OPENING REMARKS ON THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH AND THE
MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS
TRINITY CHURCH, CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS
22 FEBRUARY 2009
The Rt. Rev. Arthur E. Walmsley
We
begin the season of Lent with Ash Wednesday, three days from now. The
evening news on Tuesday will probably include a segment on the Mardi
Gras parade in New Orleans, as that city continues to struggle with the
impact of Hurricane Katrina, and the extravagant carneval in Venice,
Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. The name Mardi Gras literally means Fat
Tuesday, a time of partying and feasting prior to the beginning of Lent
which had its origins in mediaeval Europe. Globally, we are today in a
sober time of belt-tightening, not an exuberant one of celebrating. If
anything, the proper meal is a modest pancake supper in the parish
house.
That is probably a good place to begin the six week
discussion of the Millennium Development Goals in these forums. It is a
great privilege to be the keynoter of the series, and I want to try to
supply a rationale for why Christians are engaged in this agenda at
all. Beginning next Sunday, you have a series of speakers with special
expertise on the subject. Take advantage of the opportunity.
Think
of the series this way: Does the global vision it represents speak with
power to the current crises we face in the global economic meltdown,
and to possible roles for Trinity Church as a parish and individually
for you as Christian believers. Let me give a thumbnail history of the
MDGs, and the experience of the Episcopal Church with this global
initiative. In the year 2000 the United Nations convened a Millennium
Summit. All 192 member nations pledged to commit themselves to eight
specific goals, and to do so in a startlingly brief period -- by the
year 2015 – to:
1) eradicate extreme poverty and hunger;
2) achieve universal primary education;
3) promote gender equality and empower women;
4) reduce child mortality;
5) improve maternal health;
6) reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;
7) ensure environmental sustainability; and
8) develop a global partnership for development.
They
did so by pledging 0.7 percent of their national budgets to the effort,
and by calling on religious bodies and other non-governmental bodies to
do the same. In the year 2000 and again in 2003, the Episcopal
Church’s General Convention urged dioceses, parishes, and church
members to do the same, pledging 0.7 percent of their resources
(that’s less than 70 cents on every $100 to projects which seek
to serve one or more of the goals.) More important than the money is
the building of global relationships in a common effort. Partnership,
not charity.
Beginning in 2002, four of us set out to create
within the Episcopal a grass roots, bottom-up movement to respond;
eventually we named it Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation. One of
the founders, Harvard economist Richard Parker, will be here as part of
the series, as will John Hammock, Lallie Lloyd, and Massachusetts
priest Arrington Chambliss, who serve on its continuing Board. And next
Sunday, Trinity is privileged to have Rob Radtke, President of
Episcopal Relief and Development, our church’s nation agency
supporting the MDGs financially. (There is more on the series in
today’s bulletin).
More than three quarters of the
dioceses have committed themselves to working on the goals, countless
parishes large and small have done the same, as have individual members
and their families. My wife Roberta and I recently looked at our
charitable giving on our last year’s IRS form, and right behind
our pledging to our parish and other church bodies, we recognized that
something like 20.7% percent of our giving went to respond to needs
identified by the MDGs. You might begin Lent and the exploration of
this subject by doing your own family arithmetic.
If you think
seriously about the eight goals today, they apply not only to Africa
and other segments of the world confronted by massive suffering from
hunger, disease, and lack of access to basic services. Eight years ago,
that might have seemed a way of looking at the goals: rich nations,
privileged people seeking to serve their most distressed global
neighbors. Today, the global economic meltdown has propelled millions
of people in every country, including our own, to face life below the
poverty line and without meaningful access to one or many of the
services the MDGs address. Katrina opened a window for many Americans
how racism and poverty in New Orleans and Mississippi make those areas
the equivalent of third world countries on our shores. Nick
Morris-Kliment was good enough to send me a list of the outreach
activities of Trinity Church; your priorities are clearly directed to a
range of programs which target both overseas needs and others here at
home.
It is important that we not treat the MDGS as some sort of
supranational program foisted on the world by the United Nations.
Rather, we face the challenge of radically reordering our own domestic
life as well as our place in the world community. Call this a vision of
a world restored and reconciled, a world of shalom, peace, a movement
to redirect how the world understands and uses its resources. Recognize
it for what it is: a vision at odds with those scenarios which describe
the global reality as a clash of cultures, which pit people against one
another in violent confrontation, which depend on a
constantly-escalating arms race and a nebulous "war on terror" as the
means to remain secure in a troubled world. A world in which the
economic system has been manipulated by risky ventures which threaten
the financial system with ruin. Is the vision of global collaboration
hopelessly idealistic, or is it grounded in a hard-headed and realistic
understanding on which the very survival of the human community may
depend? Is it achievable? And how does it fit into your efforts and
mine to live a dedicated Christian life, which is, after all, the
emphasis of the Lenten season?
The vision of the Millennium
Development Goals is not new. For people who draw their faith from the
Bible, it is as old as scripture. What I want to do in the rest of
these opening remarks is remind you of the Biblical mandate to serve
God’s mission, how scripture offers us an understanding of the
global crisis which has the potential to move us beyond the paralysis
of the present to an affirmation and a way of being grounded in hope.1
This will, I trust, provide the undergirding for a more detailed
discussion of the development goals which takes place over the next
several Sundays.
The doorway to this understanding starts with
Jesus. And as with him, it is important to begin where he began, with
scripture. For him, that was of course the Hebrew scripture. Beginning
more than a thousand years before his birth, a number of texts became
definitive for Jews, notably the first five books of the Bible, the
Pentateuch, which sought to establish the Torah, the Law. Then came the
accounts, more or less historical, of the judges and kings of Israel.
Beginning in the 7th century, the pronouncements of the various
prophets were added to the generally accepted canon of readings. In
addition are books which reflect spiritual struggle, like the Books of
Psalms and other so-called wisdom literature.
For Israel, the
defining event of its history was the Babylonian exile, a time of
unrestrained grief and dislocation, of exile and persecution, which yet
gave rise to the vision of an order of fulfillment, of community, and
accountability. Isaiah declares the generosity of God as an encounter
of a living God and a living people, in which all are invited to enjoy
the rich abundance God had fashioned out of the preexisting void:
I
am creating new heavens and a new earth; the past will not longer be
remembered nor will it ever come to mind. . . The wolf and the lamb
will feed together and the lion will eat straw like an ox. . .Neither
hurt nor harm will be done in all my human mountain. (Isa. 65)
In short the Old Testament God yearns for the fulfillment of human
community.
It
is in this reality that Jesus begins his preaching, which he does
powerfully and with no mincing of words. All four Gospels move quickly
as they begin their accounts of the adult Jesus. His first sermon at
Nazareth, right after his baptism in the Jordan River, is from another
text from Isaiah (Isa 61):
The Spirit of the Lord God has taken
control of me! The Lord has anointed me, and sent me to announce good
news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of
sight for the blind; to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year
of the Lord’s favor.
Jesus then rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant, sits
down. All eyes in the synagogue are fixed on him.
Today in your hearing this text has come true.
Initially,
they marvel at how words of grace should fall from his lips. But not
for long. He challenges their faith, and they turn on him, drive him
out of town. And then the split begins, between those who come to see
him as uniquely living out the promises of God and those who see
someone undermining traditional Jewish values or stirring up the Roman
authorities. Even his own mother and brothers come to him, questioning
his sanity or at least his judgment. It then begins slowly to emerge
among the growing band of his followers, that in him God has taken a
decisive step in respect to the world. God has entered the world in our
flesh, confronting in person the human sense of alienation and exile
– Father, take this cup from me, he pleads, and from the Cross,
My God, why have you forsaken me? Yet he takes there responsibility to
bring about the healing and restitution for which the world longs.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. It is finished.
Into your hands I commit myself.
The reality of Jesus’
life, death and resurrection is not a departure from the mission of
reconciliation, justice, and peace entrusted to Israel. Jesus did not
come to break down the Law but rather to fulfill it. In the text with
which he began his preaching, in the extraordinary ways he reaches out
to outcasts, the sick, the poor, those on the edges of society, he
demonstrates solidarity with them. His is a living demonstration of
God’s transforming power to bring together those who are
separated, what some Liberation theologians in Latin America call
God’s "preferential option for the poor."
We need to see,
then, that the Old Testament vision is one of restoration and renewal,
lived out in hope, as God’s mission to restore the creation
through a public process that curbs the raw exercise of power. It is
yet unfulfilled, the not-yet-future to be sealed by the sending of
Messiah, the anointed one, who will be God’s sign of the
deliverance from exile and alienation. Where Christians differ from
their ancestors and partners in faith is that Jesus is the Christos,
the anointed one:
For God so loved the world that he gave his
only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have
eternal life. God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17)
When
Jews are truest to their tradition, and we to ours, the promise of
faith is not only that our personal lives are to be transformed by
encounter with the living God, but that we are swept up into
God’s mission for the creation, called to be bearers of the
vision of a restored, reconciled world of shalom, peace as it is
understood in scripture and in theological teaching through the
centuries as the presence of justice and right order, not simply the
absence of war and violence.
My friend, the late Bill Coffin puts it very well in a collection of
his writings, titled Credo.
Credo
– I believe – best translates "I have given my heart to,"
he begins. "However imperfectly, I have given my heart to the teaching
and example of Christ. . . .To learn from one another and to work
together towards common goals of justice and peace – this surely
is what suffering humanity has every right to expect of believers of
all faiths.2
No sermon on love can fail to mention love’s
most difficult problem in our time – how to find effective ways
to alleviate the massive suffering of humanity at home and abroad. What
we need to realize is that to love effectively we must act
collectively, and that in collective action personal relationships
cannot ignore power relations. Until Christians learn this truth of a
technological, complex world, we shall be in this world as lap dogs
trying to keep up with the wolf pack.3
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, describes the effect of
Jesus’ self-emptying as creating
a
pathway or an open door between earth and heaven that no turn of events
in the world can ever again close. A place has been cleared where the
act of God and human reality are allowed to belong together without
rivalry or fear: the place where Jesus is. It is a place where human
beings have only to be open to what is offered and where God demands
nothing and imposes nothing but simply abides in unceasing love, a love
that can only be imagined in the human world and human language in
terms of vulnerability. It is thus a place where human competition
means nothing; a place where the desperate anxiety to please God means
nothing; a place where the admission of failure is not the end but the
beginning; a place from which no one is excluded in advance.4
Which
shall it be? People immobilized by fear, or people empowered by hope
who dare to join together for the welfare of the globe, which is, after
all, our own welfare writ large. Halfway through the last century, when
the world was staggering through the Great Depression and later a
devastating world war, a President foresaw the possibilities of both
peace and justice, drawing on his faith as an Episcopalian. From it,
Franklin Roosevelt had the political courage to conceive of the Four
Freedoms, to support the creation of the United Nations, the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund, to challenge the Congress to
develop Social Security and other examples of a national social net.
Our times are different but the challenges are remarkably similar. The
eight areas of the Millennium Development Goals offer a means to
understand global issues, and support and deploy resources to address
them. That agenda must begin at the grass roots, the local level.
Roberta
and I belong to a small congregation in New Hampshire. Holy Cross
Church in Weare has a part-time Vicar and a budget of $90,000 a year.
Two years ago, after several months studying the MDGs, the Vestry voted
the 0.7 % asking, something over $600, and divided it between a
micro-enterprise in Cameroon which makes loans to women, one objective
of which is to provide the income to send daughters to school, the
other a contribution to support a library and computer resources to a
facility for young people in a township outside Capetown, South Africa.
Both programs were started by lay persons from the Diocese. A small
effort, perhaps, but one which has transformed the way our congregation
thinks and prays about its part in God’s mission for the world.
That’s a good place to begin.
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