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Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in God’s work to save the world.

After the Storm

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Shelly Rambo
Chapter Sermon: “After the Storm”
January 16, 2008
Shelly Rambo, Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University School of Theology, is connected with the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America which is a sponsoring group, along with ECAPC and others, of Churches Supporting Churches http://www.bpfna.org/csc
    Tomorrow we will share more about CSC.

It’s eerie, really. The quiet. We are driving through the neighborhoods of the lower 9th ward in New Orleans, the area most affected by the hurricane. There is an unsettling hush. Windows boarded up, debris still scattered on untended lawns, house after house unoccupied. And then there are the chilling black ‘X’ marks on the post-Katrina houses, marks by inspectors—whose initials were scribbled to the left, inspections dates at the top, the number of hazards found to the right. Then there is the number at the bottom of the ‘X’—the number of dead bodies found inside. Passing the houses, most of which are still evacuated, you come to dread seeing the bottom number, hoping for a ‘0,’ as you drive past, house after house.

As we turn the corner on the way to Greater New St. Luke Baptist church, we see a vacant auto-garage. Spray-painted on one side, there are large red letters: “Do not demo. I will be back.” The sign for Bridgeside Automotive is on the front and above it are the words ‘Thank you Jesus’—both remnants of a pre-Katrina message and pre-Katrina business. Now, the roof is all but torn off. The spray-painted message just below: “We will rebuild.” It’s all written on that building – the messy message of New Orleans. It’s almost two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina and there are thousands of demolished buildings waiting for owners to return.
Just hours before the drive, we gathered with a group of ministers who meet monthly to support each other and to work together to rebuild their faith communities and the neighborhoods that surround them. Conversation begins with an assessment of the “state of things”: there is acknowledgment of tent city, a growing community of displaced persons living in tents under Interstate-10, and there is a report about the growing mortality and morbidity rates post-Katrina. Dwight Webster, pastor of Christian Unity Baptist Church, presided over the session and, between business, he would break into searing meditations about the long road ahead for the city of New Orleans, for the churches in New Orleans. You can’t separate issues of affordable housing from the gospel, of corrupt politics from the life of the church, of FEMA’s broken promises from the promises of God.

    A rather soft-spoken man, Deacon Julius, followed up on Pastor Webster’s charge. He told us that he grew up in the 9th ward and that all of his family lived there at the time of Katrina. He had gone away to serve in the U.S. military but returned home after his years of service. Katrina wiped out his neighborhood. He says: “People keeping telling us to ‘get over it already.’” But I want to tell them: “The storm has gone, but the ‘after the storm’ will always be there. There are things that we can’t get back, the little things that can’t be recovered.” There’s anger in his voice, and defiance, and despair, and, strangely, faith. Faith that, in gathering with these other pastors and with us, that the ‘truths’ of Katrina will be told. The storm is over. But the after the storm will always be there.

On the tour of the lower 9th, Julius drove us past the site where he grew up. If you stand in his front yard, you can look straight ahead and see the new levee wall. The old levees broke in Julius’ back yard. I began to think about all of the little things he couldn’t get back. You can rebuild a house, but you can’t get back the view of your mother in her white robe as she stirs something on the stove. The familiar smells of the house. The feel of sitting on the top step of the front porch on hot days, waiting for the neighbor kids to be released for after-dinner play. Biking to the corner store to buy your 2-cent candy. That’s not just about a house. It’s about all those little things added up that makes family, and neighborhood, and determines our place in it. That. You can’t get back. The storm has gone, but the ‘after the storm’ will always be there. That, he wanted us to know, was the truth about Katrina.
*     *     *

You see, New Orleans is abuzz with talk about recovery. Rebuilding. Restoring. Returning. The airline magazine feature on my inbound flight had a spread about music and food in New Orleans. The Big Easy is back, it read. And if you go down to the French Quarter, it all seems to be true. Yet there’s an eerie silence in the 9th ward. While the French Quarter is whirling with tourists, the corner grocery stores, community centers, and homes in the 9th ward are still, empty. All the talk about newness in New Orleans is, using the words of Isaiah 41, like “empty wind” when you drive through some neighborhoods. "People just want to get back to where they were before the storm,” says Tim Ryan, chancellor of the University of New Orleans. They want to return, restore, and rebuild. “But, he says, “pre-Katrina realities didn’t go away." Cities do come back from tremendous devastation," says Lawrence Vale, an urban expert from MIT. “But the forces of pre-disaster inertia are very powerful, for the good and for the ill."
The Book of Isaiah speaks about a people who have been taken away from all that was familiar to them. They are displaced and in exile. Under Babylonian rule, they knew what it was to lose the little things. In what is known as Second Isaiah, we meet them in another time of transition. It is a time of political change, when Babylon, once the ruling captor, will come under attack. Justice is going to be established. God is going to restore God’s people. The salvation promised to the people has very practical political and social dimensions in Isaiah: The city of Jerusalem will be restored, highways rebuilt, land-rights reclaimed. But in chapter 42, these realities have not yet come about. They’re not here yet.

The passage from Isaiah speaks about a situation in which the people of Israel are at a crossroads between the former things and a new thing that God is going to bring about. But they cannot touch it yet, cannot taste it, cannot, I suspect even believe it. God speaks to the people: “See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” It is clear that the past, present, and future are shifting, as God addresses the people. Still in exile, they are on the brink of something new, something good. Yet we do not have realization here, we have possibility; we do not have fulfillment but promise. And most interesting of all, we do not have speech; we have silence, breath, and song. Isaiah 42 features sounds. There will be shouts and cries ringing throughout creation, but before that, we have a much quieter scene.

In the first of the servant songs in Isaiah, God announces God’s chosen one, who is going to bring about these new things. These first several verses give us a portrait of this servant. It’s not what we might expect. In most cases, when the spirit of God descends upon God’s chosen, they are asked to say something. We often perceive a prophet as one who is compelled to speak. This is a different case. Instead of delivering words, this servant doesn’t speak. “He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard on the street.” Rather unimpressive, really. One commentator says that “we naturally expect spirit endowment to lead to speech and royal commissioning to lead to action of a decisive, if not also triumphant, sort.” What we have here is just the opposite.

Instead, this servant treads lightly, speaks softly if at all. He will not, the text says, break a bruised reed, or quench a dimly burning wick. The writer uses poetry to speak about those who are fragile, poor, barely making it. These are the ones that the servant attends to. And instead of barging in and proclaiming the new reality that God is going to bring about, the servant is still, quiet, barely noticeable. When God’s spirit comes upon this servant here, there is not charismatic power but a faith-filled silence. Implied, amidst all of the instructions about what the servant will not do, is a context of brokenness, of wounding, of vulnerability. The servant does not shout in the streets but, in the words I used before, he enters into their eerie silence. The work of the servant will not be about the quick fix, the ready-made answer, the sprint. It’s about the long haul. “He will not grow faint or be crushed…until he has established justice in the earth.”

You see, there seems to be a recognition in this passage that the transition from old to new may not be so smooth. There is much that has been lost. This is not simply about ‘turning over a new leaf’ and ‘getting on with it.’ It’s about making a way with a recognition of what was lost and finding, in the midst of all of that, a way forward. What we have here is a servant, a way maker, who doesn’t rush in with his campaign promise but, instead, enters into the places and the stories that often get brushed over, often go unheard. It’s messy and unglamorous territory that the servant is in.

We don’t have a master-plan for justice laid out in these passages, but we have some necessary fuel for this journey. The first can go unnoticed, but it appears in the Matthew text as well. The one who will bring about justice—the servant of Israel and Jesus—are called and rooted in divine delight. “Here is my servant…in whom my soul delights.” “This is my beloved Son, in whom I take pleasure/in whom I delight.” We don’t often think of the work of justice in this way—it’s serious business. Many of us talk about our call, but how many of us talk about our call as rooted in God’s delight? It’s necessary fuel.

Chapter 42 also reminds us of breath. When God announces Godself after the servant song, we are taken back to creation. The spirit of God is upon the servant, but this spirit is linked to the primal wind and breath of God—the wind stirring over the waters before God speaks creation into being, the breath that animates all living creatures. The servant is reminded that the spirit that sustains him connects him to all living creatures. When the Spirit of God descends upon the servant, he and she become those who defend and repair broken spirits. However sophisticated our strategic plans for justice are, we are pulled back to the basic things. We don’t pursue justice because we’re charitable, we pursue justice because we’re alive. We’re tied to all living things, all creatures, by the breath of God.

But reading this passage when I returned from New Orleans, I also came to see that the necessary fuel for justice is song. The silence of the servant gives way to breath and then it gives way to music. “Sing to the Lord a new song, God’s praise from the end of the earth.” In the dark jazz club on Frenchmen Street, the trumpet player riffs on Miles Davis’ “So what?” And members of the group may not be able to explain it, but I bet they would say that it had everything to do with repairing spirit in a broken city, about making a way ‘after the storm.’

*     *     *
Something is stirring in religious communities in New Orleans. Between the former things and the new things. But what I learned from Deacon Julius’ words is that rushing to the new things feels a little bit like someone telling you to ‘get over it already.’ This passage tells us that between former and new, the old reality and the new one, there are the faithful ones, the way-makers, those who enter into the rather messy and uncharted territory of human loss. And instead of giving us an answer, a quick fix, they breathe into our silence and help us get back our rhythm.

The pastors who gathered were there to tell us that all the loud talk about New Orleans being “back,” is simply not true. This is not tidy territory that we are treading, politically or theologically. We don’t have the answers, Pastor Webster says, and there is no one solution. We need a lot of different things, a lot of different ways. But the choir of Christian Unity Baptist Church has a song. The selection for the day was enough to shift your theological furniture. The floodwaters of Katrina have displaced ¾ of their members, and the choir stands up and sings: “He gives me shelter from the storm.” They sang it before Katrina, and they’ll keep singing it. This is a church reaching back to the past for the resources that have always carried them through tough times. They do not know what is ahead. But one thing is clear. They’re going to sing it into being. They hear all the politicians around them, talking, shouting, but they hear something else in that eerie silence of the 9th ward, the breath of God that cannot be extinguished. Rising up….

*     *     *
I realized as this sermon began to take shape that I would end up preaching a pre-New Year’s sermon, of sorts. This passage, I believe, pulls us back to a place before beginnings, before newness. It witnesses to Deacon Julius’ reality – the reality of the ‘after the storm’ that lingers, that remains, that persists. I’m holding us in this place before the new thing comes about, because I believe it is the place where most of us live. It’s not just a truth about New Orleans but somehow the truth about all of our lives and the losses that we experience. You see, the reality of both is that we’re not working with clean slates. We can’t just wipe out who we were before August 29, 2005 or December 31, 2007. The pre-disaster realities did not go away. And you and me. My sense is that, despite the exuberance of our New Year’s resolutions, days later, the losses of 2007 and before return. The rush to declare new things is seductive, but it doesn’t do justice to the million little things—the stuff of grief and loss.

The way of justice is not just about a grand-scale plan. It is about honoring the million little things that have been lost, both around you and in you. “Get over it already” is the voice of our quick fix society, but it’s not the word of God. Instead, God calls out for way-makers, to enter into the eerie silence, to honor and fight for the breath of all creation, to sing a new song. The question is not, “what is your New Year’s resolution?” The question is, “What is your song?”

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:

Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

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