Tag Archives: economic security

About Us

Pastor Booker Vance

Pastor Vance (62) is the Policy Outreach Coordinator for Elevate Energy.  He is a native of Houston, TX. He attended Bethany Lutheran College in Lindsborg, KS where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Economics with a concentration in Mathematics in 1980. He continued his education as he graduated from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago (LSTC) in 1986 with a Master of Divinity degree. Immediately upon graduation from seminary, Rev. Vance served as the Pastor of St. Stephen’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on the Southside of Chicago in the Chatham Neighborhood for from 1986-2016.

Following his faithful and steadfast service at St. Stephen’s, Rev. Vance made his way to the Environmental Community as an Executive Policy Director for Faith in Place from 2016-2018. In this role, Rev. Vance was a prominent figure in proclaiming Environmental Justice and Ecological Transformation as a voice for the voiceless who continue crying out from the wilderness. He continues advocating for the economically disenfranchised and those who have been marginalized in the traditionally and overwhelmingly white environmental community.

After serving on the Illinois Climate Table and working with a diverse group of environmental leadership, Rev. Vance envisioned that the passage of the Future Energy Jobs Act provided great hope and promise. He likes to see Ecumenical Interfaith Environmental Justice Communities engage in productive collaborative work. He was a part of the Chicago Climate Table Working group who helped shape and pass the FEJA – The Future Energy Jobs Act in 2016. He considers his time at Faith in Place as pivotal in his growth as Environmental Justice Advocate and Ecumenical/Interfaith Leader. He sees that primarily focusing on Workforce Development and Job Creation (where real people are connected with real jobs) has been a daunting task. However, Rev. Vance strives to focus on the historical trauma that has plagued environmental equity efforts in Environmental Justice communities. He dreams of expanding the scope of Workforce Development to include Returning Citizens and Foster Care Alumni as a high hope in present day legislation. He firmly believes that the passage of FEJA and the proposing of CEJA present a challenging implementation to the traditionally White Environmental Community.

Rev. Vance stands before the Traditional Environmental Community to say that Environmental Justice is not a passing fad and that the RDEI (Diversity, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) are not experimental theories but must be the core and central values that drive our work together. He is a member of the African Descent Lutheran Association and Recent addition to the Lutheran Care for Creation Organization.

A recent addition to the Elevate Energy Team as a Policy Outreach Coordinator. Serving as Pastor of St. Stephens Evangelical Lutheran Church on the South Side of Chicago for over 25 years before engaging in the intersection of Community Organizing and the Environmental Justice Discipline. He lives on the South Side of Chicago. He is the Father of Two Sons, Booker Jr. and Erwin. Erwin is married to Krystal and they are the parents of 3 children. Therefore Pastor Vance as he is affectionately referred to is the Grandpa of 3, Aniyah, Isaiah and Nia.

 

Lectionary Commentaries, Preaching Resources, Worship

Sunday July 31 – August 6 in Year C

Is Distance Our Security? Embracing Interdependence Joyfully: Robert Saler reflects on Luke 12:13-21

Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary

Readings for July 31 – August 6, Series C (2013, 2016, 2019, 2022)

Hosea 11:1-11
Psalm 107:1-9, 43
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

Theologian Joseph Sittler once made the point that, in our day and age, to possess wealth is to be able to purchase distance from one another—to enact a kind of “blubber,” as he puts it, that shields us from undesired interaction with the world. Recently, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has explored a similar line of thought. In his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), Sandel discusses all the ways in which wealth allows those who possess it the ability to purchase separation from those with fewer resources. The examples are legion. Housing developments become gated communities, while summer homes are set apart in the woods. Skybox seats at baseball games and concerts lift wealthy spectators out from the audience or “crowd” proper. Airline passengers who pay more can board earlier and sit further apart from other passengers. We have built an economic system in which prestige is marked by the comforts of diminishing proximity – and indeed, diminishing solidarity – with others.

On the one hand, the immediate creature comforts of, say, having more room in an airplane seat are immediately understandable and require little theological interpretation. However, on the other hand, the homiletical opportunity in preaching on Jesus’ parable of the rich man who builds up granaries only to have his life “demanded” of him is to explore more deeply the impulses that drive us to accumulate wealth and its corollaries—land, excess clothing, anti-theft systems, etc.—and how these impulses betray more primal anxieties.

A homiletical failure—one that has unfortunately been common in the Christian tradition—would be to simply denounce the man’s actions as evident of “greed”  and to warn contemporary Christians away from avarice without acknowledging the various forces at work in our North American society that program us to be, not only consumers, but anxious consumers.  Even as we are urged to spend and spend, we are simultaneously bombarded with injunctions to save and build up wealth for retirement, future catastrophes, etc. We measure the health of the economy by its “growth” even as we are warned that only those who have sufficient reserves will be able to navigate the future successfully. The various incompatible demands placed upon our economic psyches leads to an anxiety similar to that depended upon by the “diet” industry: we spend more and more on diet products and exercise programs even as we are bombarded with encouragement to eat more and more.

It is this impulse which leads us to conceive of economic security in terms of distance, lack of vulnerability to the vicissitudes of the market and the crowds, and getting off the treadmill of the uncontrolled push/pull of late stage capitalism. Likewise, in Jesus’ time, where the gap between the rich and the poor was even more pronounced than in our day, to store up grain for oneself in order to ward off the possibility of future economic ruin would have been a highly understandable impulse. Thus, it might be that the more homiletically honest move here would be to focus less on “greed” and more upon the tendency, in Jesus’ day and ours, to equate wealth with invulnerability and independence.

Here, then, is where “ecological” thinking in its most robust sense may be helpful. In his recent text The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), critical theorist Timothy Morton points out the ways in which our politics, economic arrangements, and even religious understandings might change if we were to live fully into the radical potential contained in the seemingly simple base ecological maxim: “Everything is connected to everything else.” As Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to articulate so powerfully, we exist in “webs of mutuality” such that our humanity is enhanced, not diminished, as we grow more and more interdependent on each other. To seek independence through invulnerability, to build up reserves and to purchase distance such that we absent ourselves from these webs, is not only anti-ecological but also diminishes our humanity as such.

There are profound links for the preacher to explore here. Just as Jesus’ injunctions for humans to exhibit radical dependence on God’s grace were designed to heighten our humanity (as opposed to making us superhuman), so also living into our ecologies of interdependence frees us up to be creatures who joyfully embrace our dependence upon each other and our environment. Solidarity with Earth and with each other is, in one sense, nothing other than having our own fates inextricably tied to the fate of creation and its people. If that is the case, then we really have no choice as to WHETHER or not to be in solidarity—the choice is whether we receive it in joy, live into it with purpose, and eschew all that would distance us from it.

For additional care for creation reflections on the overall themes of the lectionary lessons for the month by Trisha K Tull, Professor Emerita of Old Testament, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and columnist for The Working Preacher, visit: http://www.workingpreacher.org/columnist_home.aspx?author_id=288