I don’t know about you, but for me in the last week a lot attention went to Haiti.
The disaster there, of such a huge magnitude, is brought closer to home, not just in terms of being located geographically close to this country, but because Haiti, the diocese, is a part of the Episcopal Church.
We are not just the Episcopal Church in the United States of America.
The Episcopal Church includes 10 dioceses in countries other than the US.
The Diocese of Haiti, which has been a part of our Episcopal Church since 1873, is our largest diocese in terms of membership with over 83,000 members and over 100 churches, plus over 200 schools.
Compare that with the diocese of Olympia with same number of congregations,
and 32,000 members compared with 83,000,
and our total square miles is approximately 23,000.
Haiti with 10,714 square miles is less than the size of Maryland.
Haiti – half the size geographically, same number of churches,
but almost 3 times the membership.
The Diocese of Haiti is a member of Province II of our nine provinces
along with dioceses in New York, New Jersey, the Virgin Islands,
and the Convocation of American Churches in Europe.
Haiti, the largest diocese in the Episcopal Church in membership,
but now virtually all of their church buildings destroyed.
1 Corinthians, chapter 12 the Body of Christ
The Apostle Paul writes:
"For just as the body is one and has many members,
and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body
--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free— Haitians and us!
and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. …
But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member,
that there may be no dissension within the body,
but the members may have the same care for one another.
If one member suffers, all suffer together with it;
if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it."
In Haiti, I now observe, all social and class distinctions are gone –
the collapsed buildings are not just the shanties
but the government, institutional, and church buildings –
We watched as people worked side by side
to pull survivors and bodies from the rubble.
And the response worldwide has been an outpouring of generosity, compassion and support during this initial phase of dealing with the immediate crisis.
This seems to be a clear indication
that what St. Paul was describing in that 12th chapter of 1 Corinthians
is not just a theoretical analogy for modeling how relationships within the institutional church should be,
but it is a very apt insight into an organic reality,
the organic reality of Christ’s Body as creation.
The urge to help in disasters indicates this basic, natural and fundamental connection among humans as one body.
It is at times like this that we KNOW in our bones that we’re all in this together.
Now this realization may not last very long before once again people become competitive, or start pointing fingers at each other blaming, accusing, judging, and all the many ways in which we divide up the Body of Christ
or rend asunder our organic unity in the realm of God’s creation.
But one thing that I would hope that people would notice
in all this shock and drawing our attention
to the great human calamity of this earthquake, one thing to draw our attention – our own extremely fragile condition.
Did anyone else here feel a psychic tremor, if not actual quake, in your own composure,
a sudden jolt of a reminder about your own mortality?
If you did, that’s a good sign, a sign that you are in touch with reality.
Our condition as human beings is really extremely fragile.
How we hold ourselves,what idea we have of ourselves, how we define ourselves and express that – just notice how each of us walks down the street.
But that projected image of ourselves is subject to sudden and unexpected shifts.
Just watch an extremely elegant person walk into a spider web!
You can watch them dance around waving their arms in a most un-elegant fashion.
How fragile our composed self-identity is that so suddenly and spontaneously it gets decomposed.
And so the Body of Christ, the community of all those for whom Christ died, is an organic whole, whose members hop around in terms of who are the stronger ones, and who are the weaker or less honorable ones.
Quoting again from the Epistle reading:
“The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect;
whereas our more respectable members do not need this.
But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.”
The members that seem to be weaker are indispensable.
The weaker are indispensable.
The children, the elders, Haitians, ourselves given a turn of circumstances outside our control.
We too could end up as homeless as those Haitians.
Closer to home I think about those who are spending the winter in Tent City,
those who for any number of reasons now find themselves homeless.
While our attention is riveted on Haiti right now,
at the same time the Mercer Island City Council
is looking at policies and ordinances
about Tent City coming back to Mercer Island,
and voices of opposition are again being expressed.
Those of you who did so much a year ago in support of Tent City, take note.
You are being asked again to let your voices be heard.
For these “weaker” members are indispensable, indispensable,
an essential presence for us “stronger” members, reminding us of our own fragility
and our dependence on God’s mercy and providence
regardless of our own strength and expertise.
Just as the Haitians are indispensable to us,
if for no other reason than to show us our own mortality.
We all live on shaky ground, in all senses of the word.
Now for the Gospel hope for all this.
Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit,
comes to Nazareth, a town that can lay a claim on him,
and he reads to them from the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah.
And it is a powerful passage that he reads,
about the proclamation of the Year of Jubilee,
the Sabbatical Year times 7.
It is a message about proclaiming liberty,
the time to have family lands returned,
lands that had been forfeited due to debt,
a time to free all slaves,
those who had sold themselves into slavery
in order to meet debt obligations,
the time for forgiving debts.
And Jesus, his very presence, as well as his words and deeds that match his words,
Jesus brings good news that the listening heart responds to with a leap of joy.
He brings good news to those who recognize their need and poverty of spirit.
His very presence release the captives,
those bound in all sorts of ways,
captive in relationships, captive within their own dis-ease, finding liberation, recovery of sight to the blind,
to all whose vision and perspective is clouded and obscured
by all the misconceptions, ignorance, false assumptions, clinging desperately to illusions, setting free the oppressed,
all the ways in which we perceive ourselves as victims,
no longer caught in the victim roll,
but released for action in the year of the Lord’s favor,
the time of grace that God would have us enjoy.
Jesus, the Light of the world,
the Word in the beginning with God,
the Word who is God, creating by a Word, the Source of all life, the Power Source for our life together in his Body.
When the ground under us shakes,
and we are face to face with our own fragility, our own mortality,
then comes Jesus, the one whose loving-kindness, generosity and mercy
responded compassionately to each one who came to him.
Now receive this for yourself
and let his Spirit cultivate these same qualities
in his Body, in its members, in us,
that we may awaken more fully
to the basic, fundamental organic nature
of our relationship with each other in the Body of Christ, and live radically and compassionately out of that.
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