A Fourth Church Sermon by Dana Ferguson

May 13, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Is It Either-Or?

Dana Ferguson
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 67
Acts 16:9–19

“When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying,
‘If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord,
come and stay at my home.’ And she prevailed upon us.

Acts 16:15 (NRSV)

This vision of God is not a vision of accumulation and monopoly
so that those who have the most when they die win.
This vision of God’s future is not about angels who have gone to heaven
floating around in the sky with their loved ones.
This vision, rather, is about God’s kingdom coming on earth
as it already is in heaven. God’s rules where the practices of
justice and mercy and kindness and peaceableness are every day
the order of the day. It is a vision of the world as a peaceable neighborliness
in which no one is under threat, no one is at risk, no one is in danger,
because all are safe, all are valued, all are honored, all are cared for.

Walter Brueggemann
Inscribing the Text

Two months ago I joined Fourth Church members and friends on a trip to New Orleans to contribute to the rebuilding efforts there. We worked rehabbing a number of different houses across the city. At the end of our week, we were dispatched to work on Lina’s house, a member of First Presbyterian Church, where we were staying. She and her husband, along with their three young boys, have lived in a small FEMA trailer parked in their front yard for more than a year now. The shell of their home stood stripped to the studs inside, waiting rehab. As I entered, I was enamored with the decorations hanging from the dingy 2x4s of the house. Among the salvageable furniture and boxed toys, there were rows of strung-together metallic stars in bright Mardi Gras colors of purple, gold, and green hanging, and there were candles sitting in the window seats. Despite all of the signs to the contrary, there was clearly a spirit of celebration and hope in the skeleton of this home.

Midmorning, after the group had been working a couple of hours, Lina brought a bright yellow tablecloth and laid it on the porch of the empty house next door. She then spread out bagels and doughnuts and drinks and invited us to sit and take a break. In the middle of the tablecloth was a wonderful arrangement of fresh flowers. She told us how grateful she was we were there and only regretted we wouldn’t be there long enough for her to throw a real party. Some months ago, volunteers had helped her neighbors rehab their house. The neighbors had wanted to surprise the volunteers with a party so Lina had hosted it, right there in the skeleton of a home. She had hung the metallic stars and lit candles to celebrate the volunteers who had worked on her neighbors’ home. They hadn’t come to work on hers. It didn’t seem to enter her mind to ask why or to complain that she still occupied a trailer, only that she wanted to join her neighbor in celebrating and saying thank-you to those who had worked hard.

“The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, ‘If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.’ And she prevailed upon us.” This is part of the text we read today, and it is known as the conversion of Lydia. We don’t know a lot about Lydia, but we do know that she was a successful businesswoman. She lived in a city well known for its textile industry, and she was a “dealer in purple cloth,” which means she designed for the rich and royal in the Roman world.

In her encounter with Paul, Lydia is converted. Her response is one of hospitality. As she has been welcomed by Christ, she welcomes others. Lydia becomes a bold sign of hospitality in the New Testament, our clue that sometimes hospitality—a bright yellow tablecloth or metallic stars—are our call. Sometimes our call to hospitality comes in the form of gutting homes or hanging drywall or laying floorboard. Sometimes our call is simply to offer that which can make someone a little more comfortable.

During our time in New Orleans, we took a tour of the city. The realities were stark: mile after mile after mile of damage and devastation. House after house after house after house left abandoned and decaying. Water lines across the houses and buildings remain. And the markings. The markings that told which National Guard group had inspected the house, how many pets were found under the house but unable to be rescued, and how many dead bodies occupied the home. For those of us who had been there a year earlier, it seemed not to have changed much. The devastation is mind-boggling.

What makes this story even more disturbing is that the circumstances that trapped many of the city aren’t unique. Much of that which hindered the city from rescue and now recovery isn’t an isolated story. More than 90,000 people in each of the areas hit by the storms in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama made less than $10,000 a year. Nearly 50,000 people in New Orleans lived in areas where the poverty rate approached 40 percent (Michael Dyson, Come Hell or High Water, p. 5). It’s a picture not unlike much of urban America. It is not unlike cities such as Cleveland, New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Here’s how it looks across our nation: There are 37 million people in poverty in our nation. In Chicago, 20 percent of the population lives in poverty, which for a family with two children is defined by the Census Bureau as having an annual income under $16,000 (Illinois Poverty Summit, 2 February 2006l; U.S. Census Bureau 2006).

In his book, Come Hell or High Water, author Michael Dyson reports that nearly one in four citizens in New Orleans had no access to a car and that 48 percent of the population without access to cars were children or the elderly. “They simply couldn’t muster the resources to escape the destruction and, for many, death,” he says. The same can be said for many trapped in the cycle of poverty across this country: “They simply can’t muster the resources to escape” (pp. 6–7).

It is a disturbing story, the story of the Mississippi Gulf and the story of the inner cities of America. The poverty and suffering can be overwhelming. As we gaze upon our American cities, we are left with the questions posed by members of our work trip to New Orleans. “Can what little we are able to offer really matter in the midst of so much need?” “Does it really matter?” asked our participants, shaking their heads as they gazed upon New Orleans.

One answer is this: it doesn’t matter what the answer is. The issue is that we are called to serve. We are called to journey to the areas where there is destruction and hang drywall and repair roofs. And, we are called to serve in our home cities, tutoring a child, accompanying a sick friend, serving a meal to the hungry. Why do we do it? We do it because we follow a savior who has said when you have done it to a brother and sister, you have done it to me. We do it because we follow a savior who has called us to feed the hungry and cloth the naked—period. We do it because we are called to be servants. We accompany one another along the journey when we face broken pieces of our lives, supporting and encouraging. And we open our hearts in hospitality to celebrate new possibilities, just as Lina hung metallic stars and lit candles in the shell of her home to celebrate the rebuilding of her neighbors’ home. We do these things because Christ came to serve and not to be served, and it is that Christ that we follow. We do it because we have been called to do so.

Well-known theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann, a friend of this congregation, has this to say about our cities:

You cannot have a viable, peaceable, safe urban community when deep poverty must live alongside huge wealth, when high privilege is visible alongside endless disadvantage in health and housing and education. You can have some inequities, but the inequities must be curbed by a practice of neighborliness that knows every day that rich and poor, haves and have-nots, are in it together and must find ways of being together as neighbors in common (Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann, pp. 30–31)

Brueggemann calls it neighborliness, that call that we have to live together in community. And sometimes we are called to do just what Lydia did—to welcome the needs of others and respond simply because we call ourselves Christians. And yet that isn’t all there is. We must recognize that we are in it together, as Brueggemann says, that we cannot have a viable, peaceable community “when deep poverty must live alongside huge wealth, when high privilege is visible alongside endless disadvantage in health and housing and education.” These are moments, too, when we must move into action, when we must question the systems that promote these deep divides.

“When the owners of the slave girl saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities.” From its very beginnings, Christianity has been involved in liberating people from that which entrapped them. Here Paul and Silas encounter a slave girl who has been trapped by mental illness all of her life. Although it trapped her, it paid off for her owners, who reaped the monetary benefits from her mental abilities of fortune-telling.

“But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, ‘I order you in the name of Jesus Christ, to come out of her!’” And so it is that we too should be troubled by those things that trap people—by poverty, by lack of access to education and housing and health care—that in the name of Jesus Christ we demand that things be different. Just as it was in the beginning with Paul and Silas and the slave girl, religion is mixed up with economics, and so we see it is our call too to confront the places where inequities are fostered. Particularly on this Mother’s Day, it seems appropriate to examine the kind of presence that we as Americans are to the next generation of children in this country. What kind of parents are we to those who will come after us?

First the issue of education. The state of Illinois ranks forty-seventh out of all the states in the amount of dollars it commits to education. Forty-seventh in the country. Illinois ranks among the highest in the gap between supporting low poverty and high poverty students (A+ Illinois). As you know, a significant part of education funding is based upon property taxes, which means that my children, living in Oak Park with few barriers to success, benefit from a system that invests far more in each child than the school systems just around the corner in Cabrini-Green, where the property-tax income pales in comparison to other Chicago and outlying neighborhoods. Yet those with the greatest number of barriers, those who very well may have found themselves in the trap of poverty for generations, have very little invested in their education.

On the issue of health care, sixteen percent of Americans are uninsured. Nine million, or eleven percent of, children in America are uninsured (www.childrensdefense.org/site). It isn’t simply because of unemployment. Twenty percent of the work force is uninsured.

And there are more than 73,000 people who are homeless in Chicago. More than 26,000 of those are children (Executive Summary, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, 21 December 2006). In order to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago, a worker needs to make more than $17 an hour. Currently the minimum wage is $5.15 (Dyson, p. 32).

The statistics are staggering. It is clear that in the midst of endless disadvantage and inequities there can be no viable, peaceable community. And so we ask, is it possible for us to make a difference?

John Dilulio, the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, recently wrote an article for Time magazine titled “The Power of One: From Sacred to Civic” about how faith-based groups are trying to resurrect New Orleans. In the article he points to faith-based organizations across the country that are transforming inner cities. He cites a study conducted in Philadelphia that estimates the value of the services provided by religious organizations to low-income and at-risk families to be a quarter-billion dollars a year. He argues, “Without figuring out acceptable ways to leverage similar energies in New Orleans, there is no practical hope for resurrecting the city” (Time, 2 April 2007, pp. 54–55).

There isn’t always a way to place a dollar value on the efforts that we put forth in response to our call as Christians. We aren’t always able to quantify the difference that hanging drywall or tutoring a student will make. And yet, it is making a difference. It makes a difference in our own lives. It matters that we respond in the way that Christ calls us to respond, and it does make a difference in the lives of those who are accompanied on their journeys. And it is making a difference in the lives of our inner cities whether we can recognize it immediately or a year later or not. And so we keep on doing what we are doing. We, as Fourth Church, continue the many ministries of Chicago Lights that bring access to education and health care and hope to so many lives. We continue to venture out beyond this city to the places calling us to offer hospitality and hard work. And we work hard to advocate change in the systems that encourage disadvantage and inequities. We continue to labor simply because we have been called to do so and because, as Walter Brueggemann says, “You cannot have a viable community when high privilege is visible alongside endless disadvantage.”

In that tour we took of the city of New Orleans, that which remained the same from a year earlier was startling. And yet not all remained the same. Included in our tour was Habitat for Humanity’s Musicians Village. A number of us had spent time the year before laying the foundations for some of those homes—laying floorboard and working on roofs. It now is a neighborhood—rows and rows of brightly colored houses, some blue, some purple, some orange, some red. And there was what I had longed to hear all week long: the sounds of children playing together, of kids running with the kids next door around their front yards. And there were parents sitting on the front porch watching them. It was what I had longed to see and hear: neighborhoods returning. Not just one house being rehabbed in the midst of a long row of devastated and abandoned houses but a neighborhood, a community where kids have kids to play with and parents watch out for their neighbors’ children.

As we were leaving Lina’s house on the last day, her son, Royden—affectionately called Roydee—followed us to our van. As the group had been working on his house, he had wanted to build something out of the discarded wood scraps. He had made friends with Jim, who had taught him to look for the wood without the nails in it. He wanted Jim to help him look for more wood, but our week had come to an end and we had loaded up to head home. He ran up alongside our van and knocked on the window. “Are you coming back tomorrow?” he asked Jim, standing on his tiptoes to see in the van. “We need more wood to finish our house,” he said. Jim shook his head regretfully and let him know that we probably wouldn’t be returning. We drove away as the little boy who had captured our hearts in just a short day or two waved good-bye.

Roydee was right. They needed more to finish their house—and the city of New Orleans needs more to finish their city, and cities across this country need more to transform their communities.

Some days we are called upon to be servants and some days we are called upon to be prophets. And everyday our cities need both. It isn’t either-or. It’s both-and. Both servant and prophet. Hospitality and hard work. Prophecy and change. “We need more wood to build our house,” said the little Roydee. “Come and stay at my house,” said Lydia. “I command you to come out,” said Paul.

Christianity isn’t an either-or proposition. It’s both-and. Both servant and liberator. So go now to hang the metallic stars of hospitality and neighborliness. And go now to challenge the systems that have long hindered and trapped God’s children. Go now not to be either a servant or a prophet. Go now to serve as both servant and prophet.

All to God’s glory and honor and praise. World without end. Amen.