From the Pulpit:

Sometimes the ground shakes. Sometimes the world we live in this week seems to be a universe away from the world we lived in last week.
I remember preaching the Sunday after 9/11. I remember preaching the Sunday after our nation started bombing Bagdhad in Operation
Shock and Awe. I remember preaching the Sunday after Katrina struck New Orleans and playing the song by the a capella group
Sweet Honey in the Rock, whose marvelously faithful refrain said Standing in the rainstorm I believe. I remember. I believe.

There are Sundays when the sermon that was taking shape on Tuesday is no longer the sermon that our souls need on Sunday.
In light of the earthquake that has devastated Haiti who cares about Tiger Woods or Brit Hume? Who cares about Jay Leno and
Conan O’Brien?

When we see human bodies stacked up to serve as roadblocks, when we watch a husband dig with his bare hands pulling concrete blocks
away to find his wife who was at the grocery cash register, when we watch a mother hold her screaming and writhing child as a doctor sutures
his leg with no painkillers, who gives half a hoot if wedding guests two thousand years ago got their third glass of wine?

 As the world reeled in reaction to the mind-numbing events of that sunny Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001 people from all over the
world proclaimed Today we are all Americans. Well, as one editorial writer said Wednesday morning, Today we are all Haitians.

We know more about Haiti than we did this time last week, and I, for one, am ashamed that I did not know or care very much about Haiti
before this. What I did know about Haiti I had learned when I read – and if you have not I urge you to read it – Tracy Kidder’s book
Mountains Beyond Mountains . In it he tells the breathtaking story of the brilliance, hope, and dogged commitment of Dr. Paul Farmer,
who has dedicated his life to the people of Haiti who suffer from drug resistant tuberculosis. His work with them and his foundation Partners
in Health have addressed and ministered to poor, sick populations all over the world.

But it was first of all his love of the Haitian people that directed his vocation, and from Kidder I learned that they are a proud people.
Though desperately poor, they are immaculately clean and they live with great dignity. I don’t think I understood that on a good day
80% of them live on less than $2 a day. Until this week I did not know that Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere or that
their independence originated in a slave revolt, or that France exacted a paralyzing price for their freedom. Haiti was just an island down in the Caribbean but now, we are all Haitians. Their suffering becomes our suffering. Their anguish our anguish.

My first thought was to jettison the sermon I was writing on the lectionary for the day. My first thought was to jettison the lectionary itself,
to say that these are three powerful readings, each with dozens of fine sermons to be preached, but that today we’d be looking at other
scriptures.

We could start even before Jesus himself,  when John the Baptist told the people that if they had two coats it meant that they had stolen one
from the poor. Can you count the coats you own? I don’t like looking at the pictures of the people in Haiti and thinking I’ve stolen anything
from them. And then we remember Jesus’ sayings in the 25^th chapter of Matthew, the one about the sheep and the goats, when he said,
I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was sick and in prison and you visited me. And the disciples said,
we don’t remember doing that, and Jesus said Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. The only thing I remember doing for
anybody in Haiti was to send my children’s outgrown violins to a school there, unless, and I hope it may be so, some of the Heifer Project
donations over the years might have found their way there.

We are going to send our collection today to Episcopal Relief and Development for Haiti . We’re going to do something today to help,
and I hope it is something significant. No, we are not swimming in money here, either individually or as a parish. We are not flush. But
compared to Haitians, we are wealthy as sultans.

But in all that thinking of dumping the lectionary I kept coming back to Jesus’ first sign in John’s gospel, when he turned the water into wine
at the wedding. In this season of Epiphany we see Jesus being Jesus and we watch the reactions of those around him as they begin to
comprehend, little by little, who he is and what that means for them and for the world.

As far as we know, there had just been that one unfortunate incident at the Temple when he tumped over the tables of people who were
doing the perfectly kosher business of helping pilgrims have access to appropriate sacrifices to offer. Well, people didn’t know him all that
well at that point, and maybe that was uncharacteristic of who he was.

So he’s at a wedding with his mother, and she’s the one who points out to him, as if he couldn’t see for himself, that the guests’ glasses are
empty and there are no more bottles lined up on the bar. He more or less snaps at her. Woman, he says, my time has not arrived. Well,
Mary seems to have chutzpah of her own here, and she turns to the waiters and tells them to do whatever Jesus orders.

I’m not going to follow this down the same kind of road that I might on a different kind of day. I’m not going to go into Jewish purity codes
or what the signs in John’s gospel say to us today. No, I’m just going to point out that Mary gave Jesus a nudge. I don’t think for a minute
that Jesus would have gotten into the business of providing alcoholic beverages without her. And Mary didn’t have the power to do it herself,
but she nudged him, and what had been depleted was now more than abundant.

There is an old good-news bad-news story that gets told a lot around stewardship time. The pastor gets up in the pulpit or wherever and
says to the congregation, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is that we have all the money we can ever need to do
what we need to do. Everybody smiles, but just for a moment, because then he says, The bad news is that it is all in your wallets. The good
news is that there is more than enough of everything that no nation in the world should be as poor as Haiti .

The earthquake is horrendous beyond all imagination, but the fact is that the earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1989 was of the same
magnitude, and only a handful of people were killed as opposed to – what are they saying today? – 50,000? 100,000?  The difference is
that there is no infrastructure in Haiti . The difference is destitution and poverty. The difference is a history of slavery, oppression, corruption,
and perhaps worst of all, indifference on the part of those who might have made it otherwise.

What we do as a nation and as Christians in the next days and weeks matters desperately, but what we do as a nation and as Christians
over the years to come matters even more. We need not to be in the business of providing expensive band aids. We need not to reach for
what spare change is in our pockets and then feel good when we drop it in the plate and know that we’re depriving ourselves of an ice cream
cone. We need to consider that second, or fifth, or ninth coat in our closet and look into their faces as if it were stolen from them. We need
to look for Jesus. Look for him in the hungry person, the thirsty one, the imprisoned one, the illiterate one, the homeless one. The child with
no milk, with her eye swollen shut. The mother who cannot stop the pain. The husband who taps at the walls and longs to hear tapping in return.
Being a Christian is hard work, and above all else it is about moving out of our comfort zone.

 I read a message from some American missionaries who are not in Port au Prince but rather are nearer to the epicenter of the quake,
a mountain village where no aid at all had arrived at the time they wrote.

Mary gave Jesus a nudge and the water became wine. What if it is now our turn to give God a nudge so that what is desperately tragic in Haiti
becomes the starting point for real transformation. The thing is that if we give God a nudge, if we question God and ask how he could have let
this happen, I think we’re going to get a nudge back and will be asked how we could have let this happen.

No, we did not cause the earthquake. Shifting techtonic plates of the living organism that is our earth did that. And, no, we did not cause
Haiti ’s poverty, but we didn’t really know about it even though they are right outside our door, just as Lazarus lay at the gate of the rich man.
By transformation I mean not months but decades of work, and, trust me, the people of Haiti will not be the only ones transformed. Being a
Christian is hard work. It is not for sissies. Are we up for it? Are we willing to be transformed?

 Let us pray.

God of compassion please watch over the people of Haiti , and weave out of these terrible happenings wonders of goodness and grace.
Surround those who have been affected by tragedy with a sense of your present love, and hold them in faith.
Though they are lost in grief, may they find you and be comforted.
Guide us as a church to find ways of providing assistance that heal wounds and provide hope.
Help us to remember that when one of your children suffers we all suffer.
... We pray through Jesus Christ who was dead, but lives and rules this world with you.
Amen.