Abraham's Stars

St. Paul's Memorial Church is one of the founders of IMPACT, an interfaith coalition of 27 congregations -- Christian, Jewish and Muslim -- working together on community issues in Charlottesville.

We will soon gather at the John Paul Jones Arena on April 29 at 6:30 pm to hear our proposals for a coordinated effort to reduce homelessness and create new entry-level jobs for young adults. I hope you will come.

The other evening I gave a reflection for IMPACT leaders from our congregations, and I used the occasion partly as a refresher on how IMPACT does what it does. Roughly one-third of our congregational leaders are new to this, so it was a good moment to pause and reflect on how we got where we are and the accomplishments we have so far achieved. Here is the text of my talk:

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Abraham’s Stars

Genesis 15:1-6

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great…” He brought him outside and said, “Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

I want you to look around – look at each other tonight and count the stars among you, for you are Abraham’s stars. The Lord has reckoned you as righteous and good and beloved. Do not be afraid, God told Abraham, and God tells us: Do not be afraid. You are Abraham’s stars.

Tonight I want to spend a few minutes talking about IMPACT, what we are, how we got here, what we’ve accomplished and why we do what we do the way we do it.

So let’s have a little refresher on IMPACT.

We were founded in 2006 by a group of congregations who came together wanting to make a difference in our community.

Many were already involved in ministries of mercy like PACEM and the Salvation Army. They wanted to see if they could change the system so that ministries like PACEM and the Salvation Army would no longer be necessary one day.

The group affiliated with a training organization based in Florida called DART that began showing our congregational leaders and clergy how to create a listening-based community organizing structure that would tackle tough issues in Charlottesville.

Rabbi Dan Alexander of Congregation Beth Israel came up with the acronym, IMPACT, which stands for: Interfaith Movement Promoting Action by Congregations Together.

IMPACT’s method is based on listening to members of our congregations to find out what issues are most on their minds and hearts.

We do that every year in our congregations. In my congregation we have a series of house meetings. From there we narrow the issues. In the fall, we hold the Annual Team Assembly and hear presentations on the problems we’ve heard about from you.

Everyone in our congregations is invited, and we vote to narrow the issue to one or two for the year.

Then members of our congregations volunteer to serve on research teams to find out all we can about the issue for the year.

They come up with proposed solutions, and they meet with decision makers to further refine these solutions. Our goal is to not blindside anyone.

That’s where we come in tonight – to hear about the progress on the two issues we are working on this year: youth unemployment and homelessness – and how we are pushing for action with decision makers in our community.

You will hear more on these topics soon.

Then comes the Nehemiah Action where we ask you to bring at least three people with you to fill the John Paul Jones Arena.

We ask that the decision makers who can make changes in the system come to the Nehemiah Action and appear in on stage.

We ask them if they will commit to the solutions. We will applaud them for positive answers and remain scrupulously polite at all times.

We do this in public because this is a public process we are engaged with. We ask they make their commitments in front of you, the people who have raised these issues and worked on finding solutions.

We ask that you bring as many people as possible to show that there is support in our congregations for these solutions.

This is about grassroots support for realistic solutions, but that also can make some people very uncomfortable because it may not be the way they are accustomed to conducting business.

There is another level to this that I want to talk to you about.

What we do with IMPACT is to share the influence that we have together – power that we have by being together rather than working apart.

We are being asked to come together to share our collective power especially with those in our community who are not accustomed to having much influence or having their voices heard, like our unemployed young people or the homeless.

And IMPACT is remarkable for another reason: In world torn apart by religious differences, we come together looking for what we have in common as heirs to Abraham.

That may make some of us uncomfortable for many reasons. But this is not about our personal comfort. You are being asked to be uncomfortable by standing with those who don’t have much influence on their own.

All of us are being asked to stand up with one voice, to use our voice, and to use keep standing together to change our world.

And you know what? We already have, right here in Charlottesville. Let’s count our successes in the last four years:

* In 2007, IMPACT won new bus routes serving low-income neighborhoods so that people can get to school and work, or go to the grocery store. 

* In 2008, IMPACT won approval of a free dental clinic serving thousands of people who have no dental insurance. 

* In 2010, IMPACT won approval from local law enforcement agencies to develop translation services for non-English speaking people who encounter the Justice system.

Many of our successes take more than one year.

* It took two years to win expansion of pre-school education programs.

* It took two years to win approval from the city and county for the healthy transitions program for the mentally ill. 

* It took three years to win approval of an affordable housing trust fund and the refurbishment of hundreds of housing units for low-income people.

And now we are engaged in the most difficult and complex issues we have ever engaged with: jobs and homelessness.

The outcome of this year’s Nehemiah Action is still uncertain. You will hear more on these issues a little later, but let me underline this year – more than ever – it especially important that you bring as many people as you can to the Nehemiah Action on April 29.

Last spring, we brought 1,537 people to the Nehemiah Action to speak with one voice and have an impact in our community, and that got us part of the way on our issues.

But we still have a long distance to go. We will not get there without you.

If we were to bring the equivalent of one day’s average worship attendance we would have 4,000. Think of the impact we would have with that many voices and the bigger issues we could tackle in the years ahead. Think of what we might accomplish together.

Tonight we are on a journey like our ancestor Abraham. We are walking together on a road with many bumps and curves. We will make our share of mistakes and a wrong turn or two.

But know this: This same God, the God of Abraham, the God of Moses, the God of Jesus, the God of Mohammed is with us, and will guide us, and will bring us safely through. Do not be afraid, God told Abraham. Do not be afraid, God tells us.

You and I are Abraham’s stars.

By James Richardson, Fiat Lux

We elect leaders, not messiahs

Art by Lika Tova

Today's lessons are 2 Samuel 11:1-15, Psalm 145: 10-19, Ephesians 3:14-21 and John 6:1-21     (warning: 2 Samuel contains adult content)

Here is my sermon from today:

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“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

This story today of King David and Bathsheba might not be exactly what the prophets had in mind when they penned those words.

If anyone tells you the Bible is boring, I would invite them to go back and read the Old Testament lesson from Second Samuel today. Please note that it has adult content that might make a sailor wince.

I must admit, as our able staff will tell you, that in a moment of squeamishness – or prudishness – I almost substituted a tamer, G-Rated Old Testament lesson for this one.

But then Pastor Heather told me her Bible study group wanted to know what the preacher would do with this one.

So I’m stuck with this.

I’m not sure I will meet their challenge adequately, but there are a couple of places I want to go with this in the sermon today.

To set scene of this melodrama, we have the handsome – and power hungry – King David; the unsuspecting warrior Uriah; and Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba.King David spies Bathsheba bathing in the nude, and so he has his servants bring her to him whereupon he gets her pregnant.

What is King David to do? He sends Uriah into battle, and sets it up so he will be killed. Uriah dies and King David adds Bathsheba to his collection of wives. Please note: King David has broken at least three commandments: envy, adultery and murder.

You may ask, why on earth is this in the Bible? And what does it have to do with us?

The short answer is that it harkens back to the sage Samuel who warned the people of Israel about the nature of kings. Israel begged for a king. Fine, said Samuel, you will get one. But beware of what you ask for.

King David is remembered a great and clever warrior and king. He unites Israel. But he is a deeply flawed human being. The biblical authors put this here as a cautionary tale about kings – even the good ones.

Our trust – our faith – must be in the God of all creation, the one who can reach all people. Our faith must be in the God who reaches us not as a powerful world ruler or warrior king, but as the one who finds us in our weakest, most vulnerable moments and shows us a path to healing and wholeness.

You might have noticed a line in the Gospel of John this morning when the people try to make Jesus into a worldly king.

“He withdrew to again to the mountain by himself,” the gospel says. Jesus wants nothing to do with holding political power.

These are perhaps cautionary tales for this election year. Human beings – not messiahs – are running for office.

We elect our leaders, with all their flaws, and they reflect us, with all of our flaws.

We need to see political leaders not as messiahs, but as fellow human beings, and hold them accountable for their actions as we hold ourselves accountable.

How?

One response is the temptation to find a mountain somewhere that we can withdraw to all by ourselves. But to do so would be to ignore the pain of our world.

The other path, the path of prophets and Jesus himself – is to engage the world not from a place of power, but from a place of vulnerability.

To paraphrase the prophet Micah, we need to ask of our leaders: Do they bring justice for all, and not just the powerful?

Are they merciful to the most vulnerable, or only protecting their friends?

And are they walking humbly with their Creator, or do they only lust for power?

Fine. But how do we figure this out as faithful people?

Many of us have seen, with great revulsion, the demagoguery on both the Left and Right that has ensued in our time when religion gets mixed into politics.

When we are convinced that God is on our side, and only our side, it is very hard to hear and see others who may have another point of view and, who in fact, just might also believe they have God on their side.

Is there a way to do this and not become like King David and become only in love with our own power?

It is one of the reasons I have felt drawn to the faith-based organization “IMPACT” here in Charlottesville, a coalition of 28 faith congregations that work together on solving hard problems in our community.

I know that not everyone is comfortable with our involvement in IMPACT, so I want to talk about that today.

It is a way to hold our leaders accountable to common values of justice, mercy and humility without seeking power for ourselves.

IMPACT uses methods of community organizing which are founded on a listening process in the participating congregations.Everyone is invited to participate and be heard.

To find out more about how this works, 12 of us from Charlottesville traveled two weeks ago to Tampa, Florida to a training conference on faith-based community organizing.

Our delegation represented eight congregations from here, and there were three of us from St. Paul’s. We were joined by 19 similar organizations from around the Southeast and Midwest at this conference.

The name IMPACT stands for Interfaith Movement Promoting Action by Congregations Together.

It is the first word of that name that I especially want to underline today: “Interfaith.”

Our local coalition includes not only Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Pentecostals, Methodists, Unitarians, Baptists and non-denominational Christians, but also Jews and Muslims.

It is the only interfaith organization like it in Central Virginia, and in all candor, such interfaith coalitions are exceedingly rare in the rest of the world. That alone makes this worthwhile.

Yet the conference brought home for me how hard it is to be truly “interfaith.” I learned once again that well-meaning faithful people can read the same scriptures and hear very different meanings.

That makes our coalition of faith congregations in Charlottesville a miracle – maybe more of a miracle than the feeding of the 5,000 – and a blessing worth nurturing. We sometimes don’t get it right, but we keep trying in spite of ourselves.

To work with people of other faiths does not mean giving up our own. It does not mean homogenizing our faith into some kind of meaningless mush. Rather, it means honoring the integrity of our own faith while listening closely and honoring the faith of others.

We are humans, not messiahs, and God just might be speaking through someone different than we are, and speaking a different language, and praying differently, seeing the world differently.

It is a terrible tragic irony of Christianity that it has spent much of the last 2,000 years building walls around our religion to keep people out, while Jesus and Saint Paul worked overtime to tear down walls and bring people in.

Jesus made no distinctions about who could come to his table. All were invited, none excluded. When he fed the 5,000 he did not ask who they were, where they came from or what they believed. He didn’t check for membership cards. He fed them.

He went to the Cross, not as a powerful king like King David, but as the suffering servant who would share our pain and show us a path to healing and life. Over and over he pointed to how God’s Kingdom is bursting into our world for all to see. And we can get a glimpse of it even now.

I got one of those glimpses yesterday, in a church of all places, as the Rev. Canon Susan Goff was ordained in Richmond as a bishop for Christ’s church, and the 1,066th in the Anglican line of succession in America.

She is the first woman to become an Episcopal bishop in Virginia.

And presiding was the first woman presiding bishop and primate in the Anglican world, Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Hundreds of people came, including many of you. There were many wonderful moments, but the one that grabbed me the most was not in the pageantry, but in a simple hymn, in Spanish, I had never heard before.

Its title: “Muchos resplandores.”

In English: “Many are the light beams from the one light. Our one light is Jesus. Many are the light beams from the one light; we are the one in Christ.”

Indeed, many are the light beams. Many are we. AMEN

By James Richardson, Fiat Lux, St. Paul's Memorial Church

Opening our heart and hands: Having an impact this Lent

“Happy are they who consider the poor and needy! The Lord will deliver them in the time of trouble.”

Psalm 41

As you know, Lent is a time of inward self-examination and confession. Lent is also a time of looking outward at where we have fallen short, especially in our care for the poorest and neediest among us.

That is one of the reasons that I agreed to serve this year as the co-president of IMPACT, a coalition of 31 faith congregations – Christian, Jewish and Muslim – who have banded together to work on social justice issues. One of the reasons I am committed to IMPACT is that it focuses on specific solutions that have an immediate positive impact on the real lives of real people.

One of the qualities of IMPACT that I especially appreciate is that the organization is careful about the issues it picks. We come together to vote on which issue we will pursue. It must be an issue that unifies us, has clear cut solutions and one where our effort will have an impact.

Last year we focused on mental health issues. I can tell you that as the pastor of a large church on an urban corner that the safety net for the mentally ill is very thin in our community. We see people coming through our church doors on a daily basis who have only the barest connection to reality and who are barely surviving. Many live on the street, and they end up in jail.

They have very few places to go in Charlottesville.

Inevitably, the issues of poverty and mental illness take us into the realm of public policy. I know that makes some people uncomfortable, and it makes me squirm, too. Religious people should be extraordinarily careful when wading into political arenas, and we have many recent examples of religious leaders pushing themselves onto ground where they do not belong.

But I am also mindful that the Bible is abundantly clear that we must take care of the poor, the sick, the hurting and the needy. The mentally ill are all of those, and they have so few places to turn. Sometimes we, as people of faith, must get our hands dirty in the arena of public policy, and this is one of those times.

Last year the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors agreed to allocate $42,500 for a transitional housing program for the mentally ill so that they have a place to go when being discharged from a mental hospital, prison or psychiatric unit. The program is humane, common sense, saves money by preventing re-incarceration, and it is the right thing to do.

It is also just barely enough.

This week, the county staff recommended eliminating the program. That is only a staff recommendation, and does not necessarily mean the Board of Supervisors will follow that recommendation.

But the board needs to hear from us.

There will be a hearing on this budget proposal tomorrow Wednesday February 29 at 6 pm at the County Building at 401 McIntyre Road. Filling every seat in the audience will send a message to our elected officials that we want them to do the right thing for the mentally ill. Please come if you can; IMPACT supporters will meet outside at 5:45 pm.

You can also email the board: bos@albemarle.org, or call individual members of the board by clicking HERE.

One more thing: Even if we succeed in restoring funding for this program, we aren’t done. On March 5 at 6:30 pm at the Church of the Incarnation, we will get an update on how we have done on this issue and hear more on the issue we are engaged with this year: jobs for young people.

Then on March 26 at 6:30 pm, members of all 31 congregations will convene at the John Paul Jones Arena for our annual Nehemiah Action. Please put all of these dates on your calendar and come.