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| THE CHURCH IN THE in,

WEEPING TEARS OF GRIEF AND HOPE
Lafayette, Indiana
October 16, 1992
John Buchanan, Pastor

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Ilinois

— [inere was something about his voice. It came through the
intercom of the Manse next to the church, urgently, painfully.
When you work in a city church you hear, before very long, every
conceivable story created, rehearsed, told and retold in order to
separate you from a few do1lars Y I have wondered at times about

the general health of the peop in Tennessee, because every day Yo
someone asks us for money in order to buy ys ticket to visit a th
mother who is critically ill in Nashville. ¢&nd so one devises o
some criteria to separate the wheat from the Chaff. One learns ‘van

to inhale deeply and recognize the distinct and telltale smell of
alcohol. And we devise ways to separate real from fabricated

human need. Meal ticket vouchers, food and clothing instead of

cash is one way to make sure one's charity is not ending up in

the cash register of a local liquor store. But even that can be
tricky if what you give is in any way marketable. And so, in the |
process of protecting our charity, being responsible with our
resources, assuring that our caring is deserved, something some-

times gets pees

This voice penetrated my own defense perimeters. I went to
the door and saw a young man in torn and dirty clothing. His
face was bruised and puffy, and he was shivering. It was not
particularly cold. He did not ask for money or food. All he
wanted was a sweater so he could stop shivering. So I did what
we all know we should do under those circumstances. I referred
him to our Social Service Center around the corner and returned
to the game on television. Just as I sat back down I recalled
two things: one, it was 5:30 p.m., and the Social Service Center
closes at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday; and two, a wedding was about to
begin in the chapel. So I hurried over to the church and sure
enough, there he was, standing at the side door near the chapel,
the one that is locked, pounding, trying to look through the
windows. Inside there were people in tuxedos and lovely dresses
engaged in a very important and very happy religious ceremony.

The church staff was caught between the two events: the
lovely wedding about to begin and the man standing outside the
door, with his face all puffy and bruised, shivering, wanting a

sweater. The resolution was simple enough. The receptionist
and I went down to the Share Shop, found a sweater and a wool
sport coat. I took them up to the man and gave them to him. He
was overjoyed, put them both on, thanked me profusely and walked
up Chestnut Street.

As I watched him make his way through the small cafe tables
outside Cricket's, a four-star restaurant immediately west of the
church, full of fashionable people with shopping bags from Bloom-
ingdale' s, Marshall Field's, Lord & Taylor, enjoying a late
afternoon drink, I felt guilt, exasperation, anger, frustration.
The church can't interrupt a wedding every time a homeless person
or an addict or a drunk looking for some guilt-ridden, middle
class bleeding heart to finance another bottle of Muscatel pounds
on the door. Nor can I play savior to every person with a hand
out on Michigan Avenue, not to mention the ten or fifty thousand
homeless people on the streets, depending on whose numbers you
believe, not to mention millions of hungry people in the country
and world. So I watched him walk away from the church, where the
processional had now begun, with his discarded wool sweater and
sport coat, threading his way through the cocktail crowd at
Cricket's - still shivering by the way - and I found myself
wondering.

Urban ministry is like that. The city is like that. It's
one of the reasons suburban people seem to dislike the city so
much and treat you like you have some kind of mental illness if
you say something so ludicrous as "I love cities," which I do,
always have, always will. But I do not love the city sentimen-
tally - no longer.

Harvey Cox has written the forward to a fine new collection
of essays that should be must reading for all of us, Envisioning
The New City: A Reader on Urban Ministry.

Cox, who has spent his career in cities, he says, has been
mugged in Chicago, burglarized in Boston, nearly asphyxiated in
Mexico City, interrogated in Berlin and hopelessly lost in Tokyo,
still loves the city. | Co ays the. We w of Los Angeles from a

jet approaching the' airpo it/ at du trify ca
lions of lights blink and/' Vv 8 re: fo) Shing/u ingereny air dirdgction
to create an urban icon e sheer” Scope “ana | e can dite Fae
bre away. It is a si ft \ng/ human \ \bein behg living in any pre vious
century could have imagined. But once you're on the ground, the
aesthetic thrill quickl

issipates.

(Cox “quotes the German playwright, Berthold Brecht, who
remarked that while Shelley thought hell was a place rather like
London, in his own opinion it was probably much more like Los
Angeles. [p. 13]

\ the sorts of peopl

The city as hell. In that same book, Jim Wallis tells about - BR
\YeVe ©

his sister and her five-year-old son Michael, walking through
their Washington, D.C. neighborhood on the way to the Sojourners
Day Care Center, where burned out buildings and vacant lots
remain from the 1968 riots. "Riot Corridor," it is still called.
Michael looked at his mother and said, "Mommy, was there a war
here?" [p. 44]

Urban problems have reached gargantuan proportions. Colum-
nist William Raspberry wrote recently that the problem of home-
less poor people is so complex, so multi-layered, so multi-facet-
ed, so hopeless that he has noticed his own capacity to care
shutting down. It's called "Compassion Fatigue."

You know the litany: city schools are bad, public housing is
awful, gang violence, drugs, social destruction, family disinte-
gration: \y ——— >

/ Jesus wept ov
that powerful day whe
waving supporters, he

frustration of sorrow and
Fred Craddock, p. 229]

And he says:

"Tf you only kney the things that make/for peace.
But they are hidden \from your eyes. e day will
Ww

come when yong snemine will crush yo

And then, of cours¢, he went\ straight to/the Temple, and
what he did there was yery significant. He didn't say prayers or
make a sacrifice. He/became angry\at the cofruption of the
sacrificial system and he physically ejected the profiteers. And
then he sat down to Aeach and heal and lis¥en and encourage all
/who ordinarily weren't( allowed in the Temple.
Dominic Crossan says,/ that guaranteed his
ohn Dominic Crossan,\ The Historical Jesus XII.]

\It was an act, Johf
execution. [See
\ /
' There is a /lot going on here. Thé¢re is, first of all, the
simple fact that he came to the city. /l\ discovered an absolutely
delightful detail in John Dominic Cr 's new book, The Histor-
ical Jesusi% Crossan says there was superstition among the
rural peasants of Galilee in the first century that "the most
powerful demgns are not found in small villages but in certain
cities." Pyofessor Crossan suggeSts that when Jesus exorcised a
demon, the foreople might have co
Jerusalen.

Not a bad metaphor, actually IT know people who think like
that. In fact the tltqught ocg ‘s to me, as I ponder a rush hour
trip to O'Hare Airport) that“some very real demons have found

their way to our city régéntly. I understand you have a few
demons of your own - ing about bridges!

wept because the city was blind.
we look at e city - the energy,
enclav languages and music,

He came to t
What is it we se¢é
the wonderful iversity of ethn
the symphony, jazz, the Purdue Ba rch choirs, laughing
children, usy traffic. But there a other voices - voices
which, you have the courage to hear, will make you weep.

™

go public housi
Bird Leg, their friend, fifteen, is dead, shot ona playground on
a hot August night by a rival gang member. At the funeral Pharo-
ah and Lafeyette are sitting in a pew with their family. Someone
sang, "Lean On Me."

xy "Large tears slid down Pharoah's plump cheeks. He
; clutched his rolled-up sweatshirt to his chest

for security.

"As the service closed and the mourners moved
forward to pass the casket, Pharoah, still grip-
ping his balled-up sweatshirt, asked Lafeyette,
‘What's up in heaven? Do they have stores?'

'Shut up,' Lafeyette said. 'You don't know what
you're talking about.'

"As the boys waited to file out, they heard a
mother, two rows back, scold her son, 'That could
have been you if I'd let you go over there.'

"tWwe're gonna aie one way or the other by killing
or plain out,' James said to Lafeyette. ‘I jus'
wanna die wihiin out.' Lafeyette nodded.
'Me too.!'"

March.

4:
rr WT <

cw WO

; nas Eee a “prostitute since she was thir-
tegn Time featured Camden in its-January—20, 1992 tssue=in an
iclé entitled "Who Could’ Live Here?" Camden, a once thriving
industrial center, is a gutted, flattened city of 100,000, half
of them under twenty-one, with 200 liquor stores, no theaters,
where you can buy a hand grenade for $400 on the street and where
infants die at twice the natural average, which means at the
Third World rate or worse. Nikkeye, told Time:
t_ gt Le ,

"I been stabbed, raped, stomped, ‘kidnapped and

beaten up. The only thing that's never happened

to me is I never died. I figure I know every

thing there is to know. I probably know more

than the President. I don't know how to ride a

bike. I've never been to a zoo."

The—£i-+et<thing—=—"anrd perhaps the nost—important—thing— is
that Jesus came to the city and loved it enough to know its
promise, and enough to hope for its future, loved it enough to
weep over it. And so, it seems to me, that is the least we can
do - thrill at the glory of the city, its beauty, its strength,
its grace and its hope, and if necessary weep at its despair and
tragedy.

There is in our cities a lethal combination of forces which
is creating an urban problem so large we can no longer even see
the entire picture: poverty, drugs, violence, crack, despair,
gangs, assault rifles. And beneath it all, what appears for all
the world like a massive, unconditional political surrender, the
Federal Government hands urban problems to the state. States are
notoriously broke, and so they hand them to the city itself. At
all three levels people get elected by promising to cut spending
and never raise taxes, by looking to the private sector, which
responds with some justification that its primary business is
business - commerce - not urban violence, education and health
care.

Which leaves the churches. We have refused to think in new
ways about drugs and gangs and guns. There are not enough po-
lice, not enough courtrooms, not enough jails to begin to win the
vaunted war on drugs we declared and have already lost. Because
of poverty, despair, and drugs, an enterprising child in Cabrini-
Green will look out at the world and make some basic decisions.
An eight year old "watcher" on a bicycle, keeping a lookout for
police, earns $50 a day. A twelve year old can earn twice that
much making a few deliveries.

We could, of course, do it better. We know the things that
make for peace. We could be better. We could build a city that
cares for its least, that shelters its homeless, that tends to
its sick and educates its children. But it will require a new

way of thinking. And it will require sacrifice and money, and
toughness and vigilance on the part of people and organizations
like this one who with one hand feed the poor and the other knock
on the door of the politician to talk about a better world.
pee

And-the other thing is that|by coming to the city, Jesus
showed where religion is to be focused. A recent research
project of the Center for Ethics and Corporate Policy revealed
that for most people in mainline churches religious faith affects
family life but has very little to do with the either their work
or politics or their leisure.

Professor Glenn Tinder wrote about it in The Political
Meaning of Christianity, and observed similarly that we want to
keep spirituality separate from the more complex areas of our
lives:

"We are so used to thinking of spirituality as
withdrawal from the world and human affairs that
think of it as political. Spirituality is
personal and private, we assume, while politics
is public. But such a dichotomy drastically
diminishes spirituality." Tinder says, "the
notion that we can be related to God and not to
the world - that we can practice a spirituality
that is not political - is in conflict with the
Christian understanding of God."

Our Lord came to the city - not the retreat center, monas-
tery or cloister, but the noisy, wonderful, tragic, glorious
heart of the city.

Somewhere in each of us, I suppose, is a wish that he hadn't
done that; a desire to keep our God safely transcendent, to keep
our Lord in the pleasant, rolling hills of Galilee, to keep our
own religion confined to the church sanctuary on Sunday morning.
And that might be a tenable position to assume, except for the
fact that he rode into the city. ~ Oswlesst-

In that sense it's bad news, I suppose. But, as is often
the case with religion, it is also the good news because it means
that God's commitment to us is absolute, and God's coming into
the center of our lives is relentless and determined and strong.
There is on that road down from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem
not only despair but great hope. There is in his weeping both
grief and also deep love for the city. And there is in the whole
gesture a promise that Jesus Christ comes to the city, our city,
redemptively, decisively, creatively, hopefully.

In Harvey Cox's forward which I cited earlier, he says that
what moves him most about the church in the city is its hopeful-
ness. Not superficial optimism, but hope based on the experience

which the church has that the people of God are still alive al
the city - people who know a Christ who walks the city streets.

There are tears of grief and hope because of you and this |) \, aut
enterprise which for twe ears has kept alive the deep, un- \] (2
quenchable hope that God's \pedemptive, healing love is among us!
to bring about a new creation, was

It is his incrediblé love ‘thee gives us courage to care, to/
want the world to be better, to work for peace and justice.

Did you ever notice the words his aieaiples chant along the
road:

"Blessed is the king...
Peace in heaven,
and glory in the highest heaven!"

Those words are strikingly similar to words the angels sang at
his birth:

"Glory to God in the highest heaven and on
earth peace."

It is what he is about. And it is what we must be about.

Glory to God among us. /

Glory to God for showing us how to love.

Glory to him for showing us how to live odurageously and die
faithfully. /

And peace - here - in this city, in your heart and mine.
/
"Blessed is the king /
who comes in the name of the Lord!"

/

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