'C'  /  Pentecost 19  /  9-30-07  /  Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian

 

Scriptures      Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15    1 Timothy 6:6-19
                    Psalm 91 (sung)               Luke 16:19-31

 

 

Some of you may remember Ed Koch, New York City’s mayor in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Koch was fond of relating the tale of a judge who was mugged during those turbulent years in The Big Apple. Later, that judge called a press conference. In a very formal and grave voice, he said, "This mugging will in no way affect my decisions in the courtroom in matters of this kind."

An elderly woman with rage glowing in her face stood up in the back of the room and shouted, "Then mug him again!"¹

The woman wanted to make sure the judge got the message about the prevalence of crime in the streets. Make sure ... he got ... the message.

Getting the message. Waking up – before we are mugged again, or worse. Many of us in our nation are asleep in some of the most critical areas of our lives.

Psychiatrists and psychologists talk about a phenomenon they call habituation. Habituation: Some of you have heard the example of the frog in the tea kettle. Drop a frog in boiling water, and it will immediately hop out. Drop it in comfortable water, though, and increase the temperature of the water veeerrrry slowly, and the frog will be doing laps in boiling water before it realizes it. That is, before it croaks (pun intended). For the frog has become habituated.

If I asked us to close our eyes and to describe this sanctuary, we might not do so well. We are so accustomed to this place that we no longer really see it. We have become habituated.

My family moved to our present home nine years ago last May. Fifty yards from our two bedrooms lay the tracks for the Ann Arbor Railroad. Blowing their horns at our crossroads as the law demands, freight trains typically roar by our house twice a day: 2 am and 4 am. The first month we lived there, guess who jumped out off their beds at 2 and 4 in the morning! Our son Drew would have, as well, except he was barely a year old at the time and could only roll over and cry. We couldn’t live there. We made plans to move. That is, until we became accustomed to the horns of the trains. Within a month, no one was jumping and no one was crying. We had become habituated.

 

Said Jesus, "(Once) there was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and feasted sumptuously every day. At his gate" – that’s right, at his very gate – "lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come and licked his wounds."

Jesus was quite a storyteller – what West Africans might call a griot. Note the marked contrast between the two characters in this parable: "Rich man ... purple ... fine linen ... feasted sumptuously." And, "poor man ... covered with sores ... longing to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table ... dogs would come and lick his wounds." The rich man: splendor; Lazarus: utter squalor. Jesus wanted us to see the contrast in our mind's eye, in a way we could not forget.

Great contrast. And yet … Do you think the rich man saw Lazarus lying at his gate? Most likely, he did. At first. But then he probably became habituated to the poor man's presence. Soon it was as if Lazarus wasn't even there.

So now, the question confronts us: Where do we locate ourselves in this story? With the rich man habituated to Lazarus, or with Lazarus who was habitually hungry? With the stark contrast Jesus has drawn, there’s really not much of a choice – is there?

Or … would we? Veteran church consultant Loren Mead likes to ask the question, “Are you rich?” in a variety of public settings across America. “The public response is always the same,” he writes. “I can predict many of the individual reactions immediately.”

“Why do we work so hard to hide the fact that we are rich?” Mead wonders. “Why hide it even from ourselves? … Somewhere deep inside us is a place that cannot come to terms with what it means to be what we are. That is a spiritual question, and it is the one spiritual question all Americans share. It may be the one that most threatens us.”³

So let us be known by naming what deep-down we know: that, without hanging a yoke of guilt around our necks – liberal or otherwise – we are the rich man in Jesus' story. We really are. We have far more in common with the rich man than we do with Lazarus. Middle-class or no … Compared to the vast majority of households in this world, we live in fine homes or apartments. I can look around from this pulpit each Sunday and I might not see people dressed in the rich man’s purple and fine linen – but that’s only because we live in Ann Arbor, and we go to Northside! The point is, we could dress that way if we wanted to dress that way. As for food … beyond our countless cultural triggers of fear and anxiety, when was the last time any of us involuntarily went hungry? Maybe we would not describe our lives as luxurious, but – put in global context – they really are.

 

There are billions of folk around the world who would think they had died and gone to heaven if they visited a salad bar in the average restaurant in our land. Just the salad bar! Or if they walked down the aisles of our well-lit supermarkets and superstores, buying nearly anything their hearts desired. Anne Dayanandan, an American-born Northside member and longtime mission worker in India, tells me that the most difficult challenge of returning to the U.S. comes when she walks down our supermarket aisles. The reverse culture shock strikes her there, every single time. And my own wife, 16 years after returning from three years in the Congo, cannot to this day enter a Sam’s Club or Costco or Ikea without physically growing ill.
   
And yet … need any of us grow ill? Need we feel ashamed of our affluence? As the Apostle Paul might put it: By no means! Shame or guilt is the easy way out; it’s a way of being that inhibits action. Our first step is simply to acknowledge that – globally speaking – we … are … rich.

The fact that we are rich is hardest to admit because, once we break out of our two-ocean-buffer of denial and fess up, this means – and we all know it -- that Jesus is then going to confront us with our habituation. Jesus is then going to ask us, who is the Lazarus -- the stranger -- at our gate? Who is it at our cultural doorstep that has a legitimate claim on our attention, and is not getting it?

There’s enough suffering in our global village that this last question – while important – remains impossible for us to adequately answer. The Lazaruses are so many; their name is Legion! But what I sense is this: No matter how book-educated we are or how diverse a crowd we run with here in Ann Arbor, the hurting world outside of America – and of North America – and of the North Atlantic – remains a strange world to most of us. We know it’s there – it’s at our gate – and yet, Pride says to us, “You need not pass this way,” and Fear says to us, “You dare not look!”⁴

 

Despite the images made omnipresent to us, the hardships, tragedies, and traumas of two-thirds of the world – it’s really not the Third World, but the Two-Thirds World – seem both quantitatively and qualitatively different than our own. The New York Times' former Mexico City bureau chief, Alan Riding, accurately sensed our estrangement from our friends to the immediate South when he penned his bestselling book about Mexico nearly a generation ago. Its title said it all: Distant Neighbors.⁵

   
Our Two-Thirds World friends are distant neighbors to us. They are truly strangers at our gate. So where's the Good News in all this, for us? And in Jesus' parable, today?

There isn't ... yet.  But: There can be.

One way is to put a twist on the local humor I overheard in my first few months in Ann Arbor: the joke that an underprivileged child in Ann Arbor is one who has not visited Europe by the age of ten. We can put a twist on that joke – and, by doing so, make straight our discipleship path. From our abundant resources, we can encourage our youth, not to mention ourselves, to become immersed for at least a month -- at least one time in our lives -- in the heart of a Two-Thirds World country. Staying the whole time, not in a seaside paradise or a luxury hotel, but with a host family whose lives are best defined by one word: subsistence.

Or perhaps that’s asking too much from the outset. Perhaps we can start by simply living with and among the impoverished – those made poor because many are made rich – in our own country, on a mission trip. A mission as much for ourselves, as for the Lazaruses we may encounter.

And, if we are physically unable to engage in such an immersion experience, certainly: We can still be of support.

Not only would we take away a whole new vision of the world – God's world – from an immersion experience. We would take away a whole new vision of what Jesus was all about: radical hospitality, and justice, and – would you believe it – joy. The joy of realizing – perhaps as never before – that happiness is not to be attained through limitless material acquisition: a belief “denied by every religion and philosophy known to (humanity) but (one that) is preached incessantly by every American television set.”⁶

So, go. Let us not just visit, but live in and experience, Two-Thirds World culture if we have not already done so. Perhaps some of us need to look no further than East Detroit.

 

Go. Lest we find ourselves hopelessly habituated by our mass media to the strangers at our country’s gates.

 

Go. Lest we find out for ourselves – as the rich man discovers in the torment of his Hades – that we can never experience resurrection if we have not responded to Moses and the prophets in the first place.

*        *        *

 

A very short story to put matters into perspective:

 

One day, a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing his son how poor people live. They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.

 

On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, "How was the trip?" "It was great, Dad."

 

"Did you see how poor people live?" the father asked. "Oh yeah," said the son.

 

"So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?"

 

The son answered: "I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon. We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight. We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. We buy our food, but they grow theirs. We have walls around our property to protect us; they have friends to protect them."

 

The boy's father was speechless.

 

Then his son added, "Thanks, Dad, for showing me how poor we are."

 

A bit of a Jeffersonian myth, maybe – romanticizing the truly poor. And yet: Isn't perspective a wonderful thing?

 

Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve the Lord. Amen.

   

¹See, among other sources, cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/30-years-since-the-summer-of-sam/.

 

²Loren B. Mead, Financial Meltdown in the Mainline? (The Alban Institute, Inc., 1998), p. 112.

 

³Ibid., p. 114.

 

⁴For the imperative statements, re: Fear and Pride, see Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (NYC: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1952), p. 49.

 

⁵Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (Vintage, 1989).

 

⁶Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (NYC: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 134.