"Lady Wisdom’s Call to Housing Justice": Sermon by Jill Shook

Jill Shook preached this sermon on Sunday, June 15, at the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena. To watch a recording, click here. (She starts preaching 40 minutes after the start of the worship service.)

Dr. Jill Shook preaching at FUMC

Lectionary Scriptures: Proverbs 8:1-4, and 9:1-3, Psalm 119:46 and Luke 4:18-19

Today I will be sharing several aspects my journey—about God at work in ways I never dreamed.  I hope that it will be an encouragement to you.

For Father’s Day, I want to start with a story about my father, Richard Shook. He was president of his class at Fullerton high school. He wanted to invite Lester Brown to come with his big band and have a dance at his school.  But not just his school, he wanted to invite all the other high schools in the area to participate.  The school administrators thought he was crazy and felt he would lose money. But he proved them wrong. He made money, and everyone had a fabulous time uniting the schools around the big band party. 

I guess a part of my dad seeped into my pores. 

Our family had two mottos: “Dream Big” and “Work hard so you can play hard”. As a youth, Dad would hang out in our grandfather’s orange groves and avocado orchards to work with the Braceros, a guest worker program for Mexicans to legally cross the border to gainfully work.

Dad learned Spanish from them and came to have a deep respect for these friends. So when our family took vacations to Mexico each year, we would hang out with the locals. Before we left Dad would say,  “go through all your clothes and bring what you haven’t used in the last year”  then we would drop them off at a church somewhere close to where we camped on the beaches, where we would fish, dig for clams, collect shells and have a blast with other families that joined us.

That love for the Hispanic world also seeped into my pores and I ended up spending years living in different countries in Latin America and taking university teams from across the country into different parts of Latin America and even across the ocean to Kenya. 

It takes faith to dream big.

But I didn’t start off with faith or dreaming big like my father.  Our family would bander for hours after dinner and I would laugh just because everyone was laughing, but part of me was dying inside because I didn’t even get the jokes. I worked hard to get Cs and Ds in high school, and I truly believed I was dumb.  I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t know myself.  I took the SAT and ACT test over and over until I got my scores high enough to go to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

While in college, there was a moment in the library when I was sitting with my friend Edith, giggling away.  I was also reading the Bible, and when I got to Psalm 119, verse 46 just seemed to bounce off the page and I felt like my whole body was vibrating.  I’d like to read it. 

“I will speak of your statutes before Kings and will not be put to shame”

I never dreamed that with all my struggles, that God could possibly use me to “speak thy testimonies before Kings and not be ashamed.” But God in his faithfulness has been tutoring me, speaking deep in my heart to believe this verse was for me… giving me the freedom to dream big.

It wasn’t until the 90s when I was taking classes at Fuller that I learned that I was dyslexic-in fact, in the severe category.  Finally, my life made sense to me. I didn’t process or think like others, but I wasn’t dumb. Outside of coming to know Christ this self-awareness was profound.  I began to learn how to embrace my dyslexia as a gift and began to love myself. 

The most important command in the Bible is to love God with all our heart, strength, mind and soul and love our neighbor as ourselves. On this Trinity Sunday, celebrating the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I’d like to add that this Great Command also is a trinity.  The question posed to Jesus was, “What is the most important command?” But Jesus essentially answered with three commands-love God, neighbor, and love self. All three are essential to truly demonstrate our love for God.

God in his grace and mercy has a way of taking those of us who don’t feel we have a voice, see our beauty or believe in ourselves, to bring experiences that help us see who we really are.

In Proverbs 8 and 9 in our lectionary reading for today, it refers to a more feminine side of God. Some call these chapters as describing Lady Wisdom. Lady Wisdom was also in the Methodist devotionals for this week. The Greek word for her is Sophia, referring back to Gen.1 in the creation story, when the earth was being formed, she was there at God’s side. Proverbs 8-9 show this bold, free spirited, daring and audacious Lady Wisdom calling from the street corners and dancing with sheer delight among the mountain tops, delighting in God’s creation.  I think we all have some of her in us, even fathers!

After college, I was a campus minister for seven years in San Jose, Fullerton, and Salem, Oregon. Yet, a part of me never felt adequate to work with College Students.  I was itching to spend time in Latin America, given that deep love for Latinos that I learned from my father. Somehow, I found that Lady Wisdom audacity to ask Food for the Hungry—an international relief and development organization—If they would allow me to create a program coordinating work teams from universities across the country to serve in developing nations.  They believed in me and that program was born.

We all need someone to believe in us. Even Jesus was limited in what he could do in his hometown of Nazareth, because the people didn’t believe him. One of the greatest gifts we can give is to believe in ourselves and others.

We asked for evaluations from the work team members, so we could continually improve the program. When teams from Harvard and Berkeley came, I was a nervous wreck. How could I possibly coordinate students from these universities?

When I looked at the “excellents” on their evaluations, I cried. That’s when I began to discover my gifts more fully and see them flourish. God teaches our hearts to see ourselves and humbly embrace that person.

We designed this program from the bottom up, harkening to the biblical understanding that the last will be first. Projects like solar water systems and craft cooperative were the ideas of the villagers and our teams came simply to work along with them around their dreams and goals. After a week, we already began to see prejudices melt.

I came back from living in Mexico completely burned out, so I took courses at Fuller in the school of intracultural studies, the school of psychology, and in the school of theology to regain that balance. Plus, I got a good dose of much needed therapy.

I was attending Lake Avenue Church at that time. And as I began to heal, again that audacious person that I was discovering found the courage to challenge that 5,000-member church to love its neighbors how can we love our neighbors if we don’t even know them? This church has a sea of primarily low-income Latino neighbors and at that time, the there was a 50% school dropout rate among the youth. All the while the church has many highly educated members that could come out and tutor these kids. We formed a team, researching afterschool programs from throughout the LA area. We decided to use the word “marriage” in the mission statement. We wanted a true marriage between the community and the church.  Marriage means mutually beneficial. It means a long-term commitment.   It means a genuine authentic love relationship.  And if you are not authentic, at-risk youth can sniff this out in a heartbeat. Yet, this is what it takes for at-risk youth to turn their lives around. Today hundreds of tutors still come out every week… it has transformed the church and the community with 40+ staff, and among them are some of kids I first recruited.  

The name of this program is STARS—Students and Tutors Achieving Real Success. In those early years after investing in their lives, too many were still dropping out. I drove a Green Ford Taurus with eight seat belts and filled it up with these kids.  I would pepper them with questions about how their tutors were treating them, and how their families are doing. Kids are so honest—I learn more than I needed to know!  But I also learned that as the cost of housing was soaring, their whole apartment buildings were being sold out from under them. These kids were dropping out due to the rising cost of housing so they could work or babysit so the parents could work, to make ends. I learned about the Agape Court, a faith-based affordable housing complex in their community, right here on North Garfield, just north of the freeway.   They had openings and we started moving families in there.  Because families were only spending a third of their income on housing, stresses melted away, and kids began to thrive because parents had more time for them.  As we’ve followed these families, these children were the first in their families to graduate from college, completely breaking the cycle of poverty.  I became convinced! We needed more affordable housing like this.

After starting each of these big programs like STARS, I found myself sinking into depression. I had to regain my balance after pouring out my heart and soul. 

To refill my cup, I had mentors. Today on Father’s Day I want to tell you about how one man who has played the role of a spiritual father to me. 

Dr. John Perkins, who is an African American man with the third-grade education, and 15 honorary doctorates. I heard him speak in 1982 and I felt like it was sitting at the feet of Jesus.  He understood the socio-economic aspects of society and scripture in ways I had never heard.  I committed myself to learn everything I could from him and when he started the Harambee Center here in Pasadena I had the privilege of moving in and getting to know he and his family.  He speaks about three First, Rs: Reconciliation with God and with each other including all racial and socioeconomic levels. The second R: Re-neighboring—intentionally moving into a community of need.  The third R: Redistribution of wealth and resources.  He not only provides the biblical basis for these concepts but also shows us how to live it out. Because of Dr. John Perkins, I re-neighbored, and bought a home in Northwest Pasadena with my Mom and Dad’s help. How many of children today need to depend on their parents to get into their first home?  This is the home that Anthony and live to this day,  is right in the middle of a primarily black neighborhood.

Soon I became a gentrifier.  As I made home improvements, my property values increased, and I began to see some of my Black neighbors move out. I was heartbroken. This was not my intention.  So, I committed myself to do everything I could to create mixed-income communities.  When I was researching the best practices for STARS, I traveled around the US and couldn’t help but notice that churches also had affordable housing, so I ended up writing a book about this, where Dr. Perkins provided the forward. It’s called Making Housing Happen: Faith Based Affordable Housing Models and has been used by churches and University campuses across the US.

Never would I have imagined that I could write a book! But that is another sermon! But I want to mention Chapter 2.

 “Ownership, Land and Jubilee Justice” we collaborated with some key theological thinkers to outline a theology of land, the biblical basis for our housing justice work.  When we were writing this, it was surprising that “Land” is not just a side theme, but somewhat central to the biblical story. The first sins caused a marred land, the first argument between Abraham and Lot is about land, the first 5 books of the Bible, are all about getting ready to go into the Promised land. Lev. 25 is titled “Land Use” and speaks of leaving the land fallow so it can be more productive, as well as the Jubilee, where the land was to be returned to the original owners, again regaining access to a place called home, to reset society on the right path.  It was never God’s intention to have Kings, so God sent prophets to hold kings accountable and assure that these laws were obeyed.  Prophets screamed down from heaven of the importance of obeying the God’s laws, including the ones about land use, which is a key aspect to addressing poverty. The book of Lamentations is about land lost—in fact, this whole book Isreal grieving over the lost their land because of their refusal to obey these laws. Then, in Jesus’ mission statement in Luke 4, he ends with “Proclaiming the favorable ‘Year of the Lord’”— all scholars agree, that this refers to the Jubilee. I was truly blown away at what I was learning. If we were to take these commands seriously, it would change everything. Providing affordable housing is a form of practicing Jubilee today.  

Because of the STARS youth dropping out and also of my becoming a gentrifier in a Black neighborhood, I became highly motivated to do housing justice work, and not just write about it.

Our team’s first huge failure in 2000 was rent stabilization, and thankfully today we finally won that battle. But our first big win at about that time was inclusionary housing. I love this policy! This is the opposite of exclusionary.  In our teams we follow the methods of Jesus, using a research-reflection-action approach, research-reflection-action and eventually we convinced the city to set aside 20% of all new housing to be affordable in developments that are 10 units or more in size. That one policy has produced over 1,000 affordable units embedded into high-end housing –at no cost—throughout Pasadena. Also, it has put 26 million into Pasadena’s affordable housing trust fund which in turn is invested in creating more affordable housing. 

Today we have a nonprofit called Making Housing and Community Happen with 6 teams—I want to briefly describe a few.

 We have a safe parking site over at Trinity Lutheran Church for those living in their vehicles be on a path to become housed—and many are today fully housed! Some of these safe parkers are with us today.

We are reviving what was once a thriving African American business district on N. Fair Oaks and it was a joy to have Heidi Neuroth join us and speak at the Planning commission this spring. She spoke with 29 others, most of whom had never been to a public meeting or spoken. We wore gold T-shirts emblazoned with “Restore our Community” and received high compliments from the commissioners. It looks like they are supporting all we asked for!! They even gave us the authority to name this stretch of Pasadena from on Fair Oaks from Woodbury to Washington Blvd—“the Legacy District: Historic Black Main Street,” and we have a mural with QR codes, depicting this history that some of you today have toured.

We also have a team of professionals who advise congregations interested in providing affordable housing on a portion of their underutilized land, with over 100 churches having approached us for our free technical support. Our team’s efforts should produce 1612 affordable housing units.  Additionally, we have teams that we are apprenticing with us in TX, CO, Washington State and N. CA.—and they each have churches they are working with that will produce even more.  

And finally, just like the prophets of old, we do advocacy to support both affordable housing developments, and good policy. We have also helped to pass state policy so that ADUs are now allowed as well as SB 4, which makes affordable housing possible on congregational land.

This advocacy works, both at the state and here locally, where we initiate and approve good policy and developments like permanent supportive housing that ends homelessness. In fact, our collaborative efforts have lowered our homeless count in Pasadena by over 50%! But this year there was a slight uptick due to the fires.

We truly serve an abundant God!! Doing more than we can imagine.

The Scriptures we read today from proverbs chapter 8-9 have been especially meaningful to me. Lady Wisdom is part of who God has made me to be. But it’s also part of every one of us.  The pure delight and utter freedom from fear to dance and proclaim God’s love. That feeling of connection with all those around us.  No barriers.  We so desperately need this Holy Spirit infusion today!

It took me the longest time to really accept and believe I am fully loved by God and that God has given me authority to be audacious when I know its something God is calling me to do. But Lady Wisdom leadership can have a painful and lonely sidekick. I can still get cold feet and forget who I am. That is why I need you in my life.  I have felt so loved by our church.

God is at work in each of us, moving us to do more than we can imagine—building us up step-by-step, giving us the courage to be fully ourselves, and even to display some of the characteristics of Lady Wisdom.

We all need to let this seep into our pores!

The executive director of our organization is Bert Newton. He is married to Gloria Newton, who is an artist. She created a giant 15-foot Lady Wisdom puppet that we would carry with us in marches. In fact, on one of these marches I met Anthony 15 years ago. 

Try to picture fun, tall, shiny, and beautiful Lady Wisdom going down the street with her arms and hands moving as they are lifted with long poles. Today God is challenging us to step out and use all the skills we have –art, writing, song and more, to sing and shout respectfully, and peaceful from the rooftops and street corners.

On this Father’s Day, which is also the UMC Peace and Justice Sunday, let us draw strength from Lady Wisdom, from each other and from God to transform our world.

Thank you for allowing me to share. 

Lady Wisdom puppet at the Palm Sunday Peace Parade