He took bread, said the blessing,
broke it, and gave it to them.
With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.
When I studied sacramental theology at St. Bernard’s here in Rochester, my professor, Dr. David
Stosur, asked the class to read an article written by Enrique Dussel, an Argentine-Mexican
theologian, whose work centers on liberation, ethics, and global politics. The article is entitled
The Bread of the Eucharistic Celebration as a Sign of Justice in the Community and its main
thesis is this, “Bread is life to the destitute and it is murder to deprive them of it.” Dussel and
Stosur taught me that the words – I was hungry and you did not feed me – not only have
sacramental meaning, but also economic meaning. To offer a sacrifice from the possessions of
the poor is like killing a child before their mother’s eyes. Put another way, justice is the practical
condition that makes possible the Eucharistic celebration, which saves.
I will try to help you understand what all that means with a story. Some years ago, as I walked
into a salon, I had not anticipated that the visit would take on so much significance and symbolic
meaning. It had been many months since my last visit, because my stylist had taken an extended
maternity leave after giving birth to her second child. She had been gone for so long that together
we joshed about whether she’d actually given birth to an infant or a small adult. As she gently
held my head while stroking my hair and laying me back into the basin of running water, she
calmly said to me, “Elijah was killed. Well, actually he was murdered.” I jumped up from my
reclined position, tightly wrapped my arms around her and for a long while stood with her “in the
blood of Christ.”
In that embrace, Monique and I came to a shared understanding about just what it is that murder
and deprivation really mean. Settled back into the ritual of washing, Monique poured water over
my head, and as she worked the lather into a comforting rhythm, she told me about the death of
her love and helpmate, Elijah. She said the sight and sound of the blood rushing from his wound
was like milk being poured out by the gallon. “Now,” she told me, she understood in real terms
the magnitude of the moment that I had related to her during an earlier visit, the moment when I
found myself staring down at a pool of blood, with mop in hand, in, of all places, the “living”
room, where my Uncle DJ had been left for dead. He was awakened in the wee hours of the
morning by an intruder, who broke into his home and fired a gun. And as I stood there staring at
blood on the floor, it was revealed to me that it was not simply the intruder’s bullet but rather his
deprivation-induced depravity that took my uncle’s life.
And so, Monique too found herself facing deprivation, economic deprivation. Though she wasn’t
married to Elijah, his death, in effect, had left her widowed. With newborn and one-year old
daughters to feed, she returned to work in the salon one month after the murder of her partner.
2
She and her daughters became the face of the poor. And like many working poor, Monique
hoped, despite the structural injustices that enable the rich to appropriate to themselves the hard
labor of the poor, that she and her children would not be separated from the product of her labor,
bread. It is life to the destitute. It is indeed murder to deprive them of it.
Where there is no wonder at creation, known as human life, that is violently laid to waste, there
is no wonder at creation, known as nature, for it too is spent without thought and laid to waste.
Murder, here in the City of Rochester and cities across the country, is the ugly manifestation of
environmental racism that those who shield themselves in a cocoon of privilege do not wish to
acknowledge or confront. It is not a crisis separate from the environmental movement in which
people of faith, who purport to be genuinely concerned, can simply opt out of, exclude
themselves from, or turn away.
The injustice of environmental racism – social, economic, and political divestiture – deprives
already distressed urban communities of the basics to survive and flourish. And too often,
investments that could be used to help create healthy environments and give life are instead
steered by the privileged into projects that memorialize their benevolence and achievement.
Consequently, each such act of institutionalized deprivation perpetrated against those, whom the
dominant culture has discarded, destroys lives; some through the slow, painful progression of
suffering from want and others with a bullet, in the blink of an eye.
Environmental theories and practices that 1.) fail to understand that human ecology conditions
and is conditioned by natural ecology, 2.) make no expression of moral outrage at the epidemic
of violence in inner cities, and 3.) resist confronting the institutionalized socioeconomic and
political structures that bind historically oppressed peoples to distressed environments thereby
giving rise to a culture of violence, these omissions are symptomatic of privilege that renders
injustice invisible. Carl Anthony, an ecologist and professor of biology, brought this point home
when he stated “without justice in cities, there will be no solution to problems of wilderness and
open space, endangered species and natural beauty” that the privileged are wont to claim for
God, country, and the future benefit of their heirs.
The act of conservation or rather claiming open space and natural beauty “for my grandchildren”
is an act that, in and of itself, further disadvantages already historically disadvantaged children
consigned to distressed environments and, in some instances, disadvantages them literally to
death. The choice to act on behalf of the child, who is the beneficiary of white privilege, over
and against the child who is disadvantaged by it, is not environmentalism, but the very definition
of environmental racism. Where the bread of life is not shared, it is the bread of death, and the
one who eats it “eats damnation to himself.”
3
So, what, then, is the community of faith to do about climate change and environmental
degradation? In today’s readings from the Book of Acts and the Gospel, according to Luke, Jesus
is presented to the faithful as a Prophet unjustly executed by the lawless, but released from the
throes of death, and exalted at the right hand of God. Understand that the role of the prophet is to
act as an intermediary between God and Israel, to hold the faithful to God’s standards of
righteousness, compassion, equality, and justice, to call the people to worship the one true God,
and to threaten judgment for transgression. And so, it is the prophet Jesus, who beginning with
the Book of Genesis, reveals himself in and through Israel’s long prophetic history to open the
eyes of the two disciples traveling along the road to Emmaus.
If you accepted Mother Earth’s Lenten invitation to read the encyclical Laudato Si written by
Pope Francis, you might recall reading that he points to the Book of Genesis that makes explicit
the fact that human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships:
with God, with our neighbor, and with the earth itself. And as the prophets through the ages,
from Moses to Jesus, have time and again proclaimed, these three vital relationships have been
broken, both outwardly and within us. “This rupture,” Francis writes, “is sin. The harmony
between Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the
place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations. This in turn distorted our
mandate ‘to have dominion’ over the earth, to ‘till it and keep it.’”
And so from Moses and all the prophets to the revelation of Jesus the Nazarene, the prophetic
critique of these three vital relationships was and is a voice for life in a world, bent on death. It is
a critique that decries the accumulation of land by the wealthy for Airbnbs in the face of
epidemic homelessness, the extraction of economic surplus through taxation of the poor to the
benefit of the rich, the acquisitive lifestyle of the moneyed elite, increased deprivation and
hunger in urban centers, debt slavery, unfair trade and commerce, and the questionable ethics of
our judicial system.
In response to the prophetic voice and to the breaking of the bread, heavily freighted with
symbolic meaning, the task of the community of faith is prophetic action – to open our eyes and
begin to do the hard work of restoring right relationship with God, with neighbor, and with the
earth itself.
I am so very honored to be able to share with you today that Spiritus Christi is undertaking a
very special project of prophetic action to do our part, as a community of faith, to help restore
harmony between God, people, and earth. Last month, Spiritus – through the efforts of the
Mother Earth Committee in collaboration with the Prison Outreach Ministry and Nielsen House –
was awarded a grant administered through a partnership between The Monroe County Soil &
Water Conservation District and Cornell Cooperative Extension. The grant is providing enough
resources to help Nielsen House finally realize its dream of planting a community garden in its
4
backyard. With five 8’x4’ raised garden beds and one 4’x4’ bed of pollinators (flowers), and all
seedlings courtesy of EquiCenter’s 3-acre organic farm, the garden is expected to yield 150-300
pounds of produce in its first season that will provide food for Nielsen House, Jennifer House,
Grace of God as well as prison outreach ministry graduates and their children residing in
apartments in the city of Rochester.
The grant will also provide urban gardening workshops and offer residents the opportunity to
develop a mutually beneficial relationship with soil, water, flora and fauna that they might not
have previously had. It is an opportunity to develop ecological sensitivity that obliges people to
care for and make use of the earth’s bounty responsibly, and to recognize its value not simply for
its utility to humanity, but more importantly because of its mere existence, the earth with all that
is within it, blesses and gives God, the Creator, glory.
I’m going to bring all this home now by sharing that I recently watched a news story about the
musician and activist Erykah Badu, who has been described by some as the incarnation of Billie
Holiday. Some of you might recall that she headlined Rochester’s International Jazz Festival at
the Eastman Theater some years ago. Ms. Badu was being interviewed by MSNBC reporter, Ari
Melber, who asks her to share her thoughts about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ remark, “We
will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.” You see Ms.
Badu popularized the word “woke” with her 2008 song Master Teacher, wherein she makes
prophetic observations about the signs of the time. The chorus is “I stay woke.” In response to
the governor’s remark, Ms. Badu says she believes woke has become another way to say Black
or thug. She further says, “I can tell you what woke means…It just means aware. Being in
alignment with nature, because if you’re in alignment with that, you’re aware of everything that’s
going on…”
And it happened that, while he was with them at table,
He took bread, said the blessing,
Broke it, and gave it to them.
With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.
Stay woke!
0 Comments