Domestic poverty theme of convention Eucharist
Episcopal News Service -- Anaheim, California. July 13, 2009 [071309-06]
Sharon J. Tillman
The thorny issue of domestic poverty, the story of the Good Samaritan and a diocese that has known both disaster and rebirth provided the themes for the July 13 convention Eucharist.
The Gospel story of the traveler who helps a robbed, beaten man of another culture "couldn't be a better backdrop for preaching about today's topic," said Courtney Cowart, director of advocacy and community affairs, Office of Disaster Response and Episcopal Community Services in the Diocese of Louisiana, in her address.
"A non-chosen person, a Samaritan, comes upon his social enemy - a naked, beaten, half-dead Jewish traveler of the faith that most detests the Samaritan's kind. As they come face-to-face it is as if all the angels hold their breath," said Cowart. She has been an integral part of the diocese's humanitarian response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which flooded New Orleans, southern Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005.
"Looking deeply into the victim's eyes, this Samaritan must choose: to transcend the fraught history of their estranged people, to receive the stranger's suffering as his own. To assume upon himself, as the cleansing honor, the burden of the stranger's plight. To bind the stranger's wounds and carry him to safety. Or to collude with the norm of the road, and again pass by," she added.
The Jericho road of the parable still exists along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, Cowart said.
In a news conference after the service, Bishop Charles Jenkins said that in the years since the hurricane, "Mississippi has received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid that Louisiana has not. [The rebuilding of New Orleans] is not an American issue, it is an issue of racism, poverty and the theological issue of the dignity of every human being," he said.
As the diocese helps in the recovery process, the Office of Disaster Response has taken as its theme the parable of the Good Samaritan and the image of the Jericho Road as interpreted by Martin Luther King Jr. in his speech Beyond Vietnam, Cowart said in an interview.
In that 1967 speech at New York's Riverside Church, King said, "A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
According to Cowart, all are called to be the Good Samaritan. We should not just perform acts of ministry as acts of mercy, but move beyond that to advocacy, community organizing to impact the structures that create poverty. This image and metaphor is one that Cowart says she has prayed over for four years since Katrina. "We need to transform the edifice that produces beggars," Cowart said in the interview.
In her sermon, Cowart cited several statistics regarding poverty in the United States:
- 37.3 million Americans live below the poverty line, 24.5% are African-American, 21.5% are Hispanic, and the poorest counties in America are predominantly Native American.
- Those passed by in the greatest numbers are children. In 2006 the poverty rate for minors in the U.S. was the highest in the industrialized world. Most Americans, 58.5%, will spend at least one year below the poverty line between the age of 25 and 75.
Domestic poverty is not only a concern in New Orleans. Bishop Stacy Sauls, Diocese of Lexington (Kentucky), was asked at a media briefing about the sexuality controversy and how it would affect the church's relationship with the Anglican Communion.
"I don't know where the Anglican Communion is. In my diocese, 14 of the 100 poorest counties in the United States are located. That is my primary concern," he said.