James 1:17-27; 2:14-18, 26
Fourteenth Sunday
after Pentecost/ 30th August 2015
“NEW ORLEANS — It is a wonder that any of it
is [there] at all: The scattered faithful gathering into Beulah Land Baptist Church
on a Sunday morning in the Lower Ninth Ward. The men on stoops in Mid-City
swapping gossip in the August dusk. The brass band in Tremé, the lawyers in
Lakeview, the new homeowners in Pontchartrain Park.
"On Aug. 29, 2005, it all seemed
lost. Four-fifths of the city lay submerged as residents frantically signaled
for help from their rooftops and thousands were stranded at the Superdome, a
congregation of the desperate and poor. From the moment the storm surge of
Hurricane Katrina dismantled a fatally defective levee system, New Orleans
became a global symbol of American dysfunction and government negligence. At
every level and in every duty, from engineering to social policy to basic
logistics, there were revelations of malfunction and failure before, during,
and after Katrina.
"Ten years later, it is not exactly
right to say that New Orleans is back. The city did not return, not as it was.
"It is, first of all, without the
more than 1,400 people who died here, and the thousands who are now making
their lives someplace else. As of 2013, there were nearly 100,000 fewer black
residents than in 2000, their absences falling equally across income levels.
The white population decreased by about 11,000, but it is wealthier.”
This is how The New York Times described the situation in New Orleans this
week.
President Obama returned to New Orleans on Thursday. He went house to house in the Tremé, one of
the oldest African American communities in the United States and had lunch at Willie Mae’s
Scotch House. Then he went to the Lower
Ninth Ward. In a speech given at the
opening of a new $20.5 million community center, President Obama said, "Not long ago, our gathering here in the
Lower 9th might have seemed unlikely." "But today, this new community
center stands as a symbol of the extraordinary resilience of this city and its
people, of the entire Gulf Coast, indeed, of the United States of America. You
are an example of what's possible when, in the face of tragedy and hardship,
good people come together to lend a hand, and to build a better future." Former President George W. Bush was in New
Orleans on Friday; former President Bill Clinton gave a rousing address at the “Power
of Community” service Saturday evening.
I was in New Orleans this past week to share in some of the commemorations
of the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, commemorations often overlooked
by the press. It must not be forgotten
that the faith community played a critical, essential, even pivotal role in the
recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans.
That’s why I was in New Orleans, to attend an event giving thanks to
Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faith-based organizations for their invaluable
and irreplaceable contributions to the rebuilding of New Orleans.
We heard stories of grace and gratitude from the people that
lived through Katrina, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard
Parish. People gave thanks to God. People who lost everything, but gained
something else in return, something they didn’t think they had or had lost long
ago, and that was their faith and trust in God.
There are, no doubt, people who lost their faith because of
Katrina. But there’s also the story of
people who lost a lot and suffered a lot, but found something new from out of
the ordeal.
As I shared with many folks in New Orleans, I’m grateful for Catonsville Presbyterian Church’s generous support of the recovery efforts. CPC contributed more than $37,000: $11,000 was collected right after Katrina and sent to PDA and Project Homecoming received more than $25,000. You’ll recall that we tithed a portion of our capital campaign in 2008, and with these funds we helped to rebuild a home in New Orleans. CPC’s work was recognized on Thursday evening.
It’s fitting that the lectionary for this week is from James:
faith without works is dead or of little use.
“What good is it…if you say you have faith but do not have works?” (James
2:14). Belief needs to be embodied. Faith needs to be enacted. If our faith, our beliefs, our religious
outlook doesn’t help to make a positive difference in the world, if it doesn’t
work to alleviate human pain and suffering, if it doesn’t help to liberate
people, and provide a source of healing in the world among all God’s children,
then what good is it? Faith must be put
to work.
Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun,
an award-winning account of a family living in post-Katrina New Orleans has two
sentences in his book that beautifully captures what I’m talking about. He writes, “What is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of
faith? …[For], there is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in
coastal Louisiana.”[1]
What New Orleans has accomplished in
the past decade is remarkable. Some things there are better now than before
Katrina: healthcare, restaurants/tourism
(there are more restaurants in New Orleans now than before Katrina), new
infrastructure, and new public transportation options, including expanded
streetcars. It’s a city of innovation
and development. And they’ve made enormous strides in education reform. For example, the City’s graduation rate has grown
from 54% to 73%, with a 65% African-American male graduation rate, which is
above the national average of 59%. City planners are working with experts from
Holland, learning how to live with (rising) water. The racial divide, however, is still great. Some
of the poorest parts of the City have not recovered and the reasons are
undeniably complex. “More than
175,000 black residents left New Orleans in the year after the storm; more than
75,000 never came back. Meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white population
has nearly returned to its pre-storm total, and the Hispanic population, though
still small compared with other Southern cities, has grown by more than 30
percent. Together, the trends have pushed the African-American share of the
population down to 59 percent in 2013, from 66 percent in 2005.”[2]
We walked across the street to attend Project Homecoming’s groundbreaking of what will be twelve new homes in twelve months.
Amazing Grace. The hymn is sometimes overplayed, overused. But there’s something about that hymn tune, evoking God’s amazing grace that beautifully captures the amazingness of grace. One of the gospel choirs sang it on Thursday evening—from the heart, with deep conviction, joy, and gratitude. I heard it everywhere in the French Quarter: sung by a soloist in Jackson Square in front of St. Louis Cathedral, played on a clarinet near Bourbon Street, played by a brass band in Jackson Square, even a lone bagpiper perched on a levee along the Mississippi. I heard less “When the Saints Go Marching In” on this trip and more “Amazing Grace.” On Friday evening we attended the K10 NOLA Honors Awards ceremony at the Saenger Theatre, hosted by Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr. It was a stirring tribute to all the people and organizations and corporations and countries that played a role in the city’s recovery and rebuilding. It was striking that at the beginning of the program, before any words were said, we heard a trombone soloist playing “Amazing Grace.”
Grace at work, embodied in the lives
of God’s children. Faith at work. Faith getting to work. Faith making a
difference in the world. The work of the
faith community transformed the City of New Orleans. But consider the thousands, millions of
volunteers that went to New Orleans from all over the country, who helped with
the recovery effort, who helped to rebuild the lives and communities washed
away by the flood waters, and consider all the conversations, the friendships
forged, the meals shared, the life-changing experiences, and then consider all
those volunteers that then left New Orleans and returned to their hometowns and
churches as changed people, how their
experience there changed their lives, altered the direction of their
lives. I know at least one person (from
Baltimore Presbytery) who volunteered for PDA, lived in Mississippi and
Louisiana, eventually felt called to ministry, went to Princeton Seminary, and
is now a minister serving an urban church in St. Louis. Consider all the people arriving in New
Orleans from across the theological divides of the church, liberals and
conservatives, people who went to New Orleans assuming that theological liberals
have nothing in common with theological conservatives and vice and versa, and discovering
as they worked together rebuilding lives, swinging a hammer, wielding a shovel,
and sharing meals together and discovering that theological ideas and labels
and political ideologies are secondary and irrelevant and even idolatrous when
it comes to actually doing the work of the Lord. Our theological labels,
categories, ideologies, camps separate us from one another and hinder kingdom
work.
At the press conference on Friday, a PDA volunteer, Jane
Stuart Els from Dallas, participated in the panel discussion and reflected on
what it was like for her to work in the recovery of New Orleans. She said she
grew up hearing a lot of talk about the Kingdom of God but wasn’t exactly sure
what that looked like, other than a “heavenly” vision of angels in “white
robes and halos.” As a regular volunteer worker, particularly at the PDA
village that was in Purlington, Mississippi, (where Paul Patterson, Jr. spent a
transformative week several years ago), she eventually traded the white robes
and halos for a different vision: “sheet rock dust and paint smeared on your
face. That’s what the Kingdom looks like” Jane said. She realized that she was surrounded by the
kingdom of God. It was all around
her.
[1]
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (Vintage, 2010).
[2]
Ben Casselman, “Katrina Washed Away New Orleans’s Black Middle Class,” August
24, 2015, FiveThirtyEight.
