Easter Vigil 2018

Every year, as the seasons change, we remember the passage of death to life.

Every year, after a long winter, spring comes and things start growing again.

Every year, we remember the story of Jesus, who was arrested, jailed, and executed, and then, unexplainably, rose again.

Every year, we remember that life is possible, even after the deepest pain.

Over the past year, I have buried somewhere around 17 people. Today, we remember them and we remember that, even after loss and death, this community will rise again.

A year ago, I had people in Westport threatening to run us out of town—or burn us out. Today, I suppose we still have plenty of people who dislike us, but we are still open, still working for and hoping for a better world.

This passage of death to life happens in the world around us. Those of you who like to garden see it every year—everything dies back only to spring back to life as the earth grows warm again.

It happens in our own lives. Each of us carries our own burdens and memories and pain. Sometimes wherever we end up in life leaves us on a self destructive path. Sometimes self harm or drugs take over our lives or take over our communities. And, then, somehow, we find some reason to live again. Some life deep within us and we take hold of it. In the past year, I have watched several of our young people find that strength to live again. To grab ahold of treatment or some desire to stay clean or some hope of life—and with a tremendous amount of courage, find health and hope again.

It happens in our communities. We live in a place where 71% of our adult population has no job—is out of the workforce, as the census says. Most of us are poor here. A lot of us are young with no future. A lot of us are retirement age and have no support. And, then, in the middle of the struggle, and all the things tearing our community apart, and all our hatred for each other, comes some desire to change, to live again, to make the world and the community better. A lot of you have done this. You are doing this. You are learning to find life and hope and love in a broken, amazing community.

Life.

Life coming out of the death of our lives, our communities.

Around 2,000 years ago, a group of women went to grave of a young man who had taught them to love each other, who had taught them to build a better world, who had given hope to a poor and forgotten community. Just a few days before, this young man had been arrested, tried, and executed. These women were surrounded by death.

And, yet, when they entered the burial cave, they didn’t find a dead body. Instead, they were promised that this young man had risen and would meet them back home, in Galilee where they are from.

This is where the earliest manuscripts end the story.

With a promise of life.

Told a different way, Jesus had sat with his hometown, with tiny farming and fishing communities and he had built this movement of poor people who wanted change.

And he was a threat, right? All the people getting rich and powerful off of the people of Galilee were angry, all the people who hated tax collectors and prostitutes/sex workers, and homeless people, they were furious.

So they arrested Jesus, charged him, killed him.

And then, Easter morning, his body is gone. He is risen.

Its like Jesus—its like God—is giving all the powerful, all the powers that be, all the governors and religious leaders—giving them the middle finger.

Giving the middle finger to death and all the forces that were killing his people.

Giving the middle finger to those who thought they could destroy the hope of poor communities.

Today, we gather in that spirit.

Giving the middle finger to all the things that bring death to us and our people and our community.

Giving the middle finger to all the powers that seek to destroy us. To all the forces of hate and destruction.

And, rising again.

Rising in power. Claiming life.

Claiming life away from addiction. Claiming life away from hatred of each other. Claiming life away from all the powers that keep us poor and keep us struggling.

Some of you know we just hired three young people who have just got clean and sober and we are launching a small farm enterprise. We continue to visit our people in jail. We continue to feed each other and try and learn how to take care of each other.

Every day, we claim life. Every day, we end like those women at the tomb—with hope.

Hope that resurrection is possible. Hope that no matter how many times we fall or how many times we fail, we get up again and we learn to practice life, to practice resurrection.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!!

Centering our Young People

Lent 2, St Paul's Episcopal Church, Port Townsend

In the aftermath of school shootings, there is a national conversation about our young people. What is or isn’t wrong with them, what kind of security we need to protect our kids, what kind of security we need to protect ourselves from our kids, and on the list goes.

Much of my work is with young people—teens and young adults who have found themselves poor, homeless, on the wrong side of the law, or dead far too soon.

And while I don’t have any great wisdom to offer the national conversation, what I do have is lived experience in a poor town where young people are thrown away. And what I find, in my work, in Grays Harbor, where my kids are living in a town where 1 in 25 people are homeless and where half the county is on public assistance, what I find is the constant presence of death.

Over and over again, I stand at campsites with kids in their early 20s sobbing over the bodies of friends and loved ones. I know 18 year olds who have found their mothers dead. Over and over again, I hold memorial services for kids who died at 24, at 18, at 35. One young man, the first gang involved kid in jail to ever call me pastor, died of pneumonia after being turned away from two hospitals because he was flagged for drug use. For the poorest among us, even in this the wealthiest country in the world, poverty means the constant presence of death.

And, in that constant presence, kids do daring and foolhardy things, to survive, to escape, to take a chance at one more breath. They run from police and jump into rivers to their death. They overdose. They join a drug cartel and run drugs in exchange for a nasty room in a flop house so their pregnant girlfriend isn’t in the cold.

Father Greg Boyle, who has been a pastor to gang members in east LA for three decades, relates how he was on the Dr Phil Show at one point. And Dr Phil was interviewing a couple of kids in gangs and he had these elaborate setups, pointing out that these kids were headed for death or prison. Fr Greg relates how he interrupts Dr Phil and says; “They already know that. Everyone knows that death or prison is the end result. People join gangs because they have lost hope, not to find it.”

Jesus is talking to people like that in this gospel. He is talking to men and women who have seen death on all sides, who are used to the presence of early and unjust death. He is talking to a people who know what it means to lose hope. And he is telling them that he will die with them, and for them, and he is calling them to fight for life, and to die for each other if necessary.

Lent is a time that calls us to fast, so we can acknowledge the reality of those who have no food. Lent is a time that calls us to die, so we can acknowledge the reality of those who die early and often. Lent reminds us that the gospel centers the people who are hungry. The gospel centers the people who are suffering. The gospel centers the people who are dying. The gospel centers the kids I know and love.

And, in our ministry, surrounded by death and the memory of our lost loved ones, we are learning to find life in death. We are learning to struggle for what counts. For love. Learning to gain our lives, our souls in our willingness to die for each other. To feed each other, to love each other, to keep each other out of the cold.

Tonight, an 18 year old who spent the last several years of her own life homeless, facing impossible odds, facing unimaginable violence, is helping to keep a cold weather shelter open for her friends. Tomorrow, a trans kid who has faced nothing but an uphill battle to even be acknowledged as human in his own community, will cook a meal to feed 30 people. Yesterday, a half dozen young men formed a Bible study in jail and decided that their mission was to, in the words of Isaiah, “restore the streets to live in”, and build resources for the forgotten young people of Grays Harbor.

If gang involvement and all the drugs and violence of the streets in which I work are a sign of the hopelessness of our young people, our community center and our apprenticeship program, still in their infancy, are signs of hope. Signs of life in death. Signs that Jesus’ call to risk everything for a better world, Jesus’ call to die for one another in a place of so much death, still rings true two millennia later.

This past year, we joined the national Poor People’s Campaign, spearheaded by the Rev William Barber. And one of our young people, our first apprentice, spoke at the launch of that campaign in WA DC. She said;

"I volunteered to stay overnight at our church and keep people safe while they slept. … I stayed because my community stepped up to save my life, when the rest of society didn’t care whether I lived or died, and now it was my turn to protect my community. .I’m joining the Poor People’s Campaign because I need a movement that’s as tough as I am."

We might live in a county with devastating unemployment. We might have record suicide rates and the highest overdose rate in the state. Our young people might feel like they are thrown away, as they desperately scrabble to survive while business owners in city hall openly call for their death.

But in that death and despair, a resolve is growing.

A resolve to risk building a better world. A resolve to be part of a movement to make change. A resolve to make the community a better place.

As part of that this year, we are expanding our apprenticeship program and leasing 3 acres of farmland, as a way to both bring fresh food into our community center and provide supportive employment for young people trying to get off the streets and build a better life and world.

Every time one of our people dies, we say these words; “Rest in peace, rise in power.” We imagine, as we do this great work begun in villages in Galilee so many years ago, that all of our beloved dead surround us, as a great cloud of witnesses, demanding with us a better world, demanding with us an end to suffering and unjust death, and celebrating hope and life with us in this struggle.

And we invite you too to this, as part of a holy Lent.

From the Office

Right now, I sit in a 100+ year old building, in the old offices of the 1930s CIO, in the office of Mr Dick Law, a Finnish lawyer and organizer whose wife Laura would be murdered in the wake of both of their activism over half a century ago. Her murder was never solved. By happenstance, that office is now rented by Chaplains.

I am looking over a tired old town, one of many in these United and divided States. Dozens of people living on the streets are visible, walking up and down the streets. It was a cold night last night. The pharmacy looks almost new and some of the houses of the hill look passable, but the rest of the town is full of gutted buildings and tired projects.

The people here are not really what they are stereotyped to be by the AP newspaper articles and national pundits. They are mostly working class and poor, sons and daughters of union workers, in a blue dog democrat town turning red for lack of better options. They are Native and majority white, but our children are increasingly brown as immigration continues to the area. Our opinions are diverse and often, we are thrown together for survival, whether we like it or not.

We are stubbornly stuck in the crosshairs of global capitalism; abandoned by an extractive industry that still owns the majority of the land, with no replacement economy except for drugs and prisons. The forests are young after years of overharvesting, the coasts have been overfished (although we still bring in sizable harvests), and we are all a little bit tired. Environmentalists love to visit the area to take pictures of its amazing beauty, but care little for the people who also are part of the ecosystem. While a few Seattle based bands mock the town of Aberdeen, not many people think of the place beyond “the city you drive through to get to the beach.”

We have been abandoned by capital; we have been abandoned by politicians; we are mocked by pundits.

We have also been abandoned by organizers.

The left loves to mire itself in constant self reflection. Constant facebook posts about intentions and who did things right. Constant one-upmanship around identity politics. Constant critique of anyone doing anything. Constant arguing around protest: is it good or not, who should lead it, how should you get arrested, and the list goes on. Constant smug comments critiquing every single thing. Everyone is vying to be the expert while everyone agrees that movements should be ‘leaderless.’ Everyone wants autonomy, no one wants to follow. Everyone wants individual expression, everyone needs to be right. We argue endlessly about language and tactic.

And here in the old office above Heron Street, I am tired of listening. To all of it, honestly.

Because while all the pundits and self proclaimed experts and leaderless movement builders are talking and arguing and endlessly extrapolating, my people are dying. I’ve buried 15 people or so in the last year. The oldest was in his 50s. The youngest was 24. Poverty and the drug economy and abandonment have created generations of trauma and death in my community. All of the kids I work with are in and out of jail, and many started their jail career at 10 or 11.  The native nations of this community are mired in deep poverty and camps of the forgotten and addicted grow along our riverbanks. White kids in my generation turned to white power gangs and ran drugs; the next generation are joining well networked gangs to find some sense of survival and way forward on the street. The opiate crisis has slammed this community and too many of those I bury are from overdose; after all, we have twice the state average of overdose death.

So to the white, liberal, urban organizers:

 Do something. Anything.

Don’t pretend that your identity crises and critiques and endless self reflection are helping anything, are building anything.

Ground yourself in a real community; a flesh and blood one, where people make mistakes, where white power gang members and Surenos meet and shake hands, where homophobes go to their daughter’s gay wedding and clap, where Trump voters and anarchists build homes together.

Shut up. Please.

In my community, and in communities like mine all over a nation that is now nearly 50% low income and poor, there are leaders. They are raising kids and they are in jail and they are stocking the supermarket and they are in all the places that no one looks for leaders. Because all those terrible things I listed above are true, but not the whole story. Out of the pain and darkness, leaders are arising and they will change the world.

Listen to them.

They really do have something to say.

Step out of your silos—whether those silos are universities, hipster coffee bars, an institutional church—those places meant to be white and cultured and upper crust. Stop talking to each other. See the world around you. Listen to the people you are used to talking about.

And, and, there are some things we could really use from you.

Remember how the right built up to the moment we are at right now for 35 years? Remember the jail ministries and the protests and the coffee table conversations and the popular books and magazines and the devotionals? (I do) We’ve got some catching up to do.

Start doing some of those things.

We need Bible commentaries—popular ones that can go on the shelf in the local bookstore and in jails—that tell people that Jesus was on the side of poor and struggling people. We need devotionals that address our trauma and our loss and our pain and tell us God is on our side. We need to hear from others who have dealt with trauma, addiction, and homelessness, but we also need Bible scholars to tell us that there are ways to read the Bible that can give us hope. We need to hear that God is against racism, materialism, and militarism. We need to hear about a God who takes sides. We need think tanks, people, think tanks of scholars (ones educated in universities and ones educated by the hard knock life) who can write magazines and who can put out solid web information, who can analyze our political and economic situation. We need some external acknowledgement of our collective trauma.

Sometimes, we need you to show up to let us know we are not alone. Build relationships. Sometimes, we need you to help fundraise for local efforts, or to assist us with your expertise in law or science or economics as we seek to build a better world, as we seek to transfer wealth back into our community, as we seek to end the street to jail pipeline. If you are from a small, abandoned community, consider returning to one, stymying the brain drain poor communities face when all their brilliant lawyers and doctors leave town for better fields.

Protest when you want, but don’t stop there. Continue your internal dialogues on facebook if you need to, but please, please, do something. Listen. Write. Come. Act.

From here in the office on Heron Street, in the long shadow cast by ghosts of radical, murdered organizers, surrounded by poverty and death, surrounded by new leaders and abiding hope, we are asking you to stop talking to each other for a moment, turn and listen, and act.