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Spiritus Christi

Father Jim Callan

October 11, 2020

(Isaiah 25:6-10A)

In 1997 Bishop Matthew Clark held a mass at the Cathedral to welcome the LBGTQ community.  Some of you were there.  He wanted to let them know that the church no longer rejects gay and lesbian, LBGTQ community but on the contrary cherishes them.  It was one of the peak moments of Bishop Clark’s ministry in Rochester. 

Thirteen hundred people jammed in the cathedral, standing room only and 200 of those 1300 were from our church.  There is a gay man from our church that went up to communion and as he was going up to communion he was so emotional, he was crying because he was feeling the pain of rejection all those years and before Bishop Clark gave him communion he wiped the tear off his face and gave him a big hug and of course the man lost it then.  Cried even more.  But it was a very healing moment.  Today in the reading Isaiah has a dream for the world.  God will wipe away the tears from every face and God will remove every sign of disgrace.

On year I asked Patty Fields if she would preach on Mother’s Day.  She immediately started to cry.  She said, “Why did you ask me?”  I said, “Because you are a wonderful mother. We talked it over in the staff and everybody said to ask Patty Field, she is a great mother.” Well, then Patty cried even more.  She said she would let me know later.  The next day Patty called me up.  She said, “Of course I’ll preach.  But I was crying because all week long I was down on myself.  I was kicking myself for how I was as a mother.   My children are very challenging and I ask God for a sign that I’m ok as a mother.  And then you took me aside and told me I was a great mother.”

God will wipe away the tears from every face and remove every sign of disgrace.

Two weeks ago the Jews celebrated Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  On one feast of Yom Kippur a woman came to the temple crying and she was holding a little girls and the little girl was crying too.  The Rabi said to the little girl, “Why are you crying?”  And the girl said because my mother is crying.  And that is the idea of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  It is a day to cry over our mistakes and our failings.  Why?  Because God, our Mother, is crying too.  Crying because people are racially divided.  Crying because white supremacists want to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. Crying because forest fires and hurricanes are showing that we are ruining the earth.

Speaking of sadness, the staff had a prayer meeting the other day and were talking about how things are going.  I said, “You know I have been so sad all summer.  I have been crying.”  It all started on May 25th the day that George Floyd was publically lynched in Minnesota.  I thought as I watched that and went to the funerals, I thought for sure that we white people would wake up and change things immediately.  Instead more and more unarmed black people have been killed by white police.

On vacation I read a great book, Stand Your Ground, by Kelly Brown Douglas.  She explained how white people view black people as dangerous and threatening.  We are afraid of black people.  We whites feel afraid when black people enter what we consider white space.  Even if they are asking for help.  Like Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old woman who had a car accident. She went to a white man’s house, knocked on the door seeking some help because of the accident and he shot her dead.  Because he was afraid of her.  Her skin was black and she was violating white space.

Black bodies are always guilty of trespassing into white space.  Black members of our staff, like Paul Boutte, have been pulled over in Brighton and Irondequoit for driving while black.

I talk to my neighbor across the street, a black woman

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Fr. James Callan

September 13, 2020

Matthew 18: 21-35

When I was about seven years old I broke my mother’s expensive, beautiful teapot.  It was a heirloom in the family, a wedding gift that she had treasured for years and in a rare moment of anger my mother exiled me to the laundry room in the basement as punishment.  About 45 minutes later she came down.  She sat on a load of laundry and she said, “Jimmy, today is Good Friday and I have been thinking if God forgives me I have to forgive others.  So I forgive you and I am sorry for getting upset about the teapot.”

I remember two things about that moment.  One, how good it felt to not have my mother mad at me anymore because it was so rare.  Two, the lesson.  God forgives us, we must forgive one another.  And that’s the story that Jesus tells today.  God forgives us so we must forgive one another.  

There is a servant who owes the King $100,000.  He falls to his knees and says:  Be patient and I’ll pay it back. Moved with pity the King cancelled the entire debt.  And that same forgiven servant meets a companion who owes only $10 and he seizes him and chokes him and says, “Pay back what you owe!”  The companion falls to his knees and says, “Be patient.  I’ll pay it back.”  But the servant won’t forgive him and puts him in prison.

This parable is called:  The Story of the Heartless Servant.  It demands that we look at what we are doing to each other. Even though God forgives us, we often don’t give others any breathing space.  We choke off the life of people.  

Notice the language in this story:  He seized him and choked him.  Does that sound familiar?  Police seized George Floyd, knelt on his neck and choked him until he died.  Police seized Daniel Prude.  Knelt on his naked body and choked him until he died.

“I can’t breathe!” is the language of the last 400 years.  Blacks couldn’t breathe on the slave ships or under Jim Crowe.   Or even on March 23rd on Jefferson Avenue in Rochester.  Daniel Prude died of asphyxiation as police chatted, joked and appeared indifferent. 

Jesus says the people who saw this were deeply disturbed and they went to report the entire matter.  They refused to let this injustice go unnoticed.

For too long black people have suffered alone and in silence.  Since George Floyd and Daniel Prude and Breonna Taylor, people are deeply disturbed and are reporting the whole matter.

Reverend Myra, Christine Walker and many of our parishioners have demonstrated every night.  We opened our church doors when the police were shooting at people with rubber bullets.  Late at night they made our church a sanctuary.  A safe haven where we gave medical treatment.  They also found creative ways to deescalate the violence so people’s anger and grief and outrage could be voiced and heard.  And yesterday, Reverend Myra gave a racial justice training for 16 politicians, judges and candidates.  At the end of the four hours they asked for another session. 

Last Thursday night some of you watched the NFL game as I did. And as you know they put Black Lives Matter signs at the end zones. They put the names of black victims like Breonna Taylor on the back of their helmets.  They knelt down and sang Lift Every Voice and Sing, the African American national anthem.  They made their protest public.  Like Jesus says, “They were deeply disturbed and reported the whole matter.”

As you know our church runs Spiritus Christi Mental Health Center.  Defunding the police has a lot of definitions.  But it spot lights the need for police to utilize mental health professionals.  The movement maintains that money for law enforcement needs to be shifted to mental health treatment and education.  Because of racism, people of color li

Reverend Myra Brown

September 6, 2020

Matthew 18: 15-20

So I must begin by giving a shout out to Lori Fromm for making my new beautiful stole.  Lori thank you wherever you are!

So friends I stand before you tired and exhausted. I have spent months in meetings with Mayors and police chiefs, activists, and pastors and going to court with people talking about structural racism and education, policing, funding, corona virus response, fighting to find a pathway forward for a better tomorrow.

I have also spent the last two days on the streets of Rochester marching with protestors calling for justice for Daniel Prude.  Another victim of police  brutality who died on our streets of Rochester.  I have taken to the streets before like many of you for Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, George Floyd and Jacob Blake.  And when you are in a battle for the soul of your community, for your people, in your heart you realize that the conflict that is upon you will require a move from God.  A move of the people.  Hours of dedication.  Relentless appeal and demand to transform a system that has been a mammoth and one of the last bastions of power baked in to it.  An ideology and premise of white supremacy and domination for those of us with black and brown bodies.

Last night we had to open the church to a hundred protestors, trapped in the cross fire of pepper spray, police dogs, canisters, pepper bullets in front of the church.  One person had a seizure and had to be taken to the hospital.  Another injured with a possible broken ankle from rubber bullets.  Another shot in the knee who could barely walk as she limped inside.  Others were simply finding it difficult to breathe.

The street was blocked off.  There was nowhere for them to go.  So I received phone calls up to 2:00 in the morning getting ahold of the Mayor.  Getting a hold of the Police Chief and demanding that they stand down to get people out of the church safely.  And we did.  We got them home.  We got them out.  But how fitting is it that today in the Gospel Jesus calls on us, on those of the household of faith to deal with the conflicts between them.  In this Gospel, he addresses individual conflict and gives us a blue print of what to do if I, as an individual, find myself in personal conflict with you I am simply asked to go to you tell you what the offense is, the fault that I between us, the harm that is done and make every attempt to get you to listen to me.   If I am successful, or if I am the problem and you are successful, Jesus says, then we have won each other over and what ever it was that came between us is resolved.  No harm, no foul.

But what do you do if your conflict is with a system?  How do you get a proper hearing of your offense?  Well, us black Americans in this country, we have been telling white America about an offense, a fault between us and the American policing system since its inception.  Trying to make America hear us.  And it has been a difficult conversation to have up until George Floyd’s death and now Daniel Prude.  What we understood is that the policing system in America was created around the 17th century.  In Rochester, New York it was created in 1819 to be exact when most people who looked like me were either in slavery or indentured servitude.  And so as the policing systems around the world were being created, they were being designed to answer one question after emancipation and that question was:  What do we now do with the black people in this country?  They are free now.  We cannot own them anymore.  We cannot control them anymore.  We cannot profit off of them anymore through free labor.   So what do we do with them? It is the question that our American policing system was more than happy to answer.  We created a system, patterned after the

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Twenty-one years ago, when we started Spiritus Christi, some of you were there, we had kind of a rocky start.  The Vatican had fired us.  They told us that we were giving grave scandal to the church.  The Rochester Dioceses shunned us and threatened the Dioceses employees with their jobs if they attended Reverend Mary’s ordination. Traditional Catholics in Rochester were writing tons of letters to the Editor saying those folks are disobeying the Pope, they are ruining the church.  We also had internal struggles.  Internal fighting.  Some wanted to stay Catholic, others wanted to be non-denominational.  We had power plays.  Clashes of ego.  

One time it got so bad, I was walking around Salem Church, across the river, and I was crying.  I was thinking about all the losses that we had suffered at Corpus.  I was thinking about all the infighting.  I just got discouraged.  I was crying.  And all of a sudden I hear God’s voice, “You wouldn’t be crying if you knew the great things that are coming.”  Does that ever happen to you?  Just in the moment that you need it you kind of hear something.  That’s maybe not exactly the right words but that’s what I heard.  “You wouldn’t be crying if you knew the great things that are coming.”

So, we all need moments like this.  It is the old pattern of: Order, disorder, reorder.  We have to accept the disorder in order to get to the transformation of reorder.

Well the early church had the same kind of experience.  They had a rocky start.  They wondered if they would survive.  The Roman Empire was persecuting them.  In the first 300 years of the church, there were four major persecutions by Rome.  When the Book of Matthew was written, what we are reading today (Matthew 16:13-20), that was the first persecution. That was pretty hard.  The Roman Empire was putting the Christians to death. The Jewish leaders where shunning them.  There was a lot of tension between the Jews and the Jews who had become Christians.  Finally, there was a split around the year 88 between the Jews and the other Jews who were following Christ.  There were internal struggles. Some people wanted to stay Jewish.  Others said it should be a universal religion.  There was a lot of infighting.  

That’s why there are so many New Testament stories to the boat on the stormy sea.  The boat was the symbol of the church.  It was called the bark of Peter.  The stormy sea represented the persecutions, the shunning, and the turmoil of the church.  And Jesus calmed the sea.  It always meant to the early church, “Don’t worry. Jesus is here.  All is well.  We will survive.”  Order, disorder, Reorder.

Jesus says in today’s Gospel:  You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  In other words, “I’m with you and nothing can stand against you.”  Not the Roman Empire, not the shunning of the religious leaders, not your infighting, not your lack of faith.  Even the gates of hell will not prevail against this community.  

That’s a good message for us today during Covid-19.  We feel like that boat rocking in the turbulent sea.  People say, “It’s a strange time.”  “It’s really an uncertain time.”  Have you heard people describe this moment.  They use words like that.  “This is weird!”  “It’s just a weird time.”  But we have to accept the disorder in order to get to the reorder.  Jesus says, “I’m with you and there is nothing that can stand against you.”  Not the corona pandemic.  Not the economic collapse.  Not the widespread loss of jobs.  Not the loss of in-school education for our children.  Not the infighting and culture wars and the polarization of our country.&n

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