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The
Church As Hearing Center:
the
practice of justice in Eugene
by John Pitney
I have walked to church
3 times this week. Out Horn Lane I walk south on River Road and take Railroad
Avenue to the light at Blair, I walk the diagonal across 6th and 7th to Monroe
to 13th to the light at Charnelton and across the parking lot to the front
door of our church building. The first time I did it because I just felt like
it. But my walks now have become a pilgrimage. For many years my
imagination about what the church could be has been captured by the ancient
practice of pilgrimage. There’s a difference between churches doing programs
and churches taking pilgrimages together. The word “pilgrimage” may be
offensive in this land where our pilgrim people have done so much violence to
the original peoples, but however we say it, (quest, journey, ordeal) it’s
about faithful people going somewhere together, keeping their eyes peeled for
the City about to come.
Now if I’m
just walking, I put on my walking shoes. If I’m seeking the sacred I’ve got
to discipline my inner ear and, like the children we sent out this morning,
put on a different set of lenses. That takes practice. So I sat down every
morning in a quiet place, listened to the silence and prayed these ancient
words from St. Paul of Tarsus. I said them over and over until they stuck:
Regard prisoners as if you were in prison with them,
Victims of abuse as if it were you.
Jesus suffered outside the gate,
So get outside and share the abuse.
The insider world is not our home.
Keep your eyes peeled for the City about to come!
The practice
of contemplation tunes the heart and peels the eyes. I saw things I never see
when I drive and I began to see the City about to come. Out the front door a
dog barked. Approaching Taco Time I saw a crew of wage-earning workers
mopping hot tar on the roof. Their stature and skin color told me they were
sojourners in our land and, as they looked down on me, I saw a glimpse of the
new City because usually it’s my people looking down on them
As I got to
River Road a huge billboard proclaimed An Abducted Child is Everyone’s
Child . The traffic sign said 20 Miles An Hour---Slow fo r Children.
For all that signage you’d think we really love our children, that we do
treat the abused as if it were us. But River Road Elementary is100 yards
away, a place where 80-90% of the children get subsidized lunches and parents
of 50% of the students in our neighborhood choose to send their kids to
school somewhere else.
Next I
passed the Looking Glass facility for girls. We fund treatment for boys in
trouble at a disproportionate rate compared to what we budget for girls. A
boy with a broken life can go straight from court to treatment. Chances are a
girl has to go to jail. As I was walking by, a pit bull with those angry
vacant eyes tried to take a chunk outa my leg. I got the message. With
regularity we treat battered women and girls in our community with a kind of
vacant violence.
Then I
passed a house with two women sitting at a table by the window laughing. A
sign on their neighbor’s door read: “Joe and Jeannie---Please remove your
shoes.” Welcome images. But a house in the next block had dark windows with
big letters painted on the glass “WalMart treats its employees like bleep!” I
crossed all four lanes trying to avoid the Adult Shop at the base of the
overpass with it’s sign flashing “Open 24 Hours” and it’s windows like mirrors
on our exploitation of women. Onto Railroad Avenue, I passed Gallery Obscura
on my left as a freight train moved on my right. I love train grafitti. In
the Gallery painters paint on canvas but you never see train artists. They
work in obscurity on the iron canvas of machinery that powers our way of life
and leaves more and more of us behind. The pastels express a world we would
never know unless we left our soft identities and walked the tracks. I think
the City to come will have that kind of random radiance. As I stopped to
study the big sad human face sketched in dark chalk on the door of a boxcar,
the train came suddenly to a stop with a chain reaction that rolled like
ancient thunder from beginning to end. If violence and neglect can ripple
like that through the generations of our communities so can justice and love.
During the
season of Lent, we have been focusing each week on a different Christian
practice. We’ve worshipped around 4 of the 10 practices Diana Butler Bass, in
Christianity for the Rest of Us identifies as common to the vital
mainline congregations she has studied. We’ve looked at the practices of
discernment, hospitality and testimony. This week we give our full attention
to the practice of justice. As people of the Christian and Hebrew story we
have a legacy of discernment. Diana rightly defines discernment as the
practice behind all Christian practices. But what does discernment have to do
with justice? I believe the practice of Justice requiresdiscernment.
It requires praying the world.
And Sacred
journeys of discerrnment are our tradition. Adam and Eve were called East of
Eden to discern the pain of a community parched by hate and greed. Fresh from
the wilderness, God suggested the Israelites send spies across the River to
see and name the powers dominating the Promised Land. Christ sends his
friends into the towns 2 by 2 with nothing but the clothes on their backs. We
are invited to go and find the misfits and the exploited outside the camp.
When we
discern the world and seek God’s call explicitly for justice what are we
looking for? First of all, as we put on new eyes we find the ancient love of
God that predates everything is everywhere. Next, no matter what the
buildings or people look like, the Kingdom---what we call the Beloved
Community is on every street and alley, in every doorway and around every
corner. That’s what we see if our eyes are peeled.
But sometimes
you really have to look hard. On my sacred walk I crossed the tracks and knew
I was in a different world than I’m usually in. Up the sidewalk I came to
the little eatery called Las Brascas “Biggest Burritos in the World!”
Posters of latino bands and dancers were pasted everywhere and hanging in
strings. There were iron bars on all the doors and windows of all the
buildings on the street and ads and instructions everywhere in a language I
have not tried to learn. As I walked on I felt like an immigrant. I hurried
on like a tourist. I tried to cross 7th but traffic was awful and after I
waited several minutes, Igot no light. Backtracking in my mind I remembered
all the signs behind me that said, “No Turn Around.” But I did turn around
and then I got it. Our faith says we’re all sojourners and guests. The
beloved community is all immigrant.
Then behind
me and across the street I saw the butcher shop. Lupita’s Carneceria
Panaderia the sign says and stuck to the front window: “Carnes Frescas (fresh
meat)” Looking with God’s eyes I saw “carme”, the word “carne” repeated.
Carne is the root Incarnation. And I saw painted up high on the store wall an
image of the Holy Mother and below, her child Jesus, the word that became
flesh: “carne”, “carne” Incarnation. And I remembered Eugene Peterson’s
paraphrase of the Incarnation: “The word became flesh (carne) and moved into
the neighborhood.” And I thought again to myself: “So that’s how it is, in a
storefront few would want, in a neighborhood I don’t inhabit, the word becomes
flesh and moves in, and an immigrant family makes a living doing something few
have been able to do in our globalized marketplace. Go figure. I look up
and realize the image of Christ on the storefront is smiling and I know why.
Our
discernment must be incarnational. Jim Wallis, in his book God’s Politics
says liberal mainline churches are well-meaning when it comes to alleviating
poverty. Trouble is, we don’t know anyone who’s poor. Of course that flies
in the face of our faith. Jesus was of the poorest of the poor. He stood 5’
3” or 5’4” because his class were chronically malnourished. And we are
called to follow that Jesus. Wendell Berry has said, “The world’s curse is a
person who wants to be somewhere else.” If that’s so maybe the curse of God’s
Beloved Community is a church made of people who live somewhere else. If
that’s so maybe the blessing of God’s Beloved Community is a church that
becomes flesh and moves into the neighborhood to be with Jesus among the
outcast and malnourished.
Once we see
the Beloved Community, God’s eyes help us witness injustice. Injustice for
Christians is anything that denies any of the children of God access to this
Beloved Community just for showing up, just for being born, for the luck of
the draw, because of their culture, class, orientation, age, belief system or
condition. Injustice is keeping anyone out of the Family of God because of
the way we do things and the powers and principalities that legitimize that
violence. This calls us to see Jesus with different eyes again so we can see
our world. Jesus was publically executed for proclaiming there was a higher
allegiance than the powers of Empire, for suggesting Cesar Augustus was not
God. He was executed for refusing to legitimize the exploitation of the
powerless as a right of power. He was crucified for challenging the ordinary
way of doing things. We also know Jesus would likely have witnessed 100’s of
crucifixions as he walked the roads and streets of his neighborhood.
He was an extroadinary human being, disposed of in a violently ordinary way.
Peeling our eyes we gain this sight as well, that we can bear witness to the
crucifixions of the lives and livelihoods of extraordinary people that happen
all around us every day whose birthrights and destinies are disposable.
We are
trying to re-imagine the church as a neighborhood church. Continuing on my
sacred journey, when I finally got across 7th, I saw some signs and store
names suggesting new images of church. On one side of the street I saw
Laughing Planet---I mean, think of that as an image of God’s realm. Of course
there was Sweet Life and I’d trade their food for maple bars anyday as a
witness to God’s goodness in the sour places of our City. The church sign on
the corner read “The church is a hospital for the hurting, not a museum for
the saints.” A real estate sign suggested another church vision: “Wow, Better
Than New!”
I think when
we keep our eyes peeled for the City about to come, we start seeing the church
to come. One day I walked past the Kezar Hearing Center on Blair and
it struck me: The church to come might be most like a Hearing Center. On the
door it advertised “Board Certified Hearing Specialists.” What if we were a
church of hearing specialists scattered by 2s and 3s wherever people need a
listening ear and a story told. Its much like what we’ve been offering in our
process toward becoming a Reconciling Congregation. Throughout the past year
and a half, we have tried to create “Listening Posts” where people feel safe
to say what they feel no matter what. We’ve had certified listeners for that.
Diana Butler
Bass has given us many exciting images of what the new neighborhood church can
be. She talks about the congregation with an 8am Sunday worship for 200
homeless, followed by breakfast. Another creates a ministry called the Amos
Center where church leaders get training to work together in response to
poverty in their county. In another community a cluster of 19 congregations
builds housing projects and works together to reclaim neighborhoods from drug
dealers. Another forms Reconciliation groups across their city, where people
are forming friendships and learning from each other across the boundaries of
race and class. Still another celebrates Holy Communion for all comers in a
downtown park every week. These stories can stir our imaginations but theirs
aren’t blueprints for practicing justice and doing church here. Christ comes
in the flesh of the people and places of our unique neighborhood full of the
gifts and promises of this place.
We have much
upon which to build here. We have regular groups serving at the community
dining room. What are we learning there? We welcome homeless families 2
weeks in the winter. Could people be matched with the families to shepherd
and mentor through the rest of the year? Because we do That’s My Farmer with
17 other faith communities we’ve got lots of ears out listening to the stories
of farmers and low-income families. Because we are listening, we will be
able to support10 latino farm families this season who haven’t, until this
year, been able to get access to farm land and water because they are
immigrant people. Maybe in the future we’lll see their produce in the
restaurants and Carneceria on Blair. That’s gonna be exciting.
And we have
some pilgrimages planned. We are gonna walk for Hunger and pray our way from
Oakridge to Florence in June. But we’re not just raising money for the Food
Bank. We are doing that but, just as important we will be learning and
discerning, talking to people, studying hunger, stopping at foodbanks and
pantries all along the way, having press conferences with decision makers to
see if we can come closer to answering why, in this place of plenty there are
so many empty tummies and malnourished futures. All of you can join this
Hunger Walk out on the road or during the time we will be marching through
Eugene on safe trails together. Later in the summer both our youth and adult
mission trips will be sacred journeys of understanding with people on Indian
Reservations in Williamson River, Oregon and Blackfoot, Idaho. The new friends
we’ll make are probably as different from you and me as anyone we could meet
in our region. We will all return as certified hearing specialists for sure.
What do you hear God calling us to be?
Last year our
Governor and his wife tried living for a week on food stamps. That’s the kind
of discernment we’ve gotta do to give us clues for what justice requires. To
stand in the shoes of the homeless kids on the downtown mall and listen in at
the jail. To hold vigil at the payday loan shops and shuttle the people down
the street to the credit union where they can get loans without the cruelty.
To link arms with men and women together and convene church at the Adult shops
and enough to create the attitudes and policies that will make their ugly
legacies disappear. To do everything we can so the children at River Road
School don’t go home hungry every weekend.
Christian
friends, I truly believe God has put everything we need into our neighborhoods
to make them stand up and live. Trouble is it’s still a long way from the top
of the Tate to where our friends bed down under the steps at the back door of
our church and a long way from where we live to there. I truly believe we are
entering another rich time of discernment. Let us be in prayer on the world
together and to with these words in our imaginations:
Regard prisoners as if you were in prison with them,
Victims of abuse as if it were you.
Jesus suffered outside the gate,
So get outside and share the abuse.
The insider world is not our home.
Keep your eyes peeled for the City about to come!
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