The Pennsylvania Grand Jury: First, Do No Harm

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. But if any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
Matthew 18:1-6

Several times each year I use a portion of a prayer by Harry Emerson Fosdick that asks God to “Remind us of Jesus’ tender compassion for children and of his burning indignation against those who do them wrong. Remind us of his deep and overflowing love, drawing all children near to him.”

According to Matthew’s account, burning indignation would be an understatement. 

I have been thinking about the stories of clergy sex abuse and the cover ups by the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania. You can read an overview here, but I will not retell any of the painful testimonies offered by victims or the damning descriptions offered by investigators.

They are just too painful and too disgusting.

If you read the stories you will soon be in tears and then you will want to beat your head against a wall. The suffering of the victims is immeasurable. 

And there is no reason to believe that Pennsylvania is unique. Then beyond the pain inflicted directly on the victims, there is the pain done to the faith of so many others.

It would be bad enough if the problem were confined to the Catholic Church, but it isn’t.

And, of course, it isn’t confined to clergy.

But the clergy cases are uniquely troubling. Like teachers and coaches and physicians, we clergy are given roles of trust and responsibility in the lives of the people we serve. But the role of a clergyperson is sacred in a way that the other professions are not.

When someone comes to my office they need to feel safe and they need to be safe. They need to know that they will be listened to and respected and cared for. They need to know that whatever they share will be held in sacred trust. And they need to be both physically and emotionally safe.

In church, the pastor’s study and the worship space should each be a place of sanctuary.

Like many other congregations we have a “safe sanctuaries” program that provides guidelines to prevent opportunities for abusive relationships. Our offices and classrooms have windows. We don’t meet alone with children or youth. Those precautions ought not to be necessary, but the Pennsylvania cases remind us that they are.

In 1739 Methodist founder John Wesley provided three simple rules for the clergy and lay persons who were part of the Methodist movement. First, do no harm. Second, do good insofar as possible to all persons. And third, attend the public ordinances of God.

They all matter.

But the first one is first for a reason.

Do no harm. 

If we cannot keep that first rule, nothing else matters.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish.

The Crisis at the Border Is Also Close to Home

"The New Colossus"
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
                             Emma Lazarus, 1883

Emma Lazarus’ poem is not in the Bible, but it is sacred scripture just the same. For Americans, it is one of our most sacred texts. It stands engraved on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty, greeting those who enter New York harbor with a clear declaration of what America is all about. Children memorize it in grade school and adults treasure those words throughout their lives.

Emma Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849, one hundred and sixty-five years ago this week. She was the fourth of seven children born to Moses Lazarus and Esther Nathan, Sephardic Jews whose families had come to New York from Portugal in colonial times. She was a supporter of Henry George, one of the great reformers of the Social Gospel era and she was deeply committed to the poor and the outcast. She was widely recognized for her poetry, but she died on November 19, 1887, long before her poem was dedicated as part of the Statue of Liberty in 1903.

Last Friday, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick invoked the spirit of Emma Lazarus in his emotional announcement of a plan to provide temporary shelter for up to 1,000 of the children who have come to the United States in the past several months. The Governor made reference to our historic commitment to giving “sanctuary to desperate children for centuries.” He went on to say that he is haunted by our refusal in 1939 to accept a ship filled with Jewish children desperately trying to escape the Nazis. We turned them away and many perished in the Holocaust. Fighting back tears, Patrick made reference to a passage in Deuteronomy, “My faith teaches,” he said, “that if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him but rather love him as yourself.”

In Governor Patrick’s plan, the children would be housed either at Westover Air Base in Chicopee or at Joint Base on Cape Cod. After considering the options, Joint Base, formerly known as Camp Edwards has been selected as the preferred location.

Last night, on Emma Lazarus’ birthday, the Selectmen in the Town of Bourne, my hometown, met to respond to the Governor’s proposal to temporarily house the children on the base, which is largely in the Bourne. George Brennan, reporting for CapeCodonline, writes: “The Board of Selectmen voted unanimously Tuesday night to send a letter to Gov. Deval Patrick opposing the use of Joint Base Cape Cod to house unaccompanied immigrant children, citing the potential financial effects and strain on emergency services.” According to Brennan, those who packed the hearing room were overwhelmingly against housing the children.

Sadly, the Selectmen in Bourne are just a microcosm of America. We see it on the news reports every night. Grown men and women carrying American flags, some with their faces painted in red, white and blue, shouting at scared children, “Go home!” “Not my problem!” “No way, Jose!”

It is ironic that on the birthday of Emma Lazarus, we have decided that we do not want to be the country she believed we were.

When I was a child, growing up in the Bourne school system, no one told me about how badly we had treated immigrants. I grew up with the vision of a lamp beside the golden door and I was proud of that vision. Later, when I learned a very different and more painful history, I was reassured by the belief that even if we had failed in the past to live up to our vision, that vision would call us forward. If we had not always been the country we should have been, we would do better in the future. And I believed that there was a broad consensus among us that, as Martin Luther King said, we would live up to our promise.

Even now, when I am well aware of the human capacity for evil, I am shocked by our response to the children at our borders. In the long term, as citizens of the world, we know (or we should know) that borders are just lines on a map. This is a global issue and it will require a global solution. But in the short term, we need to “welcome the stranger.”

If we were erecting the Statue of Liberty today, would we affix a plaque calling her the “Mother of Exiles”?

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

In a parable about the final judgment, Jesus said that the righteous will ask, "Lord, when did w see you a stranger and welcome you?" And the Lord will answer, "When you welcomed the least of these my sisters and brothers, you welcomed me."

Rachel Weeping for Her Children

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
Matthew 2:16-18

During an interview this fall, Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan was asked repeatedly what he intended to do about assault rifles. He deflected the question several times before finally saying something like, “Why are you asking me about that, even President Obama isn’t going to do anything about assault rifles.”

Sad but true.

Both parties are so fearful of the NRA that they will not put forth even the mildest plans to limit the availability of guns.

When Bob Costas talked (in the mildest terms) about the “gun culture” in the United States and in the NFL after Javon Belcher shot his girlfriend and then killed himself, there was widespread outrage, not that we had endured another senseless gun death, but that Costas had the bad manners to talk about it.

We can all agree, before we go any farther, that whenever we talk about something like the killings in Connecticut this morning, or Aurora, or Columbine, or Javon Belcher, we are talking about people who are mentally imbalanced. And we can all agree that we need to do more about mental health, and that mentally unstable people should not have access to lethal weapons. All of that is true, but if we had reasonable controls on guns, we wouldn’t be talking about 20 dead children in Connecticut.

Sticks and stones may break your bones but they are nothing compared to a semi-automatic weapon with lots of ammunition.

We are not number one in the world in gun deaths. In fact, we are 28th. Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Jamaica, and almost two dozen other countries are ahead of us. But we are number one among wealthy developed nations. And among those nations, it isn’t even close. The gun murder rate in the United States is nearly 50 times as much as the murder rate in England or France. That means that Americans are 50 times as likely to be killed by a gun as people from England or France.

In this country we have as many licensed firearms dealers as gas stations.

Gun reform will not come easily. There will be massive and well-funded resistance. Proponents of reform will be vilified (just ask Bob Costas). But we need to try. We owe it to the future, but most of all, we owe to those little kids in Connecticut. Nothing can bring them back, or ease the grief of their parents, but reform would be a living legacy.