Erl Purnell Sermon

aEaster 5 ~ April 20, 2008 ~ A sermon preached by The Rev’d Erl G. Purnell at Old St. Andrew’s Church, Bloomfield, CT

Acts 7.55-60; Psalm 31.1-5, 15-16; 1^st Peter 2.2-10; John 14.1-14

On next Sunday morning, we will worship in the Parish Hall. The reason? Bill Johnson, Russ St. John, and I want to share our pictures and impressions of Haiti with you. Catherine Wilson is away. Following the presentation, we’ll celebrate a Table Eucharist. In other words, the first part of our usual service—the collect, lessons, sermon, creed and confession—will be devoted to a slide show and discussion. Obviously, there is much more to tell than time allows, but it’s important for us to let you know what we experienced.

For this morning, I want to speak more personally about learning to care about and for others and about friendship.

My childhood was privileged. There were six children in my family and we often wore hand-me-downs, but we all had more than two pairs of shoes and we were always clean; gallons of milk filled the frig and family-sized boxes of Cheerios were in the food larder; each of us had our own bed.

I learned to read using the Dick & Jane series in a small private school. On the way to my school, I passed the one room, K-5 school that was our neighborhood school. Mary Lou Shawley went there. Her mother helped out around our house sometimes. One afternoon, I found myself at the Shawley’s place—really more of a shack, with goats and chickens and cats and dogs everywhere. They were having dinner—that’s the middle of the day meal in western Pennsylvania. Dinner was boiled potatoes, white bread, and butter.

My seven-year old heart opened a crack, and I remember knowing that I was both different from the Shawleys and lucky. I lived in a big house, I had nice clothes, we had hamburgers for supper, and our animals lived in a barn, not the house.

I asked my mother about the Shawleys. Mr. Shawley worked 10-12 hours a day, six days a week in the strip mine that was operating in Weavers’ Mills back then and Mrs. Shawley helped us and some other folks, as well as tended a huge garden, canned a winter’s worth of food every fall, made cider, hunted squirrels and deer, mended clothes, and cared for her three kids and a small menagerie. My mother did some of those things, too, but not the squirrel and deer hunting.

I suppose I felt sorry for the Shawleys. I thought it wasn’t fair that I got to have all that I had—like my Schwinn bike and my bow and arrows—and they didn’t. Maybe Dick Shawley stole my really cool Navy scuba diving knife because he was so poor he couldn’t get one any other way. Anyway, I asked my Mom, “What can we do for the Shawleys.” She said, “We already do help them. Mrs. Shawley works here sometimes and we give them our old clothes.”

Since then, a lot has opened my heart further and other images have been added to that dinner time at the Shawley’s in 1953.

A dozen years later, I found myself in the ghettos of Pittsburgh. I’ve spoken about this seminal experience before, so I won’t go into any detail now. Suffice it to say, something about being different and lucky still stuck with me. The lucky part was just as real. I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh, I had a pretty girl friend, I had all the opportunity in the world. At 19, though, I started to realize that I actually wasn’t different from the Shawleys … or anybody else. And, if different meant something like better—which I’m sure it did to me at one time—I needed to take a hard look at myself.

Slowly, I came to understand that I couldn’t fix the whole world—at that time eradicating racism was my personal goal—but I could work on myself. The question was What do I do? The answer, that came in fits and starts over many years, was that first and foremost, I needed to care. I needed to care … enough to see what I was too blind to see. I needed to listen and hear what people less fortunate than I were saying about their lives, their hopes, their dreams. I needed actually to reach out and touch people—push a wheel chair, guard a child’s crib from rats in the middle of the night, bring a bag of food to a hungry family.

Of the gifts God has dropped in my lap, turning on my caring gene has taught me the most about what ministry is. It’s good to care … but, caring can be extremely frustrating, too. You know what I mean: when you care but feel unable to act.

Friendship. The connection between caring and friendship is dynamic. Here, I want to speak about my friendship with Jean-Elie and Mona Millien. When we met 15 years ago, the cultural divide was huge. I struggled to understand their accented English. Their Haitian place references meant nothing to me. The single common thread was the Episcopal Church.

But, Jean-Elie endeared himself to me. I simply liked him. His sincerity. His interest in me. His faithfulness. His commitment to the Haitian people, especially children. We found ourselves working together on a few projects in the Greenwich Deanery. He invited me to preach at l’Eglise de l’Epiphanie at St. John’s in Stamford. He visited St. Paul’s in Riverside.

In the years since our friendship formed, much has happened. Jean-Elie retired after a long and distinguished career in the Church and he and Mona returned to their beloved Haiti. I came to Bloomfield. Jean-Elie and Mona decided to convert their home in Carrefour into a small school for local children. They began in 1996 with a dozen youngsters and now there are about 175 children enrolled. After arriving at OSA, I introduced the parish to my Haitian friends and the school they had started. Jean-Elie visits here almost every time he comes back to the States. He has preached and celebrated with us. You have welcomed him and his family and you have provided a life-line to l’Ecole le Bon Samaritain is so many ways.

Friendship requires a mutual feeling of trust and affection. But, it also calls for behaviors that support those feelings. It’s never enough just to care. The generosity and goodness of Jean-Elie and Mona towards me has been extraordinary. In material ways, they have given me beautiful Haitian art work and bottles of really good island rhum. More than that, however, they have cared about my ministry here, always asking about you all and how things are going. They have given money at Christmas time with instructions to send Christmas cards to all the neighbors or to put ads in the Bloomfield Journal about our Christmas services. Likewise, our support for l’Ecole le Bon Samaritain has sustained them, and the children and teachers. Our prayers and financial contributions mean everything to the survival of the school and the lives of those children.

Perhaps the most powerful reflection of our friendship is that Danelie, one of their daughters, has become like a daughter to me. Most of you have met her when she comes with her parents to OSA, or even, like three weeks ago, on her own. She’s a peach and I would do anything for her. But, I know, too, that Mona and Jean-Elie would do anything for me and my family. As I told the children at l’Ecole le Bon Samaritain, “Père Millien est mon frère parce que nous avons le même Père.” (Father Millien is my brother because we have the same father.)

This deep friendship included many invitations to Haiti but none was realized until three weeks ago. A brief window of safety opened. The visit was extraordinary. To see this land that Jean-Elie and Mona love so much and the children for whom they care so passionately has renewed my own commitment of caring, of caring for and about them and the school. I come away knowing that nobody can fix Haiti. Only the Haitian people themselves can make right their plight. Yet, the impact that Jean-Elie and Mona have with some children is stunning and beautiful. They truly care. These few, and a few others like them at other schools, are Haiti’s future.

Caring and friendship. Each begets the other. We are called to care and likewise to grow friendships especially with incredibly good and faithful people like the Milliens.

Amen.