....Diversity in God's Kingdom

   Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ Luke 10:9

So here we are, the day after a very busy political day in the nation, our city and our island. We some things remain the same, and others will be different. That is what elections do; that is what changing times do; that is what a generational shift can do, and these are not bad things. 

In today's Gospel reading Jesus is commissioning his disciples and followers to go out into the world and spread the good news to everyone. He gives them permission to walk into all sorts of different experiences with limited assets and work with the folks there to do ministry and let them know that their God is near to them, whomever they are and wherever they are.

Growing up in New York City was, for me, a time of celebrating its vast diversity. As an outer borough white ethnic kid, I had a unique educational expierence being educated in an inner-city parochial school that was located in what was one of the roughest neighborhoods of the day: Bed-Sty....not the froo-froo gentrified Clinton Hill or Bedford- Stuyvesant of today, but the " roll up your car windows and lock the doors" Bed-Sty where drug deals could be found on every other corner and the local Pizza joint didn't deliver after 9pm.  And my elementary school was located in the beating heart of the hood. Every morning I arose in my lily-white Brooklyn neighborhood , a neighborhood of well-kept single family homes with small lawns and small backyards on tree-lined streets, to hop on a school bus at the local Roman Catholic Church to be shipped passed the deconstructed Ebbits Field, over Eastern Parkway and into the heart of darkness...and it was great!

This was the era of post war America, the Baby Boom years and, as part of that statistical elephant, the local parochial school was over crowded, so several parishes in my part of Brooklyn sent their overflow students to a school on Classon Street where the demographics were changing with a rise of African American families from either the south or the Caribbean.  These newer families were mostly Protestants and were buying up the houses of the Irish' German and Italian Americans who were moving quickly out of town and deeper into the new Long Island suburbs created by builders whose red-lining tactics kept non-white people out of their developments.  This allowed a new wave of people, people of color, to move into the houses left behind.  A significant difference, besides race, was that the majority of the new inhabitants were not sending their kids to parochial schools. This meant the school attached to the local parish was very under-utilized and had many empty seats.  Those seats were filled up with kids like me for whom there was no room at the local parish school....more their loss.

We had all kinds of kids at Nativity, my grammar school. Kids were bused from all over Brooklyn to learn together there: refugee kids from Africa and Hungary, newly arrived transplanted Puerto Rican kids, Afro-Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica and Barbados, mixed race kids like the Chins whose Chinese father married a strikingly beautiful Irish and African American red head and fathered seven children with her. They ran a successful chain of local laundries. We learned together and learned how to work together. We played together and ate together. And most importantly, we worshiped together. We would sit by class in alphabetical order for church services: I sat with Leticia Rodriguez, Maria Sierra and Dorothy Jane Zilkowski....then, as now, I was an end of the alphabetical order line kid. Every Wednesday we had Benediction in Latin after lunch.  On the first Fridays of the month we attended Mass before classed began, and then feasted on hot chocolate and Danish pastries, a gift from a local bakery to the good Sisters of St Joseph. It was probably the one day a month our teachers knew that all of us had breakfast before we got to school. And we reached spiritual milestones together: First Communions and Confirmations were done through the school and not our local parish.  We became a tight-knitted, scrappy, tough and smart group of urban kids for whom working and living in a truly integrated society produced a healthy tolerance and understanding of "otherness", because in one way or another we were a school of "others", for even those of us for whom there was no room in our local schools were often treated poorly by our neighborhood kids who were luck enough to attend the local school. We were tainted by our daily connections with those of other ethnic groups and cultures, but, in reality, we were the lucky ones.

Every day we saw the kingdom of God in action. Everyday we walked with "the other" and knew that they were really more like us than not. Every day we were enriched by new and varied experiences and personal interactions with some wonderfully interesting, smart and funny kids whom we would never have met if we stayed in our comfort zone. It was definitely an unexpected, unrecorded and undocumented social experiment, but it was also a celebration of  radical welcome in God's kingdom, look around, do we need to widen our circle to get more and different folks in our orbit? That is how we grow in mind and spirit.

Let us pray: O God you have bound us together in a common life. Help us, in our struggles, to engage one another without hatred or bitterness, and to work together with mutual forbearance and respect; to bring the Kingdom of God to all who seek it through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.