By the Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
February 17, 2013
First Sunday in Lent
Luke 4: 1-11
The Cowtown Christ is a series of sermons that reimagines the ministry of Christ as if it was taking place in Fort Worth today. Please remember that this is a work of fiction, happening in a fictionalized Fort Worth. While many events, facts, places, institutions, and characters are real people, The Cowtown Christ, her followers, most of those she meets, and her adversaries are completely fictional, as are any of the events that take place in her life.
The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesse, The Cowtown Christ.
“The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark 1:1
Jesse grew up a child of Mexican immigrants. They lived a few blocks off Berry Street in a tiny neighborhood along with other Mexican immigrants. Her parents both worked hard, and so did she from very young.
Jesse was always very spiritual. In fact, when she was very young, her parents worried about it. Even as a pre-schooler, she said she saw angels and even talked to them. She’d say, “Look there’s Gabriel! He’s waving hello!” And of course there’d be nobody there. She prayed all the time, but it was almost like talking to herself. She called God “mi Papa,” and would say, “Mi Papa, this is your daughter Jesse.” They were very concerned and they took her to their priest, who recommended she visit a Franciscan friar who was part of a group of Franciscans who worked with the homeless on East Lancaster.
They met and talked a long time, and the Franciscan came out with his hand on the little girl’s head and said, “This young girl has extraordinary insight. She is deeply spiritual. But people will always be uncomfortable around her. They may even think something’s wrong with her.”
Despite this, Jesse did well. Jesse went to Paschal and excelled there, and from there she attended UTA, where she took as many religion courses as she could and majored in social work.
Then she had to decide what to do.
What was always first on her mind was, “What does God, mi Papa, want me to do?” She saw God’s hand at work everywhere. Even though she didn’t talk about it as much as she used to, she saw visible evidence of the Kingdom of God everywhere, in everyone she meet; she could see their angels, and she could see their demons. It was an odd thing, and she knew it, so she didn’t talk about it; but it didn’t trouble her.
She decided to start by working at a church.
The First Temptation: A Big Steeple
“And [the devil]took Jesus to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the Temple, and said to Him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here…” (Luke 4: 9)
She was hired by a big-steeple protestant church to be their director of mission and outreach. She soon began a Bible Study/fellowship group mixing church members and the poor and the homeless. People began to get very excited about it—more excited about it than they were about the regular Sunday service and the pastor. Many well-off church members got involved.
It was exciting, but it was also beginning to reveal some fault lines in the church. There had long been a lot of tension in the church. Some of those tensions had over time turned into personal animosity, and a power struggle over the future of the church.
Finally some of the richest church members visited her one day and said, “Jesse, we really believe in you and in what you’re doing. We’ve collected enough money to back you in starting your own church, with you as the leader. We’ve already got a location off of I-20, where we could start building our mega-church. You could be a liberal Joel Osteen.”
Jesse said, “That’s very nice, but I’m not interested.”
They said, “But Jesse, it’d be your church. You could do it your way. We love what you’re teaching. And we’ve got enough money to pay you well and get the church off to a nice start—and of course we can help you with the business end and strategic planning!”
Jesse smiled. “I know you mean well, but it’s not completely your better angels guiding this. You’ve been in a power struggle with the traditionalists and the pastor for years, and now you’ve just given up on them. But God doesn’t give up on anybody, and neither do I. Seek to forgive and be reconciled, not pick up your marbles and go somewhere else. And I know something else about you, too. You control Fortune Five Hundred companies. Deep down you think you can control me. I’m young, I’m idealistic—you think you’ll make a church the way you want it. But you don’t know me as well as you think. And you need to know yourselves a good deal better. When you have a greater grasp of yourselves, you’ll be able to live into the good you intend to do a lot better. And when you do know yourselves better, come see me.”
They were furious. And that’s how Jesse got fired from her first job.
The Second Temptation: Bread Alone
“Women and Men Do Not Live By Bread Alone…” (Luke 4: 4)
One of the local homeless shelters was looking for a director. It wasn’t one of the biggest ones, and they didn’t have a big salary, but Jesse had a great heart for the poor and the helpless, a good education, and was a good administrator, and she got the job. Within a week she was both shocked and fired up by what she’d found out. Many on the street were addicts of some kind, but a large number were mentally ill and without anyone to provide them services. Women on the street were certain to get victimized by men—it was almost the definition of being a homeless female. All were despondent and felt that they could never rise above their situation and just survived day-by-day.
The homeless weren’t easy to deal with, either. They lived by the rules of survival, and they were good at it. Her staff of social workers and volunteers got exasperated by their greed and conniving. Jesse had a very different view. She loved their greed and cunning. To her it was an expression of a lust for life that she thought was sorely missing among the folks she saw scurrying around Sundance Square. People would complain about the homeless stealing, or lying, or taking advantage of others, or always asking for a little more. Jesse knew that their behavior was wrong, but she admired it, too, because the system was so completely stacked against them that it was a wonder they hadn’t given up on life altogether.
The case workers would sometimes say, “They won’t help themselves,” but even they knew why, because the case workers had the same problem that their clients did—a maddening bureaucratic nightmare of red tape, which it was crazy-making to navigate. Try as hard as you want, in the end it was impossible. Jesse loved her case workers dearly, and knew they were here first and foremost because they cared about the homeless, but the system was eating away at their souls and making them question why they did it.
Then the budget battles came. Cuts were inevitable, and even as Jesse was appearing before city council to fight them, she knew there wasn’t much to be done, but still Jesse fought hard for more money. She didn’t make much progress, but it garnered her a lot of respect.
The Third Temptation: The Exclusively Political
“…It shall all be yours….” (Luke 4: 7)
So one of Fort Worth’s leading political king-makers came to her and said, “Listen, you’ve got tremendous cred right now. You’re charismatic, smart, attractive, and Hispanic. You’re the perfect political candidate for the future of Fort Worth. You could be the Hispanic Wendy Davis! The at-large seat on council is open. You should run for it. Then eventually, the Lege, or the House of Representatives. Think of the great things you could do!”
Jesse was tempted. For a moment she thought, “I can do politics my way, and no one would be able to control me.”
And then she thought, Okay, that’s the wrong way to think. For one thing, God can control me. What does mi Papa want me to do?
If she became a politician, she’d be caught up in the nitty-gritty of politics in a way that would make it very difficult for her to do the things she cared most about. Ultimately, you see, politics is about compromise. She loved compromise—it was an important value. But the values she was most interested in, those she didn’t want to compromise. She needed to be free to serve God and to help those who needed help the most.
And that, she thought, was everybody. It was the king-maker who mistook having a political ideology for having a soul. She loved him for it even as she knew how misguided that was. She didn’t blame him. She knew that he was trying to do what was right, as he understood it. It was just that there was so much more.
It was the case-workers and service providers who had really once been motivated by the best intentions but who’d been beaten down by the system.
It was well-intentioned church members who were frustrated because they felt like their spiritual needs, and the needs of the world, weren’t met in their churches.
It was the poor and needy and the victims of life, who believed that there was no one who would look out for them but themselves—and they didn’t trust themselves.
It was a society that made persons into commodities.
And it was institutions, whether government, or the church, or charities, or agencies, that believed that the world couldn’t survive without them, so they’d lost sight of their real mission in the struggle simply to survive.
What all these people needed was to see what she saw. She saw the City of God, la Ciudad de Dios, sitting over the City of Fort Worth. It was this magnificent city of God that was manifest in what was good in the city—the charitable acts of so many, the outreach of the city to the homeless, its increasing diversity.
But this City of God overlaid a Fort Worth that still had struggles and needs that made everyone frustrated that there just was so much to do. Many people believed in God, but didn’t believe that God had anything to do with their lives. They didn’t see the City of God overlaying and influencing and creating something new. They were living Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation.”
They believed in God in the sense that they believed that God was in heaven, and they’d see Him when they died. But they didn’t believe God was here, here and now. As much as they wished it, it was too much to hope for.
They needed Good News, the Good News Jesse knew was true: God is here. God is now. God is active. And God can and will work through you.
But to see that, people—and things—need to change. They believed the old news, that everything was bad, and that God wasn’t here with us, and we were on our own. Tears came to Jesse’s eyes when she thought of their sadness.
That’s when she knew what to do. She said no to the Kingmaker. She quit her job at the shelter.
It wasn’t that they were wrong—they just weren’t big enough.
And she began to go around saying, “I have Good News for you all. God is in Fort Worth. Right here, and right now. Believe the Good News, because the time for change is now.”
“The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel.” Mark 1: 15
“Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Matthew 4:17
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
Luke 4: 18-19
Cowtown Christ and The Cowtown Christ Loses Her Job@copyright 2013 Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch