Peace, love, and justice: a dialogue

[Dialogue written and presented for Community United Methodist Church of Naperville, IL for vocational discernment service on July 21, 2013. Also posted at Rich Experiences.]

Joe: This is Kacie. She is southern girl from just north of Nashville, Tennessee.

Kacie: This is Joe, He is a Pensyltucky boy from the mountains of central Pennsylvania.

Joe: Kacie knows just about every country song on the radio and about every Nicholas Sparks-inspired movie in the theater.

Kacie:  Joe is not afraid of camping in the mountains where there are hundreds of bears, plus he is a big sports fan, maybe not the Chicago bears but definitely a Pittsburgh Steelers fan.

Joe: Kacie is an artist. She is very visual, very tactile. She sees scenes of color and texture and transforms ordinary things into works of art.

Kacie: Joe is very intellectual. He uses big words, mainly because his head is always stuck in a book. It’s a beautiful site to see him so concentrated on his reading. He reads books by authors like Paul Tillich and Alice Walker.

Joe: Kacie is also very passionate about justice for women.

Kacie: Joe is also very passionate about justice for workers.

Joe: And so it makes perfect sense—

Kacie: That we met in—

Both: Washington, D.C. at Ecumenical Advocacy Days.

Kacie: I feel that we both have a call to advocacy, which means joining with the voices of the poor, the weak and the marginalized to make change in our nation and world by speaking stories of truth in our communities to our local, state and national leaders.

Joe: We’ve both had strong religious experiences where we felt transformed by God—what John Wesley would call “justifying grace”—but we also continue to feel the Spirit move us toward acts of mercy and justice for people around us. Wesley called that part “social holiness.”

Kacie: One of the biggest issues we advocate for is poverty and food justice. We both help with a student and homeless ministry in the South Loop of Chicago. We have a community meal with students and people from the streets, make sandwiches together and walk the streets with our friends to pass out the sandwiches.

Joe: There’s this one community off Lower Michigan where about a half dozen homeless people usually sleep. Someone wrote a Bible verse on the wall there. We always drop off a couple of sandwiches for the folks there. Last week, they were all gone and the Bible verse had been painted over. We figure that the city had evicted them for the Taste of Chicago and a movie someone was filming.

Kacie:  This is community, and we feel like we are part of the community. We are all equal, and deserve equal treatment in our society. We go to our local, state and national leaders to remind them about our friends on the street. These are the stories of truth that make up our society.

Joe: Jesus and his followers also spent much of their ministry among the sick, the poor, the socially marginalized. As two followers of Jesus Christ in 21^st century Chicago, we continue to practice ministry with our friends and neighbors—Black, white, Latino—

Kacie: Gay, lesbian, transgender—

Joe: Native born and immigrant—

Kacie: Rich and poor.

Joe: We are all one in Jesus Christ.

Kacie:  Last week I completed my internship with Bread forthe World, a national organization that works with churches to end hunger through advocacy. I am using this training to start a sewing ministry for homeless women.

Joe: And I’m in seminary, making my way through the process of becoming a United Methodist pastor. I’m finding ways to incorporate God’s call for justice in acts of preaching, teaching, and service.

Kacie: One thing I’ve done in response to my call to justice is write letters to my congressional representatives. I was able to do this through Bread for the World’s offering of letters program.  I invite you, too, to write a letter to your member of congress on issues dealing with food justice or just an issue you are very passionate about, especially if you cannot travel to DC or Springfield. Get a group of friends together and write an abundance of letters. This is definitely a way to raise your voice and speak for justice.

Joe: If you’d prefer a more direct action route for justice, I encourage you join with me and my friends at IIRON, a regional community organizing network. We’ve set up shanty-towns in Federal Plaza, had flash-mobs at the Apple store, and occupied abandoned properties to show how too much money is going to excessively wealthy corporations at the expense of our friends and neighbors.

Kacie: Even though Joe loves brown and his Carhartt jacket—

Joe: And Kacie loves pink and lace.

Kacie: Joe is very talkative,

Joe: Kacie is a bit more introverted.

Both: We both have a place at the Lord’s table with—

Joe: Peace

Kacie: Love

Both: and justice.

Kacie Greer and Joe Hopkins outside of Sen. Mark Kirk's office
 in Washington, D.C. They are now engaged and plan to marry in
June of 2014.

Dinner with Jesus and the CEO

The communion table is the ultimate Christian dinner table.

Wait, is that a can of Red Bull? (Photo by Tom Gaulke)

A few weeks ago I participated in a workshop at the Chicago Temple called “Resetting the Table”. It opened with a theological reflection from a professor at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in which our 21^st century American society was compared to sitting down around a table for dinner. The professor posed 5 questions:

·         Who gets to sit at the table?

·         How are the seats arranged?

·         Do the elements served nourish the body?

·         What bonds are formed around the table?

·         And in whose name is the meal blessed?

Considering that I live in a co-op with seven roommates, these questions have quite direct implications on how I eat my kale and pasta at night.

The other important consideration is that this symposium took place only two weeks before NATO came to Chicago and in the middle of a national effort to get into shareholder meetings of the country’s largest companies. And about a week after the United Methodist Church General Conference.

Generally, I like to like to imagine that people get an equal shot to come to the dinner table; that no one has a more important seat than another; that the meal will help keep me healthy; that I become closer to the folks slurping soup around me; and we bless the meal in the name of God, our Creator and Redeemer. I like to think that generally our democratic systems in government, corporations, and churches run this way, too, though maybe in more secular terms for government and in corporations.

But that’s not the way it often works. Here’s an example.

On May 23 the CME Group, also known as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, held its shareholders’ meeting at the iconic Chicago Board of Trade building. To give you an idea of how important that is, Forbes Magazine called CME one of "the four companies that control the 140 companies that own everything.”  Corporations are ultimately accountable to the shareholders that own the corporation’s stock, so this was a big deal.

Last year CME Group threatened to leave the state of Illinois unless it received a billion dollars in tax breaks over the next 15 years. Illinois was and is facing record budget deficits, and now the state legislature is looking to cut $1.6 billion dollars of funding for health care for the poorest people in Illinois. Despite this fact, the legislature gave in to the CME’s demands and Illinois residents will pay the ransom for years to come.

That meal is poison for a state with the third-highest home foreclosure rate in the United States. How were the seats around that decision-making table set? In whose name was that meal blessed?

We live in a world where many, many people only have access to the crumbs that fall from the masters’ table. People of color, people without proper immigration documents, people with felony convictions, people who are attracted to the folks of the same sex, perpetually can’t eat at this dinner table. In fact, very few of us can eat at that dinner table.

Stamp on the hand of a friend who entered

the CME Group shareholder meeting. 

(Photo by Joe Hopkins)

Several people I know tried to go to the dinner table at the CME’s shareholder meeting. They had to show that they had shares of stock, and then their hands were stamped to show that they had only one share. When they asked the CEO about how nourishing the elements are for the people of Illinois, they were rebuffed. It was clear in whose name the meal was blessed.

I know that many people are debating the role of public protests this spring. Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement have people talking about it. When is it okay to set up tents in a public park? Is it out of order to keep singing in the middle of General Conference?

Jesus talked a lot about the dinner table, in fact a lot more than he did about homosexuality. And when Jesus talked about the dinner table, he included the despised people who normally would never eat with a CEO or a defense minister. And Jesus even deliberately disobeyed the rules during dinner.

Dear friends, let’s look at our dinner tables. Who gets to eat there? How are the seats arranged? Is the food good to eat? Are we becoming closer together as children of God? Do we take God’s name seriously when we say grace? I think we will find heartbreaking answers to these questions if we answer them honestly.

However, I know that the Spirit of God moves around the dinner table. The doors will burst open, and it won’t even matter what language you speak or what your immigration status is or what crime you were convicted for or who you have sex with. God is so much bigger than all of that.

And when you feel that Spirit whip around in tongues of fire, how will you respond?

Lift Up Your Voice Like Trumpet

"Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet!"

- Isaiah 58:1

I remember when I was in college as an undergrad at Bucknell University, my response to learning about mass, systemic injustice and oppression was revulsion. I had grown up believing that the United States is a nation founded and maintained by Christian values. Then I learned about so many programs that continue to oppress ethnic and religious minorities, women, and poor folks who were an awful lot like my neighbors in central Pennsylvania.

So I tried to remove myself from the system, and I called myself a Christian anarchist. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I still admire intentional communities that practice radically counter-cultural lifestyles.

However, I soon also learned how transforming bad policies, especially government policies, can have an enormous, positive impact on people. For example, imagine how the country would benefit if all immigrants could confidently join our political systems without fear of detention and deportation. Friends, that’s a beautiful vision.

The hard part is how we get there. Over the past 30 years, across the nation it has become unpopular to stand on our Christian, and yes, our Methodist values to advocate justice for the oppressed. I was a product of that movement, but now I stand firm on Christian scripture, church tradition, human reason, and my personal experiences to confidently advocate for justice.

US-2 peer Marjorie Hurder and I in front of
the Supreme Court during the Ecumenical
Advocacy Days.

I attended the Ecumenical Advocacy Days in Washington, D.C. as a United Methodist young adult missionary and future seminarian. We were unafraid in speaking the name of Jesus in the same breath as “health care” and “budget.” We were unafraid in praying for our elected and appointed government leaders.

And we were unafraid to talk about our faith in Jesus Christ even in the offices of our elected leaders. I shared my personal story of how my neighbors on the South Side of Chicago joined with a campaign to shut down one of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the United States. I shared how my sisters and brother in my local parish could not stand to sacrifice our neighbors’ health to the god Mammon, which in the United States is denoted with a dollar sign. I shared how we won that fight—that power plant will stop polluting the South Side by the end of 2012.

Sisters and brothers, God gives us a voice to sing praises for God has done, is doing, and will do. But God also gives us a voice to speak up when others are silenced. This is what advocacy is. We use our voices in worship services, bible study, and in one-on-relationships with one another.

We also use our voices in public. I think it’s so appropriate that the Ecumenical Advocacy Days came one week before Palm Sunday, when we celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry in Jerusalem. Jesus was making a Daily Show-style mockery of the political system of the day, and a lot people tuned in. When the powerful people from Capitol Hill demanded that his followers stop shouting and show some respect, Jesus answered, “If these keep silent, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40).

Sisters and brothers, why should we let the stones have all the fun?