Laboring in Vain
I may have mentioned a few times now that I was born in Schenectady, and that I grew up around the Capital Region. The history of Methodism in that part of New York State is long and fascinating. There were Methodist preachers in the City of Albany about the same time that Methodists were starting to get organized in New York City, in the mid-1760s. The person leading that effort was a British army officer named Captain Thomas Webb, a lay preacher who was a devout Methodist and who preached many of the first Methodist sermons in the American colonies, from Upstate New York down to Delaware. While Methodism eventually took off to some extent out in the Albany area, it was slow-going. When Freeborn Garrettson, an early Methodist leader, first started to try and put together societies of Methodists in Albany, he was met with resistance and wrote in his journal that the people of Albany are rude and apathetic and don’t care much for religion. People still say that about Albany, and I just think that that adds to the charm. Eventually, though, Garrettson and a few others got things rolling, and by 1791 the First Methodist Society of Albany was officially organized—and they even had their own building. As the society continued to grow, other Methodist churches branched off of this First church, taking root in neighborhoods as the city grew both geographically and in population. The growth of these city churches continued, until just after World War II, when all the affluent and middle class white people moved out to the suburbs.
By the late 1940s, First Methodist was in quite a bind. Their neighborhood, once populated by middle-class, Protestant white families, was seeing a demographic shift as more Black families and more immigrant Catholic families moved in. So the trustees got together and decided two things: first, that it wouldn’t do them much good to try and do outreach with the catholics, and second, that they most certainly did not want to integrate their church. And so they decided to start a mission out of First Methodist, which would have its own pastor and building. They received funding to hire a pastor—a second career pastor who started out as an attorney and a social worker. Rev. Angelo Mongiore had a passion for working directly with the impoverished families in the church’s neighborhood, and especially with the youth. As uncomfortable as the leaders of First Methodist were getting with the shrinking distance between them and their neighbors, they kept the mission going. Then, in July of 1961, the Methodist appointment system kicked in and a new pastor was appointed to serve the mission: Rev. Randy Nugent, a 26-year-old African American pastor. For many at First Methodist, that was the last straw. Those who remained staunchly opposed to integration left the church. Despite the labors of Rev. Nugent, the members of First Methodist voted just two years later to merge with another Methodist Church in a more affluent neighborhood nearby. That church, Trinity United Methodist Church, was closed last Spring by a vote of the Annual Conference. In a sort of sad irony, the only Methodists left in the City of Albany are members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a predominantly Black denomination.
This story of how the United Methodist Church in Albany met its demise irritates me to no end. Here was a church that held its own bigotry at bay while it tried something new, something that could have been truly transformative and a real source of grace in its community, and they let it all fall apart in the end because they just couldn’t hold it back any longer. Here was a pastor who had responded to a call to step into a setting that was openly hostile towards him, so that he might make a positive impact in a community of people whose backs are against the wall. And all his labors seem to have been in vain, after all.
Most weeks, I have a pretty good sense of what the sermon is going to be early on. The manuscript comes together later in the week, but I almost always have a sense of what the message is. This week, though, I kept coming up short. My news feed was overflowing with stories of the heinous violence committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, both in public and in detention facilities. With stories of the cuts to healthcare funding, of courts ruling on whether a handful of transgender women can participate in sports, of conquering yet another nation. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, to get swept away in the volume of evil in the world. Where do we begin? Why bother? I understand that feeling. I’ve been struggling to sift through the news this week and find signs of hope amidst it all. Even in the protests, even in the floods of people standing up against these terrible acts of violence, all their labor seems to be in vain. And even those who feel this divine call, who feel this unshakable urge to respond to the harm being carried out in the world can find it easy to do as Isaiah does and say “enough, God. Nothing’s working. I’m done.” But then there’s God, that pesky God, who doesn’t back down. God, who still puts that call on our hearts, even as we struggle to see the good it will do. The God who sees us through the eyes of Christ, who sees our hopes and longings for a transformed world, and who pulls us along.
Call it cliche, but I think I want to share a quote that came across my feed this week from Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Junior. It comes from a sermon he preached just a few months before he was murdered, and was shared by the Reverend Beth Quick, a colleague of mine and a PhD student at Drew Theological School. The quote goes “And I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren't fit to live. You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause—and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you're afraid that you will lose your job, or you're afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity or you're afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand. Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice.”
Even in the midst of the chaos, even in the midst of the lack of tangible progress, even when all our labors seem to be in vain, still God is calling us to cast aside that fear, that doubt. God is calling us to reject the sting of Death, to embrace the hope that we build together, as we seek to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. As we seek to build that Beloved Community that Dr King preached about. The community where justice reigns, where the evils of poverty, racism, and militarism cease to exist. May we hold onto this call with all that we are, with all the resurrection hope that we can muster. May we continue to hear God calling out to us, dragging us back to the unfinished work, even when all we see is vanity. May we hold each other to this, in the love that seeks justice. May it be so. Amen.