest need, so the bottom floor of a Jubilee Housing apartment building is the perfect home for us!

While I could talk to you all day long about Jubilee JumpStart and our children, staff, parents, and community, I wondered this past week exactly what I should tell you about. As you all know (and have responded to with love and support, God bless you), we have had an exceptionally difficult time financially over the past few months.  On Wednesday evening, I was struggling with a swirl of thoughts as to what I could do with my remaining time at the center…thinking to make calls, send emails, look at the budget, etc.  I can admit here that I was not totally thrilled to see a parent at my door, just wanting to talk at 5:15 p.m.  But this was no ordinary parent. It was a mother who lives in the building above our center, so she is one of my closest neighbors. A mother who has grown up in Jubilee Housing and still lives there with her mother and with her 5 children, 2 of whom have now attended Jubilee JumpStart since we opened.  This mother and her family are exactly who we aim to serve but even so, it has been 3 years full of the dance we all do as we try to change, moving closer when feeling optimistic and brave, hiding and fighting when feeling fearful or discouraged.   But our mission is to be present and available when the need is present and the time is right.

So there we were last Wednesday, me taking a breath, lifting my head, and opening my eyes to the exact reason I am here…as this neighbor of mine told me how pleased but nervous she felt about her youngest child beginning to receive early intervention services the next morning. This victory was being presented as a gift to me even though we had worked for months through the summer to make these services possible. For it wasn’t the services that were uncertain, it was Mom, who needed time and trust and encouragement to see that the center was not able to provide all that her little boy needs.  She had the support of teachers, a social worker, psychoanalysts and administrators and had seen all of these be enough to help her through difficult times with her older son. But her youngest son had been with us since he was an infant and we were able to see with both our hearts and minds that he needed special assistance.  And now she was ready and wanted to talk about the next big steps! So we did, while I also made sure to celebrate all the big steps she had already taken to get there.  And then we talked about her older 4 children, going through each one, hearing about current developments. And then we talked about Mom’s own goals and her renewed desire to finish her GED and start working.

One of my favorite topics came up as she was telling me things she was doing with the kids that she was finding helpful as a parent. She was reading aloud to all of the kids, she was trying to go to more school activities, she was spending more time in the classroom at our center.  And then she told me something that stopped me in my tracks for a moment. She said she was trying to get all of the kids ready for when she isn’t with them any longer.  When I made sure she wasn’t sick or expecting to leave soon, I asked why she is so focused on this kind of preparation.  She said “You never know what can happen” and that she thinks a good mom makes sure kids are ready for being alone.  My heart felt like it was sinking and soaring at the same time because while it was such a sad thought, I was honored by her sharing such an intimate thought with me.  I seized the opportunity to tell her that what a child needs most is a parent who is deeply in love with them, finds joy in simply being with them, and builds their resilient spirit with every interaction.  I encouraged her not to worry about preparation for the future since how she is with them in the present will do a fine job of preparing them for whatever challenges life brings.  We agreed (to my great relief) that she would continue doing what she has been finding so rewarding lately, reading, singing, cuddling, playing and laughing with the five most important people in the world to her.

I am reading “The Social Animal” by David Brooks and recently came across this thought in the book: We might think that children develop their minds and then go out into the world to form relationships. But it actually is that children’s minds are formed by their first relationships, which are with their parent(s), and they take those selves into the world.  We literally become who we are because of how we are loved and nurtured and spoken to from our earliest days.  I think this is true of how we are formed in our relationship with God – because God loves us so, we can take that self into the world for love and service.

Jubilee JumpStart is different because we are a beloved learning community for children and their families, offering love where there was little connection, providing warmth where there has only been cold, presenting safety in the face of fear, and sharing abundance in the midst of scarcity. We are committed to loving our neighbors as ourselves and find that being present with families on all legs of their journey is the highest honor. We are grateful to everyone who walks along on our journey as well, especially 8th Day and other groups in the Church of the Saviour community. While we all want to prepare for the storms of life, we are finding that being fully, lovingly connected in the present provides all the preparation we need.