Sermon on August 29, 2010
Park Avenue Christian Church, NYC
By Tom Ehrich
Jesus said, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.”
I want to start by saying two words of gratitude.
A year and a half ago, my friend Ray McGarrigle invited me to meet with him and Pastor Alvin Jackson, to discuss starting a recovery ministry at Park Avenue Christian Church. None of us knew exactly what form such a ministry could take. But it seemed important, in a city with at least one million addicted persons, to offer whatever help we could, to make an overt connection between recovery and faith, and to make a difference in as many lives as we could reach.
We studied other recovery ministries around the country. Our planning team grew to twelve. We spent six months going deeply into the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and sharing our own personal experiences with addiction and recovery.
Now we gather every Sunday for singing, guidance in prayer and meditation, and a talk. God is bringing some extraordinary people to this fellowship. Every week the talks are inspiring. With the truth that comes from “been there, done that,” speakers convey the promise of recovery through conscious contact with God.
So, I want to thank you for this opportunity to coordinate a new ministry and to lift up my own need for restoration and hope. This congregation is to be commended for giving this important gift to the City.
Second, I want to thank you for welcoming me to your worship and community. I learned long ago that, while I believe fervently in faith communities, I have little patience for churches that are self-serving, afraid to change, hostile to diversity, and determined to die safely and quietly, rather than take the risks of living boldly for God.
It has meant a lot to me personally to find my way into this village at 85th and Park Avenue, where you have a long history of living boldly for others, and not for yourselves, where change is happening every day, where diversity isn’t just tolerated but sought, prayed for, and celebrated, and where the risks of living for God are considered small price to pay for the surpassing joy of knowing God in Jesus Christ.
So, thank you for being a village of goodness and radical welcome.
On Thursday I delivered our third and youngest son to college. He joined 2,000 other young men and women in the Class of 2014 at Binghamton University. As we drove three hours across Route 17, I thought of the great village that it took to raise this child.
I thought of the teachers who taught him to read, to think, to sing, to play the violin, to have a strong personal code of honor, to tell the truth, to see himself as worthy. I thought of the parents who welcomed him into their homes, fed him meals, kept him safe. I thought of the camp counselors and coaches, the older teammates who showed him the ropes, and the countless friends who enriched his life. I thought of the faith communities that allowed him to be himself and not get stuck in being a “preacher’s kid.”
I thought especially of his older brothers, who have shown him great love and respect, his grandparents, and his mother, a saint in our midst.
As they say in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, it took a village to raise our son. We could not have done it on our own.
Forty-seven years ago, another father dreamed of the day when his four little children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." He dreamed of black children and white children joining hands in the great songs of freedom. He dreamed of a time when “all flesh” would see the glory of God.
I don’t think we are there yet, but we have come a long way.
I grew up in an era and a city where the march of African-Americans out of poverty and segregation into better neighborhoods and better schools was seen as an invasion, not an expression of American ideals. We tracked their advance and could name every neighborhood where the color line had been “broken.” We didn’t know them as persons and had no idea why “they” wanted to live in “our” neighborhoods. In many respects, the Indianapolis of my childhood was not a healthy village. I had much to overcome.
In 1993, I had occasion to visit Memphis, Tennessee, and spent an afternoon at the American Civil Rights Museum, built around the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I watched the film of his speech on August 28, 1963. I stood before a large screen and simply wept. I wept at how much pain my own people had caused. I wept at the suffering of my fellow Americans. I wept at King’s vision of an America where, in the words Jesus spoke, we would “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” to the banquet of American prosperity, where those who were brought here in chains would hold their heads high as free men and women, where freedom would ring more loudly than any hatred abroad in our troubled land.
Thirteen years later, I stood at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and read the poem that a Jewish woman from Providence, Rhode Island, had written in 1883 after visiting the aftermath of Tsarist pogroms in Russia. Emma Lazarus saw a day when a woman with a “mighty torch” would stand at the gates of this great village, a “Mother of Exiles,” who would shun the “storied pomp” of ancient aristocracies and say to the world,
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
This past week, a drunken young man attacked a taxi driver for the offense of being Muslim, a tragic but not surprising outgrowth of massive hatred and fear on display in Lower Manhattan.
Yesterday, a rally of people filled with fear and loathing tried to co-opt the memory of Dr. King, claiming the mantle of the civil rights movement and claiming to lead a religious revival. I found their phony sincerity bizarre and not the least convincing.
Our villages are troubled. Our American villages are convulsing in fear, despair, and worry about jobs, and now anger, deep and boiling anger, whipped up and exploited by some of the most despicable politicians in American history, anger that can erupt at any moment in acts of violence against the vulnerable.
This anger will not be restricted to shouting down Muslims near Wall Street. It will turn against gays and lesbians, against people of color, against immigrants, legal or otherwise, against Jews, against anyone who seems a promising target, even, in time, against me and thee.
This is not a time for Christian communities to be turning inward, focused on their in-house concerns and small issues of who’s in charge. This is a time for people of faith to stand over against the darkness. It is time for us to turn our faces boldly outward, to form alliances across the boundaries of religion, to stand shoulder to shoulder as people shout hatred. It is time for Christians to nurture good villages, where our children, as Dr. King dreamed for his children, can be raised in righteousness and freedom and tolerance and high moral calling.
When we give our banquets, we must not stop at inviting people like ourselves, people whom we enjoy, people who share our values. We must invite the wretched of the earth, the sad, the lonely, the misfits, the homeless and tempest-tossed, the people who yearn for freedom and will walk across a desert dodging vigilantes to find it. When we give our banquets, we must say to a broken world,
Here in this village is a meal fit for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
Here in this village is a fellowship that Jesus would be pleased to share.
Here in this village is brokenness being made whole.
Here in this village is the Higher Power who alone can bring sanity to our lives.
Here in this village is a voice that shouts praise to the living God, not anger to boil your blood.
Here in this village is a dream that is grounded, not in what white men will allow to happen, but in what God demands will happen.
Here in this village is a hope that does not depend on hoarding prosperity, but a hope that shares prosperity with the world.
Here is a village that can raise children of goodness and virtue, children we are proud to call our sons and daughters, children who will, by the saving grace of almighty God, make this a better world -- for everyone.
