Sermon - "Haiti" - Ephraim Radner - January 31, 2010

The Rev'd Dr. Ephraim Radner is the Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto, and an honorary priest at the Anglican Church of St. Paul, Bloor Street, Toronto.

As we turn our hearts to our calling by Christ towards our brothers and sisters in Haiti, I would invite us to reflect on some verses from the Psalm we sang together earlier: “I look to the right and watch, but there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me, no man cares for me. I cry to thee, O LORD; I say, Thou art my refuge… The righteous will surround me; for thou wilt deal bountifully with me” (Ps. 142: 4,5,7). The righteous will surround; and you will deal bountifully with me.

1. Why are we here, gathered in this church? It may seem obvious; but when Haitians gathered the night of the earthquake – battered, traumatized, broken, and homeless that evening – and when they crowded into streets and sang and prayed in the darkness, reporters on hand were amazed. One NY Times editorialist thought it was senseless – why pray or sing to a God who just let this happened?

Indeed, we do know these things: we know that on Tuesday, January 10th, at about 5 pm, the earth moved and shook in Haiti near the capital city of Port-au-Prince. And in a few minutes, the buildings collapsed leaving over 100,000 dead – we will probably never know the number; 2700,000 or more homeless; thousands injured; 100,000 or more children left without parents or known relatives at this time. And the churches too – sanctuaries, cathedrals, seminaries, schools – all gone. 100 of the 120 church buildings of the Anglican Episcopal Church in Port-au-Prince are destroyed – cathedral, seminary, churches, primary and secondary schools buildings, university, cultural museum, vocational schools, and more.

2. Staggering extent of suffering. Is this why we are here? Probably not, because, however staggering, it is no more than so much daily suffering: 25,000 children alone die each day from hunger and illness; 7 million a year. around 8.000 die each day of AIDS – preventable; 3,500 are dying of malaria each day – preventable; 1,350 suicides each day.

Natural disasters far away: we all know in 2004 of the great Tsunami; but only a year before, in 2003, 40,000 died in an earthquake in Iran; another 40,000 in 2005 in Kashmir; 100,000 in a flooding in Burma in 2008.

And, of course, there is war: perhaps 90 million people were killed in wars, or in ways directly connected with war in 20th c.; in 2002, 175,000 were killed. Over the past decade, up to 3 million have died in the Eastern Congo alone. It’s been happening, in other words, all the time; we didn’t need to wait until January 10th.

I am trying to numb us with statistics, because it is numbing; most of us cannot comprehend them, bear them, engage them.

3. So why are we here? It is not simply the numbers or the extent of suffering.

Perhaps, it is because Haiti is so close by, and there are Haitians even that we know. After all, Haiti and North America have long been linked.

Jean Baptiste Pointe-du-Sable, a black Haitian fur-trader, started a settlement in the 1770’s that marks the founding of Chicago. Yes! Chicago, founded by a Haitian. 800 freed Haitian slaves, fought for the Americans against the British at Savannah, in 1779; there’s a statue in Savannah to prove it! The Catholic Church is canonizing a freed Haitian slave who came to New York in 1987, Pierre Toussaint. He cared for the poor while cutting rich people’s hair. There are now anywhere from 600,000 to a million Haitian immigrants in the US, and another 100,000 in Canada.

But until recently, it mostly went the other way: Americans in the 19th century worried over Haiti’s slave revolution: would it come to the US? They also worried over Haiti’s potential dealings with Britain and France or Spain, and carefully guarded the waters of the Caribbean around it. Concerned with political chaos and wanting to protect their investments, the US occupied Haiti in 1915 for almost 20 years. They left the country rich in infra-structure, but utterly weakened in leadership and economic self-sufficiency. US Marines returned in 1994 and 2004 in the midst of chaos; the UN has had 6.000 military personnel there since then. And now in 2010, thousands more –US and UN soldiers alike – are entering.

4. So we have connections in geography and history. Is this why are we here tonight?

I think there is another reason, a better reason, and stronger and deeper reason: Psalm 142:7 “The righteous will surround me. For thou wilt deal bountifully with me.”

We are here because we are joined – we in this church, with Haitian Christians and their people -- to body of the Christ, in the Church. Haiti: did you know that they are the people most engaged by Christians in the world, including Anglicans? There are more one-to-one relations between Haitian Christians and North American (or other) Christians than anywhere else.

That was not always the case: The tremendous failures of the Christian Church have weighed on Haiti for centuries. Columbus arrived in 1492, with his missionaries in tow. Within only a few years, the indigenous Taino Indians were enslaved and finally killed by disease. All they left for posterity was the name of this country, “Ayiti”, “land of the high mountains”. The Spaniards, with the Church’s support, began then to important African slaves, and so the terrible story began on that score, that engulfed millions of human beings and souls. When the French took control of the western part of Hispaniola in 1697, they brought their own French priests. And the slave plantations thrived, growing sugar cane, indigo dye plants, and coffee, and killing off a third of the slave population every 5 years. When the slaves finally gained their freedom by revolution, in 1804, the Catholic Church fled, and the Vatican only chose to recognize Haiti in 1860, insisting on a special treaty – one that allowed in the 1960’s, the dictator Papa Doc to choose his own crony archbishops and bishops.

It was in the shadow of Catholic complicity and negligence that Anglicans first arrived. And only because of American Protestant racism. James Theodore Holly, a convert from Catholicism who went from DC to Detroit to Toronto, where he helped the worked with the famous American-Canadian abolitionist Henry Bibb on his paper Voice of the Fugitive. Finally he reached New Haven, CT, where he became an Episcopal priest. Holly became convinced that black people in the US would never find their way unless they could grow strong in their own lands, apart from whites. With the blessing and financing of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, Holly left with a party of 110 African-Americans for Haiti, in 1861. Received by the Haitian President, Holly spent the next 50 years of his life as a missionary, building an autonomous Anglican Church, supported here and there by American Episcopalians. He became Anglicanism’s only second non-white bishop in 1874 – consecrated, in fact, in the very church where I worked in Brooklyn. By the time he died, the Orthodox Apostolic Church of Haiti, as it was called, had over several thousand members, 22 churches, 13 priests. He built schools with every church, knowing that literacy was the door to understanding the Bible and gaining skills for some movement out of poverty.

5. Not that it was easy. Holly did his first baptism on his second day in Haiti – it was his week-old son, born on board ship. The Haitian president and wife were his godparents. But within a year, malaria and a typhoid epidemic had killed half of his emigrating party: including Holly’s wife, three daughters, and the young son he had baptized. With little money, Holly was forced to work as a shoesmith, and most of his priests eventually also worked full time at other jobs. Fire and civil war destroyed his churches and home numerous times; a token of what was to come, even three weeks ago. The Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, now in ruins, was already the sixth incarnation of a building that had been arsoned, bombarded, and burnt over and over again.

For all his race-consciousness, though, Holly was a Christian committed to the Christian church. He would work with all people, and sought only to pour his life out for them in the terms of the Gospel. Remarkably, he was present at the Second Lambeth Conference, in 1878. While visiting, he was asked to preach at Westminster Abbey. It was a stirring moment, and one to remember, as the great of the church gathered from around the world to hear him: Psalm 142:7 The righteous will surround me. For thou wilt deal bountifully with me.

6. With his death, the Anglican Church in Haiti was left wobbling; ten years without a bishop, only the inclusion of the Haitian church as a diocese within the American Episcopal Church’s structures steadied things, at least in terms of finances. From 1924 on, the Episcopal church of Haiti has had American and now Haitian bishops, and has grown to 115 congregations, 200 schools, several hospitals and numerous clinics, over 100,000 baptized members, and 36 active priests.

And in this, Haitian Anglicans are like many other churches now: in a country with no infrastructure, the church does majority of education and health. To be honest, most of the money for this comes from Christians outside of Haiti. With respect to the Episcopal Church, it derives from partnerships with individual congregations and parishes in the US, and a few in Canada. No one knows the number involved! I would put it in the scores of such partnerships. Maybe hundreds!

7. And now we look at this dreadful scene in Port-au-Prince. But we must say, as the psalmist say, (Psalm 142:7): The righteous will surround me. For thou wilt deal bountifully with me. It has happened for 150 years. It will continue, will it not? The righteous will continue to surround?

Bishop Zaché Duracin of the Haitian Episcopal Church lost his own home and all his possessions (he had earlier lost his car to a carjacker). He was offered the chance to evacuate in order to direct the church’s life again from a safer place. But he has chosen to stay in Haiti, living homeless with the homeless. He sent out a note the other day with this affirmation: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ….I am writing to you from the tent city we have set up behind the rubble of College Ste. Pierre, our marvelous senior secondary school that is no more. As you know, we have gathered approximately 3,000 people here alone. Across the land, the Diocese of Haiti has set up at least 21 refugee camps, caring for more than 23,000 people.” And in this, and so much else, “We are partners” with you, he writes.

That is, “we are surrounded by the righteous”. Not that we are “the righteous”, except as we are righteous in Christ and so act righteously through his grace. But that is the claim and calling, as Bishop Yu told us earlier this evening. A claim on us by God Jesus, and a calling to us from Him.

What faces Haitians, and Episcopal Church in Haiti now? : immediate life issues of housing and food and health; sorting out the losses and getting people together; rebuilding; That will require money and resources. St. Paul’s is “surrounding” with God’s bounty, we hope, joining up with St. Basil’s church in Gonaives, already themselves housing hundreds of refugees in their church year; Wycliffe, I hope, will help somehow with the rebuilding of the seminary in the months that come. But today, we can surround with prayer; and self giving as it arises, without stint.

May I end with Bp. Theodore Holly’s closing prayer at Westminster Abbey in 1878? “And here in the presence of God, of angels and of men, on this day sacred to the memory of an apostle whose blessed name was called over me at my baptism, and as I lift up my voice for the first and perhaps the last time in any of England's sainted shrines, I dedicate myself anew to the work of God, of the Gospel of Christ and the salvation of my fellow-men in the far distant isle of the Caribbean Sea that has become the chosen field of my special labors. […] O thou Saviour Christ, Son of the Living God who, when Thou wast spurned by the Jews of the race of Shem, and, who, when delivered up without a cause by the Romans of the race of Japheth, on the day of thy ignominous crucifixion, hadst Thy ponderous cross born to Golgotha's summit on the stalwart shoulders of Simon the Cyrenian of the race of Ham, I pray Thee, O precious Saviour, remember that forlorn, despised and rejected race whose son thus bore Thy cross when Thou shalt come in the power and majesty of thy eternal kingdom to distribute Thy crowns of everlasting glory. And give to me then, not a place at Thy right hand or at Thy left, but only the place of a gate-keeper at the entrance of the Holy City, the new Jersualem that I may behold my redeemed” Amen and Amen, and let us stand and move with him and his people who are our people.