A Sermon by The Very Rev. Tracey Lind
Chapel of St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet, MA
Outreach Sunday 2024
While many of my friends were seeking their fortunes on Wall Street, I spent the 1990’s serving as the Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Paterson, New Jersey, one of our nation’s oldest and poorest, and most forgotten cities. Established in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton as the birthplace of the industrial revolution in America, by the time I arrived in Paterson, it had become a densely populated, deeply impoverished, immigrant community surrounded by wealthy, suburban towns focused on New York City.
Together, with my congregation composed largely of new immigrants from around the world, and with the support of some Episcopal churches in neighboring communities, we built one of the nation’s first faith-based community development corporations to “alleviate the conditions of hunger, homelessness, unemployment, poverty and illiteracy in the City of Paterson.” It was an ambitious mission, but that’s what we felt called to do in the name of Jesus.
One afternoon in the early days of this effort, I was walking around the neighborhood with a potential foundation donor. This well-dressed, polished, executive from Manhattan was asking lots of pointed questions about our work, and I was trying my best to provide answers that would convince her that St. Paul’s CDC would be a good philanthropic investment. As we wandered down a deteriorated inner city block near the church, I pointed out the vacant lot we were transforming into a garden and the dilapidated building we were converting into affordable housing.
Midway through our walk, we were interrupted by a frantic woman sticking her head out of a second story window in a run down apartment building, waving a five-dollar bill in her hand and yelling, “Rev. Tracey, Rev. Tracey, wait up! I need to talk to you.”
My potential donor was startled, and I was taken aback. At first, I was tempted to respond, “I can’t talk now. Come find me later.” Instead, I shrugged my shoulders, stopped and waited for the woman to join us on the crumbling sidewalk. She ran up to us, grasping the five-dollar bill and gasping for breath as she spoke in a shrill voice. “Rev. Tracey, you’ve got to take this money for the church. You’ll do something good with it and if I don’t give it to you right now, it will just get me in trouble.”
My walking companion had a bewildered and confused look on her usually composed face, but I knew exactly what my neighbor was trying to say. It was her last five dollars and she was ready to buy drugs to feed her habit. For some reason, when she saw me walking by, she decided to give the money to the church instead of to a local drug dealer. I accepted the five-dollar bill, thanked the woman, turned to our potential donor and said, “Now you can see what good this church does in this neighborhood.” My five-dollar donor smiled, and said, “She’s absolutely right!”
The woman with the five-dollar bill gave to the church, out of her poverty, all that she had. The foundation, out of its abundant wealth, agreed to support our outreach ministry in the community with a fifty thousand-dollar grant (that’s a 10,000 percent return). We leveraged both the five-dollar bill and the fifty thousand-dollar foundation grant to raise even more money for community development.
Thirty-four years later, St. Paul’s outreach ministry is still going strong in this struggling, post-industrial city. As an agent of hope, and in the word’s of Matthew’s gospel, a “good and faithful servant,” St. Paul’s CDC has grown from a fifty thousand to over two million dollar annual budget that supports emergency shelter, transitional and affordable housing; a large food pantry; workforce development; youth programming; Americorps; community schools; and neighborhood organizing. That’s a lot of leverage from a five-dollar bill. So much from one little interruption on my walk about the neighborhood some thirty years ago.
Interruptions are something that I have come to take for granted in my daily life. In fact, I actually enjoy interruptions, unless of course, I don’t want to be interrupted. And if the truth were told, there are a lot of times that I don’t want to be interrupted. I don’t like a ringing phone or text message signal intruding into an important conversation or meeting. I don’t like it when bad weather interrupts my outdoor plans. And God forbid, I don’t like accidents or illness interrupting my life. On the other hand, I like being interrupted when I’m procrastinating over a project, and I welcome interruptions when I’m bored. Children who interrupt parties often amuse me. I chuckle when a cell phone rings during the orchestra. And once I accept the inconvenience of it all, I really like blizzards and snow days. One of the best times of my life was when a broken ankle interrupted my life and insisted that I lie in the backyard reading books, talking with friends and looking at the sky.
I don’t think I’m alone in my mixed feelings about interruptions. Most people believe that interruptions are a nuisance. That’s why we call them inter-ruptions, a word closely related to eruption and disruption. They break into the normal state of affairs and stop the continuity of events. It is no wonder we’re taught as youngsters that it is not polite to interrupt others.
I am convinced that Christ happens in the interruptions. Though I don’t always welcome them in the moment, I see interruptions as opportunities of divine grace waiting to be recognized and received. In fact, I believe that Christ is always standing in the shadows of life, and every now and again, the Risen Lord comes out and makes himself known to us through some action or event, an interruption into the ordinary realm of possibility. One time Christ showed up on Easter morning as a drunk old man weaving down the church aisle at the beginning of my sermon to wish us Happy Easter and place a dollar in the offering plate. Another time, Christ appeared during Good Friday worship as an unhoused woman yelling that someone stole her shoes while she was sleeping on the sidewalk. And once, an early Sunday morning service was interrupted by a young man who appeared threatening but was actually just hungry. We never know when Christ is going to move from the shadows to center stage. It just happens, and when it does, the normalcy and complacency of our lives is interrupted.
Jesus was interrupted repeatedly in the Gospel accounts. The gospels tell us that wherever Jesus traveled, into villages, cities or farms, people interrupted him, “laying the sick in the marketplaces, and begging him that he might touch even the fringe of his cloak” (Mark 6:56).
Did Jesus reject or refuse all these interruptions? No, Jesus saw the realm of God at hand as an interruption to be welcomed. Moreover, Jesus was an interrupter himself. He interrupted the ordinary lives of some naïve fisherman by inviting them to follow him. He disturbed unclean spirits and demons that were holding innocent people hostage. He intruded upon the profitable career of a tax collector. He interjected himself into the argument James and John were having about being the greatest. Jesus interrupted the Sabbath. He interrupted the storm. He interrupted the corruption of the temple. And through the resurrection, he even interrupted the finality of death.
In all these interruptions, Jesus embodied a new definition of human reality: faith as human power, human power as divine power in the world, divine power with the ability to heal the sick, feed the hungry and even raise the dead, thus sending forth in amazement a revived humanity. Jesus placed his God-given authority at the service of desperate, needy and interrupting people, willing to see and to seize interruptions as opportunities for connecting human lives with divine energy and grace.
Today, in the name of Jesus, we are interrupting patio time to show how your contributions to the Chapel of St. James the Fisherman multiply to make a difference in the lives of so many year-round residents and seasonal workers on the Outer Cape.
This past year, your generosity, coupled with a matching grant from the Tucker Foundation, allowed us to donate $49,500 to eighteen local, non-profit organizations that address food insecurity, housing and health needs in Wellfleet and the Outer Cape.
A number of good folks have allowed us to interrupt their Sunday morning by participating in this “Outreach Fair” so that we might learn more about the ongoing needs of local residents and seasonal workers and the services and programs provided to meet those needs. As our grant recipients will attest, the lack of affordable housing, climate change, worker shortages, immigration issues, and inflation only make their jobs more challenging and the lives of many of our neighbors harder.
I hope you will stick around this morning after church and greet those who do the never-ending work of caring, serving and advocating for those who live with physical, economic, mental and spiritual challenges here in Wellfleet and the Outer Cape. I also hope you will be intentional in your generosity so that we, as the Chapel of St. James the Fisherman can continue to make a difference through our outreach grants.
Finally, I hope that as you go about your daily life, you will keep your eyes open and ears attuned to the possibility of meeting Christ and glimpsing God in the interruptions. When you are interrupted, before saying, “I’m busy,” stop and ask yourself: am I really too busy, or am I avoiding the possibility of the Divine disturbing, inconveniencing and interrupting my life with the opportunity to make a difference in the life of the world.
Who knows what wonderful experience is about to happen, or what gifts might give and receive. God only knows how we might be “good and faithful servants” and instruments of God’s grace: how we might ease someone’s pain or share in another’s joy, and in doing so, experience the amazement of life more fully.