April 25, 2010
John 10:22-30
Acts 9:36-41
Revelation 7:9-10, 13-17
Over the past several years, I've been talking a lot about death: the deaths of millions of children around the world, the deaths within our environment, the deaths from militarism, the million small deaths from consumerism, the death of our economic system … and so on. And while I've tried to hold on to hope (sometimes even successfully), much of me has leaned toward despair. I really haven't seen any way out of this morass that was even remotely possible. I hadn't found much hope in our way of doing business … even a radical way of doing business, even our committed Church-of-the-Saviour way of doing business. I've come to the end of my faith that our rational solutions will solve our problems.
Each of our lectionary scriptures this week, however, is about life conquering the power of death. Peter's raising of Dorcas is the most obvious. Dorcas is dead, deader even than our hope. Yet God does something new, something utterly impossible and raises her into life.
The Revelation's passage is a little more difficult. I still have trouble reading Revelation because of its bizarre images ("washed in the blood of the lamb" has never been part of my usual vocabulary). It also seems to divide people into good and evil, and it's only one step further to read it as saying that everyone who doesn't confess Jesus as Lord will rot in hell. But much modern scholarship is discovering that Revelation is actually a message to the scattered churches written in code: fantastical images that wouldn't be recognized by their Roman oppressors. It's written about living as people of faith within the death that was the Roman Empire. Here in this passage is a multitude that--by God's grace--has been given new life, eternal life. They've come out of their ordeal to find themselves guided to springs of the water of life, every tear washed away.
Might God already be providing us with a way out, with hope?
When I first came here in 1983 to practice medicine in the inner city, part of my goal was political: to encourage health care providers and American voters to see not only the necessity but also the possibility of providing care to the indigent. Perhaps middle- and upper-class physicians were shying away from such work because they didn't really know how to organize it or relate to such a different culture. Perhaps voters and government didn't know the true circumstances of the poor but might be taught. Hopefully our clinics were not only "pilot projects" to encourage others but also a revelation of the need and a demonstration of the possibility.
From today's perspective those were, pretty obviously, naïve presuppositions. Most doctors weren't that interested in indigent care because they had other--especially economic--concerns: poverty wasn't very high on their priority list. This was also during the Reagan-era's "War on the Poor" when increasing numbers of Americans blamed the poor themselves for their poverty. Government services decreased. I became discouraged about widespread change.
There were two significant exceptions, but I must confess that, at the time, I underestimated their importance. When I joined Janelle Goetcheus at Columbia Road Health Services, there were relatively few such clinics in the entire country. And … that's changed. When I spoke to medical students twenty years ago, there were always a few who were deeply interested, already involved in volunteering at small "free clinics." They planned to provide care for the poor in their later practices. Although their numbers are small compared to the need, there are now not only quite a few doctors but even national organizations dedicated to the care of the poor and homeless. Lectures on poverty and the rights to medical care are now standard parts of medical school curricula. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of clinics for indigent care across the country. There was no national leadership, no ideology driving this. People just saw the needs around them and responded to them. All of it happened so gradually, so organically, and so dispersed around our country, that I never really noticed.
The other exception brought something I thought I'd never see: city-funded, comprehensive, indigent care for the entire District of Columbia, thanks in large part to Janelle's work with city officials. Since she began here in 1978, Janelle has never had a formal role with the DC government. There was no large organization or even a movement that lobbied for health insurance for the indigent. But Janelle had no other agenda except health care for the poor, and her dogged persistence in pushing city health officials ultimately led to Unity Health Care with almost 200 physicians offering care to the impoverished and then to the city-funded DC Healthcare Alliance that--from my experience helping people get coverage--actually does provide what it says it does: good medical insurance for everyone in the city who can't otherwise afford care.
After my initial naïveté, I was, for many years, skeptical that such individual, private programs would make much large-scale difference. In fact, I wrote an essay and spoke frequently about the conflict between charity and justice. Charity--voluntary good work providing health care--is different from justice--the right to health care. Charity is certainly good, I believed, but large scale change would require centralized, government action.
But I'm changing my mind. I've begun to see the national spread of clinics for the indigent and the existence of the DC Health Care Alliance as examples God's beginning to raise us from the dead. They're part of a huge global movement that's offering us new life.
Environmentalist Paul Hawken has written a book entitled Blessed Unrest, in which he writes that late the 18th century "[a]bolitionists were the first group to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know."[1] Since the founding of that single organization, he estimates on the basis of his research, the number non-governmental organizations around the globe engaged in the struggle for justice and environmental sanity has grown to well over one million. These range in size from one-person and no budget to large staffs with billion-dollar budgets. The subtitle of Hawken's book is: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.
In our book study here last fall of Gus Speth's The Bridge at the End of the World, many of us recognized that any relief from the multiple crises confronting us would require a widespread growth in spiritual consciousness. But, "Would we recognize a worldwide spiritual awakening if we saw one? … What if there's already in place a large-scale spiritual awakening and we're simply not recognizing it?"[2] What if those thousands of poverty clinics around the country and the DC Healthcare Alliance--not to mention Joseph's House, Academy of Hope, Bethany, Way to Jerusalem, Family Place, Manna and the others--what if they're part of it?
Like the early Jesus movement with its multiple churches that not infrequently held quite different beliefs, the environmental/justice "movement" today is not really a movement at all because it has no ideology, no leaders and little coordination between the groups; sometimes, as we know, there's actually conflict among them. What keeps them from being what they look like: tiny, scattered, and hopelessly outmatched?
Well, for one thing, of course, there are hundreds of thousands of them. Hawken likens this loose network to the human immune system. The immune system has usually been characterized in top-down military images, but, in fact, there's nobody in charge. There are different parts to the immune system that actually work independently and within each of those parts there are millions of individual elements that do their job with considerable independence. The immune system is more like the Internet: minimally coordinated and comprising diverse, disordered and imprecise entities without which we'd die in a matter of days.
Like the immune system, these countless organizations in this global network have little power individually to cure the earth's sickness, and it'd be tempting to think that their uncoordinated efforts would also have only minor effects given the vast and powerful array aligned against them--government, corporations, huge trade organizations, powerful institutions and wealthy individuals. But, in fact, the whole may be much greater than the sum of its parts.
This isn't the greatest image, but these hundreds of thousands of organizations may be something like an ant colony. No single ant grasps the big picture or needs to direct the group's effort, but following a few simple innate principles, the shortest route to the food source is located, the anthill is built. Perhaps the few simple principles of the global movement include: loving others, having compassion for your neighbor, prioritizing the poor, including everyone, and following your call.
Its grass-roots origins and its dearth of ideology and coordination give this movement a resilience that no top-down organization could ever have; you can't kill it by getting rid of or co-opting the leadership because there isn't any. Its use of modern communications technology give the whole a power never before available to dispersed groups. The movement constantly grows and renews itself; one organization may disappear because of whatever, but others take its place. Those that are small with few resources by necessity use those resources efficiently and work with dedication. They work primarily on the basis of observation of the local conditions and whatever works rather than ideology, so they're much more able to switch their activity in response to the actual conditions on the ground. Any organization with fixed ideas fades out when the ideas no longer match the reality. In contrast, most movement organizations can make mistakes, even disappear, without affecting the whole. We in the Church of the Saviour have founded and work in some few of those organizations; we know that individuals called to small local projects are usually deeply committed and willing to dedicate enormous amounts of time, energy and money to pursue their objectives. This energy and commitment draw others to the work … on the basis of their own calls and commitment, not remuneration. This gives them potential for amazing transformation.
An example of their flexibility can be found at Joseph's House. Before the availability of effective medications, we were primarily a community for homeless men with AIDS; we guaranteed them a home as long as they lived. We took men in when they were just beginning to need medical support and lived with us for an average of about a year before dying. Hospice care was almost incidental. But with the new drugs, conditions changed. If we’d continued bringing in new people just when they were beginning to get sick, we would ultimately have collected a houseful of well people, not exactly our mission. So we changed, gradually, to become a hospice admitting only people who appeared near death. The conditions changed; being small and shunning an ideology, we changed, too.
Because these many organizations around the world are trying to respond to the needs they see around them, they are not working from a fixed, overall blueprint for how the world should be. Rather, their overall vision--if they think of it as an “overall vision” at all--comprises simple values: a world whose operative principles are love for others, compassion for all, inclusion of everyone, prioritization of the poor, and reverence for the Earth.
Hawken writes:
You can try to determine the future, or you can try to create conditions for a healthy future. To [determine the future], you must presume to know what the future should be. To [create conditions for a healthy future], you learn to have faith in social outcomes in which citizens feel secure, valued, and honored.[3]
If more and more people embrace these values--and thereby withdraw their support from the dominant order--that old cannot survive without deep transformation.
An example of such transformation: For at least the last half century, no large country has successfully colonized another through militarily power alone. Small, indigenous citizen organizations refusing to cooperate have withdrawn their support from the would-be colonizers and prevented it. In the war in Afghanistan, for instance, local Taliban units can disappear into the general population where they become unidentifiable "villagers," hidden by the people they know. Because of its firepower, the US military wins virtually every major military battle … but it won't win the war because of the thousands of small, indigenous units fighting against it. War has changed, and suddenly the old kind of power has little military success.
Now, writes Hawken, it's true that
[t]he state of our world today suggests that, given the number of organizations and people dedicated to fighting injustice, the movement has not been particularly effective. The counterargument to this claim is that globalization's predations have had a nearly five-hundred-year head start on humanity's immune system.[4]
And there've been countless small victories … remember Janelle and DC's comprehensive health care.
And remember, too, that the proliferation of these small organizations dedicated to justice and environmental sanity began only 225 years ago, and their numbers are exploding.
I've believed for so long in a top-down governmental approach to our problems that I've actually not paid nearly enough attention to this grass-roots movement. I'm still not sure if I’m convinced that it can adequately influence the powers of wealth, corporations, or economic and political systems stacked against it enough to move us toward greater health, but at present there seems to be no alternative. Perhaps this diverse, uncoordinated immune system collectively has the vision for the earth that--improbable though it may seem to my rational intellect--can topple the giants. Worker-owned, customer-owned, and community-owned businesses, for instance, have already begun to chip away at an economic system currently based on large, powerful, shareholder-owned public corporations.
In her sermon last week, Connie talked about getting comfortable in our "mountain refuges." One of mine is the notion that government and corporate structures must be challenged directly. And while I know that the chances of bringing about justice and saving the earth that way are minuscule, until recently I remained committed to it.
For me, I think, the spiritual issue is that I doubt the possibility of newness. I tend to agree with the writers of Ecclesiastes: "There's nothing new under the sun."
But isn't newness, something unimaginable precisely the promise of the Resurrection.
Perhaps some of us have not paid enough attention to the reality that, even now, God frequently does something new, something we previously didn't believe possible.
We've talked often about our sense of hopelessness in the face of the multiple crises facing us. Perhaps we're so mired in that hopelessness that we don't see the new possibilities that God is offering us.
May we have eyes to see.
Amen.
[1] Hawken, Paul, Blessed Unrest, p 5.
[2] Hawken, p. 184
[3] Hawken, p 131
[4] Hawken p 145