Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Deborah Little Wyman
June 6, 2010
All Saints Parish
Brookline, Massachusetts
You know what my prayer is? I pray for all those people walking by me, not looking at me, they all look so sad. They don't know the hardest thing about homelessness is the loneliness. Maybe they don't know Jesus loves them. That's what saves me. I pray God shows them we're all the same ... Amen.
We begin today Ordinary Time. We'll be Green from now until Thanksgiving. No fasting, no menu planning, no struggle with any of our high season theological mysteries. WE get to live our lives. We get to be ordinary. We begin a bit older, a bit wiser, to take up the gift of life. "Haven't you heard what happened in Jerusalem?" Yes, we've heard, and now we head home. We head home maybe by a different way, susceptible, maybe open to reconsidering, having another look at whatever our longing is.
One day, say, 22 or 3 years ago, I was driving to a meeting up Mass Ave in Cambridge, stopped at a red light, making a few notes about what points I wanted to cover, and I just happened to glance to my right. Sitting on the steps of an entrance to my own apartment complex was a woman surrounded by all her belongings in paper bags. In that instant, I heard within myself these words. "I want to have a life, so i could go and sit with that woman until she has what she wants." I had been aware for some time that I wasn't yet doing what I was meant to be doing. I knew the very thought of changing my work, my station in life such as it was, was so scary that I had pushed the rustling away for several years. But at this point that strategy wasn't working. It wasn't any special day, this day. It just happened to be the day my jig was up.
I reflect on these lessons today and I think, how did that destitute widow leave her only survival strategy to make that leap of faith. And Paul, who left the traditions of his ancestors and the company of human beings, even of fellow converts, to "go at once" to foreign lands where he was feared, despised, unknown, taking the good news revealed to him by God's Son. And the widow of Nain, weeping and bearing the body of her only son … Jesus sees her, comes forward, touches the bier and demands that the young man rise, and he does. Moments when time stops, an ordinary human being stands open and broken by the wounds life so generously provides, and into that crack falls new life. A new way of understanding ourselves and God. Wounds are rich soil.
Given the givens of life, It's some kind of miracle if we even catch sight of a new idea. It's pure GRACE when we manage to say YES to one. I think the yes is planted in us, waiting to be set free. Once I said yes to the idea of seminary, priesthood, street ministry – which took a few years after I was invited by the woman on the apartment steps – then it all began to unfold. I began praying every morning as I did this morning "oh God, make me a priest in YOUR church". I was given the grace to put one foot in front of the other.
You know you have a new idea when the interesting people start cheering and the institution says NO. I think it's in the job description of Authorities to challenge any new idea. Important to remember they signed on to that, not we. But WE have practicality, responsibilities and fear to protect us from change. A YES is often the beginning of a long trip requiring all the faithfulness and doggedness we can muster. Jane Butterfield Pressler, then co-rector at St Peters Cambridge, gave me a key to surviving with my soul and my vocation intact. She said, "It's not enough to be right." My long trip required keeping on doing what I needed to be doing. As I fell more and more in love with folks on the street, I felt THEIR support and became better at putting words on a ministry that had not been done, a ministry not immediately understood as priesthood. Bearing the gifts I knew the church at her best can offer, the gifts I had received when I fell into the lap of Emmanuel Church in 1976. I wanted to take these gifts out to the people who for whatever reason cannot come in to receive them. This seemed so obvious to me that I was quite unprepared for the reaction I received. It could have sent me back to my security, but I would have been miserable and I think the church would have lost something important.
Please listen to your own story as I speak. This is definitely not about me or exclusively about the church. We all navigate in spheres starved for innovation. I believe individually and collectively our very integrity depends on new vision, requiring every last ordinary one of us to welcome new ideas. So I hope you take my small story and the small good thing of Ecclesia's expression of church as a parable. This is about how God works when she is set free to be Who she is.
So, what is it to be the church on the street? How do we offer what the church does best, remembering we are not doctors or social workers or lawyers. We are not even (and this is the toughest for me) problem solvers. "What are you doing out here?" I was asked by a man I'd greeted for two weeks passing by his panhandling spot. This was the dreaded question somehow even more penetrating from Jack than from the Standing Committee. "Ummm, trying to be helpful??" We're standing there, eye to eye, Jack, his outstretched cup into which a passer by had just dropped a coin, and white, middle class me. Two weeks into this street life and it's in my face. Am I willing to live naked before the truth telling of people who have nothing to hide or lose. Is this why Jesus sent us to the poor to learn about God?
In no time, I was panhandling too. I needed a salary. Two things I felt passionate about made fundraising very tough. One is that I insisted that we are not an outreach project. We are a church that has no way to support itself. I would say, We don't need your money as much as you need to come and be with us. Second, donors love successes and I had to resist the temptation to sell our ministry as a solution to homelessness. People closest to my heart were by definition likely not to go in or make life changes that people who live as we do consider progress.
I made up street ministry as we went along. When I began, there was only one street outreach worker in Boston and when HUD released funds to end chronic homelessness, Jim and I wrote the grants. I was able to site the first two "safe havens" for women, at St. James Porter Square and Emmanuel Boston. As I found myself chaplain to the new social services teams, I realized we needed disciplined self reflection to prevent burnout. I required my growing number of volunteers and seminarians to attend al alon, have spiritual directors, attend team reflection meetings, and paid for one mental health session a month for each of them.
Common cathedral was unplanned. One day I saw the folks on the benches and saw a church waiting to be gathered. I learned quickly that church is deeply sought by people normally outside the door. I learned that church is big enough and flexible enough to welcome in the midst of worship, the bloody faces, raw truths, drunken gospel singing, cigarette smoking, seizures, nakedness, squabbling and despair. Church can be constructed from shards of real life. Liturgy can be open enough to hold anything that happens, however personal, however messy. Outdoor church can be made up of whoever is there and whatever is happening. Dave overdosed on Listerine waiting for the Sunday morning bootlegger and the EMTs drive into the middle of our church to pick him up as we're setting up for the service. We pray for him and I'll head to Boston Medical after the service. Billy needs his new wheelchair blessed. "Here, I have a song for ya'" Jimmy grinning as we start our prayers. Micky has a shoebox full of baby rats she wants baptized. Dave thinks the gospel calls for a kind of Samba and several join him in the dance. Mama walks into the middle of our circle and more important, into the middle of my brilliant homily, puts her bags down, and with every muscle in her nearly 6 foot frame announces "I've heard all this before, when's lunch?" Gary, who was turned away from many downtown churches, built our cross and our altar. "The eucharist is my kiss from God. This is home" he said.
I was determined that the ministry survive the founder's leaving and I knew that meant I shouldn't stay too long. This is one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it's worked …. Today common cathedral Boston is in its third generation of leadership, fundraising hasn't gotten any easier, and I urge you to support it. I left and sought separate funding to be full time missioner to people wanting to start street ministries and churches. Today, some 200 affiliates in the US, Brazil, the UK .. are involved in about 85 ministries. I believe that as soon as I know how to do something well, it's time to give it away. So I'm creating a team of mentors to new ministries from among many now experienced affiliates. Church of the Advocate in Asheville, Church of the Common Ground in Atlanta, Open Cathedral in San Francisco, common cathedral in Longmont CO, Street Church in Cincinnati, Church on the Green in New Haven, the Bridge Church in Guerneville CA, Grace Street Ministry in Portland ME, Welcome Church in Philadelphia, and so on.
You know what I'm saying …. YES has a life of its own.