There is one swear word in this sermon. Which I say mostly to heighten expectation. But also by way of warning.
Dan Stevenson has lived in the Eastlake neighborhood of Oakland, California for four decades. Over those years he has watched the community deteriorate with drugs and crime. But one day, Dan and his wife Lou decided to take action and made a decision that transformed their neighborhood, reducing crime by 82% in a single year. That decision? They bought a Buddha.

Dan’s story was featured on an episode of the podcast Criminal. In it, he explains that after the city created a traffic diversion outside his home, a concrete median with a few trees in the middle, the place quickly became a dumping ground for the unwanted belongings of those fleeing the neighborhood. Sometimes, he said, the piles of discarded dressers and busted TVs could rise above eight feet. And as soon as the city came to clear the area, another heap would form. Finally, at their wits’ end, Dan and Lou decided to purchase a concrete Buddha statue from a local nursery. They figured out how to anchor it in the ground so it wouldn’t be stolen and placed it between a couple trees on the median. The couple isn’t Buddhist, but they chose Buddha because, as Dan said, “he’s neutral.”

A couple months later, the transformation began. One morning, Dan came out to see that the Buddha had been carefully painted white. A few days later, offerings of apples and oranges began to appear. Soon someone built a small red box to keep the rain off the statue. The offerings got more elaborate, the visitors more numerous, and crime began to fall. The Vietnamese Buddhist community had discovered the Buddha and groups began to pray their daily. By the time the podcast was recorded, the shelter under which the statue sat had been enlarged so that pilgrims could pray under its roof. The Buddha had been painted gold and many more ornaments had been added. It had become a real shrine with 70 visitors a day, and on the high holy days, Dan and his wife were overwhelmed with visitors knocking on their door with gifts of food and wine for the couple who created this sacred site with a simple lawn ornament.

In listening to Dan’s story, I am struck by his decision to take action. Were it me, I would likely have grumbled about the trash heap and maybe called the city to clean up the trash, but I never would have bought a Buddha. As desperate and absurd as his plan was, I am impressed that Dan believed he could and must act to create a better community.

In his book, Community: The Structure of Belonging, Peter Block writes that “most sustainable improvements in community occur when citizens discover their own power to act…it is when citizens stop waiting for professionals or elected leadership to do something, and decide they can reclaim what they have delegated to others, that things really happen.” It’s not that Block believes that professionals or officials are unimportant, but he believes their ability to create lasting change is limited. “Organized professional systems,” he writes, “are capable of delivering services, but only associational life is capable of delivering care.” The professional systems in Oakland could have continued to clean up the trash on the median. They could have posted signs and issued citations. But only someone truly invested in that place could provide the care needed for real transformation.

We don’t know what professional systems the people of Jerusalem could count on when they fell on hard times. Whatever they were, they were clearly not enough to care for the man outside the Beautiful Gate. The line that stood out for me as I read this passage was, “All the people saw him walking and praising God, and they recognized him as the one who used to sit and ask for alms…” They recognize the man. Like the heap outside Dan Stevenson’s house, he had become a fixture there, so much so that the people have stopped really noticing him. Some may have passed him every day without ever being curious about his situation. Others may have grumbled that someone ought to do something about the man. Some probably tossed a little change his way but never considered the underlying issues that kept him outside the gate year after year. None of them had truly seen that man and taken responsibility for his well-being.

Commentators typically focus on the miraculous element of this story, but the words themselves draw our attention to a rather unmiraculous act. That of Peter looking at the man and the man looking back. Four times in three sentences the author uses different words for seeing to highlight the point. “When he saw Peter and John about to go into the Temple, he asked for alms. Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, ‘Look at us.’ And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from him.” I believe the reason the writer pays so much attention to this intense exchange is because Peter is the first to truly see this man, to recognize their connection to each other, to recognize their belonging to one another. And I believe it is in this moment of recognition that the man’s healing is truly accomplished. In the moment when we recognize our belonging to one another and accept our accountability toward each other, when we realize we cannot walk by the person or the pile of trash one more day, the transformation begins.

Block writes about this sense of belonging essential to community building. “What I consider mine I will build and nurture. The work then is to seek in our communities a wider and deeper sense of emotional ownership; it means fostering among all of a community’s citizens a sense of ownership and accountability.” And accountability, he says, “is a willingness to care for the whole.”

I think it’s this sense of ownership and community that John Phillip Sousa is afraid of losing when he writes this essay on “The Menace of Mechanical Music in 1906; that when people can easily listen to professional musicians, they will lose their sense of ownership over music, the understanding that music is something we create together for the good of the whole; that each of us has a voice to be raised. And if his rhetoric is a little over the top, his prediction seems prescient. Recording technology has radically changed the way we listen to and create music. A century after he wrote, there can be no doubt that people make much less music with friends and family. The national throat has weakened. The national chest has shrunk. And music has largely been left to the professionals.
Music and community clean-up are just two examples of a larger trend toward professionalization over the last century or longer. In areas as diverse as healthcare, home improvement, food production, and faith, amateurs have slowly ceded their power and authority to professionals who are educated and authorized as the experts. Our work has become more and more specialized, and with this specialization we have lost a sense of ownership over our neighborhoods, our bodies, our food, and our spiritualities. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the specialized training that other have. I am happy to call someone to fix my plumbing and thankful that I am not expected to give myself a colonoscopy. Even so, the move from being creators to being consumers comes with a price for our communities. Block says that when we look to others to create our communities, “it lets citizens off the hook and breeds…entitlement.” Over time there are fewer people like Dan and Peter, willing to take action to create community and more specialists assuming it must be someone else’s job.

But I believe that tide is turning. On her mantle, a friend of mine has a framed piece of cross-stitching bordered with embroidered flowers. It reads, “We Make Our Own Shit,” which she says works on a lot of levels. Psychological, biological, and in her case, D-I-Y. She’s one of those people, perhaps like some of you, with a loom in her dining room and homemade yogurt cooling in jars on her bathroom floor. This is the way I’ve always thought of do-it-yourself, and I’ve been amazed, inspired, and intimidated by those of you who are growers of food, brewers of beer, quilters and carpenters, and community problem solvers. I am not a crafty or handy person. But when I think about Dan and Peter I realize the spirit of D-I-Y is bigger than I had assumed. It is not just about being handy or crafty but about a spirit of creativity and responsibility, a spirit of action and empowerment to build the world we want to live in.

Block writes that when we choose that spirit of accountability, far from finding ourselves ill-equipped and in need of the experts, we will discover that, “we currently have all the capacity, expertise…and wealth required to end unnecessary suffering and create an alternative future.” When we turn from hoping others will act to doing it ourselves, when we take accountability for the well-being of the communities in which we live and of all their members, we will be struck, not by the burden of our deficits, but by the abundance of our gifts.
I want to close with a word about the scripture I thought I was going to preach on. One of the disadvantages of not being here for several weeks, is that I have no idea what’s been going on in worship, so when I sent Shelly my scripture for today, she said she was happy to read it but added very gently that she had preached on it just two weeks ago.

That story that our great minds both picked, sees a huge crowd listening to Jesus’ teaching. As it starts to get late, the disciples encourage Jesus to wrap it up so that the people can make the journey into the town to find food and shelter for the night. Then Jesus turns to them and says, “You give them something to eat.”
That line has been echoing in my head this week as I thought about what it means to have a do-it-yourself faith. “You give them something to eat.” The words cut through all my feelings of inadequacy, all my apathy, all my certainty that there is someone else who should be doing this work. “You give them something to eat.” They remind me that there is no one else who can provide the care needed to create transformation, no one but us to build the world in which we long to live. And we have everything we need to make it happen. Amen.
Prayer
As we move into a time of prayer, I want to adapt the Christian tradition of the Prayers of the People, which usually moves from prayers for the world in to prayers for ourselves. Taking the theme of becoming accountable for creating the world in which we hope to live, I want to reverse that order and invite us to begin by praying for our own concerns and gradually visualize our light and love expanding in a wider and wider circle.
Let us pray:

Holy One, we come to you with the quiet concern hidden in our hearts, the hopes and fears known only to you. We name them now…

We give thanks for the gifts of family and friends, those trusted ones in our inner circle. We pray for them now…

We surround this church and all its members with loving concern. We pray for the community we are creating…

We open our circle again to include the whole city of Gainesville. We pray for the challenges that face us and giving thanks for the many gifts which reside here…

We surround now our nation, praying for justice and wisdom for the leaders and for the people…

We see our community expanding to include all nations, asking for peace and safety for all…

Finally God, we pray for all that is, acknowledging our insignificance beside the cosmos, asking to be shown our place in the care of the universe…

Amen.