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Lift every voice. Sing hope. Bring hope. Birth hope. Be hope.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached at St. Paul's in Atlanta, GA on Sunday, November 8. 

 A story like Ruth and Naomi’s could probably only be made into a movie if it carried an X rating.  We miss a lot of the innuendo in translation, but basically, Naomi is out to procure a husband for her widowed daughter-in-law.  That’s the only way either one of them is going to survive economically.  She says to Ruth, “Look, there’s Boaz, time to jump the broom with him – and he’s OK, he’s not a complete foreigner.  Go get gussied up, then get yourself over to the barnyard, and hang around – be visible, show yourself off.  Don’t talk to him until after dinner, but find out where he sleeps.”  Actually, Naomi says, “Don’t make yourself known to him until after dinner.” The word to know has the same meaning as “and Adam knew his wife and she conceived and bore a child.”

Naomi goes on, “Well, when you know where he’s going to sleep, get yourself over there, uncover his feet” (feet are a euphemism here), and they’re not feet for making a descent, but feet for making descendants!  “Lie down, and he’ll tell you what to do.”  I’m sorry, but this is way too racy for children.

Naomi is a very canny widow.  She knows that the two of them aren’t going to survive if they don’t have a male family member – a wage earner or a farmer – and they aren’t going to get one without Ruth’s cooperation.  Julia Dinsmore would call this an example of “the survival skills of the poor.”  Dinsmore wrote a powerful book titled, My Name is Child of God, Not “Those People.”  It’s about the gifts of the poor, particularly their creativity.

We tend to judge this story from a very different economic location – one that has the luxury of at least some choice about what kind of work we’ll take or who we’ll marry or not marry.  And if we read further in this story of creative survival, we discover that God is at work in the midst of it, for Ruth becomes great-grandmother to David, the hoped-for savior of Israel.  When David doesn’t pan out so well, God keeps on working.  Ruth shows up in Jesus’ list of ancestors, along with three other women:  the prostitute Rahab; Tamar, a widow who gets sons by seducing her father-in-law; and another foreigner, Bathsheba, with whom David commits adultery, and then makes a widow.  God is at work in all of this “inappropriate sexual behavior,” which eventually, according to Matthew’s gospel, leads to Jesus, born of Mary, husband of Joseph of the house of David.

This story continues, through all the centuries since, with more Naomis and Ruths, desperately looking for hope.

I’ve just finished reading Edward Ball’s, Slaves in the Family, about black and white descendants of the Ball family who started the big slave plantations outside Charleston.  There are a whole lot of arranged marriages in the Ball family.  On the white side, most of the marriages are with cousins, designed to keep the “property” in the family.  Many of the marriages in the black community are arranged by slave masters who decide which slaves will marry whom.  There are a lot of uncouplings and widows made as well, when one or another is sold off the plantation.  And then there are the relationships between sons of the masters or the masters themselves and the women in slavery.  Edward Ball learns about a lot of this by reading the slave records and connecting them with the family stories he hears from his black relatives.  The surprising reality is that there wasn’t a whole lot of choice about who married whom on either side of the family, and women were usually on the short end of the decision-making.

That’s really what Jesus is getting at in his jabs at the scribes and his commentary about giving at the temple.  Those scribes who “devour widows’ houses” are exploiting the lack of freedom widows have to make economic decisions.  The widows of Jesus’ day had just as wretched a social position as Ruth and Naomi.  They weren’t going to make it economically without a wage earner in the family.  In Jesus’ day, there were basically no jobs or economic possibilities for poor women without male relatives – except “the oldest profession.” 

The scribes of Jesus’ day were interpreters of the law or the Torah.  They were more like what rabbis became in the years after Jesus – interpreters of scripture for daily life.  Jesus is criticizing these scribes for their self-interest, because they’re getting rich off those poor widows.  Their legal deals and interpretations just keep squeezing those widows.
 
That’s probably also what lies behind Jesus’ comments about the widow and her two coins.  He notes the difference between the rich folk who put in lots of money and the widow who gives her last two pennies.  In order to be a good Jew in Jesus’ day, you had to make an offering at the Temple.  In order to keep the Romans off your back, you also had to pay Roman taxes.  This widow is giving the very last of what she has.  We don’t know if it is from gratitude, or to keep her place in the community.  Jesus doesn’t praise her, he simply notes that she’s giving the last of what she has.  This often turns into a stewardship story about how generous she was.  We rarely hear the critique of a religious system that keeps widows poor by depriving them of economic possibilities and any real hope. 

On Friday, I visited Emmaus House and met with the urban interns.  These three young women have just graduated from college.  One is African-American, one Asian-American, and one Anglo.  They’re spending a year working with some of today’s equivalents of Ruth and Naomi and poor widows.  They are working with other young women without much hope or economic freedom of choice, young women who are being trafficked or groomed for exploitation.  The urban interns are supported and encouraged by older women and men who are trying to change a system that seduces poor young women into relationships for profit – not their own profit, but the profit of others, who are today’s equivalent of slave holders and devourers of widows’ houses.

All of the sin in these stories is really about removing creative possibility from others, denying them their God-given ability to make choices, to exercise their free will.  That is what is most essential about being created in the image of God – sharing in God’s own creativity.  Ruth and Naomi didn’t have much ability to choose another way because their society limited them to specific roles.  Jesus’ female ancestors were similarly limited.  The widow of the gospel is kept poor by a religious and political system of exploitation.  The same was true of the Ball family – and the white side was nearly as constrained by the system of slavery as the black side.  Fear of loss and poverty motivated the slave-owners, and fear of death and destruction and further degradation kept most of the slaves in the system.  Many young people today are being raised in a system that says that they have value only for the ways in which they can be used – by tricks on the corner or athletic teams or the military. 

The freedom we have in Christ is about hope.  Jesus’ way insists that all God’s people are created for dignity, and each one has meaning and value from being made in the image of God.  No one is a commodity to be bought and sold. 

You and I share Jesus’ work of confronting the scribes who diminish dignity and steal hope.  Opportunities for redemption are all around us, in the young and the old.  God is at work even in the worst of despair nothingness.  Our job is to help give birth to hope, and help it keep growing into full and abundant life.

Let there be no more days when hope unborn has died.  Lift every voice.  Sing hope.  Bring hope.  Birth hope.  Be hope.

Where are you looking for treasure?

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori addressed the Diocese of Atlanta Annual Council on November 6. The following is her sermon.

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding Bishop
The Episcopal Church

We’re celebrating the feast of William Temple today, and the first suggestion of something unusual is that this isn’t the date he died; it’s the date he was baptized.  Maybe that’s a hint that his witness has more to do with incarnation than death and resurrection.  Temple was just three weeks old when he was baptized, but he grew up fully into that hopeful act, and his example offers some remarkable clues about what the ministry of the baptized can look like – even if he was Archbishop of Canterbury!

Temple served in that post for only two years, during the height of the Second World War.  Despite his short tenure, he’s thought by many to be the most significant Archbishop of Canterbury in recent memory.  He was the son of another Archbishop of Canterbury, but he was not at all what you might expect of an English ecclesiastical aristocrat.  His adult work was largely done on behalf of the poor and the working class.

The focus of his ministry was almost always on healing division – social, theological, religious, and national.  He was a man of strong opinion who insisted that a person’s belief reaches maturity only through vigorous conversation, and responding to the opposing views of others.  He was a reconciler, but he was most definitely not a pacifist; in fact, he called himself an anti-pacifist.  He was widely criticized by other religious leaders for not condemning the Allied blanket bombing of Germany, and he was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to go into battle since the Middle Ages – visiting Normandy in the summer of 1944.

He was a big man, physically, and one poet [Ronald Knox] begins to describe him ironically like this:  “A man so broad, to some he seem’d to be Not one, but all Mankind in Effigy.”  He was indeed a leader of remarkable breadth, a representative of all God’s people, and a follower of Jesus who strove to, as the collect put it, “rejoice with courage, confidence, and faith in the Word made flesh, and … to establish that city which has justice for its foundation and love for its law.”

William Temple may be best known for reminding us that the church is the only human institution that exists primarily for those who are not its members.  That’s a challenging view to some Episcopalians – that the church isn’t here primarily for our benefit, that the church’s basic job isn’t to take care of us or meet our needs. 

The church’s primary task is to help us care for, heal, and reconcile the world.  We do that by becoming like the one we worship, into whose family we are baptized, and whose members we become as we share in his body at this table.  We become what we eat here, we become the living water with which we are washed, we become what we worship, we become whom we emulate. 

John speaks of how this begins:  ‘no one has ever seen God; it is Jesus, God in the flesh, who has made God known.’  As we become part of the body of Christ, we share in that mystery and that ministry.

Where do you discover the word becoming flesh?  Or letting the mystery hidden in God be made known, as Ephesians puts it?  Jesus himself would point us to the poor, or the treasure of the poor, in the phrase of St. Francis.  Jesus calls the poor blessed, for they know and receive the kingdom of heaven.  Where people are most vulnerable, most aware that all they need can only come from God, God’s mystery is being revealed there – the power of God made known in weakness, the wisdom of God made evident in the world’s foolishness.

I had a message from the Bishop of Taiwan a couple of days ago.  He wrote to tell about the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot, which hit the southern end of Taiwan in early August.  Hundreds of people died in the storm and the flooding.  Bp Lai gathered his clergy on retreat recently, and took them to the village devastated by the landslides, Shiao-Lin.  More than 400 bodies still lie buried under 60 or 80 or 100 feet of mud and debris.  He said the smell of rotting flesh was still appalling, and their group joined in praying part of the Ash Wednesday liturgy.

One of the Episcopal churches in Taiwan had been working with school children in Shiao-Lin before the typhoon, but the school principal had forbidden any efforts at evangelism.  After the typhoon, the same principal asked the church to help with the spiritual needs of those devastated children.  The teachers recognized that the children of Shiao-Lin, like their elders, needed the hope these Christians could bring.  Local pastoral workers are leading Bible study and prayer classes with students twice a week, and ministering to 16 local families much in need of spiritual and physical resources.  The church hopes to rent a small house nearby to provide a base for continued work.  Shortly after the typhoon struck, many NGOs and humanitarian agencies responded, but at this point they have all departed.  The church is the only group still there in Shiao-Lin.

What’s it been like here, in the aftermath of your own floods in September?  The loss of life was much smaller, and the community has responded, but your bishop tells me that the shelters are closed and almost finished with their work.  Healing from other floods, like those in New Orleans, has not yet finished, and it is still the churches that endure and persist and proclaim hope.

What about the kind of enduring disaster that’s represented in the poorest inner-city neighborhoods?  Who sets up camp and stays in the inner city, after one teen is murdered and another raped?  Who mentors young girls in danger of being exploited?  Who encourages a larger view of the world with kids who only know fast food, a fast buck, instant gratification, and 23 minute TV answers?  Who ministers to and with the mentally disabled?  Only people who know that death is not the last word.  Only those who follow one who hangs in, even through death and violence and degradation and rejection.

We discover the word becoming flesh in the treasure of the poor, those who are poor in the world’s eyes, those who are radically dependent on God for hope, for life, and the possibility of new life.  Some speak of that treasure of the poor as reflecting God’s own poverty – that God has nothing to give but God’s own self.  If we’re going to follow a God like that, we have to begin to discover that radical poverty of dependence.  It is only in accompanying the poor, joining in solidarity, that we will find God’s treasure.  If we want to find the kingdom of heaven, we’re going to have to let some of that poverty rub off on us – in water, and meal (whether frugal or feast), and incarnate encounter.  When we let go of the world’s protections, we just might discover the treasure of the poor.

Poverty isn’t just about what you have in the bank.  Poverty is about where you look for hope.  The world calls rich those who can look to the bank for hope.  The blessed look to God, and the incarnate sharing-of-self evidence of God in Jesus and his followers – there is the treasure.

Where are you looking for treasure?  Are you willing to look in the midst of those who are starving for hope?