Sermons

A Sermon Preached by the Very Rev. Gary R. Hall, Ph.D.
Dean and President
Professor of Anglican Studies
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary
Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, Ohio
October 14, 2007

I.

It is such a privilege to be with you this morning. I have long admired this cathedral and Tracey, your dean--and because Kathy and I are longtime friends of Rosalie and Tom Anderson, we have had occasion to worship here many times over the past several years. As I often say to people around the church, if I could pick one place to go to church on Sunday and one preacher to listen to over time, it would be here at Trinity Cathedral with Tracey Lind. That you have sent Audra Abt to Seabury (the seminary I serve) as a student this year only increases my respect and affection for this place. So thank you and thanks to Tracey for the invitation to be here this morning.

I'm sure that all of you come here today with something other than seminaries and seminarians on your mind. The shootings of two teachers and three students at Success Tech Academy last Wednesday, and the ultimate suicide of the fourteen year-old shooter, are clearly the most important thing that has happened in this community in recent days. In a country that claims to value children, we routinely subject our kids to degradation and violence. And Success Tech is, by all accounts, a highly attractive and effective public magnet school. But schools, as good as they are, cannot solve every social problem. The unfolding story of Asa Coon, the shooter, is even more tragic than the events he unleashed at Success Tech. Just two weeks before the incident, Asa and his brother Stephen had been the targets of an unsuccessful drive-by shooting. Our children are caught in the web of an escalating spiral of violence. Someone in this society needs to speak for them.

II.

Now even though I live in Chicago, I know that there is another story unfolding in Cleveland this week, the story of the mighty contest between the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Red Sox. So before I return to my main subject, I want you to let your imagination roam for a moment and indulge me while I sketch out the following parable. This kind of teaching worked for Jesus, so I hope it will work for me.

Imagine you are a lifelong Cleveland Indians fan. Over the course of the 2007 baseball season, you begin to get warnings that you might be transferred to Boston, home of the dreaded Red Sox. Suddenly, in early October, you are transferred to Boston, and your new boss asks you to go with him to Game One of the ALCS last Friday night in the home of the enemy, dreaded Fenway Park. As hallowed as it is, going to Fenway is for you like a journey to Osama Bin Laden's hideout, but a job is a job, so grudgingly you go along. But you make this deal with yourself: you tell yourself that outwardly you may cheer for the Red Sox, but silently, in your heart, you will continue to root for your beloved Tribe.

And then, something miraculous happens. You go to the game. You're munching on your Fenway Frank when you hear a voice say to you, "Hey, pal. You live in Boston now. I know you love the Indians. But give it a rest. It's time for you to root for the Red Sox." And that voice is the voice of Eric Wedge.

Now it's not much of a parable, but I'm not as practiced at parable making and Jesus was. And for good or ill, you probably find it kind of shocking. The Indians' manager telling you to root for the Red Sox? Has the preacher been drinking beer past the seventh inning? As shocking as my parable might sound, it makes exactly the same point made by the prophet Jeremiah in this morning's Old Testament reading. Over the course of the last several weeks we have heard Jeremiah excoriate the Israelites for their faithlessness, and he has prophesied that their exile into Babylon will be the fitting punishment for their social and religious offences. Week after week after week Jeremiah has talked about exile in Babylon as if it's worse than going into hell itself. And then suddenly this week he says this surprising, even shocking thing about what the Israelites should do once they get there:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.

In other words, says Jeremiah: you're going to go into the belly of the beast, the home territory of everything you distrust and dislike. Do not give in to the temptation to go underground there. Do not keep yourselves separate from Babylon, holding onto your beloved dream of Jerusalem in the golden past. Give yourself over to it, live in it, become part of the fabric of Babylonian life. Now that's shocking advice, but perhaps a highly evolved Israelite could find a way to live with it. But Jeremiah doesn't stop there. He turns it up a notch:

But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.--Jeremiah 29

Not only are you to live the life of the place you once defined as your enemy; you're also now commanded to wish it well. "Seek the welfare of the city...for in its welfare you will find your welfare." Is this some kind of divine joke?

III.

Now what is the relevance of all this? For many people, religion is about preserving a dream of the past. We all do that to some extent--witness our celebrations of Christmas. Certainly we see this tendency in many of the arguments abroad right now in the Episcopal Church. Living as we do in a world where we are constantly bombarded by change, religion can often appeal to us as a safe place, a refuge from the storms that surround us. I often wonder if the arguments about human sexuality in the church are really about that at all or if they're really about something else--our corporate inability to process the implications of what we now know about biology, psychology, and even physics.

From Jeremiah's point of view, religion is not at all about preserving a dream of the past. It is not at all about staying pure and unpolluted from the currents of life that surround us. True religion, from even this conservative, grumpy, xenophobic prophet's point of view, is about being present to what God is up to in the current moment, when and where you find yourself. If you look back to an idealized past to find God, you will always be disappointed. If you look to the future to find God, you will always be waiting. If you want to find God, live your life here and now in the place you inhabit and with the women and children and men whom God has given you to live it with.

And that brilliant, counterintuitive, radical insight has something to say to you and me about the sad events which we have witnessed this week at Success Tech. "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." For better or for worse, this (and you can read Cleveland, Boston, Denver, Phoenix or any other major American city you can think of), this is the city to which God has sent us. You and I will find our welfare not in trying to escape the urban reality of the situation we're in. Our welfare does not lie in some dream of a suburban fantasy. You and I will find our welfare in seeking the welfare of the city we inhabit together.

And that means some specific things. It means that all the beauties and benefits of the city are our treasures. It means that all of the problems and challenges of the city are our burdens. We cannot escape them by constructing a fantasy of our own nostalgic purity. And more than that: it means that the children of the city are our children--all of them, not just our own nuclear or extended family children, but all of the children of this and every city are our children. And the kids at schools like Success Tech deserve as much of our love and care and support and involvement as the children of our own households do. And so do their teachers. Seeking the welfare of the city is not only about living life and finding God in the here and now. It is about stepping up to the responsibility to claim all those who are at risk and who suffer as members of our own extended family.

In today's Gospel, Jesus is amazed that, after healing a group of people, only one comes back to say thanks. "Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?"[Luke 17] It is no accident that both our scripture readings say something to us about expanding our definition of who counts as "one of us." For Jeremiah, even the Babylonians, finally, were part of the charmed circle of God's concern. For Jesus, even a Samaritan could "get it" in ways as faithful Jew might not. If we think that the shooting of five people by a disturbed teenager is a problem that doesn't concern us, that involves only "them," then we are not hearing what Jeremiah and Jesus are saying at all. In God's reign, there are no outsiders. There is no "other," no them. We are, all of us, in this together. We are, all of us, implicated in each other's struggles and joys. We are, all of us, to find our welfare in each other's welfare.

"Seek the welfare of the city." Our children in America are caught in the midst of forces so stressful that few of us adults can even imagine them. The violence which characterizes the life of an urban child in a poor community in an American city has become so routine that you and I no longer seem to notice it. Who will advocate for these children if we do not? You and I, who live in and love our cities, you and I must be the voices of reason and sanity and hope for our children and their teachers. We must demand better, safer schools, better, safer streets, affordable housing, universal health care, improved nutrition, the promise of meaningful work. We must also be willing to pay for them. These kids are not at risk because they dropped here from Mars. They're at risk because of the social choices we have made and because we have not faithfully and forcefully sought their welfare as Jeremiah and Jesus demand that we do.

"Seek the welfare of the city." God has taken you and me seriously enough to call us, together, into this community of blessing and connection and faith. God has taken you and me seriously enough to charge us with caring for the children given into our care. May this week's shootings at Success Tech wake us up to God's commission to each and all of us that we seek the welfare of God's city and our children. And in seeking that welfare, may we find ourselves blessed in and through this community of faith--the one which gathers now around God's table, giving thanks to the One who came among us seeking our welfare, not that One's own. Amen.