Sermon for Sunday, October 18, 2026 || Proper 24A || 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Today is the feast day of St. Luke the Evangelist, writer of the third account of the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. Luke’s Gospel focuses on Jesus’ mission of preaching good news to those in poverty, challenging oppressive systems, de-centering imperial power, and bringing together a disparate group of followers to form a beloved community. Taken together, these mission priorities continue to guide us today as we join God in God’s mission of healing and reconciliation in this broken world.
One of the primary ways we respond to God’s mission here at St. Mark’s is our long-term partnership with St. Luc School in Mercery, Haiti. Since tomorrow is the feast of St. Luke and since many of our newer members don’t have much exposure to this mission partnership, I’d like to take the sermon time this morning to highlight this important aspect of our mission: the Haiti Partnership’s history, its justice imperative, and our ongoing commitment to our friends and mission partners at St. Luc School.
But before we jump into the history, we’ll ground this wonderful story in Holy Scripture. Today’s reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians begins like this: “Grace to you and peace. We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
These are the very first words ever written that became Christian scripture. Scholars theorize that First Thessalonians is the earliest piece of the New Testament, predating the rest of Paul’s letters and the accounts of the Gospel. I love this theory because it means that the earliest Christian letter (that we still have a record of) begins with grace, peace, thanksgiving, faith, love, and hope. Every one of these beautiful spiritual concepts characterizes our partnership with St. Luc School, and I’ll come back to them at the end.
The Haiti Partnership began in 2008 under the leadership of former rector Mark Santucci. A small group of parishioners dedicated their time and resources to establish a connection with an organization in Haiti. After a short time of discernment of various opportunities, St. Mark’s connected with the Church of St. Croix in Léogâne, Haiti, and their priest Kerwin Delicat. Léogâne is about 20 miles west of the capital Port-au-Prince, but due to road conditions, the trip in the best of times takes well over an hour. Thankfully, this has isolated Léogâne from the worst of the civil unrest in the capital over the years. As is common of Episcopal priests in Haiti, Father Kerwin was in charge of eight satellite churches in addition to St. Croix. One of those churches ministers in the small hamlet of Mercery outside of Léogâne. That church is St. Luc.
Because of an almost non-existent public education system in Haiti, many churches fill in the gap by providing schools as part of their missions. At the time of the beginning of our partnership, St. Luc School had classes from Pre-K through Grade 6. These classes meet next door to the church in a one story cement building that forms an L-shape around a field. The classrooms are without power, they are loud and echoey, and many of them contain more students than can comfortably fit. Textbooks are scarce, so the teachers do most of their instruction from the chalkboard. But the seemingly rudimentary nature of the school building does nothing to hamper the spirits of the students or the dedication of their teachers.
The small group of parishioners who began the Haiti Partnership gathered funds to pay for the teachers’ salaries. They also sponsored three mission trips in the early years of the partnership, in which members of St. Mark’s went to Mercery, met with the administrator, teachers, and students, and did various projects including the construction of desks and training in the various educational materials we brought with us. Our final trip to Haiti happened in late 2015 when Tim Evers and I flew down for a whirlwind 36 hours to meet the new priest, Father Sonley Joseph, and have a series of discussions with the teachers.
This trip served as a turning point for the Haiti Partnership. Conscious of the colonial mistake of deciding ahead of time what a disadvantaged partner needs, Tim and I listened carefully to the dreams of the teachers of St. Luc. Their superlative care and concern for their students was evident as they told us about two kinds of hunger: the mental hunger the children had to learn, and the physical hunger that kept them from doing so. The school had to dismiss at lunchtime because the kids were too hungry to learn. Together we dreamed up the lunch program, and a few months later, Father Sonley sent us a proposed budget. I can only describe my reaction as reverse sticker shock. At that time in 2016, we could feed the students for the entire school year for 25 American dollars each.
We set to work, first expanding the small group of parishioners active in the partnership to include the entire parish. For the first time, the partnership was added to the church’s budget, and we invited members to pledge directly to the lunch program if they could. Since then, our commitment to St. Luc School has grown deeper. We continue to pay teachers’ salaries and provide lunches (now all year long, with the help of some other partners like the Mystic Area Ecumenical Council). We have helped them build a new well, a library, new latrines, and new classrooms. The seventh grade was added a few years ago, and we’re now dreaming about eighth grade, as well as solar panels to provide electricity to the school. A third priest, Father Seme, is in constant contact with Liz Porter, our Haiti Partnership leader, who took over recently from Doug Barrett, who shepherded the mission faithfully from the beginning.
In all of this, we have forged a deep relationship of prayer and mutual spiritual support between St. Luc and St. Mark’s. We pray for them, and they pray for us, and therefore we are together in God’s love and grace despite the physical distance between Mystic and Mercery. Over the years, we have also come to understand that our partnership is not so much the work of charity but the work of justice. Due to the history of Haiti as a country whose wealth was plundered by French and American forces, we now see our infusion of monetary resources into a local Haitian community as a form of financial reparations. Each year, the Haiti Partnership is the second largest line item in the St. Mark’s budget after my salary, and each year we reaffirm our commitment to education, to nourishment, to community, and to repairing the effects of historical injustice.
This story of our partnership with St. Luc School illustrates those first verses of the first piece of Christian scripture. We send to our friends in Haiti God’s grace and peace. We always give thanks to God for the children, teachers, and staff of St. Luc School. And we mention them in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father their work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
