I have two readings I'd like to share with you this morning. The first is from the Greek poet, Cavafy. The poem is called "The City."

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is -- like a corpse -- buried.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, destroying and wasting."

You will find no new lands; you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
and you will grow grey in these same homes.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other.
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.

And from the prophet, Jeremiah:

"See the welfare of the city and pray to God on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

After church today, something exciting is happening. About a hundred church members, myself and Reverend Green included, will spread out in small teams across the neighborhood around the church and meet our neighbors. We're going to find out who our neighbors are and what concerns and dreams they have for our neighborhood. Today's walk will be followed later by two others: One in June and one in September, just before the Democratic Party primary which, for all intents and purposes in Washington is the election. The ultimate goal of these series of walks is not simply to listen; it is to make social and political change. Based on our conversations with our neighbors today, we will formulate an agenda for city elections this fall and call on candidates to declare their support for our agenda.

During our walks in June and September, we will be focusing on voter turnout, reaching out to, I forget the technical term for them, but the under-motivated voter, the people who vote some of the time but not as often as we'd like them to. We'll be trying to turn them out and we'll be passing out cards detailing our agenda and encouraging our neighbors to support that agenda. And the good news is, we're not just doing this alone as All Souls' our sister churches in the Washington Interfaith Network, or WIN, will be doing the same all over this city. All told, we'll be walking in more than 40 precincts between now and the primary election in what will almost certainly be the largest non-candidate-specific voter-turnout effort ever in this city.

Why all the fuss? Why now? This is a watershed year, a watershed election for the District of Columbia, with the potential at least to dramatically change the power balance in the District. About half the people on the City Council are running for something else this year. There could be lots of turnover on the Council. And, for the first time in eight years, we actually have a competitive mayoral race coming up which gives us the leverage to make a real difference in our city. And the next four years are going to be an important time for the city; lots of decisions will be being made that answer the question, "Where is the city going and who is our city for?" Big projects like the redevelopment of the Anacostia waterfront will fundamentally alter the character of this city and we want to make sure that we have a say in what this city will be and who this city is for. Because a church isn't a political institution, first and foremost. It is a moral and spiritual institution. And so we don't simply enter into this political fray for political ends, but because we have a moral and spiritual vision for our city. And really, that extends to our nation as a whole.

This morning I want to share with you some of that vision as I see it. I want to say that I found inspiration this morning in an unlikely place, a place called the Book of Numbers. Now, I'm betting that some of you don't even know what the Book of Numbers is. You might be imagining a guy on a phone at the racetrack, flipping through his little book of numbers there; that's not the book of numbers I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Bible. The Book of Numbers is one of one of the five books of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Torah that, according to ancient lore, were written by Moses.

You need to know that the Book of Numbers is an unlikely place for a religious liberal like me to be going for inspiration, because Numbers, along with its companion pieces, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, can be dangerous territory for a liberal and, really, for many modern people. Here's where you get the passage that says homosexuality is an abomination. Here's where an "eye for an eye" kind of justice is par for the course. Here's where the disabled are proclaimed unworthy and therefore are forbidden from being priests. Here's where the Bible justifies slavery and where elaborate purification codes force women into isolation for seven days during the time of menstruation. What's more, God makes threats in these books. He details -- and it's a "he" in this case -- an elaborate series of punishments if the people disobey the rules. The first time they transgress, he will rain terror down on them. The second time, send a plague. The third time, smite them with his own staff.

Remember a few weeks ago I talked about the difference between conservative and liberal theology in America? I talked about how there's a difference between folks who believe in a God who is a strict father and God who is a nurturing parent? Well, this is pretty much strict father stuff right here in Numbers. And in the ancient world, there were lots of tribes that were competing for land and territory. Each tribe had its own god, and when they went into battle, the tribe that won, they believed had won because their god was stronger than the other tribe's god. I want to say as a disclaimer, some people use these images of God, here in this part of the Old Testament, to paint the entire Old Testament picture of God as brutal and warmongering. That's not true. I want to say, there are other life-giving images of God in the Hebrew Bible as well.

But, tucked among all of these "thou shalt nots" and all of these threats of punishments, there is a striking image of mercy in the Book of Numbers. And it's an image of the city. In the thirty-fifth chapter of the Book of Numbers, God says to Moses, "Tell your people when they cross the Jordan into the Promised Land, then you shall select cities to be cities of refuge. The cities that you designate shall be six. These six cities shall serve as refuge for the Israelites and for the residents or transient aliens among them. So that anyone who kills a person without intent may flee there." Now what does that mean, "so that anyone who kills a person without intent can flee there"? Well, in this eye-for-an-eye world that I described for you, justice demanded that any murder, even an unintentional murder, required that the murderer be killed. Customs allowed the family of a person who was killed to track down the murderer and kill them, even if the murder was an accident. And so, in Deuteronomy, we're actually given a "for instance," in this example of the city of refuge. It says this: Suppose someone goes into the forest with another to cut wood. And when one of them swings the axe to cut down the tree, the head slips from the handle and strikes the other person who then dies. The killer may flee to one of these cities of refuge and live, because it was an accident. I'm resisting the temptation to make a Dick Cheney joke right here. [Laughter] City of refuge. I promised I wasn't going to say that. [Laughter] But all joking aside, think about that image of the city of refuge. Think about the nature of justice that is raised by it, an oasis of mercy in a desert of otherwise unremitting "justice," a place of reprieve, a place where someone down on their luck can get a fresh start. A sanctuary of sorts.

I find myself drawn to this image because I realize I've always seen this city as a city of refuge, as a place where people who may have been victims of the larger society's notion of what is just, misconceptions of what is just, have come and found a place and found a home here in the city of refuge. I think about how this has happened throughout the city, about how this city provided a refuge for African Americans to build up communities and cultures when restrictive covenants and other racist practices prevented them from living elsewhere. I think of how this city has provided a refuge for gay and lesbian people to live in relative openness and freedom when they couldn't elsewhere. I think of how this city has been, for generations, a place where immigrants and refugees have come and built institutions and communities and lives here, having fled a nation that was filled with violence or injustice or where they simply wanted to have new opportunity. I think of how, for young adults throughout the generations, this city has been a place to explore freedom. For all these people and more, this city has been a city of refuge.

I think that what this passage is trying to teach us is that there need to be places of refuge. There need to be sanctuaries in the city for all of the people. The city needs to be for all souls. That's what I think the passage is trying us this morning. That's what I think is meant by the city of refuge. To think about this city as a city of refuge forces us to ask "Who will our city be for?" Increasingly, the answer to that question is that the City of Washington, D.C., will be for the rich and for the white. You can see the cranes as you walk out of church this morning over by the Columbia Heights Metro station. You can see, if you spend time in this neighborhood, how, building by building, the poor are forced out, the immigrants are forced out, people of color are forced out. The neighborhood is going condo, which means going rich and white for the most part.

This means that the people who work here, the people whose churches are here, the people whose community institutions are here are instead scattered to the nether regions of the Beltway, forced to build new lives, forced to find new communities, found new churches and start their lives all over again. I think that the City of Washington must be a city for all souls, and I think that that vision must be lifted up in the churches of this city.

But this becomes difficult for us to talk about when we realize -- and when I say "we" I mean many of us in this church, not all of us -- our own complicity in making a city less of a city of refuge. It's a complicated thing. It's easier for me to use my own story as an example, and be personal here. I live in a home just a few blocks south of All Souls Church, near the corner of 16th and U Streets. This is what is called a "transitioning" neighborhood in Washington, D.C., a mixed neighborhood racially and economically. I had the good fortune, thanks in part to the help of the church, to buy a little apartment there a few years ago. Over the last few years, I've seen the value of that apartment increase substantially. Next door to my apartment building are two buildings that are subsidized housing. One is for the working poor and one is a kind of transitional housing.

Every once in a while at night on Saturdays I'll sit in the park outside my front door and I'll have conversations with people who are taking their dogs out for a walk. People will say things to me like, "Rob, I want to get the absolute best price that I can for the investment that I've made on my house in Washington, D.C. You see those properties, right next door there? They are bringing down the values in the neighborhood. You know, if they went condo, we'd get a better price on our place, right?" And they say it with a kind of matter of factness, and this is said a lot in Washington, D.C. these days. But it's said with a kind of matter of factness that suggests that what they are saying is, on the face of it, rational and true and morally acceptable. You know. As if the maximization of profit were a foregone conclusion for how we should live our lives and govern our relationships in this city.

But it's not. We need a broader moral vision for our city. We need to recognize that what Jeremiah said is true. Jeremiah said, "Seek the welfare of the city, for in its welfare is your welfare." I think Jeremiah had a vision of the city that was more of an interdependent vision of self-interests than that of my friends in the park walking their dogs. I think it's a vision that recognizes that a city is kind of an ecology. We can borrow something from the environmental movement here and imagine a city as a complicated ecology of people and forces and markets and institutions and that if that ecology is going to be healthy, all of those people and all of those pieces have to be a part of it to make it work. Everyone has to find a place in the ecology for the ecology to be healthy.

We have to raise up a vision for the city that is clear that the maximization of profit is not a morally acceptable or sufficient calculus. Which means that at uncomfortable moments, when we are talking with people in the parks or talking with people in the streets, or having a dinner and inevitably that conversation comes up about housing prices in Washington, D.C., we have to be able to say "the maximization of profit is not a morally acceptable calculus here." And then people will cough into their wine glasses and feel all uncomfortable [Laughter], but it's got to be said. It's got to be said. We have to find the balance. People say to me "Well, Rob, but my child's college education is riding on the maximization of my profit," and "my retirement is riding on the maximization of my profit," and all those things are true. But we have to hold an ecological vision of the city. We have to have a broader sense of our own self-interest as individuals in the city, for in the city's welfare we will find our own welfare.

But I think something else needs to happen too. You know, I believe that any kind of social transformation needs to ultimately start from a spiritual transformation. And here I want to lift up the work of Howard Thurman. Howard Thurman was, for many years, the Dean of the Chapel at Boston University, a black preacher and theologian, he was actually at B.U. when Dr. King was getting his doctorate there and was a big influence on King. Thurman often talked about the city of refuge; it was a metaphor in his preaching. But one time, Howard Thurman had this to say: "Ultimately, a person's only refuge in this world is the heart of another person." Ultimately, a person's only refuge in this world is the heart of another person. Thurman was an activist but he was also a mystic. And he understood that social change must be grounded in a spiritual transformation or it will ultimately fail.

This morning I would like to ask all of us to consider how much room there is in our own hearts for us to think of our hearts as a place of refuge for our neighbors in this city, for all the people of this city. How much room is there in our hearts? Are our hearts a refuge for the stranger and for the neighbor? A change of heart without a change of hands and feet can deteriorate into sentiment. And so, I will invite you to join us after church, if you would like, to go out into the neighborhood, to meet our neighbors, to meet people who may be strangers to you, and to understand a little bit more what the ecology of this neighborhood is like. That vision of the city of refuge comes from the very beginning of the Bible, but in the last pages of the Bible, in the Book of Revelation, the Prophet John offers us another vision of the city with which I'd like to close this morning. He writes:

Then I saw the holy city, coming down out of heaven from God and I heard a voice say, "Its gates will never be shut by day and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and honor of all the nations. There God will be with God's people and will wipe away every tear from their eye. Death will be no more. Mourning will be no more. Behold, I am making all things new."

Let us be among the people whose hearts are made new so that our city may be made new, a city of refuge for all souls.

Amen.