Let It Begin With Me – December 2, 2007
Reading “A Tale of Two Charlies”
Sermon
There is too much violence in this world.
That’s the long and the short of it.
Charlie Howard, age 23, thrown off a bridge.
Charlie Carpenter, age 38, shot “after an altercation”.
As my colleague Aaron McEmrys says, “what exactly is ‘altercation’ anyway?” Charlie Carpenter was African-American and male and in a fight on the South Side. Deaths like his go entirely unnoticed every day. His death in May isn’t even noted on the internet except by the University of Chicago’s newspaper and by several of my colleagues in their blogs. The memorial at his coffee shop is remarkable in its presence, that anyone outside of his family and friends noticed at all. I knew him because my seminary is located a block and a half from the coffee shop where he worked. I don’t drink coffee, but he handed me a lot of pastries. I remember that he smiled and sang and joked across that counter, that he remembered people’s names and faces and stories. I remember him as a good man.
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