The Church of St.
Paul & Incarnation, Jersey City NJ
April 7, 2019
Year C: The Fifth
Sunday in Lent
Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8
Standing in the Right Place
My
previous church, Grace Church in Madison, had – and I think still has – the
tradition of a youth mission trip every other summer.
Like
many other church groups, they’ve traveled to places like Central America and
Appalachia, spending time in these unfamiliar places helping people in need.
It
is undoubtedly a great experience for the kids and their adult chaperones who
get to see a very different way of life and to do some good for some very poor
people.
Although
I appreciate the value of mission trips, I’ve always had some concerns about
them, too.
Unless
they’re planned very sensitively, it’s easy to slip into the mode of rich
Americans or rich Northeasterners coming to “save” or “fix” people in places
that we might consider poor or backward.
Plus,
being kind of cheap, I’ve always wondered about the huge cost of transporting
all of us to these faraway places. Like Judas in today’s gospel lesson, I’ve
wondered, might that money be used in better ways?
Anyway,
one year when I began thinking about the mission trip – it was during the
recession when money was at least a little tighter than usual even for people
in well-to-do places – I suggested that, instead of flying to some faraway
place, maybe this year we do our mission trip closer to home, specifically in
the city of Camden, NJ.
There
were some who liked the idea of serving people who live just an hour or so down
the Turnpike, while others were disappointed that we weren’t going to some more
“exotic” place.
And,
of course, some parents were understandably concerned about their kids spending
a week in such a poor and dangerous city.
But,
we did go – and we spent a week at a place called the Romero Center – each day
fanning out to different social service providers in town – food pantries and homeless
shelters and adult day care centers – learning about poverty and discovering what
some generous and loving people were doing about it in a city that most people
had long since written off as a hopeless cause.
Probably
the most memorable exercise was when we were divided into “families” and given
only the money that a family would receive from food stamps. We then went to
one of the local supermarkets – the kind where as soon as you walk in you can
smell that at least some of the meat has turned – we went to the supermarket
and had to figure out how to feed our families on the little money that we had.
There
was a lot of white bread and mac and cheese on the menu that night.
It
was a powerful experience but when it was over we got back in the van, drove
home to beautiful Madison, and got on with our lives, though hopefully
remembering, and maybe even a little changed by, the lessons we had learned,
the insights we had gained.
We
left.
And, it was sure
was nice to return to the comforts of home.
A weeklong mission
trip is a whole lot different than people who devote their whole lives to
living and working among – to serving – the poor.
I was recently
asked to join a board where I will be working alongside Sister Roseann Mazzeo,
the Executive Director of Women Rising.
Sister Roseann, born
and raised in Jersey City, has given her life to serving people in need right
here, including some of our own parishioners and friends.
And then there’s a
Jesuit priest named Greg Boyle who has given his life to serving young people
in Los Angeles – originally thinking he could “save” kids who had been drawn
into the dead-end of gang life, but ultimately realizing that he was really
meant first and foremost to stop judging them and simply get to know these
young people and to love them as beloved brothers and sisters – brothers and
sisters who had been traumatized and who lacked what’s maybe most important in
all our lives: hope.
In 1992, he
founded Homeboy Industries, what’s now the largest gang intervention,
rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world, helping people break the
cycles of addiction and crime and teaching marketable skills – it’s a model
that started in LA and has now spread across the country and around the world.
This past week I
read a new article about Fr. Boyle in which he said something that really
struck me:
“For Jesus, it
wasn’t about taking the right stand on issues. It was about standing in the
right place.”
For Jesus it’s
about standing in the right place.
We are now just a
week away from the beginning of the holiest days of the Christian year.
Next week we will
begin with a joyful palm parade but the mood will change quickly when we retell
the story of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, and death.
But, first we are
given the beautiful and mysterious scene depicted in today’s Gospel lesson.
We’re in Bethany –
not far from Jerusalem – in the home of Lazarus, the much-loved friend whom
Jesus had raised from the dead.
Mary and Martha –
the sisters of Lazarus – are there, too, fulfilling their familiar roles of loving
and serving Jesus.
We’re told that
Mary anoints Jesus in a remarkably intimate way – with costly perfume on his
feet and then wiping them with her hair.
You can imagine
that there was stunned silence in the room at this powerful gesture – silence
broken by Judas who, maybe because he was a thief or maybe because he was
practical-minded like many of us, objects to the expense.
A denarius was
about one day’s wages so three hundred denarii was a lot of money – money that,
it’s true, could have done a lot of good for the poor. If anybody but Judas had
said this, most of us would be nodding along in agreement.
Jesus defends Mary
– and seems to silence Judas – by pointing out that for him and for their life
together, the days are growing short.
Jesus who can
raise the dead to new life will be with his friends for only a little longer.
And then Jesus
concludes with words both haunting and troubling:
“You always have
the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
It’s easy to hear
that remark about the poor as a kind of fatalism from Jesus, right?
And that’s how
these words have often been interpreted, kind of like, “Well, we can try to
help, but, really, there’s only so much we can do? Remember what Jesus said, there
are always going to be poor people, now matter what.”
But, that attitude
doesn’t sound like Jesus to me.
Instead, what I
hear is Jesus calling us to give our best to him.
For Mary of
Bethany, that meant giving Jesus lots of expensive sweet-smelling perfume.
But, for us,
giving our best to Jesus means giving ourselves – our time and our skill and
our resources – giving ourselves to be with the poor so that, as Jesus expected,
the poor are not far off in some other city or some other neighborhood, but are
always right here with us.
For Jesus it’s
about standing in the right place.
On Good Friday,
many of us will walk the streets of Jersey City, carrying the cross to places
scarred by violence.
We’ll be there not
to judge but as a sign of God’s love for – and presence among – people and
places that the world might dismiss as God-forsaken, as hopeless, as not worth
the trouble.
After all, we walk
pretty much the same streets every year.
For some of us
these are our neighborhoods while for others it’s an unfamiliar land and we may
feel like intruders, like we don’t belong.
But, no matter
where we live, if this little parade is all we ever do – if this is a kind of two-hour
mission trip - then Good Friday is an empty ritual and it would be better for
us to just drop it.
But, for more and
more of us, our Good Friday Procession is a symbolic acting out of what we’re
doing all year long - feeding the
hungry, housing the homeless, shaping the lives of young people, helping people
who feel powerless find their God-given voice.
What honestly
thrills me most about our church and keeps me here is that more and more of us
really are giving our best to Christ – and we’re doing that by standing in the
right place.
Amen.
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