Preston Shipp on Discipleship at the Cross-Section of Faith and Life, Part 2

This is the second part of a keynote address Preston Shipp delivered at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America South Carolina Synod Rostered Leaders’ Convocation on October 23-25.

Yesterday, I began with a quote by Richard Rohr, “If we are not marginalized ourselves in some way, we normally need to associate with some marginalized group to have an enlightened Gospel perspective and to be converted to compassion.” My story is about the conversion I experienced when I associated with a marginalized group – prisoners – and gained an enlightened gospel perspective and was converted to compassion. Although I was a life-long believer, raised in the church, it took going into prisons to convert me from a superficial, belief-oriented way of thinking about faith, to a deeper, discipleship-oriented, faith-cutting-into-the-marrow-of-my-life way of thinking about faith.

In my experience, for too long we have merely taught people to believe in Jesus. We have emphasized orthodoxy (right belief) to such a degree that we have failed to teach orthopraxy (right practice). We have failed to train church goers to follow the teachings of Jesus, to order their lives according to his ethics. As a result, Christians tend to be just as (or even more) materialistic and greedy, judgmental and inhospitable, anxious, violent and angry, self-righteous and hypocritical, as non-Christians. After all, I could have continued on my career trajectory and remained a prosecutor, throwing people I did not know into prison for decades at a time, and still been well thought of in church, maybe even become a leader in my congregation.

In a very real sense, I believe that the church, and I mean the church universal, is standing upon a precipice. 500 years ago, the church was in need of a revolution, and it got one. I believe that we have arrived at another historic opportunity for us to re-imagine what it means to be the Lord’s church. People are leaving all of our denominations at an alarming rate. In studies, the words most closely associated with Christians are hypocritical and homophobic. The prominent television preacher, our brother Joel Osteen was recently publicly shamed when he did not immediately open his lavish church building to shelter hurricane victims, and if we are honest, we are more like him than we might like to admit, often betraying the gospel by valuing our own agendas and material holdings more than people. I believe one of the most glaring signs of the times we are in is how reticent some Christians are to condemn racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and homophobic rhetoric. We are going to have to do better.

Most important to our discussion of what is going to be required of the church in America and its leaders as we move further into the 21st century is the issue of race. I say it is the most important issue for two reasons. First, racism represents America’s original sin, for which it has yet to atone. We have regular reminders that racism is a deadly wound we have yet to heal – the shooting at the black church in Charleston, the marching of white supremacists in Charlottesville, the controversy over monuments to Confederate soldiers, and NFL players kneeling during the national anthem in protest of the treatment of African-Americans in our society. The issue of race has not gone anywhere. Racism did not end when slavery was abolished or when the Civil Rights Act was passed. As Michelle Alexander has noted, it merely reinvented itself.

Second, the church has failed miserably to lead the way when it comes to racial justice. It has been widely noted that Sunday morning is the most racially segregated time of the week. On average, churches are only a quarter as racially diverse as the communities in which they are located. (The End of White Christian America, by Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute). But we Christians do not merely worship in segregated churches. To a large degree we live in racially segregated neighborhoods. We often send our children to largely racially segregated schools. Fifty years ago, the white church in America failed to bear witness to the mystery of the gospel that there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, black or white. And our failure continues today. This despite the fact that we are called to be ministers of reconciliation.

For the church to make the most of this opportunity, to experience and be an agent of reconciliation, will require a conversion experience. It will require repentance. It will require being born again, as Jesus taught Nicodemus.I want to propose two basic areas that the church will need to focus on as we move forward in repentance to unlearn what we have learned, to quote Jedi Master Yoda, to begin again being the church. The first was the subject of my remarks yesterday, which is going to the margins.

It can be intimidating to leave our comfortable spaces to be with people who are despised, poor, victims of injustice. So let me first say that we can in a sense go to the margins by listening to people offering perspectives we have not heard before. My thinking about the criminal justice system began to change before I actually entered the prison. In preparation for teaching that first class in 2007, I started reading books that I had never heard of before. In college I studied American history, and the best professors I had helped me think critically about what has happened in our country and what our country has done since its founding, not merely memorizing dates and events. So when I was asked to teach at the prison, I knew that I wanted to help people think critically about the criminal justice system. I read Changing Lenses by Howard Zehr and The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison by Jeffrey Reiman. Right away I knew that something was missing from my law school education. I had been taught how to plug into the system, but I had not been taught to think critically about the goals of the system and how effectively it meets those goals.

Since then, other excellent resources have become available. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson are must-reads. The church needs to be receiving the witness of Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by James Cone, and Jesus and the Disinherited, by Howard Thurman. Book clubs and Sunday school classes at predominantly white churches need to be reading books that were not written with them in mind. And there are also some excellent documentaries, such as 13th, The House I Live In, and Do Not Resist and other resources such as TED talks that lend themselves well to small group discussion.

But as important as education is, we can’t be content with reading a few books or attending a conference here and there. There are some lessons that can’t be learned in a classroom or read in a book. As Richard Rohr is fond of saying, “We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living; we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” There is no substitute for leaving our comfort zones and going to be with people who are different from us, people who are at best overlooked and pushed to the side, at worst vilified and demonized as less-than-human. This, it seems to me, is Jesus’ clear mandate in Matthew 25. Proximity is absolutely crucial, and relationships are imperative.

Again, Richard Rohr writes, “Jesus did not call us to the poor and to the pained only to be helpful; he called us to be in solidarity with the real and for our own transformation. It is often only after the fact we realize that they helped us in ways we never knew we needed. This is sometimes called ‘reverse mission.’ The ones we think we are ‘saving’ end up saving us, and in the process, redefine the very meaning of salvation!” This resonates with my own experience. My salvation, I have come to understand, is bound up with that of people behind bars. We have to be willing to leave our comfortable spaces and see what God is doing elsewhere, in places and among people that may intimidate us.

Listen to what Mark Longhurst has to say about the powerfully transformative space of “margins” in a recent article:

The spiritual practice of befriending margins is uncomfortable, terrifying, and yet contains transformative power and beauty. . . . To pay attention to margins is to pay attention to how boundary lines are constructed in our world and lives—and then to cross those boundaries . . . Today, more people are awakening to the way social systems have marginalized society’s most vulnerable populations . . .

Margins are nothing less than what Richard Rohr calls ‘liminal space.’ . . . Liminality is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where people can begin to think and act in genuinely new ways.

For white people coming from privileged backgrounds, this may mean non-defensive, open-hearted listening to the marginalized life experiences of black and brown Americans. Once hearts are cracked open, for example, to hear the horror of African American experiences, first of slavery and lynching, and now of incarceration, the war on drugs, and gun violence, it becomes a transformative human response to affirm with weeping, prayer, solidarity, and action that black lives matter. Once hearts are cracked open to hear and honor immigrant and refugee stories, our hearts become broken at America’s long legacy of turning away or disenfranchising those who differ from the white mold. And, once hearts are broken, [we are left with] a natural human response of compassion, reflecting our inherent, yet fragmented, oneness.”

Once again, this is the invitation to us: to go to the dark places, the poor places, the despised and hurting places, to discover our inherent oneness as the children and image bearers of God. It is important that how we go to the margins is just as important as going to the margins. As we seek to emphasize othopraxy and not merely orthodoxy, Matthew 25 should serve as a litmus test. We must be mindful that in Matthew 25, when Jesus instructed us to care for the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, he did not say that we would be acting as Jesus to them. Quite the other way around. We are not being Jesus to them. The people who are pushed aside, given no consideration, the ones who have no voice or power, are actually being Jesus to us.

When we go to the despised places, we go to meet the Lord, not to introduce him.

Too often I’m afraid that traditional outreach ministries are based on a model that the benevolent ministers have something that these poor lost souls need. It is often a one-way relationship. But if we adhere to the model articulated by Jesus, trusting that it is with the disenfranchised that Jesus identifies, that changes the posture with which I go to be with them. Since I am going to meet Jesus, I should go expecting not so much to talk, but to listen; not so much to teach, but to learn; not so much to transform, but to be transformed.

Fear, however, can be a powerful deterrent to being present to people who are different from us. It seems that we are as fearful as we are busy and distracted these days. Our political discourse and media content are characterized almost exclusively by fear. We’re afraid of immigrants and refugees. We’re afraid of transgender people using our bathrooms. We’re afraid of criminals. We’re afraid of Muslims. Fear clouds our vision, causes us to behave irrationality, and controls us. The Buddhist monk from Vietnam and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh states, “Hatred and fear blind us. We no longer see each other. We only see the faces of monsters, and that gives us the courage to destroy each other.” It is easy for politicians and the media to exploit our fears to garner votes and ratings, and we end up paralyzed in our little bubbles. So when you ask people to befriend and stand in solidarity people who live in poverty, in fear of deportation, in prisons, you seldom get a lot of takers.

Remember those traditional Lipscomb students on the first night of class, how afraid they were of being taken hostage? One of them didn’t even make it to class that night. When he arrived in the parking lot of the prison and saw all of the fencing and razor wire, it was more than he could handle. He just turned his car around and headed back to campus. People are afraid of the margins.

I think people are largely afraid of the suffering they will find in prisons. Author, death penalty abolitionist, and new monastic Shane Claiborne has this to say,

[W]e have a pattern in our culture that teaches us to insulate ourselves from suffering, to build up gates and walls and border fences that separate us from those who are suffering right outside of our comfort. But we come to find out that not only are we locking the suffering out, but we're locking ourselves in – to a life that’s incredibly lonely. Those patterns rob us of life and community . . . We have an invitation to tear down the walls, to bust through the fences, and to get to know the names and the faces of those who are suffering outside of our comfort.

We need not fear people who suffer from poverty or injustice or discrimination. Thich Nhat Hahn goes on to teach us that “Though we all have the fear and the seeds of anger within us, we must learn not to water those seeds and instead nourish our positive qualities – those of compassion, understanding, and loving kindness.” He reminds us that the opposite of fear is not courage or bravery, but love. As our own scriptures teach us, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18). We must move past the fear that causes us to retreat into our comfortable bubbles in order to open up in love to people who are different from us, encounter Christ in them, and experience deep transformation.

Remember my friend Rahim Buford, who experienced reconciliation with a gang member when he returned to a prison after his release? Rahim didn’t want to see that razor wire again. He didn’t want one more pat down by a guard. He was very apprehensive. But he knew that it was important to go to The Places That Scare You, to cite Pema Chodron. Like Mary Magdalene had to go to the tomb to meet the risen Lord, Rahim had to go to the prison, to that place of suffering and death, to experience Easter manifested in that way. It didn’t happen in a church building or at a university. But when we’re willing to venture into those places like Rahim did, you never know what might happen. That night, it was a reconciled relationship. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said the only thing that really converts people at a deep level is seeing “the face of the other.” When we go where they are, when we are fully present to them, when we listen to their stories, we are able to recognize our common humanity. And we experience some good news. Matthew 25 kind of good news.

So education is huge. But there is no substitute for proximity and relationships. Leaving our comfort zones, overcoming our fears, going to the margins, experiencing solidarity with people who may not look like us or have come from similar backgrounds, all the while expecting transformation to occur. This is the first major task for the church to re-member itself as the body of Christ.

I believe that the second area that the church will have to emphasize as we focus on discipleship, on faith intersecting with our daily lives is a commitment to the spiritual disciplines, which comes from the same root word as disciple. [Scott’s influence]Although disciplines such as silence, simplicity, contemplative prayer, and lectio divina at first appear to have little to do with going to the margins, I believe they actually go hand-in-hand and compliment each other beautifully.

As Meister Eckhart preached, “What we plant in the soil of contemplation we shall reap in the harvest of action.” Contemplation is the stillness out of which all of our action springs. A commitment to the contemplative life gives us a solid place to stand, makes our footing sure as actively engage the world. In order to serve others, speak prophetic truth, and work for justice, we must be firmly rooted in the will of God. The spiritual disciplines provide that root system for the church. We must take care to nurture our inner lives because, as Jesus taught us, “the kingdom of God is within.” (Luke 17:21). It is through the disciplines that we are emptied of our own egotistical agendas in order that we may discern the will of God.

In contemplation, we begin to see as God sees, with the eyes of love. We are able to transcend the dualistic thinking and false dichotomies that so grip the world. We are able to pierce through the illusion that we are separate from God and each other. No longer do we divide the world into us versus them, good and bad, in and out. We recognize that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” We are all of us, friend and enemy alike, capable of great good and great evil. We are all of us caught up in a web of mutuality and interdependence.

The great contemplative monk Thomas Merton had this epiphany as he was walking down the street one day:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.

Merton experienced a sudden awakening in how he viewed himself and all people. The contemplative disciplines, all of the great spiritual traditions teach us, are designed to help us wake up, to cultivate awareness. Jesus tells his followers to be alert. But so much of our culture preponderates against living mindfully and seeing with the eyes of Love. First of all, we are busy. There are only so many hours in the day, and we have all kinds of responsibilities that demand our attention. No one practices the spiritual disciplines by accident. We have to make our practice a priority.

In addition to being busy, we have to be some of the most distracted people in the history of the world. The obstacles to mindful living are legion. Twenty-four-hour news cycles leave us feeling that if we turn off the noise for one minute, we may miss a crucial vote, a scandalous tweet, or the declaration of war. We have reality television shows that feature people who are famous just for being famous. A coworker was recently telling me about a Bachelorette draft, like the NFL draft, that she and her husband were preparing for, where they review the bios of all the contestants and try to determine who the bachelorette will choose in the finale.

I probably lost some of you at “The Bachelorette.” Technology is another culprit. Although technology can be a powerful tool for all kinds of good, technological advances have also become a significant pitfall, causing us to have more meaningful relationships with our phones than we do real people. Between taking selfies, posting status updates, texting, and checking our twitter feed, it seems our eyes are at all times glued to our phones. “Electronic soul molesters,” as my friend David Dark calls them.

And then there is the distraction of sports. In the early 1970s, lay theologian and Harvard-educated lawyer William Stringfellow named professional sports one of the great tools of the principalities and powers to keep people unaware of the power of Death at work all about them. And this was in the 1970s! Before ESPN, much more the internet. We sacrifice so much time, energy, and money to the institution of sports. A youth minister I know recently took a break from watching sports, listening to sports radio, reading the sports page, and keeping up with scores. He reported that he had been shocked to see how much his life revolved around sports. It took up tons of time and energy, and even dominated his conversation with others. When he turned it off, he was surprised how much time and energy he had to invest in other things. In order to wake up and remain alert, we’re going to have to turn our attention away from lesser things and invest ourselves in what matters, as you all well know.

There are some folks who are very suspicious of contemplative practices, of anything that sounds mystical or eastern or New-Agey. But the practices of silence and solitude and meditative prayer are not new practices, and they are not ways of retreating from ministry or the active life. They equip us for it.

As Thomas Merton said, “We don’t come to the monastery to get away from suffering; we come to hold the suffering of all the world.” If we are going to lead people to serve among the poor and despised, if we are going to embrace the command to work for justice and to love mercy, then we must do from a place of unity with God. Like Jesus, we must move away from the hustle and bustle of ministry in order to find our Center, our Grounding, to be still and know and be known by God.“Be still! Be quiet! Find acquaintance with silence. Go inside, delve into your heart. Take a day off from the clamor,” says Muslim mystic and poet Rumi. “Don’t just do something, sit there,” say some of our Buddhist sisters and brothers.

Having quieted our hearts and connected with our Source, we can then move back into our active world, knowing that it doesn’t all depend on us. That we don’t have to feed and clothe the whole world or find a way to release all of the prisoners or cure racism in America once and for all. We can go forth to the margins of our society knowing that we are not required to do great things, but only small things with great love, as the quote attributed to Mother Teresa goes.

Like Mother Teresa, leaders of the church must lead by example. We cannot lead anyone down a path that we ourselves are not walking. I believe that this is at the heart of Jesus’ instruction to his disciples in Mark 10:

You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.

There is a world of difference between a leader who, like a cowboy, attempts to wrangle a group of people into going in the direction that the leader thinks they should go, and a leader who, like a shepherd, simply begins walking and invites anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear to follow.

I think about Becca Stevens in Nashville. Becca is a priest at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. She longed to open a sanctuary for survivors of human trafficking, violence, drug abuse, and living on the street. In 1997, she herself went to the margins and invited five women into a loving community. She founded a transitional housing program called Magdalene House for women who were coming out of prostitution. She quickly learned that even with the support of a loving community, counseling, and health care, many of these women simply could not find jobs. Therefore in 2001, she began an entrepreneurial enterprise called Thistle Farms, which manufactures bath and body products such as lotion and candles. The women make and market the products to support themselves. Thistle Farms’ mission is to heal, empower, and employ women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction.

For her work, Becca has been featured in national media and was recently named a 2016 CNN Hero and a White House “Champion of Change.” Becca is an Episcopal priest, so she places great value on the faith community and the liturgy of the church. But she understands that what happens on Sunday morning is not the main point. It is a means to an end, and not the end itself.

The real liturgy, the real work of the people, takes place outside the walls of our buildings. What often passes for a successful congregation – packed pews, building projects, a healthy budget – may well contribute to the downfall of Christendom within a generation, because people are looking for authentic expressions of the gospel in the world, not beneath steeples. Becca has been nationally recognized not for her excellent preaching in church on Sundays, but for her Matthew 25 spirituality all during the week. The world, skeptical of anything smacking of hypocrisy, wants to know whether our faith intersects in a meaningful way with regular life. After all, faith is not merely something we have, but something we do. And faith without works is, well, not actually our faith. But when our faith manifests itself in an inspiring orthopraxy, it is the best possible antidote to a world that is suspicious of claims to objective truth and right-sounding theology, but very concerned with the goodness of our practice.

There is little question that we are living in a post-Christian era. We cannot afford to be tone-deaf. The margin for error for the church is razor-thin. Recently I have had the sad occasion to observe some statements and conduct by ministers in my own tradition that have helped me understand why people have decreasing interest and confidence in our institutions. One of my closest friends, who is a very knowledgeable, thoughtful man who is pushing 50, got fired twice in close succession, and spent the better part of two years unemployed. His wife is a teacher, and they have two daughters, one of whom was in college and one who still lived at home. They were basically broke.

My friend spiraled into a depression. He had coffee with one of his ministers. The minister asked him how his “spiritual” life was going, as if all of these vocational and financial troubles were not spiritual, as if there were some un-spiritual aspects to life, as if there were a single secular molecule in the entire universe. When my friend said he didn’t really know what that phrase meant or how to respond, the minister inquired in a somewhat accusatory tone whether my friend was “struggling with doubt.” My friend corrected him by saying that there is no struggle, that faith for him is largely a matter of learning new things that lead to him let go of other things. The minister then immediately related my friend to his unbelieving son, who is a drug addict. As you can imagine, none of this was helpful.

In a world of skepticism, pain, and conflict, when people can spot B.S. a mile away, we cannot afford to be so tone-deaf.

I am thinking of a minister in his mid-30s who accepted a position as the senior teaching minister for a wealthy congregation of about 1,200 people. In a private conversation, he said that he had heard people say that he was the next big preacher in his denomination. He wrote a couple of books and was invited to speak at a few conferences. A few years into his time at this congregation, he was having a meeting with lay church members in his large office, and someone commented on how nice it was. He then, with no apparent sense of self-awareness, disregarded the purpose of the meeting and spent the next several minutes explaining that when he first came to the church, he took a smaller office as a sign of his humility. But he soon regretted it and was now glad that it had worked out for him to be in the biggest and best office. Except for the blinds. He hated the blinds and was looking forward to picking out new ones. It is so tempting to remain in places of honor and prestige. It is so difficult to go to places of shame, like prisons or the streets that prostitutes walk. But if we are not regularly in dishonorable places, among people who have little dignity, can we in any meaningful sense be said to be following Jesus?

Not long after this episode with the office blinds, this same minister sent an email to his congregation stating that he was taking a month-long sabbatical. He would not be preaching, he would not be answering emails, and he would not be in the office. The youth minister had also recently been on a sabbatical, during which time he visited a monastery and spent considerable time in silence, solitude, prayer, study, and seeking spiritual direction. He returned saying that the sabbatical had been a life-changing experience. But the preaching minister used his sabbatical to take his family on a month-long vacation. He went to the beach with friends and went tubing on a lake in Texas. The trips were well-documented on Facebook. My friend who had experienced such a difficult time finding work and battling the resulting depression, pointed out to me how such an email from a preacher going on an extended vacation might be received by someone who is unemployed, who hasn’t worked for months, or who hates their work, or who is struggling to find a meaningful vocation. There’s nothing wrong with going on vacation and spending time relaxing with our families. But as church leaders, we cannot afford to not think about how our words might distance us from the people in our churches who are hurting.

Let me give you one more example I have recently observed on social media. A few months ago, a senior pastor posted something on Facebook about how reticent churches are to publicly express lament. He went to Psalms to point out how often the psalmist mourns when it feels as though God is absent. Yet somehow in church we do not leave room for lament, for crying out in despair. Beautiful, right? Here’s a senior pastor publicly acknowledging that to not lament is to not be faithful to the biblical witness or to the human experience. But the occasion for this reflection on mourning? Let me just read part of it to you:

Full disclosure: I’m writing this in a season of lament. Yesterday, we lost our dreamhouse we’ve been planning to move into for more than half a year. We lost more than the house. Our faith took a hit. It is still living and breathing…but it took a hit. In the middle of the hottest market in real estate in decades, our house couldn’t even get more than a handful of showings. Real estate agents from several agencies were speechless and shook their heads in disbelief: it was the best house, in the best location, for the best price (by far) and yet lesser homes sold for more money all around us. We asked for and received tens of thousands of prayers from some of the finest friends and prayer warriors anyone could ask for (and no one has better FB friends and followers than me and no church is better when it comes to prayer) ... and still lost that house. We will continue to live in our current home – a nice home but too large for us, too much lawn for me to care for, and too far from work. Why? I don’t know. But I DO know that once this hits Facebook, hundreds will want to leap to God’s defense and tell us not to mourn, not to lament.

I read you that not to be tacky or make light of someone who was clearly going through a difficult time of disappointment and frustration. But from a minister of the gospel and a leader of God’s people, this simply will not do. We need leaders who are able to lead us into the depths – illness, doubt, self-denial, addiction, death, love of the scapegoated other, concern about injustice and oppression, addiction – real life stuff and the challenging aspects of discipleship. Will the parents who lose a child seek counsel from this minister, who publicly proclaims that his faith has taken a hit when he did not get his dream house? When a job is lost, or a family member is terminal, will this preacher have an ounce of credibility? Would a death row inmate or a homeless family find anything useful in this preacher’s version of the Christian faith?

Leaders of faith communities cannot afford to ignorantly neglect the very real struggles of their congregants and communities by focusing on the blinds in their office. We cannot afford to be glib and superficial. We cannot afford to think that lament, which is so crucial to a life of faith, is about not getting a beautiful new house when thousands of people in our own cities are without shelter, adequate nutrition, and employment that pays a living wage.

The most devastating critique I ever heard of a young, too-sure-of-himself preacher came from a friend who grew up very poor in Russia. After the sermon, she simply remarked that the preacher “has not suffered enough.” We risk being blinded by our own comfort and privilege. The world is in desperate need of authentic expressions of the gospel. The church is in desperate need of leaders who model the subversive teachings and example of Jesus by dying to themselves and embracing the way of the cross. In contemplation, we learn to see as God sees that Christ is incarnate in those who suffer and that we too are united with them. By going to the margins, to where the need is so great, we come to identify and experience solidarity with the suffering of people around us and around the world.

Speaking very frankly, as I know you are reformers, the church is expendable. If we do not speak, the rocks will cry out. If we are not willing to be the church, God will appoint someone else. Therefore, if the church is unwilling to speak out about extreme poverty in Africa, about people who are perishing simply because they do not have access to clean drinking water or basic medical care, about tens of thousands of children who starve to death every day, then God, in God’s infinite sense of irony, will raise up a rock star like Bono to speak the word of the Lord and jar the conscience of wealthy, complacent Christians. If the church is not willing to speak a prophetic truth about our country’s history of racial injustice that continues right up to today, then God will appoint millionaire professional football players to bear prophetic witness that racial injustice violates the core of the gospel. And if the church does not have the will to speak truthfully about our addiction to violence and instruments of violence in the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, then someone else, such as late-night comedians, will be chosen to do the work of the Lord.

Do you know who said this: “If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.” It was Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. The church is standing on a precipice. If we do not ground ourselves in the contemplative disciplines, and from that solid foundation confront crucial social issues like racism, immigration, poverty, violence, anger and fear of the other, then the credibility of even some of the best expressions of the Christian faith will be compromised.

In our moments of peace and calm, we know that the work does not belong to us. The world is not ours to save. We are only tenants working in the landowner’s vineyard. We do not cause the vineyard to bear fruit. But we must embrace with a new sense of urgency our marching orders to love others as we love ourselves. With the eyes of love, we see that we are all children of God, and what affects one affects all.

I leave you again with the words of the great Henri Nouwen, who after twenty years of teaching at academic institutions such as Notre Dame, Yale Divinity School and Harvard Divinity School, himself went to the margins to live and work with mentally and physically handicapped people at the L’Arche Daybreak community in Ontario:

We become neighbors when we are willing to cross the road for one another. There is so much separation and segregation: between black people and white people, between gay people and straight people, between young people and old people, between sick people and healthy people, between prisoners and free people, between Jews and Gentiles, Muslims and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, Greek Catholics and Latin Catholics. There is a lot of road crossing to do. We are all very busy in our own circles. We have our own people to go to and our own affairs to take care of. But if we could cross the street once in a while and pay attention to what is happening on the other side, we might become neighbours. To become neighbours is to bridge the gap between people. As long as there is distance between us and we cannot look in each other’s eyes, all sorts of false ideas and images arise. We give them names, make jokes about them, cover them with our prejudices, and avoid direct contact. We think of them as enemies. We forget that they love as we love, care for their children as we care for ours, become sick and die as we do. We forget that they are our brothers and sisters and treat them as objects that can be destroyed at will. Only when we have the courage to cross the street and look in one another’s eyes can we see there that we are children of the same God and members of the same human family.

I believe this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. It has been a tremendous privilege to speak to you. Thank you.