Jedediah Mannis
March 4, 2007
First CC of Chappaqua, NY

SERMON 81

Jeremiah 1:4-10; I Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 19:16-25; Psalm 27

“When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

* * *

I am the minister of the Outdoor Church of Cambridge, where Tom – before you called him from us to become your pastor – was also a minister. It is -- as the United Church of Christ has it -- my ordainable call, the church for which I was ordained.

The Outdoor Church is a church for homeless men and women in Cambridge. We’re out there in all seasons and in all weather. We reach out to men and women who, because of shame or embarrassment, hostility or illness, cannot or will not enter conven-tional churches. We take the church to those who cannot or will not reach it on their own.

Nearly three years ago, I and Pat Zifcak, a vocational deacon at Christ Church, headed out at one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in June to the cobblestone apron next to the Civil War monument in the Cambridge Common. We took a metal cart with wheels for an alter, a pink plastic bin with xeroxed orders of service, an alter cloth, little plastic cups, grape juice and everything else we needed to conduct a service out there, and some sandwiches and Juicy Juice boxes.

Many members of our supporting churches join us outdoors, braving the February cold and the March chill to pray together with the homeless. North Prospect Church in Cambridge, where Tom and I were both interns, is such a church – that’s why Tom was out there. Children from our supporting churches make ham and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us. We bring out the sandwiches and Juicy Juice boxes -- one of the greatest inventions known to outdoor ministries -- so that we can share a meal with everyone after the service. Then we take communion and sandwiches around the Common to all the people who didn’t attended the service.

Soon, we were taking our sandwiches around Harvard Square and Central Square. Central Square is where most of Cambridge’s shelters and affordable housing are located. It’s also where most of Cambridge’s liquor stores are located. They open at 12 noon. By the time we get there at 4 or so, most people have drifted down there to have a few drinks before they go indoors, if they’re going indoors at all.

Two years ago, we started a morning prayer service in Porter Square on Sunday mornings, right under the mobile steel sculpture at the intersection of Mass Avenue and Somerville Avenue. Lots of people come up there early Sunday morning from the shelter at 240 Albany Street, especially in winter, because the T stop is open and warm and accessible. There’s also a CVS right across the street, and you can get gallon jugs of Listerine there at any time of day or night. Here is where we look most like a church. After the service, we take coffee and sandwiches and communion around the Porter Square T Station. People that we see here, early in the morning, we’ll see again in Central Square later in the day, much the worse for wear but still happy to see us again.

Now, we encounter sixty to seventy homeless people every Sunday – pretty much all of the people who are outdoors most, if not all, of the time. Those are the people to whom we want to minister. It’s not always the same sixty or seventy people. Many of our congregants stay with us for a while, and then disappear, often because they’re in jail or prison or a hospital or confined to some other institution. Some of our people are serving such long prison sentences that our older clergy – there are now three of us – will be retired, if not dead, before they get out. So we take the church to them too. We hand out cardinal red wristbands with our name and telephone number on them, so that our congregants – and the social workers, nurses, chaplains and others who care for them – have a number to call in an emergency. We make court appearances for our congregants, and serve as character witnesses. We visit them regularly and write often to them. Many of them have been with us in Porter Square from the very beginning; they are ours – we will not let them go.

We want to provide the same pastoral services to our congregants that any good church would. We do far too many memorial services for men and women who have died on, or because of, the street, and far too few baptisms and weddings. Christmas usually means gift certificates from Dunkin’s Donuts, free tickets to Loew’s movie theaters and bags of toiletries. We try to remember what homeless people can’t forget, like Christmas, and celebrate it with them.

Our supporting churches are astonishingly generous and imaginative in thinking up ways to engage in our ministry. Their kids thought up the idea of toiletry kits, which people love, because it makes them feel human again, or at least, clean shaven. They thought up incorporating the making of sandwiches in their monthly communion service. Once a year, the kids at First Church in Cambridge actually make the sandwiches on their alter during communion. It is a phenomenally moving event.

We are an ecumenical church. There is no one who asks to whom we will not min-ister. We are ecumenical because we exist only to respond to Jesus’s command to actively encounter the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the homeless and the oppressed.

Ministries of action -- prison ministries, hospital chaplaincies, disaster relief, teaching -- are ecumenical in impulse. Methodist prisoners will not reject the ministra-tions of Presbyterian clergy. Congregational patients will not disdain a visit from a Unitarian chaplain. Catholic refugees will not refuse food and water from Baptist relief workers. And likewise on the streets. There are no Methodist egg salad sandwiches, no Baptist socks, no Episcopal Juicy Juice boxes. There is only the Body of Christ.

* * *

People ask: “What good are you doing? How can you tell if you’re making a differ-ence”

It’s hard enough to understand what we see in front of us, much less what to do about it. On one of those rare occasions that I’ve given money to someone on the street, I passed a guy with a Starbucks cup standing in front of the Harvard Coop, dropped a quarter in the cup -- and heard a splash: it was just some guy drinking a cup of coffee. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t fish it out and I was too mortified to apologize. Well, after all, it was Harvard Square. He was probably an adjunct professor of philosophy.

In all these years, I’ve never worked out the ethics of giving money to homeless people on the street. Generally, I don’t. I try to remember to carry booklets of $1 McDon-ald’s gift certificates, which I give out instead of money. I get them in batches over the internet, and we all carry them wherever we go. It’s like having an egg salad sandwich in your pocket. There’s no question about whether the person is going to spend it on drugs and you don’t have to walk past pretending he doesn’t exist.

Giving a McDonald’s gift certificate to a homeless woman sitting in slush in front of the Out of Town News in Harvard Square is an ethical act. But any honest ethical system says that one McDonald’s gift certificate isn’t enough. How much is enough? One more gift certificate? Ten more? Would I be “perfect” like the sorrowful young man? Then all the gift certificates I can buy and all the time and energy I have to hand them out. Peter Singer, the Princeton professor of philosophy who is best known for his advocacy of animal rights, once calculated that – on average – every American could give away $200 a year without making any difference whatsoever in how they lived. Pain free charity. I’m sure that everyone one here gives at least that amount every year to charity – probably magnitudes of that amount. And I’m equally sure that everyone here has asked – at least once – “Is that enough?” But Singer wasn’t calculating how much was enough – he was saying how much - $199 – is too little. That leaves a lot of room on the upside.

The Greek word for perfection as it appears in our text – tellous – doesn’t mean without flaw or defect. Rather, it connotes “fulfillment” or “completion” or, in this context, “self-realization.” Jesus does not ask the young man if he is slavishly devoted to the letter of the law – it‘s sufficient that he is observant. Jesus wants him to observe the law as a disciple, not because he ought to be good – only God is good, Jesus reminds him. He wants the young man to be fully realized as a man of faith. The young man under-stands and turns away sorrowfully – he is a good man, an ethical man, but he is not ready to be a disciple.

When people ask me whether what we do “works”, they are asking me to make an ethical judgment. To be sure, we carry around sandwiches and socks and juice, but these are more a way to begin a conversation than an effort to relieve people of hunger or cold. In terms of delivering services, we’re close to useless. We don’t solve problems and we don’t provide much material assistance. We cannot measure what we do in sandwiches or juicy juice boxes or pairs of clean white socks. We cannot justify ourselves by counting the number of referrals we have made or the number of people who, because of our presence, have found their way into a detox center or hospital or halfway house. Too many of the people we encounter are so substance dependent, so deranged and so utterly defeated that we can not realistically hope that any program or set of programs -- short of vastly improved versions of the institutions that were closed forever a few decades ago -- will ever get them off the street.

But Jesus doesn’t ask that we be ethical. He asks that we be perfectly obedient to his call to be his disciples.

This, as the sorrowful young man knows, is even harder than being good. Self-realization as a Christian – discipleship - requires that we commit to what Reinhold Niebuhr calls the “impossible possibility.” People, said Niebuhr, are caught between the fact of their humanity and their awareness of their capacity to transcend their humanity. We know - Jesus demands it of us - that we must transcend ourselves as ethical beings. That act of transcendence is a leap of faith from the solid and familiar ground of experi-ence, of education and of wisdom, to a place in which we allow ourselves to depend on something utterly other than ourselves.

In this transcendent place, we have no independent way, no systematic ethics or morality or politics, no disinterested point of view, with which to judge the merit of how well we do what we are called to do.

Here is where I begin to stutter. As Paul says, I have come to you in weakness and in much fear and trembling, and my speech and my message are not in plausible words of wisdom. In the verses following our text Peter comes to the same realization: “When the disciples heard this they were greatly astonished, saying, "Who then can be saved?" But Jesus looked at them and said to them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." Then Peter said in reply, "Lo, we have left everything and followed you. What then shall we have?" Peter has nothing other than Jesus; there is no-one else on whom he can rely, nowhere else to go.

Nothing except Christ.

This is an enterprise that requires humility. Not a bowing and scraping humility, like Uriah Heep, but in this sense: we are asked to give up so much of what we have been trained to value - intelligence, wisdom, experience - that the very giving up of it measures the enormity of what we have chosen to do.

No system that claims to be grounded in anything other than this call to disciple-ship – not ethics, not morality, not social welfare theory, not law – will avail us. Every-thing we have learned about who we are in the world, and what it means to succeed and succeed in being good – we must abandon it all. The whole ethical person must die so that the person of faith may live. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When Christ bids us come, he bids us come and die.” Whatever else it may be, this is humbling. No surprise, then, that Paul asks us to work out our faith with fear and trembling

I know that very few people are called to make egg salad sandwiches and hand them out to homeless people in the slush of early March. I also know that every Christian is called to a life of discipleship, however unexpected and challenging that call may be. Tom and I stood together for many months beside the same subway stop in Cambridge in the same cold drizzle, giving away the same clean white socks and the same doughnuts. But it was preparation for vastly different calls.

Ethics quantifies, makes judgments, justifies. But four tuna salad sandwiches are not four times better than one tuna salad sandwich. An outdoor church is not better than a homeless shelter or a free meal or a food pantry. What I am called to do or what you are called to do is not the standard against which any one else can make meaning of his or her call.

When we commit to discipleship, the human judgments that define and justify our lives are cast aside. The scales of qualitative and quantitative comparisons no longer measure our worth. This isn’t just humbling. The contemplation of it is terrifying.

The contemplation, yes, but not the act. Jeremiah wavers; he tells God that he does not know how to speak. Don’t be afraid, God tells him. Your destination will be of my choosing and you will be speaking my words. See? I touch your lips and you are delivered from your mind’s terrors. I knew you before you were formed, I knew your name even then, and you are mine. When I call you, you may still see as through a glass, darkly, but your eyes will be wide open and you will hear every word I speak to you and through you. You will be perfect.