Sermons

The Welfare of the City

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
October 14, 2007	Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7

 

The episode I am about to recount is not recounted lightly, nor for sensationalistic reasons. I’ve not shared it publicly, ever, but it seemed to pertain to this morning’s conversation.

I do not remember the date precisely, but it must have happened some 13 or 14 years ago. I was headed to the Chicago Presbytery office for a meeting in the middle of the day. It was a Monday, I do remember that. Since it seems that I spend much of my time in meetings, and presbytery meetings at that, this is not unusual.

I arrived at the presbytery office early, and therefore walked down the street several blocks for lunch. Thusly fortified, I headed back up the street. It happened in a flash. A young man, in his early 20’s as far as I could tell, appeared out of a doorway and approached me. Nothing unusual about that. Being a city resident, I was accustomed to that experience, and had developed over time what I had hoped was both a firm and civil response.

Not this time. I didn’t even get to that part of the discussion, because this young man drew a gun and placed it alongside my left leg and demanded that I take out my wallet and give him everything that I had. I did so. I opened my wallet. I remember I had about $30.00. He then demanded my watch, which I quickly removed from my wrist. He then told me to walk and not look back, which I also did. I must have walked 15 or 20 minutes in the opposite direction until I then circled back to the presbytery office.

I was in a daze at that point, a surreal daze. We called the Chicago Police Department, who came and took a report, but nothing much came of it. They insisted to me that such incidents rarely happened in that neighborhood, and I tried to impress upon them how little I cared about being a statistical aberration.

In retrospect, the young man had seemed very nervous, if not under the influence of something, and the police speculated that he needed cash, and my not very pricey watch, to score his next fix, as they say on TV.

Was the gun loaded or not? Would he have pulled the trigger or not? I don’t know. This is not an episode I've thought too much about, but every once in awhile, I do think about the barrel of that little pistol resting on my leg, and the fact that I had enough cash with me so that whatever was disturbed in that clearly disturbed individual was not disturbed any further.

Several years later, serving another church in that same city, my responsibilities included oversight of a family resource center in Cabrini-Green, then one of the most notorious public housing projects in all the country. The church had operated a tutoring program for several decades, and now, after building relationships with families in Cabrini, we determined to work not only with school-aged children off-site, but younger children and families on-site, in the apartments.

We rented a Chicago Housing Authority apartment, fixed it up a bit, hung up a sign that said “it takes a village to raise a child” long before it was a cool political slogan, and opened what we called “The Center for Whole Life.” Simple things. Parenting classes. Bible study. A place to come.

We had a director and staff, but part of my job was to ho to Cabrini once a week or so to touch base and check in. It was a complex task, because not only did we need to receive approval from the housing authority, the C.H.A., but we had to be vetted by the particular gang that controlled that particular building.

At that point, political philosophy was put aside. It was not that we approved of the existence of gangs, nor were we unaware of gang culture. But the reality of the situation said that if we wanted to be in community in that place and work with and seek to serve children and families in need, we had to accommodate our own social and cultural understandings to the moment at hand.

That meant that whenever I showed up, I first walked through a police metal detector, which typically did not work. I then was approved for entry by a building resident, which meant a gang member. The first several times I showed up weren’t so wonderful. Later I became a known persona and was generally waved right through to our apartment. But never, not once, did I forget that those who vetted our program, allowed us to set up shop and permitted me entry were armed and ready to utilize their weapons, as they might have done earlier that day or might do later that evening, to protect their turf and their way of life.

In a time earlier in our history, some 27 centuries ago, a prophet named Jeremiah shared a vision from God. The people of Israel had been sent into exile, punished, so it was understood, for their wandering ways. But they were also political and military victims. The Babylonian captivity, it was called. And the miracle seems to be that they were released from that captivity and returned to their land.

No land. No home. No prospects. It is what makes the story of the modern state of Israel so resonant, or the current tragedy of Darfur so poignant.

Jeremiah did two things. He was deeply, deeply critical of the people for their behavior, intimating that they deserved the exile and banishment as a result of God’s righteous punishment. But when the exile happened, Jeremiah held out to them a vision of hope and possibility, making possible their survival in the season of banishment and their eventual return home.

But even in exile, Jeremiah, articulating the voice of God, called the Israelites into a kind of new ethical vision, a kind of preparation for their return home. Even in exile, “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

Seek the welfare of the city. I could not help but connect the dots this week:

* Two personal experiences of gun culture in Chicago.
* A disturbed 14-year old opening fire on his classmates in Cleveland and a family buying automatic weapons for their son in Pennsylvania.
* The senseless death of community worker James Slater in our own city, the 43rd homicide this year.

I do not know, but it seems as if the welfare of the city is not doing so well.

There are so many components, are there not? Education, economic development and opportunity, housing, medical care. But surely a base level of the city’s welfare has to do with guns, their availability and use and the sickness and deep human brokenness that makes gun violence seem almost acceptable.

It was the poison of addiction, perhaps, that caused a young man to place a gun alongside my left leg. It was the crush of racism and economic devastation, perhaps, that allowed the parallel culture of Chicago gang life to grow, as it has, perhaps, in our own city. It was the deep anguish of mental health, perhaps, that led a Cleveland teen to act in the way he did, including the taking of his own life. But the stories would be different had not these broken conditions and broken people also not include the presence of the kind of weaponry that turns human brokenness into violent tragedy.

Seeking the welfare of the city must certainly include how we as a city, as citizens, and most clearly as people of faith, think about these things.

I am no politician, nor an expert in law enforcement. I hope, though, that we as a city and as a broader community can find the economic resources, the human resources, the political resources, to make a difference.

But it goes deeper than that, and we know that as well. To seek the welfare of the city means so much more than thinking about gun control. It is to think of ourselves – all of us regardless of our address – as citizens, citizens connected with every other citizen.

Jeremiah writes that in the city’s welfare we will find our own welfare, and we must live as if that were true, because it is. To use Paul’s imagery, if the body is sick we must tend to all of its attendant parts.

If the city is sick – this city or the broader city into which we have been called – then we must do the same. We must tend to how we relate to one another, how resources are apportioned, how opportunities are identified. We must consider the very young, the very weak, the very marginalized, the very vulnerable, as those whose welfare we consider the most important, rather than the most expendable.

As people of faith, we share dual citizenship – citizenship in the church and citizenship in whatever city God has placed us. What Jeremiah seems to be doing is insisting that those citizenships are not mutually exclusive, but rather compatible and integrated.

We will elect a new president some 55 weeks from now. I can’t wait. From now until then, you will read and hear much about the interrelationship between religion and politics, about how one party or the other is articulating better policies in terms of religious issues, or trying to capture certain groups of voters based on religious preferences. It makes one feel just the tiniest bit manipulated and cynical: if we say “this” and you believe “that” then you will vote this way or that way.

But the prophetic tradition of the Bible, articulated by Jeremiah, embraced by Jesus and embodied by our own Presbyterian heritage at its best, is neither Democratic nor Republican, neither liberal nor conservative. It is faith-based, to be sure, but not in the way that the pollsters would have us understand.

Our politics is acted out at a deeper level, more fundamental. It seeks the welfare of the city, which is neither red nor blue, but which always embraces justice, and hope, and peace.

And we are called to be citizens of that city, the human city and the city of God, with every risk that we can conceive, and every reward that we cannot even begin to imagine. Amen.

The welfare of the city is at risk – rather than becoming depressed or weary or overwhelmed or immobilized, we must muster the righteous indignation of the prophet and also the vision.