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Communication
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Evensong Dedicated to the People of Haiti
January 17, 2010
St. Paul's Cathedral
5:00pm
Come Holy Spirit: Touch our minds and think with them, touch our lips and speak with them and touch our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. AMEN.
Yesterday, as I was preparing this sermon, I walked around my home and saw it with what I can only describe as new eyes. The pantry and refrigerator nicely stocked, my bed with clean sheets, the furnace set to come on to take off the chill of the night, and my garage filled with tools—hammers, saws, shovels and the like. Over the last few weeks the city has been replacing the aging water and sewer lines making the street uncharacteristically rough. I remembered my irritation with the crews for shutting off the street so that I had to park a block away and walk to my home. I thought back to times when I was irked by the water or electricity being interrupted without notice.
As we gather tonight to pray for our brothers and sisters in Haiti, I feel my own shame as a person of immense privilege who all too easily bridles when my own conveniences and abundance is stifled.
Earthquakes are caused by shifting of rock below the surface, releasing stress, stored up the rock, sometimes for over hundreds of years. In Haiti, Tuesday’s seismic shift sent a tectonic wave that was immense. But these waves were amplified by the very disparity that makes our daily lives so different from that of the average person in Haiti. Our buildings are built to withstand earthquakes with even our hot water heaters carefully strapped in place. Rebar gives concrete greater strength as it spans above our heads. One only has to look at the rubble of Port au Prince to see the difference.
I think we all know that a clear evil that has made this tragedy so colossal is the great disparity of wealth in the world. Yet some will try to make the victims responsible--like Pat Robertson who suggested that Haitians brought their multiple woes on themselves through some alleged pact with the devil. He even has the audacity to say it’s a fact, even thought he knows history so poorly that he doesn’t know that the Haitian people threw off the yoke of slavery and French Imperialism when Napoleon ruled France not his nephew, Napoleon III who came to power in 1848. It is this foolishness that gives Christianity a bad names but worse gives too many who claim to be Christian justification for the suffering of others while they are comfortable.
Tonight is the sixth night that the Haitian people search for rest wherever they can. Most are hungry and thirsty. Many are injured. Some of those who are hurt will die in the hours and days to come because they will not receive relatively simple treatments that would save them. To be sure, led by three presidents, our nation will marshal impressive resources and show her compassion in these days. We will make a difference. Part of that difference will come from your generosity this night as your gifts from this Cathedral travel through Episcopal Relief and Development directly to the people Haiti. Some of you will give astonishingly and sacrificially because that is how you are hard-wired. Others may be like me, are convicted and guilty because we see things of which we were previously blind.
Joan Didion begins her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, with these words, “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” At 4:53 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, everything changed for the people of Port au Prince. For the 9.8 million people living in Haiti, one world passed away and a new, uglier world was revealed. In our diocesan office we felt that change a while later when we heard about the earthquake. For you see, one of our newest staff members, Canon Suzi Holding’s daughter, Mallory, is a Young Adult Service Member for the Episcopal Church working at our seminary in Port au Prince. Mallory is safely back in the United States. But for forty eight hours, we knew that everything had changed; we just were not sure how much or what cost we would bear. And this night, I sense that that is essentially the question for each of us. How much have we been changed by that moment? And what costs are we prepared to pay in this new and different world that has been revealed?
We heard tonight the story of Noah going into the ark and in the coming of the flood. You may think that this lesson was specifically chosen for this service. Rather, it is the lesson appointed for this day in our daily office lectionary. As it is presented, it is only destruction of the wicked with a privileged few saved. Pat Robertson would like the seeming message of this passage. The good are preserved; the wicked perish. Indeed, this very lesson raises thorny questions about an all powerful, benevolent God reigning over a creation that includes tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes.
As Christians, we negotiate those vexing theological questions through the cross. We know suffering is a part of a broken world, whether that suffering is from human hands or so-called “acts of God.” What we believe is that God is in the rubble of Port au Prince sharing the pain even unto death. We also believe that death, even senseless and avoidable death is not the end of the story.
I find myself wondering what would have happened if the story of Noah and the Ark had played out this way:
“Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation... For in seven days I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.’
And Noah said, “No. I can’t leave my neighbors to the flood. I know they are pretty screwed up, but I just can’t.”
Would the floods have been abated? Would the rainbow rather than being a symbol of God’s promise to never again to destroy the world by flood be instead a call in the heaven for us to stand in the way of the suffering of others, whether we think they have made a pact with the devil or not?
In an instant, at 4:53 p.m., everything changed in Port au Prince. In that instant we should be changed too. One world passed away and a new, uglier world was revealed. Or maybe the ugliness of the world we inhabit was simply revealed. Haiti is yet the latest invitation to be different. We do not have to live this way and be this way. We can be changed by the conviction of our sin of possessiveness, racism, and privilege. We can be changed by our great human empathy.
On this weekend, we do well to remember the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, "An injustice to anyone is an injustice to everyone." Those of us formed by Jedi wisdom may recognize Dr. King’s words echoed by Obi Wan Kenobi and most apt for these days, "Remember, Luke, the suffering of one man is the suffering of all. Distances are irrelevant to injustice. If not stopped soon enough, evil eventually reaches out to engulf all men, whether they have opposed it or ignored it."
I suspect that the world community will be held captive by the pathos of Haiti for just a few more days and then most will go back to paying attention to former things or be shaken by a new crisis. Let us not forget the people of Haiti. As important as it is for us to give tonight, I am going to suggest that you consider putting tonight’s Bulletin insert on your refrigerator. Remember how easy you receive God’s bounty and continue to give to the people of Haiti—give weekly or month—but keep giving. You are here tonight because you were changed on Tuesday. The world’s events changed you. The reverse is also true as Gandhi reminds us all: “We must become the change we want to see in the world.”
One of Mallory Holding’s responsibilities in Haiti was to teach English to seminarians. As a project, her class wrote and published a daily devotional for Advent. Let me conclude with a prayer written by a third year seminarian:
Thank you, God, for your Son who you sent to die for us and give us life. Your love is incomparable. Increase our faith. Help us to love our neighbors as you love us. Help us to see others before seeing ourselves. Chase away in us egoism, discrimination, racism and all bad things. Help us to share what we have. Make our love a contamination for the world. We pray you in the name of Jesus, our Lord and savior.
To this we can all say, AMEN.