Some years ago, I boarded a plane at LaGuardia and took my aisle seat. Seated next to me in the middle seat was a little girl, probably about four years old. She was traveling with her grandmother, who was seated by the window. Clearly, it was the child's first airplane trip - she was all dressed up, and excited beyond words. She was exploring everything - the seat lights and vents, the call buttons, the seat belts - and asking a million questions about what was going to happen and when. Finally her grandmother got her settled down and belted in. Suddenly, the plane started backing up to leave the gate. The child sat up straight, eyes wide, and looked around wildly. She turned to her grandmother: "Grandma, are you driving?" "No," she was told. She whirled toward me: "Are you driving?" I shook my head. She raised her head and called out loudly, "Who's driving this thing?"
Out of the mouths of babes!! There are many mornings when I think, especially after hearing the news, "Who's driving this thing?!" The question seems most apropos in the macro sense, in a world seemingly gone amuck, with walls built constantly higher and stronger, as Barbara Kingsolver so eloquently describes. But it's also one I think we have been asking ourselves at Judson in recent years. Maybe it's not so much who but what is driving this thing, this beloved community of ours with its rich history and gifted people. And the answer is not a simple one - like most churches, we are driven by a complex set of values and obligations. We have a diverse congregation, whose pastoral needs require great care and time. This same diversity among us means that no one set of educational and spiritual programs can serve all our needs. We have a new and renewed building that must be paid for and maintained. We have high expectations for the number and quality of our staff - far beyond most congregations our size. All of these things, to some extent, drive the decisions we make about our ministry and our resources.
But from the very beginning, Judson has also been uniquely driven by a deep and abiding conviction that we are called to a life of action outside our walls. An overt symbol of this historic commitment is the fountain at the corner of our building. When Edward Judson worked with Stanford White to design the church, he insisted on the fountain to provide clean cold water to nearby tenements. He understood Judson's ministry to be one of bridging the wealth of the neighborhoods north of the Square and the poverty of the immigrant communities to the south. The enduring legacy of this unusual feature has been a constant, and a constantly changing, ministry focus on our Village neighbors, our city and its peoples, our nation and its policies.
The fountain has been dry and unused for decades. In some ways, this is sad; but in other ways, it is an appropriate metaphor for the approach that has characterized our public ministry: we identify a need, develop programs to address it, and, once the context and need has shifted, so do we - we move on to identify new needs. Over the century-plus that this church has existed in this place, this drive toward the wider community and its needs has led us down strange and wonderful paths: to programs with students and artists, prostitutes and politicians, refugees and immigrants, homeless families and runaway youth. When women needed a way to get safe abortions, Judson established a network to make it possible. When families of restaurant and service workers, many of them immigrants, who died at the World Trade Center needed support, Judson helped to create and administered a foundation to serve that purpose.
It is this rich history into which we step with our new community ministries program, with its dual focus on providing, on the one hand, training for congregation-based ministry in the public arena for seminarians and other young leaders, and providing, on the other hand, opportunities for members of the Judson community to be more fully involved in a variety of social justice activities. After several years of relative quiet when it came to bold actions for change, we now have the energy and the leadership to do a new thing.
When I met several weeks ago with Donna and the Community Ministers to plan this service, we talked about the ways things are being stirred up here; the way the waters are being troubled. Of course, the spiritual makes it clear that it is God who troubles the waters; we are simply invited to wade in. Not that we at Judson have ever had our feet completely dry - but perhaps we have been for awhile in water that's a bit shallow, and we are being called to wade in deeper. As a quintessential beach person, I know well that the further you go into the water, the stronger the currents become and the greater the risk of encountering a rogue tide that could sweep you away. When I was a lifeguard, I always insisted that no one go into the water alone. Here at Judson, we don't have to - we always have companions for those ventures into the deep.
During that same planning session, Donna said something simple, but I think important; she said, "Perhaps God troubles the big waters in small ways. " That may be what is happening at Judson these days. With the help of five - count them, five! - bright, committed, energetic young adults, we are feeling the waves licking at our feet, inviting us to wade in. Through them, we are meeting people and making contact with organizations that can resource us and be our allies on a number of issues: immigration, spiritual violence, homelessness, prison ministry, LGBT youth, the arts. You're going to hear now from two of our Community Ministers as they reflect on how they see this new thing we are doing, before I wrap up.
Stephen Epps:
Wade in the water
Wade in the water children
Wade in the water
God's gonna trouble the water
These words, flung from the shadows of a bleak and disenchanting socio-cultural purgatory, the nocturnal bosom of those lonely nights in the history of our nation's liberal democratic exhibition, now echo with a chilling clarity in the discourse of a nation and a progressive movement whose waters today appear still.
The governmental, corporate, and theological waters of post-modernity lay dormant as a status-quo preserving web of devaluing democratic principles, deregulating capitalist ambitions, and divesting faith of its social justice frame of reference. We exist in the inertia of a world unlike what Francis Bacon wrote about as "The New Atlantis", Martin King preached about as "The Beloved Community", and John Lennon sang about in "Imagine."
Despite Voltaire's Pangloss teaching Candide that this plutocratic, racist, sexist, militaristic, homophobic, systemically dehumanizing and discriminatory world is "the best of all possible worlds" - I declare not so: the waters of our times need troubling! It is highly probable we will be branded as "troublemakers" because we overturn supremacist and imperial social arrangements by engaging in strategically emancipatory, context-changing kingdom building and not genuflecting to the American myopic denial and evasion of the existential pain and un-redemptive sufferings of humanity. In other words, we realize, as did Dr. King, "our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
We will be labeled "troublemakers" - naïve "troublemakers" - demanding "troublemakers" - irrational "troublemakers" - but what an honor, an enviable privilege it is to cause trouble for corporate executives who are paid 400 times more than the average employee, yet refuse to pay a livable minimum wage. How commendable the life given to causing trouble for neocolonial expressions of hegemonic power on behalf of democracy and individual freedom.
This is why I came to Judson Memorial Church. When I heard you spoke truth to power, affirmed the ontological "somebodyness" of all people, and promoted love, peace, and justice, I knew I found some "troublemakers." A place where I could confront the wrath of the prison industrial complex, the burden of debt upon the national economies of the developing world, the disheartening religious lethargy of ecclesiastical bodies, and sacrificially serve the least, the lost, the last and the left out - what better place than Judson Memorial Church? So allow me to introduce myself. Yes, I am a Community Minister. My name is Stephen Epps and I too am a "troublemaker".
Rich Montone:
A few years ago, I was reading an issue of the Canadian magazine Adbusters. Are any of you familiar with Adbusters? In their words, it's a not-for-profit, reader-supported magazine concerned with the erosion of our physical and cultural environments. The issue I'm remembering had a photo spread from an anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. On the left side of the spread there was a person screaming toward the right page. On the page at the right, there was a person screaming back toward the left. Two opposing sides, one noise, no progress. I thought to myself, if this is what we look like when we are doing social justice and making peace, something is terribly amiss.
Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has a very controversial teaching. He says that by drinking tea, we can stop war. At first this may seem so fanciful and unrealistic that it would easily offend anyone actually faced with real war and suffering. But Thich Nhat Hanh is not removed from the worst things humans can do to each other. He watched first-hand as his homeland was bloodied by violence during the Vietnam War. Given the chance to clarify further, Thich Nhat Hanh explains that if we cannot bring our whole lives - physical, mental, and spiritual - to presence in the simple act of drinking tea, how can we possibly do the enormous task of social justice in a way that transcends binary conflict? Thich Nhat Hanh refused to take sides in the Vietnam War, employing his Buddhist practice to bring him to an understanding that all involved in war are victims - and are in need of relief. Such a courageous view of war transcends the useless binary conflict I saw in Adbusters. And I can't help but wonder to what degree it was enabled by mere tea drinking.
This teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh has become profound for me. I'd like to learn to embody it better. And I'd be thrilled if you're compelled to help me in this learning. The community ministers are working hard to keep us engaged in critical social justice issues in our city and beyond. But within it and behind it I would enjoy learning in small groups about how we can bring our whole persons to bear in justice advocacy. I want to strengthen my own moment-to-moment practice within this community, and make our large justice work a sum of little and loving acts. Our most profound activism cannot help but emerge from a ferocious-but-humble spirit practice. If you'd like to trouble the waters of our world in this way, let's make it happen together. You'll find an invitation to do so in next week's bulletin. If a different way makes more sense for you to connect spirit with justice work, please don't resist whatever that call is. We each have to find our own way and take it. But if our activism isn't driven by a practiced connection with the Ultimate, then who's driving this justice thing, anyway?
Peggy Halsey:
Margret Hofmeister found a wonderful passage from Ezekiel, which she read as our Ancient Testimony. It talks about springs of water trickling east from the temple, then becoming a stream, and finally a torrent. As it moves toward the sea, the living water sweetens the foul waters it encounters. Creatures draw life from the freshened waters and "where the torrent flows, everything shall live." Fruit trees spring up on the banks for "their water comes from the sanctuary; their fruit is for food and their foliage for enjoyment."
Now I'm fairly certain that Edward Judson's placing of the fountain with its living waters on the east side of the church was simply a matter of practicality. And I am not arrogant enough, even on behalf of Judson, to think that our small efforts to sweeten the foul waters of our time will become a torrent anytime soon. But I am deeply grateful that we have this exhilarating moment of possibility, when Donna's creativity, the energy of our Community Ministers, the gifts of past donors to our designated funds, and the commitment of this amazing community, presents us with new ways to be faithful to our history and our vision. So let's just wade on in…
