SI, SE PUEDE: a Memoir

SI, SE PUEDE: A Memoir

John Heinemeier, Pastor

PREFACE

It has been said that the main thing Jesus brought people was hope. This brief memoir is about hope. Hope for the poor. Hope for the city. Hope for the church. Si, se puede. Yes, it is possible. Yes, we can. The God over us all is a Si, se puede God.

I write this memoir partially as a teaching instrument. These remembrances were incubated in the bowels of great American cities. I believe the inner-city church especially needs to be a teaching church. For its own sake the larger church needs to listen to the church of the poor for the “rest of the story.” Bishops and seminarians and suburban pastors and laity and boards that decide church policy need to “come on down” or have urban pastors and lay leaders “come on up” to make the work of the whole church more responsive and real.

So there is a prophetic word here. A subversive word. A word from below. A word of hope. Read on and lift up your heads!

Chapter One

ROOTS

It was July, 1963. We drove up to St. Matthew’s LutheranChurch in Brooklyn, New York, in my wife’s old red and white Ford, and we sat there and cried. At the seminary I had requested to be sent to any metropolitan area on salt water. I had always been a bit adventuresome, but this was taking it to a new level. There was no one there in front of St. Matthew’s to meet us. We knew not a single person in this whole foreboding place called Brooklyn. We were in over our heads.

I was born in 1936 in San Angelo, Texas. Both my dad and my grandfather had been Lutheran pastors whose entire ministry was in Texas. After San Angelo, my dad accepted a Call to SalemLutheranChurch, Malone, Texas (population: 200). That should read near Malone; the church and parsonage were on a dirt road three miles north of Malone.

Thus began the halcyon years of my childhood. I attended a two-room school, with ink wells and wooden floors, throughout my elementary education, a school many of the students traveled to and from each day by horseback. I remember “dare base”, “crack the whip”, and softball at recess with dried cow patties for bases. Each summer alongside African-American field hands chopping and picking cotton in HillCounty that had been producing the second highest cotton totals of any county in the nation just a few years earlier (HillCounty). My brother and I shared a bicycle with only one speed, but with mud flaps. Our family raised most of the food we ate, both livestock and produce. The only time we broke that routine was for the occasional trip to Malone for store-bought hamburgers.

I remember the rain on our tin roof at night and the soft water from the cistern and the hard water from the well. We used soft water for our weekly bath in a Number Two wash tub. I remember live candles on the tree at home after the Christmas Eve Program, fresh bread and pecan pie baked by mother, shorts and shirts she made from feed sacks, potatoes kept under the house during winter, Johnson grass and cockleburrs in the cotton patch and white weeds around the chicken house. I remember freezing my tail in our two-hole outhouse in the winter, and “that man with the silver bullet” and Marion Anderson singing “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen” on our tube radio. I remember my mother calling out to me in the front yard when FDR died, and such generous farm people, particularly the Willie Krueger family. I remember going barefoot most of the year and each year’s fresh spring grass and loving an old Jersey cow I milked each day. I remember ringing the church bells at the Angelus each Saturday at sundown and sending up gallon-bucket lids over the church roof to be caught by the constant plains wind and carried far, far behind me. I remember “mustang grape jelly” and southern-fried pullets and corn on the cob, both less that an hour from their places of growth. Those childhood years in Malone were good years.

The next place my dad took us as a family was to St. Michael’s LutheranChurch, Winchester, Texas, population: 150. Indoor plumbing for the first time since San Angelo! I remember Confirmation and First Communion in my first suit and “Finlandia” played by some itinerate harpist at St Michael’s and the best bar-b-que and homemade noodles in the world. In recent years, that tiny congregation was awarded an entire square block in the middle of Winchester to build a community center with fifteen “serious” bar-b-que pits and a beer shed out back. That center is booked nearly every weekend of the year for birthday and anniversary celebrations; wedding receptions and reunions…a veritable “Babbette’s Feast” on a weekly basis.

Probably too early, I was sent away at the age of fourteen to a Lutheran boarding high school and junior college in Austin, with a trajectory toward ordination. There was mandatory music appreciation every week with classical music on 78’s on a portable phonograph. There I studied Latin, German, and Greek and went to chapel every day. But there I also rolled shotput steel balls down the dormitory’s long concrete-floored hallway at 3:00 AM and slept on mattresses at night on the sun roof in this pre-AC time. For two weeks we gorged ourselves on fresh eggs and produce from the “Spring Collection” from central Texas congregations. I peddled “Ice Cold Pop” at TexasUniversity football games, was part of the first and last Senior Class Trip to Galveston, and I loved Joyce Thorssen, a cheerleader for our males-only school teams. For a whole year as a college freshman we males awaited the utopian addition of coeds to our college, but then were devastated in losing the election for student body president in that eschatological year.

To help pay the tuition I began going up to Arlington, Wisconsin, then Dekalb, Illinois each summer to can peas, corn and lima beans for Del Monte, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. I remember a student government trip to St Paul, Minnesota in February, with no overcoat, where the temperature dropped a full hundred degrees during the time it took to fly there.

My parents moved several more times during my formative years, always to new German Lutheran ghettoes in Texas, but really I was footloose as of l950, when I went away to Austin.

Concordia Seminary in St. Louis gave me a good, orthodox theological training, and I met my wife, Sharon, while a seminary intern in Peoria, Illinois. I remained at Concordia to earn a Master of Sacred Theology, but it was that time of courtship and marriage to Sharon that saved my life during those final years in St Louis. A portent for the future, I found myself driving past maybe thirty Lutheran congregations on Sundays to cross the Mississippi and attend a small African-American Lutheran church in Alton, Illinois. In my graduate year I served as an Associate at St. Philip’s LutheranChurch, a African-American congregation in inner-city St Louis. I still recall the first purely social encounter either of us had had with an African-American couple when Sharon and I were invited for dinner after Sunday workship to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Morris Walker. Without knowing or planning it, I was being groomed inwardly for my particular life’s work in a place called Brooklyn and The Bronx and Roxbury, Boston and East Baltimore.

“To any large city on salt water.” That was my response to the seminary exit interview. Several weeks later Sharon and I opened the Call envelope. It read “St. Matthew’s, Brooklyn, New York.” Big city. Salt water. More than we could handle? Perhaps. Little did we know that this placement would be one of the most providential things that ever happened to us.

THINKING ABOUT IT

I have been asked countless times during my forty-five years of ministry, Why this particular focus and work? Why all these years working cross-culturally, both racially and economically?

Some of my reasons may not be so noble: trying to be different from Jim, my older brother and friend, who also is a pastor, the need to be needed, even a need to “fix” what appears to be broken. But I believe most of my best reasons come out of these childhood years:

1. Solidarity in these childhood years, at least in the workplace, with economically deprived African-Americans in some of the hardest work known to humankind: The cotton industry, prior to mechanization.

2. Growing up in a “simple” lifestyle made necessary by a depression and wartime environment (but not too dissimilar from lifestyles among the poor even today).

3. Disillusionment with the provincialism, insularity and myopia of so much of German Lutheranism in this country, and its often theo/ecclesial smugness.

4. A desire, from early on, to try to follow Jesus of Nazareth in as direct and simple way as possible (e.g., I have had many opportunities and even encouragements to “move on up” the career ladder, for example, to use my STM degree in some explicit way or join church-wide staffs, but none afforded the more direct calling and opportunity to be where Jesus is among his best friends—the poor, and especially those in our cities.)

Chapter Two

ST. MATTHEW’S, BROOKLYN 1963-1967

It was a good place to start. On that July afternoon in 1963 Sharon and I had driven up to St Matthew’s LutheranChurch in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. My prayer had been answered: Canarsie borders tidal JamaicaBay to the east…salt water.

Canarsie got its name from the Canarsee Native Americans, the tribe that made the infamous sale of Manhattan to the Dutch in the early 1600’s for some sixty guilders (about $39 today). Canarsie was early-on part of Flatlands, one of the five original Dutch towns on Long Island, having been sold to those same Dutch by Canarsee Chief Wametappack in 1665 for “one coat, one pair of shoes, four axes, two cans of brandy, a half barrel of beer, and one hundred fathoms of white wampum.”

It was a fishing village through the 1800’s—St Matthew’s was founded in l879—and in the 1920’s Italians joined the mostly German immigrants, followed later by Jews. Today it comprises 312 square blocks and a population of 96,000, mostly African-American. Jimmy Durante, Al Roker, and Curtis Sliwa (founder of the Guardian Angels) are among the notables who once lived in Canarsie. St. Matthew’s, first glimpsed that July afternoon “like a spouse in an arranged marriage,” (Rick Lischer, Duke Divinity) was a small congregation left over from that earlier fishing village era.

My ordination on the second Sunday of July (even though I knew no one in Brooklyn I wanted to get started) demonstrated my initial naiveté. The bishop, who had never visited this remote congregation, did not visit it now, but appointed the “Circuit Counselor,” Erwin Prange, to ordain me. And so on that auspicious occasion, during a rather violent thunderstorm, with only two pastors present and a probably somewhat tentative congregation, I received my Holy Orders (or at least I think I did).

It was a good place for a greenhorn pastor to start, and during the four years we were there many of what would become signal accents of my ministry began to emerge.

• By the end of 1963 we had received some seventeen new adult members and among that group were the congregation’s first African-American members.
• We did a VacationBibleSchool each summer, but by the third year we were bussing in African-American children from Canarsie’s only public housing project, Brukelen Houses.
• During my tenure at St. Matthew’s we established weekly Holy Communion
• And historic liturgical vestments and a crucifix from Oberammergau (Sharon and I visited Europe in 1966) and kneelers—more formal and historical liturgical practices on the ascendancy in the LutheranChurch in the United Statesat that time. I attended my first Easter Vigil, that ancient first celebration of Easter late on Easter Eve, at nearby Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church in 1966—in a storefront sanctuary so filled with incense you could scarcely see two rows in front of you,
• We completed a major expansion of the St. Matthew’s building during these years, to handle both the growing numbers and programming.
• I, who had known only German Lutherans in my sheltered upbringing, now readily and necessarily became ecumenical. In fact, in a community of many churches, but dominated by the huge Holy Family Roman Catholic Church with its Monsignor Vincent Genova, I dared to coalesce and chair the first Canarsie Clergy Association.
• Moonlighting in hospital chaplaincy to help meet the budgetary needs at St. Matthew’s became important—one day a week at KingsCountyHospital, and in later parishes at GreenpointHospital, Lutheran Hospital of East New York, and Boston’s VeteransAdministrationHospital.
• Kenneth Fosse, a son of the congregation and Paul Marshall, for a time our parish organist and now an Episcopal bishop, would follow me into ordained ministry.
• There were forays into social ministry with the establishment of a seniors and a mentoring program, but the critical social needs of this community were modest compared to the communities with whom I would be ministering.

The acculturation of this rather naïve country boy from Texas into the warp and woof of The Big Apple continued for some time. I remember being invited over to Mike and Gussie Lantieri’s home for Sunday dinner. I had never known any Italians before, nor had I enjoyed lasagna before. Thinking it was the main course, I had several helpings, only to find out that the fried chicken and roast beef and ham and mashed potatoes and stringed beans and corn were still to come. I remember attending a community event at HolyFamilyChurch and being introduced to a Mr. Silverstein and simply assuming that he was also German (I also had known no Jews). I thought I was “too busy” and thus missed the August, 1963 March on Washington (although I did get to hear Dr. King several years later outside the United Nations Building).

Bagels and deli’s and the New York City subway for five cents (Canarsie was the last stop on the “LL”), and “Once in Royal David’s City” for the first time at Riverside Church at Christmas, and St. Matthew’s member Joe Hall’s assessment of ever so many of his fellow citizens in Brooklyn as “joiks,” and the 1964 Worlds Fair in Queens, and the building of the Verazzano Bridge (with enough room on the tops of both of its towers for two tennis courts, both of which were several feet further apart on the top than the bottom because of the curvature on the earth) and, of course, that defining moment of President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963—all these impressions slowly but surely turned this rube into at least a fledgling inhabitant of one of the world’s great cities.

Sharon taught in two Lutheran schools during these years—in JacksonHeights, Queens and in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We took the first of maybe 25 summer vacation trips to coastal Maine, and, in 1966, a trip to Europe. A miscarriage saddened our lives and made us even more determined to have children soon.

In 1965 the Atlantic District of the LutheranChurch took a bold and overdue initiative: It established a new mission congregation in the middle of one of Brooklyn’s most devastated neighborhoods: Brownsville. I was part of that planting while in Canarsie, having no idea that I would be its second pastor ten years later.

I was considered for a Call as a missionary to Lagos, Nigeria, but did not feel up to that. And then in 1967, St. John the EvangelistLutheranChurch in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a very progressive African-American congregation, called me to be one of its pastors. I declined the Call, but then they sent another Call within months. It seemed that something was up, and we decided to move to Williamsburg in 1967.

THINKING ABOUT IT

How is a new pastor to get started, to learn the ropes, to find his/her legs? Although there are now three-year startup mentoring periods for new pastors, back then you were simply taken out into the middle of the pond, dropped, and expected to swim to the shore. Most of us made it through, but most of us also made many mistakes along the way. Those congregations that, because of their smaller size, are relegated to often accept first-call candidates deserve a special place in heaven. As I neared retirement in 2007-08 I asked each of the congregations I had served if I could come back one final time to preach. All of them invited me to do so as a kind of final act of closure, but it was to St. Matthew’s in particular that I needed to go back and say a profound Thank You for who they were and what they did in my formation as a pastor.

In my second Call, to St. John the Evangelist, I would come into my own in cross-cultural (both racially and economically) ministry, but it is clear to me now that these four years in Canarsie were also definitely cross-cultural as well. Brooklyn, New York, is about as far culturally from rural Malone, Texas, as entering a new and foreign country. As difficult (for all parties) as it was, I am so eternally grateful for this discontinuous placement! Over night my world changed, opened, broadened, complexified, with attendant adjustment in theology and ecclesiology. I broke through to a more real, comprehensive and beautifully multifaceted world simply by being plopped down in a place called Brooklyn. It was one of the best things that ever happened to both my wife and me.