The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey
July 13, 2008
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Introduction to the
Scripture:
In this passage from the book of Isaiah, we are witness
to an intense vision. Isaiah is praying in the temple, when he suddenly finds
himself in the midst of a terrifying situation, abandoned by all reason. God is
about to ask Isaiah to descend into darkness, and the fate of a nation hangs on
his reply.
Scripture: Isaiah 6:1-8
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting
on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each
had six wings: with two they covered
their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the
whole earth is full of his glory.’
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those
who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said:
‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a
man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes
have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal
that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and
said: ‘Now that this has touched your
lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying,
‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’
And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’
Sermon:
The angel’s stone wings are gloriously outstretched, their feathers carved from solid rock. Her carefully chiseled fingers look soft, but they show their age. They’ve been slowly chipped away by the wind and the rain and the fierce winter snow. Her left index finger is missing altogether, along with her head.
Her head is gone. All of their heads are gone. A hot dog stand looms in the distance.
These lonely statues are the denizens of an abandoned Christian theme park, perched upon a mountaintop that overlooks the prosperous Brass Mill Shopping Center in Waterbury, CT. A strange electric cross towers over the I-84 interstate, lit up like a firefly after dark. From down there, no one in their speeding cars can see the host of headless angels that bask in its light.
Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can think that building a Christian theme park is a good idea. Do “holy roller” coasters, log-ride baptisms, and safari tours through the Garden of Eden really glorify the Lord? Are communion wafers still holy after they’ve been deep-fried and covered with powdered sugar? Would Jesus approve of throwing stones at sinners, just for the chance to win a free stuffed animal? Is that guy in the Devil costume really fooling anyone?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, you might have enjoyed Holy Land USA, a hot-spot for pilgrims and church youth groups and road-trip wanderers throughout the 1970’s. At the height of its popularity, Holy Land USA was drawing in crowds of nearly 45,000 visitors a year. It beckoned to them with its Hollywood-style sign and a towering, electrified cross.
After a steady slide into bankruptcy, the park closed its doors in 1984. These days, it attracts a very different sort of crowd. Abandoned by all but a mysterious order of nuns who still attempt to care for the grounds, Holy Land USA is home to street gangs, scavengers, and teenage vandals. They are joined by photographers, writers, and chroniclers of abandoned places who still journey there to see the crumbling village of Bethlehem, the forsaken tomb of Christ, and the faceless remains of the angels, who spread their wings over the land that time forgot.
***
There’s something intriguing about places that have fallen into ruin. Old hospitals, abandoned factories, condemned theme parks, and ghost towns have a charm all their own. I know that it’s strange to harbor such fondness for places where rust has consumed every inch of steel and rainwater flows through cracked floor tiles. I know it’s unusual to be attracted to smashed windows and rotting floorboards. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I grew up in a once-prosperous town that had slowly died over the years. I was confirmed in a church that stood nestled among the remains of restaurants and boutique shops, all of them empty and smeared with graffiti. Maybe that’s why abandoned places hold such appeal for me.
Or maybe, as Belgian author Henk van Rensbergen points out in his book, Abandoned Places, people are drawn to the abandoned out of a fascination for what these places once were. He writes of “…abandoned hospitals where you can still smell the anxiety of the ill,” and of ruined waterfront hotels, “arrogantly overlooking the beach and fiercely withstanding all the storms of the past century, a decayed symbol of wealth for the rich.”
Regardless of the reason, when I heard that our project for this year’s Senior High work camp was to renovate a condemned community center in the St. Louis slums, my interest was piqued. As much as I would like to go explore abandoned buildings in my spare time with a camera and a sack lunch and a pair of night-vision goggles, gaining entry usually amounts to an act of criminal trespassing. At long last, this was my chance to experience a condemned facility without fear of being arrested.
I’ll tell you, I was not disappointed, but I was deeply disturbed.
***
The St. James Center is truly a diamond in the rough. The community it serves is a run down shantytown, a rugged collection of boarded-up tenements, liquor stores, and storefront churches that look like they’re held together with glue. In all honesty, this St. Louis neighborhood is as devastated as anything I saw in Uganda last summer. I later learned that the average annual household income in this community amounts to $20,000 a year, which sure isn’t much when you’re trying to raise a family.
Naturally, that kind of poverty leads to a whole lot of crime. It doesn’t take long for kids to learn that they can make more money dealing drugs and selling guns than they can get working at McDonalds©. When both of their parents are in prison, the criminal underworld may be the only world they know. For all of the crime I never saw any police, except for two guys in cargo shorts and police-issue bulletproof vests. I watched them from a distance with my zoom-lens camcorder, and let’s just say that I’m not sure they were cops at all.
In the midst of this concrete hell stands the St. James Center, a community organization that gives local kids an alternative to joining gangs or sitting in their broken homes all day long. Here, these children of the unemployed, the incarcerated, and the drug-addicted can make friends, play basketball, paint, and learn to dance. Man, do they learn to dance. Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough echoed from the St. James gymnasium in an endless loop all that week, and didn’t stop until long after I had had enough.
Everything these kids do, they do under the watchful eyes of the St. James staff, a small but amazing group of dedicated workers who love these children as if they were their own. Even with three inches of dirty water in the basement, the St. James Center is the best game in town.
That being said, it was still in need of a little work. The backyard was more or less empty, save for a lone swing set that creaked in the wind. And the basement, which houses a bowling alley, looked like something out of a nightmare. As I looked upon the cracked window panes, the busted ceiling lights, and the debris that covered all four lanes, I marveled at the complete destruction of a great American pastime. I leaned over to pick up a bowling pin that had been split in half and wondered—
What inhuman claws
could have done this?
***
When I went to St. Louis, I went in search of abandoned buildings. What I found was abandoned people. I found Ms. Billy, the center’s director, who struggles to help these kids with so few resources at her disposal. I found an eight-year-old boy with a heart of gold, who had given himself a nickname too obscene to be repeated here. I also found Dylan, a troubled young kid with a bad attitude and a fondness for teenage girls twice his age.
Dylan refused to believe that I was an ordained minister. To be fair, my skull & crossbones T-shirt probably didn’t help. After a couple of days, he did start calling me “Preacher Boy,” and demanding that I prove myself by making up sermons on the spot.
“Alright, Preacher Boy,” he’d say, “Preach.”
He later asked me to pray for the safety and well-being of a worm he’d found in the dirt, which struck me as kind of sweet. After I said a prayer for the worm, Dylan demanded that I swallow it whole.
Still, I got off easy. The boys on the trip had to contend with Dylan’s knack for physical violence, earning themselves more than a few undeserved bruises. And the girls—while flattered, I’m sure—had to work while Dylan followed them around like a little lost puppy. When Dylan wasn’t hitting the boys or hitting on the girls, he was playing matchmaker and trying to set them up with each other. Not all that surprising, for a kid whose parents are divorced.
Charming and obnoxious in equal measure, Dylan is a real character. “Someone needs to hit that kid,” one of our crew told me in frustration. “Or stop hitting him, I’m not sure which.”
For all of his character, Dylan is not unique. He’s just another child of the streets, an abandoned human being. The world has thrown his neighborhood away and him along with it, like a baby being thrown out with the bathwater.
It’s a fascinating thing to walk through the wreckage of an abandoned city, but then you realize you aren’t alone. There are shadows on the walls, and footsteps echoing all around. Then you realize that these aren’t ghosts of the past, but real people who still live here among the ruins. All of a sudden, it doesn’t fascinate you anymore. It makes you feel sick.
***
As the week went on, amazing things were happening all around me. In the backyard of St. James, our Senior High youth were planting flowers and sewing seeds, transforming a barren lawn into a beautiful garden. With fierce determination they transformed a lonely swing set into a full-fledged playground. The little kids were so excited that our youth practically had to beat them off with 2 x 4’s until the playground was finished. Slowly but surely, we restored that basement bowling alley to its former glory. They sanded and painted the gutters, waxed the hardwood lanes, polished the bowling balls, repainted the pins, fixed the lights, and even repaired the broken pin-setting machines at the end of the alley.
Still, while this condemned building was being brought back to life, I found myself wandering its halls with a heavy heart. The children of the St. James Center seemed happy enough here, but I kept wondering what their lives might be like when they weren’t here. Which of the local tenement buildings, I wondered, did they call home? What could their parents afford to buy them for Christmas? Did they even have parents, or were they in jail for some unspeakable crime?
Why, I asked myself, why has God abandoned them?
The answer to that difficult question didn’t occur to me until our last day at St. James. We had invited all of the children down to the basement for the unveiling of their new bowling alley, and invited each of them to bowl a frame. For the next hour, that basement was filled with excitement, laughter, and little children grinning from ear to ear.
God hasn’t abandoned these little ones, I realized. God sent us to help them. The youth of our church built more than playgrounds and gardens and bowling alleys. They built real relationships with these abandoned kids, such that when it came time to part ways, no one wanted to leave.
***
Hearkening back to the scripture, the prophet Isaiah has a vision of angels with outstretched wings—six of them, to be precise. It’s an extraordinary vision of smoke and fire, of earthquakes and inhuman angels. The most amazing part of this scripture is Isaiah’s answer to God’s question, “Whom shall I send?”
“Send me, Lord” Isaiah replies. “Send me.”
Isaiah reminds us all that while the world may abandon the poor and the sick, God abandons no one. God sends us into those abandoned places, to those abandoned people. It’s just a question of whether we are willing to go.
According to ancient tradition, angels are often portrayed as beings with six, or six-thousand, or six-billion wings, because it makes them all the more magnificent. If angels have six-billion wings, then God has six-billion hands—one for every child of the earth.
We cannot wait for God to reach down and fix the world. We are the hands of God, and the wings of the angels, spread over one another, and all the abandoned places of the earth.
Or we could be, if we are only willing to stretch our wings.
Amen.