Crossing the City

Over the past few months a team of dedicated individuals from All Saints Parish in Brookline have begun a new ministry with the Learn at Lenox Afterschool Program in Roxbury. Volunteers from the church spend one Friday a month conducting a workshop with the kids that demonstrate a set of skills or values that supplement the lessons taught during the week and reinforced at the center Monday through Thursday. The workshops have been diverse and included a broad range of topics including a poetry recital, personal finance lessons and a nutritional demonstration on sugar and soft drinks.Friday June 10 was the last day of the after school session for the academic year and our volunteers wanted to throw an extraordinary end of the year celebration.

Part of the mission of our fledgling ministry is to build deep relationships across different parts of the city. So while our church and the after school center may be separated geographically by only four miles and a fifteen minute drive, culturally, economically and aesthetically Brookline and Roxbury might as well be located on separate continents.Roxbury is gritty, densely populated and lined with unattractive circa 1970’s housing projects. Alternatively, Brookline is tree -lined, nicely manicured, pristine and the housing stock is constituted of beautifully maintained, large Victorian homes. Many of the children from the after school program are being raised in environments where crime and violence are part of daily existence while the kids of our parish are raised in an environment that encourages an unhealthy expectation of overachievement in school, in sports and in other extracurricular activities. On most days these two communities fail to interact. The kids of Roxbury and Brookline grow up in parallel but alternate universes.

The Friday Workshops have begun to change this dynamic. Once a month Brookline goes to Roxbury or Roxbury goes to Brookline. Individuals, who under normal circumstances would never have had the opportunity to meet, become friends witheach other. We begin to dialog together and discover the different challenges that we face in our lives and ways to support each other. This dynamic of developing a personal transformative relationship across communities is the essence of our ministry with Lenox. It is a lesson in the reality of social change. The type of radical change that takes root when actually we take the time to listen to each other’s experiences and develop relationships that cross barriers of race, class and thought. And so it is my deepest desire that last Friday, a genuinely transformative experience occurred on a sunny, warm, late spring day in Brookline over a game of tag and a bowl of ice cream.

Transformation in Time

This past Friday I had the great opportunity to visit with my spiritual supervisor in Cambridge. Since our first meeting in early October 2010 I have found great comfort in the consistency and availability of my mentor, and now, friend. If you are unaware, parking in Cambridge can be a great task at times. Since I drive to see my spiritual supervisor from my home in Brookline, I have to find parking that is about a 5 minute walk to our meeting location. I have made this walk every few weeks and I am always refreshed by the views of changing seasons that this 6 city blocks provided.

In the fall I witnessed the cool and crispness as colors of orange and brown surround me in the trees and on the ground I was walking. In the winter I trudged through the 4 foot snow banks to feed the parking meter and encouraged my snow boots to show me what they were made of. In the early months of 2011 I witnessed the poking through of leaves that had been hiding under a layer of snow for months, reclaiming the sun and ground as winter thawed. In the spring I was greeted with the sound of children’s voices in the playgrounds as my toes, now exposed in sandals, felt the warm street beneath.

This blog is not about the weather however, although the description of the weather is an important aspect of this entry to give you a sense of the environment in which my entry takes place in. This blog is about a house.

Every time I walked to my spiritual supervision meetings I passed an old house being renovated. In October they had just begun the project, with wood and studs exposed. I remember seeing the workers outside, and thinking to myself that they were beginning something very big and in the midst of some hard weather conditions. Every week I went to spiritual supervision, there were always workers inside and outside, completing and finishing a new project. I didn’t think much of these memories until this past week in my supervision meeting. “So how do you feel, looking back on your experience in Boston over the past year?”, my supervision asked me. I took a minute to think and all I could think about was that house being built. So I went with it.

Not one for recalling things in perfect verbatim form I will explain how I saw this house as an image of my journey. I saw this house much like my spiritual journey while I was in Boston. At first, people were around as I looked inside and decided what had to go, what could stay, and if I had the means to finish the job. Studs, walls, floors all came out. New things were added, and people with different crafts entered into my life to add to the renovation. I am sure there were times when things needed to go but were covered over, to once again be exposed. I am sure things were fixed and would no longer need tending to. A whole new wing of the house was even added, and I saw this as an image of the things that I have built anew in Boston. So many people, doing so many things, and it was finally beginning to come together as a finished product.

My life in Boston is a lot like this house that I passed every couple of weeks. I felt proud to almost see it done last week as I walked by it that I felt an urge to tell the people adding the insulation that they had done a good job. I wanted to tell the guys working on the windows that I remembered when that old building didn’t have any windows. I wanted to tell the concrete guys that the new driveway was where a big pile of scrap metal was only a month and half ago. I am sure they knew all this but I still felt the urge. I think I feel the same urge to let the people who have come into my life during this year of renovation know the impact and change they have induced.

As I walked back to my car, after my supervision, I remembered that without having to park far away I wouldn’t have seen this beautiful transformation over the course of my time in Boston. Much like my literal move to Boston from the South, the distance from all things familiar has allowed me to witness a great transformation in my life during this time. I hope that as you come across having to walk a little further after parking far from your destination sometime in the future, you take that time to realize God might be giving you a chance to see something new, or to take a break and reflect on your journey. It might not get you to your destination any faster but I think it may give you a newfound appreciation for God's interruptions in our lives.

What does justice look like?

A sermon preached by Tamra Tucker at The Crossing on May 26, 2011.


Do. Love. Walk.
Justice is intimidating to me. And appealing and I want it. It’s intimidating coming from Oklahoma, where comfort is key, to a place that lives and breaths social justice. But how do I talk about justice? How do I approach it? How do I describe what it looks like?

I don’t know what it is, but I know what it isn’t: it isn’t kids taking care of their siblings because their parents aren’t home. It isn’t one of my kids at work losing her aunt to gang violence, being shot in a drive by. It isn’t the trafficking of young girls in our city. And it isn’t passing the mentally disabled off as crazy addicts so we have an excuse not to help them.

But what is justice? Is it turning the tables over in the temple? Is it getting up in the face of injustice and having a shouting match? How do you use the fire that burns for justice? Maybe sometimes.

This is the question that always bugs me. How do you make that jump into uncharted territory? This is why I love and hate this passage of the bible. People ask how to be a follower, how to devote their lives to God, how to be good. It is simple: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. But how? Is it really that simple? How do you do justice? How do you love mercy? How do you walk humbly? I need opportunity; someone to say, “Come with me, I have an idea.”

The strongest example in my life is a deacon named George Day. He lived this verse. He walked into the prisons around Oklahoma and sat with those already condemned, in a place where justice is supposedly already served. And he loved them; he loved them deep with mercy, with kindness. To him, justice wasn’t for condemning people. His call was to walk with them. He met the condemned where they were, in their cells and saw the Christ in them that was in himself, and he loved them and walked with them. He found God in those prisons and loved God and walked with God.

George lit a fire in me. I blazed through my childhood trying to do justice, every bit of it I could. I skipped school to volunteer. I did every charitable thing I could get my hands into, but I could never get it quite right. I didn’t really know how to live this out. How to stay on fire all the time. How to walk humbly with God. How do I live day to day life, doing the simple things that need to get done, and still be on fire, fulfill my call?

The answer is simpler than all the extravagant expressions of emotion we could make up in our mind. Micah pulled direction from Amos, Hosea and Isaiah to give a clear and simple way of obeying God. Do. Love. Walk. This verse gets a lot of attention for the justice side of things. But that isn’t all that’s here. What about the action of kindness? What about walking humbly? How do we check our passionate paths of justice with love and humility? I think there is a reason justice cannot stand alone here.
This passage is used to base the 5th component of our Rule of Life at the Crossing - the justice and service piece. In our rule of life, we commit to justice and service as a spiritual discipline. This discipline takes practice. That fire I had has burnt out a few times and justice doesn’t come natural to me. When I find myself in the body of Christ, with its different members, I find more than opportunity for service; I find love and humble steps, the fulfillment of this passage.

We start this work by worshiping God with one another, and we continue with our voices, by sharing our stories and opportunities for service. We lift one another up, supporting each other not with empty words but with our actions, by our commitment to be present to each other. The point here is not to know on our own, but to keep coming together and doing this work in community, to pose this question to each other, to celebrate each other’s work, to challenge each other’s failings, to hold each in love when we burn out, and to work together to do justice, that God’s will be done on earth.