Health is about community...

…it’s more than a transaction, it’s about the health opportunities of our comunity

On Sunday, July 25, 2021, I joined colleagues in community, political and faith leadership, and the Schenectady Coalition for Healthcare Access, in our asking Schenectady’s local hospital system, Ellis, to include and stand on behalf of the community as a merger process is underway with the multi-state health apparatus of Trinity Health:

News coverage of this rally can be found in the Daily Gazzette and the Times Union

For over 5 decades, the Schenectady Community Ministries (SiCM) has been a collaborative of faith communities serving all of Schenectady County, seeking to bridge the gaps perpetrated by systemic poverty. Our focus has been to provide food and nourishment - to the tune of hundreds of thousands of meals worth of food a year to thousands of households throughout the county. We do this by managing the largest pantry in the county, farming upwards of 1.5 acres of urban land, and facilitating a county-wide summer meals program for children and youth.

Food insecurity is not only an expression of poverty, it is also an expression and an aggravation of the health for the thousands of households we and other sister pantries and youth programs serve. There is no health without food, nor can there an expectation of a healthy outcome without an intentional, present, and engaged health system with, for and among the community.

Ellis, and its predecessor hospitals, have been more than staples in Schenectady. For decades, this community has known in its hospital a member of this community committed to its stability and wellbeing. Community organizations, including SiCM, have known in Ellis - its medical and administrative staff, its foundation, and its volunteer corp - a colleague in understanding the needs of our communities, and an active participant in figuring out what needs to get done to be closer - literally and figuratively - to where the need is, and to where ideas are being voiced. It is this connection to the community that made Ellis for a very long time and trusted space for quality and timely care, especially for the health of women on their terms, care that considers the depth and breadth of the cultural and religious expectations of care, including equitable access and care for the LGBTQIA community, and care that understands the reality of poverty in Schenectady city and county, and that is committed to care over profit, and is willing and wanting to engage with the community in keeping accessible, round the clock, quality care in this county, for the people of Schenectady, and dare I say by the people of Schenectady city and county.

I am joining my colleagues in community, government and religious leadership making a loud, clear, and consistent call to Ellis and to Trinity Health to live up to the expectation they created that this process would intentionally and attentively engaged with community leadership in this process. In some corporate room here in Schenectady or in Chelsea, Michigan, this might seem like a transactional process of moving ownership and administration of a small hospital group to a health system with presence in about half the country. For us, this merger will represent, either the opportunity of our community to access the resources and expertise of a multi-state health system, or the profound concern that our hometown hospital will be turned into a simple satellite. The people of this city and of this county deserve to know what the future of their hometown hospital will be because, literally, our health and their dignity depend on it.

Individualism Is a Sin (video)

Individualism Is a Sin: Attention and Intention are Required

based on a sermon preached at the First Presbyterian Church of Albany, July 25, 2021. You can access the transmission of the sermon here, beginning in minute 17:17

The lesson from II Kings 4:42-44 (Common English Bible) inspired these thoughts:

A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing the man of God some bread from the early produce—twenty loaves of barley bread and fresh grain from his bag. Elisha said, “Give it to the people so they can eat.”

His servant said, “How can I feed one hundred men with this?”

Elisha said, “Give it to the people so they can eat! This is what the Lord says: ‘Eat and there will be leftovers.’”

So the servant gave the food to them. They ate and had leftovers, in agreement with the Lord’s word.

There was no shortage of news in the weeks preceding this sermon regarding social engagement and community responsibility. I had joined federal, state, and local officials reminding the parents and guardians of over 87% of minors throughout New York State that the Child Tax Credit was being disbursed in cash, and encouraging those who do not traditionally file taxes and who qualify to report themselves and their children in order to receive this significant albeit temporary cash support from the federal government.

The Schenectady Community Ministries, the organization I serve as CEO, was already 1/3 of its way into our summer meals program. For the past 27 years, SiCM has served free meals to school-aged children and youth throughout the city of Schenectady. During the pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021, regulations blanketed the whole city of Schenectady, and even areas in Rotterdam, Scotia and Niscayuna as areas of need, making children there eligible for these meals. During the summer of 2020 we served just shy of 60,000 meals. This year, the United Way estimated that we could hit close to 62,000 meals.

The day I shared this sermon I joined a press conference in Schenectady where community leaders gathered to call on our local hospital system to be transparent with the community as a large regional hospital system buys them up and community engagement has all but ceased in this process.

Gun violence became the focus of Albany’s local government narrative, including the murder of two persons in separate circumstances the Friday and Saturday preceding my sharing this sermon. Violence throughout the city was increasing, no question about it. And City Hall referred to this crucial situation of public safety and community stability as an issue of certain parts of the city that needed to be managed.

There were many other things I could have shared about Saratoga and Rensselaer counties. A quick read of local and regional newspapers, or having listened to local public radio would be enough to grasp the crisis we were in - a crisis of ability to engage as a larger society and to be responsible for each other in the community. The pandemic, of course, made everything worse. I am no expert in public health policy. However, generalized numbers of high vaccination rates in Schenectady and Albany counties, and in New York State continued to ignore very specific areas where vaccination rates roamed well under that generalized number, some well under half of eligible persons.

We need to pay attention to our response to all of these – individual, congregational, social, and political, especially if that response goes unchecked. Our initial responses to these, or to other news regarding public policy and public safety, are based on our biases. Most of us will have reacted considering how “they” are cause or victims of these circumstances. Maybe some of us even went as far as to think that these issues do not affect us – individually, as a congregation, in our social circle, or our political standing.

If this is your and/or my reaction, it’s ok. Our prejudices are set in our social and communal beings. There is no way to escape them. What we can do is decide how we will act upon them. A hallmark identity of U.S. American economic and socio-political structures is the obsessively committed encouragement of personal individualism in culture and society. Individualism, the U.S. American standard operating procedure, is core to how we live our social beings. Individualism drives many of us to social reactions that rationalize the pain, marginalization, and downright evil that others are suffering as “their” issue. We seek to make sense of the pain, suffering, and marginalization of others by believing the lie that accomplishment is a possibility with sacrificial personal effort. That rationalization often takes form in this way: “they” - that other that looks, sounds, lives, or earns differently from the individual or collective “I” - are going through “that situation” because “they” were not as socially, politically, financially, or theologically efficacious as the individual, yet often collective “I” is.

“I am tired of leading in this dissonant social space where individualism reigns on the one part, and the Spirit is leading us to embrace each other in reverent obedience.”

Individualism is what drives many of us and in this society to articulate constitutional freedoms as individual freedoms – rights that apply first and foremost to “me.” Individualism is what is drives the conversation about vaccination access, mask options versus mandates, pushing for an achievement of normalcy that is really a generalized yearn to go back to the future.

As a faith leader, I find myself living in a dissonant social space. I find nowhere in our Holy Scriptures a sanctioning of individualism. U.S. American Christianity, however, especially our Reformed branch of that Christianity, especially the branch that presumes (and often calls) itself to be more orthodox, has over 300 years of theological argumentation for individualism in society and salvation. I hope others find themselves in in a dissonate social space. I would go even a step further and join those that have articulated individualism, especially the U.S. American kind, a sin. Far from fostering a right relationship with God, individualism drives us as individuals, as a society, and as a culture away from God. Individualism drives us away from God’s most basic call to the Church in and through the example of Jesus – to love God with all that we are, and our neighbor as ourselves. That example goes hand in hand with the call to go share the good news of Jesus to the farthest corners of Albany and of the world. Individualism is nowhere in the message of Jesus. What is more – when directly confronted with his own cultural and religious biases, Jesus took a step back and corrected his action and message for the sake of that good news he embodied.

The lesson of II Kings, chapter, for, was a respite for me this week as I continue to inhabit the dissonate space between the social reality of individualism, and the contradictory call I find in the gospel. In just three verses, the lesson shows us four social commitments the prophet Elisha lived by, social commitments with profound theological repercussions – hospitality, doubt, solidarity, and provision.

We see hospitality in the generous gift brought by a Canaanite man to the prophet, a messenger of the religion of Israel. Hospitality is shown in bread and grains brought to the prophet – bread and grain from the first fruits, the best of the harvest. We see hospitality in the turning of a personal gift into the call for a feast for all that were present. Hospitality is about generosity, is about seeing and being with and for the other. Hospitality is about giving generously what has been received generously.

We see doubt in the reaction of the prophet’s servant to the order to share the gift. The gift was intended to be a generous, perhaps extravagant gift for one person. I’d be concerned with 100 people, perhaps around the time for a meal, wanting to eat and just enough food for a few. Doubt is one of the most human feelings and actions. Our social upbringing urges us to suppress doubt. This lesson, and the whole of the Scriptures, encourage the followers of Jesus to embrace doubt. No need to ignore it. Doubt is a part of who we fully are.

We see solidarity in the lesson in that this gift was given to a person of a different ethnicity – ethnicities that were pegged against each other for no other reason than the political control of the ruling class and theological sanctioning for political expediency of the religious class. Solidarity takes hospitality one step further – it demonstrates unconditional welcome. Solidarity takes generosity one step further, for it is about sharing what one has as if it wasn’t ours in the first place. Solidarity is about the courage to believe that if God says there is enough for everyone to eat, there is enough for everyone and then some.

And it is there that provision is seen in the text. When a people show hospitality, when a people learn to embrace doubt and other human feelings, when a people decide to pay attention and be intentional about how they live and move and have their being in society expressing solidarity, provision happens. Abundance happens when a people decide to obey reverently that most basic expectation of humans – to be respected, to be welcomed, to be included, to be sought out, to be seen for what each one of us is.

And here me well, I am talking about a people obeying reverently. The call is not for individuals. The call is to a people. Elisha was not leading a life of a personal relationship with God. Elisha was a godly man, but everything he said and did was for people, with people, and by people. Nowhere in this text does it say that those 20 loaves of bread magically multiplied into a feast. The only thing this text says is that bread and grain were gifted generously, that doubt was voiced, that solidarity was practiced, and provision happened because a people embraced who they were as a community of humans and decided to believe what the Lord had said through a messenger. They obeyed reverently because they believed that despite the appearance of some among them, despite what the amount of food might have seemed, despite any other doubt or social prejudice that might have existed, a people acted with attention and intention for the sake of each other, for the sake of community.

I confess that I am tired of leading in this dissonant social space where individualism reigns on the one part, and the Spirit is leading us to embrace each other in reverent obedience. To go up and against the forces of this world built on individualism, we will require attention and intention. But we have been gifted with all it takes. For hospitality, solidarity, and provision are all at our grasp because the Lord has said so. May we believe in the word of the Lord with attention and intention. May we obey reverently with attention and intention that most basic expectation of humans – to be respected, to be welcomed, to be included, to be sought out, to be seen for what each one of us is – a full expression of the image of God.

May it be so.
Amen.

For every child's sake...

For every child’s sake:
Pantry services are NOT emergency food services

On Friday, July 16, SiCM had the opportunity to host U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for a press conference highlighting the Child Tax Credit that is being made available through the American Rescue Plan. Below are my remarks:

Schenectady Community Ministries (SiCM) is an over 50-year-old collaborative of faith communities throughout Schenectady County, with a mission to bridge the gaps opened and perpetuated by systemic poverty through access to food and nourishment. Because food insecurity is only one expression of poverty, we also seek to embrace the intersections of food and poverty through intentional social justice organizing and advocacy, and in curating spaces that are safe and encourage diversity and inclusion.

By managing the largest pantry in the county, farming upwards of 1.5 acres of urban land, and facilitating a county-wide summer meals program for children and youth, the Schenectady Community Ministries has thousands of connections with neighbors and friends that live in or close to official measures of poverty. Our main work with the community is to bridge the food insecurity gap - we serve hundreds of thousands of meals worth of food to over 10,000 households. Well over 30% of the people we serve are children. And anecdotally we know we are not reaching all children and families that depend on food assistance, discounted or free meals in our schools. What I mean by that is that by adding our work to that of sister food pantries throughout the city and the county, we know we have much work to do. Pantry operations are not emergency food services. Pantry operations like ours are becoming the main source of nourishment to many families in the city and county of Schenectady.

The availability of the Child Tax Credit, in cash, for the next 6 months, will provide thousands of families across the county with another way to bridge the challenges of poverty many face. For the next 6 months, thousands of parents throughout Schenectady and New York State will have a financial opportunity and perhaps the mental space to embrace some of the dreams they have for their children - dreams of health, strength, and opportunity.

Schenectady Community Ministries - with and alongside community organizing and service partners - will do its part in helping bridge the many gaps of poverty. We thank Senator Gillibrand and the NYS congressional delegation for their steadfast work on behalf of children in this landmark legislation. We look forward to collaborating with the senator and policymakers at all levels of government to make sure the appropriate assistance and infrastructures are put in place to ensure the possibility of our children to thrive.

Esenciales y Excluidos

Apoyar a Trabajadora/es: Asunto de Dignidad

2 de abril de 2021 - Viernes de Pascua, y Viernes Santo

Hoy tuve el honor de ser invitado a una vigilia de oración organizada por el Movimiento Santuario del Condado de Columbia a favor de trabajadoras y trabajadores esenciales, quienes siguen siendo excluidos de las asistencias económicas gubernametales durante la pandemia. A continuación mis palabras:

En este día muchos recuerdan la historia de un hombre arrestado, sometido a una parodia de juicio, humillado y ejecutado por varias razones:

• porque era un palestino de tez oscura, el tipo de persona que el imperio no estaba hecho para privilegiar

• porque habló palabras y animó acciones de solidaridad, dignidad, de dependencia mutua,de restauración de la posición social, de libertad de movimiento, de salvación ahora, no más tarde

• porque sus palabras retaron al imperio, uno de los más ricos de su tiempo. El problema del imperio no era dinero, sino voluntad política

• esas palabras fueron habladas en un acento extranjero, un acento extraño para aquellos en el poder.

Estado de NY, Proyecto de la Asamblea A5421 y del Senado S4543 - Fondo de Rescate para Trabajadore/as

Los seguidoras y seguidores de Jesús hoy recuerdan su ejecución. Pero ese no es el final de la historia.

EL judaísmo hoy sigue en la jornada pascual… aún no llegamos al final de esta historia.

Hoy nos reunimos, personas de buena voluntad, en el momento en que los legisladores y el gobernador del Nueva York están negociando lo que muchos esperamos sea un acto significativo de apoyo y reconocimiento de miles de trabajadoras y trabajadores neoyorquinos que han sido excluídos de la asistencia federal - especialmente los trabajadores migrantes, los que han sido liberados recientemente de la cárcel, y los trabajadores que son remunerados solo en efectivo.

Esa historia aún no acaba. Las negociaciones que se llevan a cabo en la Mansión Ejecutiva y en el Capitolio sobre el proyecto de presupuesto no es sobre dinero. Nueva York es una de las economías más ricas y poderosas del mundo. Las negociaciones sobre el presupuesto sobre el Fondo de Rescate para Trabajadora/es es sobre voluntad política.

Un Palestino judío de tez oscura fue ejecutado un día como hoy, pero los cristianos creen que ese no es el final de la historia. Ellos creen que Jesús venció la misma muerte.

La historia de la pascua cuenta de las noches más interminables que ningún pueblo marginado haya podio sufrir. Pero los judíos creen que ese no es el final de la historia. Sus ancestros tal vez comenzaron a paso corto, pero su caminar les llevó a la liberación.

Hoy nos reunirmos para recordar esas historias porque aún cuando no sepamos las intrigas del imperio, nuestro caminar es en esperanza y convicción de que la vida, la dignidad y la liberación es un derecho de todo ser humano. La historia no termina aún. ¡Y nosotros venceremos!

#FundExcludedWorkers

Supporting Excluded Workers: a Matter of Dignity

2 April 2021 - Friday in Passover, and Good Friday

I was honored by the invitation to join a vigil organized by the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement in favor of essential workers who continue to be excluded from government financial stimuli during the pandemic. Here are the words I shared:

Today many remember the story of a man that was arrested, submitted to a mock trial, humiliated, and executed for various reasons:

• because his dark-skinned Palestinian self was not what the Empire was built to privilege

• because he spoke words and encouraged actions of solidarity, dignity, mutual reliance, health, restoration of social standing, freedom of movement, of salvation now, not later

• because in speaking those words, he challenged the empire, one of the wealthiest states of its time. The problem was never money, it was political will

• and those words were spoken with an accent that was foreign, foreign to those in power.

The Worker Bailout Fund, NYS A5421/S4543

Today, the followers of Jesus remember his execution... But that is not the end of the story.

Today Jews continue in the Passover journey... We are still not at the end of that story either.

Today we gather together, peoples of goodwill, at the time NYS legislators and the governor are negotiating what many of us hope will be a significant act of support and recognition of the dignity of thousands of working New Yorkers who were excluded from federal financial assistance - especially migrant workers, folks recently released from incarceration, and cash economy workers.

And that story is not over yet. The negotiations happening about the state budget in the Executive Mansion and the Capitol is not about whether there is money. New York State is one of the wealthiest economies in the world. The budget negotiations happening around the Worker Bailout Fund are about political will.

A dark-skinned Palestinian Jew was executed a day like today, but Christians believe that was not the end of that story. Christians believe Jesus overcame death itself.

The story of the Passover speaks of some of the longest nights a marginalized people ever experienced. But Jews believe that was not the end of the story. Their ancestors might have begun with short steps, but that journey sure led to liberation.

We gather here today to remember those stories because, even when are not privy to the political maneuverings of the empire, we journey in the hope and conviction that life, dignity, and liberation are the right of every human. Yet again, the story is not over. I believe we will overcome!