April 13, 2008
(Fourth Sunday of Easter)

Jericho Road

By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Acts 2:42-47  •  Psalm 23  •  1 Peter 2:19-25  •  John 10:1-10
(From The Lectionary Page)

For the next few moments I invite you to imagine with me. Imagine that you live in a neighborhood of houses. This neighborhood has been your home for several years. It is familiar. You know most if not all of your neighbors. The streets are wide, and sidewalks run throughout the area. It is home.

Then a time comes when you and everyone in the neighborhood is told to leave. A storm is coming, promised to cause damage and endanger life. Since the next weekend is a holiday weekend and you were planning a short three or four day trip anyway, you load up the car early and along with many of your neighbors head out.

And it comes to pass that the storm lives up it predictions. In fact, due to other circumstances, more damage than could have been predicted is done to your neighborhood, and to you city.

Time passes. And you return home. As you enter your neighborhood, house after house bears a common symbol which was not there before you left. 

Imagine a large X spray painted on a wall facing the street, usually near the front door.  In the four spaces of the X are numbers or letters.  At the 12 o’clock space is a date such as 9-01.   Going clockwise, in the 3 o’clock and 6 o’clock spaces are numbers, and at 9 o’clock are letters. The letters stand for the rescue crew who searched each house, the date indicating when the search was done. The 3 and 6 o’clock spaces stand for the number of people found in the house and the number of bodies discovered.  One house bears the message: 1 dead in the attic.

You live in New Orleans. And your house is in the 8th Ward or lower 9th ward.  This was how you found your neighborhood some four weeks after two hurricanes ravaged your city, and especially after a barge struck a levee, rupturing a wall and flooding much of the city. 

And imagine that this morning, April 13, your neighborhood looks virtually unchanged now 2 and a half years later.  The floodwaters are gone, thought a brown high water line like a bath tub ring can be seen everywhere. The levee has been rebuilt. But your home, and those of hundreds of your neighbors stand empty, beyond repair. A spray-painted X is on every structure, and as you see the numbers of dead found in the home, every day becomes All Souls Day.  Every day you recite the 23rd Psalm: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

Over last weekend I attended the annual conference of cathedral deans in New Orleans. Along with deans and spouses and partners from across Canada and the United States, I traveled in air-conditioned comfort through such neighborhoods and wondered a lot about things like:

The large X on houses was not the only symbol we encountered. Let me tell you about a drive down Jericho Road. It is not a street, but a response, an incarnation of Easter and Resurrection life.

Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative is a faith-based nonprofit organization, providing working families and individuals affordable housing opportunities in New Orleans neighborhoods. Created with substantial funding from Episcopal Relief and Development, the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana, and two endowed congregations - Christ Church Cathedral New Orleans and Trinity Church Wall Street New York - Jericho Road is working with other non-profits, private businesses, governmental agencies and faith-based groups to create long-term housing strategies which include new construction and rehabilitation of existing owner occupied homes.  To date 41 lots have been purchased, and 16 houses completed.   (http://www.jerichohousing.org/index.html)

Another significant partner in Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative is Grinnell College in Grinnell Iowa. Grinnell Corps offers selected new graduates one-year fellowship opportunities to volunteer in New Orleans on projects ranging from grant writing and client support to mapping and brownfield redevelopment. (http://www.grinnell.edu/offices/socialcommitment/grinnellcorps/)

To see the Church at work in a place where too little work is going on also called to mind the 23rd Psalm. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I well dwell in the house of the Lord forever. One home a time, one House of the Lord at a time, New Orleans is being rebuilt.

Another aspect of the Jericho Road is job training. Reconcile New Orleans is a mentoring and skills building program which trains New Orleans youth in the culinary and construction trades.  Sounds a lot like Culinary Cornerstones here at the Cathedral. Many New Orleans teens effectively lost a year or more of high school education, so this program is vital. The deans conference was fed by this group – a good meal to be sure, but more savory was the food for our souls and for thought.

Today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles says that the first Christian community had two priorities. First was the common good: All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.  And secondly, Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

The Gospel lesson for today, on this Sunday known as Good Shepherd Sunday, ends with Jesus proclaiming: I came that you may have life, and have it abundantly.  The Good Shepherd is calling us to an abundant life that may well challenge our fiercely defended notions of what life is to be about, and especially at least for me, my definition of abundance.

The Jericho Road project takes its name from the place where a true act of stewardship and shepherding took place: After two religious folks walked by a beaten dying man in great need, not wanting to get involved and invoking religious purity arguments, a despised and hated Samaritan saved the life of the man left for dead. The story of the good Samaritan begins on Jericho Road. 

As we return home today, to places where no large X is or by grace will never be painted, let us ponder our blessings, the meaning of baptism, and neighborhoods in Kansas City or New Orleans or wherever. Opportunities surround us. May we listen for the Good Shepherd, and follow where he leads.