Spiritual Choices in Difficult Times
A Sermon by
Rev. Robert M. Hardies
All Souls Church, Unitarian
Washington, D.C.
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Our reading this morning is one of the most famous stories from scripture. It’s the story of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes from the gospel of Matthew, Chapter 14, verses 13 through 21.
After a long day of ministering to the sick and poor, Jesus and the disciples
withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds
followed him on foot from the towns so that when Jesus landed, a large
crowd had gathered by the shore. Jesus had compassion on them and healed
their sick. As evening approached, the disciples came to Jesus and said,
“This is a remote place and it’s already getting late. Look, send the crowds
away so that they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.
Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to
eat.” “But we have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they complained.
“Bring them here to me,” he said and he directed the people to sit down on the
grass in small circles. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking
up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the
disciples and the disciples gave them to all the people and they all ate and were
satisfied. And the disciples even picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces,
crumbs that were left over. The number of those who ate was about five
thousand men, besides women and children.
Spiritual choices in difficult times. If you needed any other evidence that our nation has entered a difficult and even desperate time, you need look no further than the few-block radius around All Souls Church, where signs abound. Gun violence is on the rise in our neighborhood. The week before Barack Obama was inaugurated as President, gunshots erupted a block from the church, at the corner of 15th and Girard and stray bullets shattered the windows of the new recreation center that was built there. A young man playing at the rec center was shot in the hand by one of those stray bullets. A member of the All Souls staff was also in that building when the gunshots occurred.
Last week, the United States Senate appended to the historic D.C. voting rights legislation a repeal of the D.C. gun control laws. I’d like to ask those of you who live in the Commonwealth of Virginia to go back home today and tell Senators Webb and Warner that you work and go to church in the District, that the people that you love live in the District and that the residents of the District shouldn’t have to choose between their vote and their safety. [Applause] Another story: On the day after the inauguration, I came into church to discover that the small custodial contractor that cleans the church had that morning, due to the downturn in the economy, laid off two of the church’s custodians, Nora Nolasco and Blanca Diaz. Nora and Blanca have worked with the church as long as I have been your minister. We tried to negotiate a deal to hire them back ourselves but it proved too costly. So we said a sad farewell to them and tried to do the best we could to give them a generous severance and to continue their health insurance. And now we’re trying to use church networks to help them find another job.
Another story: Just two weeks ago, the church’s administrator, Katie Loughary, came to me and she said, “Rob, over the course of the last week, the church has lost more than $14,000 in pledge income.” She said all week long members have been calling or e-mailing me apologetically, to say that they have to cancel or reduce their pledge because they’ve lost their job. They’ve been downsized. Others of you have come to me after service on Sunday mornings to say, “Keep me in your prayers this week; my workplace is cutting back jobs by ten percent and I don’t know whether I’ll be employed when I come back next Sunday.”
This economic downturn, friends, is affecting us all. Some are losing jobs. Others are watching their retirement savings disappear. And it is forcing all of us to make difficult choices. Folks are cutting their budgets. Some are postponing their retirement or delaying their dreams. Some are forced to choose between paying for health care and paying for food. Others are trying to figure out if they can still afford to give their children the kind of education they had hoped for. Difficult choices. But before we make any of these difficult choices about our finances, I believe that there are some prior choices we must attend to and those are spiritual choices, spiritual choices that will affect and, sometimes, determine the material and economic choices that we will make in response to these difficult financial times. This morning, I want us to talk together about those spiritual choices that we must make in these difficult times.
The first choice that I want to talk about is the choice of whether or not we will give in to shame. Money has a strange way of inducing shame in people. Some folks feel ashamed that they don’t have enough of it. Folks are losing their jobs and they feel as though that’s an indictment of their worth, that they’ve let their families or their children down. As a result, they tend not to talk about their financial difficulties. I was at a conference last week with colleagues who told me that they have parishioners who are so ashamed about their financial situation that they won’t even come to church on Sunday mornings. Strangely enough, there are other folks I know who are ashamed for the other reason. They’re having kind of a survivor’s guilt about the recession; they’ve kept their jobs, they’re doing okay, and they’re feeling a little bit guilty about the fact that they still have money to spend.
What a strange thing, that money can make us ashamed if we have too little of it and ashamed if we have too much of it. We sometimes forget that money does not have ultimate value. It has instrumental value; it is only as good as what we exchange for it. Money, its presence or absence, is not a determinant of our worth and dignity as human beings. And all of this shame is entirely unhelpful. So, I want to ask us to agree on something this morning; I want us to agree that All Souls Church is going to be a shame-free zone during this economic difficulty. [Applause] And I want to encourage all of us to create the space for us to be able to talk about our financial situations, no matter what they are, without shame. That means perhaps talking about it over lunch in Pierce Hall, or being able to go to our small groups and our adult education classes and share about it there, or coming to our ministers to talk about the problem. We’ve noted that people are calling the administrator to cancel their pledges and say that they’ve lost their jobs, rather than calling their minister. So I want to invite us to break the silences that keep us ashamed and apart. We are fortunate to worship in a tradition where our worth as human beings is not measured by the size of our pocketbooks. Let’s take advantage of that.
So one choice is whether or not we will give in to shame. But there is another spiritual choice that we must make during these difficult times. Some of the other emotions that we are overcome with during these times, in addition to shame, are anxiety and fear. Some of us who have lost our jobs or seen our savings disappear are, understandably, reacting with fear. Others of us who haven’t seen much happen yet are, nonetheless, afraid that something’s coming down the road, that we haven’t seen rock bottom yet. My experience is that human beings tend to react to anxiety and fear in one of two ways. Our kind of instinctual response is a defensive retreat, right? We share this instinct with the animals who, when threatened, will either recoil and hide or, worse, lash out aggressively. And so, we have this choice of retreat and isolation. But we have another choice that we can make as well in the face of anxiety and fear. And it’s not that choice. It’s this choice: it’s the choice of solidarity and relationship in the midst of anxiety and fear. And that choice will largely determine the other choices that we make in response to this economic crisis.
Our reading from Matthew today, I think, dramatically illustrated this choice between isolation and retreat and solidarity. We find Jesus and the disciples, after a hard day of work ministering to the poor. They hop in a boat and sail off to the other side in hopes of going to a solitary place, it says. But the folks on the shore see them going and they’re not going to let Jesus get away. And so they all chase after him so that when they get to the other side, there’s a huge crowd of more than 5,000 people waiting for Jesus and the disciples. You can just see the disciples going, “Oh, lord!” [Laughter] Jesus steps off the boat and he heals the sick, but the disciples are watching the sun go down and they’re looking in their baskets and seeing how much food they have and they realize that they’re in this isolated place and it’s getting to be dinnertime and they’re worried about who’s going to get their food, where, and that there’s not enough food to feed the 5,000. So they say to Jesus, “Look, send them away, send them back into their village so that they can go buy food for themselves. We don’t have enough to share over here.” Jesus says, well, why should we send them away; “You give them food to eat.” He says, here; show me what we’ve got. And they bring out their five loaves and their two fishes and Jesus gives thanks and they distribute those loaves and fishes to the 5,000. That’s five thousand men, it says, “besides women and children.” Now biblical scholars have lots of interpretations of how this miracle occurred. My feminist scholar friends like to imagine that, you know, women would never go off to a remote place with their families without having stashed away a little bit of food under their hems. [Laughter] So when they gathered into small groups, there was enough food to go around. I think that the miracle happened something like that probably. But it was a choice. A choice was made for solidarity over isolation and retreat. And in times like these, that choice can make all the difference.
Some of you may have heard the tragic story that took place on the streets of this neighborhood just a couple of weeks ago, the story of Jose Sanchez. Jose Sanchez was a 31-year-old, homeless man who lived on the streets of Columbia Heights. About a week after the inauguration, Sanchez was hanging out on the street corner during broad daylight and two people walked by and Sanchez shouted a homophobic slur at these two guys. They beat him to within an inch of his life and left him for dead on Park Road. Jose Sanchez lay on the street for twenty minutes in broad daylight before any passerby called 911. He died three days later from a traumatic brain injury in the hospital. A surveillance camera captured the event and its aftermath, and revealed that 150 people had walked by Jose Sanchez during those twenty minutes before a phone call was made. There are consequences to the choices that we make in difficult times. Let us choose solidarity rather than retreat and isolation.
We’ve included some ways for you to begin to imagine that reaching out in solidarity. Louise pointed out the yellow flyer in your order of service which just highlights some of the ways in which you can reach out in solidarity here at the church. I think it’s also important, though, that the church models this solidarity during difficult times. Many of you know that we have been experiencing financial difficulties here at the church. In January, the board cut the church budget by about $70,000. But I think it’s important that we make a commitment here at the church that in difficult times we will not let our own challenges prevent us from reaching out into a community in need and helping those who are in need. And so, we have made the decision that, for the foreseeable future, we are going to tithe, which is to say give away ten percent of all of the “place cash” that comes in on Sunday mornings. That’s just the fives, the tens, the twenties, not pledge income but the loose plate cash that gets thrown into the offering plates on Sunday mornings. We are going to tithe that now and each quarter we will cut a check to a social service agency in our neighborhood to help provide emergency relief. [Applause] It’s a small act, but it is symbolic of our commitment to continuing to serve others even though we, ourselves, are in need.
I’ve been trying to imagine what else we can do. I’ve been trying to imagine a way in which we can incorporate this act of solidarity into our actual worship experience, into our liturgy, on Sunday mornings. The Greek word for liturgy actually means “the work of the people.” But oftentimes on Sunday mornings, it’s the minister, you know, doing a lot of the work up here, and we don’t often involve all of you in the liturgy, in the work of the people. And so today, we want to do something a little different. We want to imagine our offering today as a ritual of solidarity, as a symbolic act of solidarity over isolation. I want to invite us all this morning, during our offering to do one or more of two things. First, we’re going to invite you forward today to bring your offerings to the church and to the community. The ushers will gather up front. We’ll invite you down to make your offering as a more active participation in generosity today. We will also have, up front here today, a basket that is filled with Safeway gift cards, each for five dollars, which is just about enough to get a deli sandwich or a prepared lunch at the Safeway here on Columbia Road. I want to ask you, as you come forward, to do one of two things with that card. If you need that lunch yourself, I want you to take that card and keep it. And there are people in this congregation who need that card. If you don’t, I invite you to come forward and take that card and pledge to give it away this week in an act of solidarity, to practice that act of solidarity in the community this week. We’re going to have an opportunity on line as well, for folks to talk about and reflect on that experience this week.
I’m thinking about Jose Sanchez lying alone on Park Road for twenty minutes while no one came up to him. What I’m asking is that this week each of us take an action that will break down that isolation that keeps us apart and alone. We live in difficult times, but it is precisely in times such as these that our souls are put to the test. We can either retreat into a self-protective place that spurns others or we can reach out, helping others and ourselves at the same time. How will we choose?
Amen.