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Bridging the
Grand Canyon
by the Rev. Rich Smith
September 23, 2007
Luke 16:19-31
Our scripture reading this week, with parallels in
Egyptian and Jewish folklore, is a drama in three acts. It is the
unsettling and uncomfortable story about the rich man and Lazarus. In
the first act we meet the rich man – arrayed in purple, the color of
royalty, and feasting sumptuously. Picture him as a rotund man, draped
in a bright robe with big cuffs, smacking his lips as he polishes off
another leg of lamb. And then, there is poor Lazarus, a beggar lying
outside his gate, starving, longing to eat even the crumbs of oily
bread falling from the rich man’s table, covered with sores licked by
stray dogs, but completely ignored by the man inside.
In Act 2, their situations are reversed. Both men die—Lazarus likely of
starvation, the rich man of a heart attack or stroke or other
fat-and-cholesterol-induced condition. Lazarus goes to heaven, carried
by the angels to the bosom of Abraham, gathered to his ancestors in the
closest way imaginable. The rich man, however, is simply buried, and
finds himself in hell.
As Act 3 opens, the rich man cries out: "Send me Lazarus! Send him to
dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in
agony." But this isn’t going to happen. The rich man no longer has the
means to get whatever he wants. As Clarence Jordan put it in his
Cottonpatch version of the gospels: “Lazarus ain’t gonna run no mo’ yo’
errands, rich man!” He has found rest and isn't going to be anybody's
lackey. And there is this insurmountable problem of a Grand Canyon like
chasm between the two men that cannot be crossed.
And then for the first time in his life, the rich man starts to think
of somebody besides himself. He worries about his five brothers back on
earth, likely behaving as badly as he has, and asks that Lazarus be
allowed to go and warn them about what has happened to him. Sorry – no
can do! If they aren't willing to listen to the prophets' calls for
justice, scaring the hell out of them (or into them, as the case may
be) isn’t going to do any good. "Fire and brimstone" preaching is no
substitute for genuine invitations to mercy and justice, and if they
ignore what is so plain in front of them, they too have sealed their
fate.
As Lazarus was stuck with his lot in life, so the rich man is stuck
with his lot in death. His refusal to cross the chasm between him and
Lazarus in their earthly life, his failure to walk outside his gate, to
share his abundance, doomed him in the afterlife. He kept himself
apart, and such is his sentence for eternity. (1)
Now, this is not really a parable about the next life so much as it is
a parable about this life. As Marcus Borg reminds us, Jesus’ teaching
was not about believing now for the sake of heaven later, but about the
kingdom of God breaking into this life, here and now, in our midst.
Reihnold Niebuhr always said we should not focus overmuch about
“furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell.” And I like to say
that if we have known the love of God in this life – lived in that love
and practiced that love – then surely we will know it in the next and
that is all we need to know about it. And so to me, the chasm, the
Grand Canyon, of this parable is not the one that exists in the
afterlife (because God can bridge that one, and did so in Jesus) but
the chasms that we allow to exist right now. The chasm between the
overfed rich man and the starving beggar is one we teeter on the edge
of, every day!
Walter Wink has retold the parable this way: “There once was a rich
nation that consumed almost half the world's resources. Landed elites
in the poor nations became rich by producing cash crops for export to
this nation while their own people lacked adequate nutrition. Even in
that rich nation, many were hungry and homeless, unemployed and ill.
Yet the rich nation ignored them, or had them arrested. Because the
rich nation really was not religious, but only pretended to be, it had
no fear of divine punishment. And because it was so powerful
politically and militarily, it was able to protect itself against
revolts abroad and revolutions at home.
“In short, this rich nation had nothing to fear from any quarter. Yet,
inexplicably, it began to fall apart. The judgment it scoffed at in the
future began to eat away at it like acid. In desperation its people
began to arm themselves. Soon this rich land had the most heavily armed
populace in the world. But still the acids continued to eat. They built
walls to shut the emigrants and "inferior races" out. But still the
acids continued to eat.
“They called for the death penalty, for more prisons, for more arrests,
for greater surveillance, for tougher sentencing. Their politicians got
elected on platforms of resentment, fear, and greed. The people cried
for the restoration of traditional values, not recognizing that these
values had landed them in the soup they were now in. And still the
corrosive acids continued to eat at the fabric of society.
“It never occurred to them that salvation lay in solidarity with these
poor within and outside their borders. Like the rich man in the
(biblical) parable, this rich nation could not understand that the gate
outside which Lazarus perpetually lies is an opening, not a barrier.
All he had to do is go out and connect with the poor, and seek a common
destiny. All he had to do was recognize what lay before his very eyes.”
(2)
As I said, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is not about an
afterlife. The canyons and chasms that separate us from one another are
all around us, making our own differences of opinion about things like
worship styles or rental of our facilities seem rather... well let’s
just say it puts them in perspective. Even the larger-seeming divisions
in our country that divide us into red and blue states, or
fundamentalists and liberals are not as deep as the economic and racial
divides that separate us from some of our own citizens and from much of
the rest of the world.
It is played out in places like Iraq, and this week’s developments
surrounding the private security contractor Blackwater. Look at the
difference reported in how our own soldiers often try to engage the
Iraqi people on a human level – playing games with them, sharing food,
try to bridge the cultural chasms and meet them as individuals; whereas
the attitude of Blackwater is quite the opposite, seeing all Iraqis as
potential threats and not engaging them at all, except with guns.
This week thousands marched in Jena, Louisiana, in support of six black
teenagers who have come to be known as the “Jena 6.” The pervasive
racism that was painfully exposed in the response to Katrina two years
ago is laid bare yet again, in yet another American town. It all
started a year ago, when a black student at the high school asked an
administrator if he could sit underneath a tree in the courtyard where
traditionally only white students sat. The administrator told him that
he could sit wherever he wanted. But the next morning, there were three
nooses hanging in that tree. The school dismissed what was clearly a
hate crime as a mere prank. When black students protested, the local
district attorney threatened that he could take their life away with a
"stroke of my pen." Then, white students provoked a series of incidents
with black students.
In one altercation, a white graduate of the high school threatened
three black students with a shotgun. The black youth wrestled the gun
out of his hands, but incredibly were charged with theft of the weapon,
ignoring the fact that they were defending themselves! Then, a group of
white youth attacked a single black youth at a party -- and the police
took no serious action. Finally, a black youth named Mychal Bell struck
a white youth who had taunted him with racial slurs, and several of his
friends joined the fray. The white youth went to the hospital, but was
released that day and even went to a party that night. The six black
students were charged with attempted murder. After a national outcry,
the charges were reduced to conspiracy and battery. This month, a
Louisiana court of appeals vacated the charges against Bell, ruling
that the prosecutor was wrong to charge him as an adult instead of a
juvenile -- but he is still sitting in jail, even after a hearing on
Friday.
Many of us are shocked by this sort of bigotry. We ask why aren't
Jena's white residents equally protective of all their town's children?
By only intervening to protect whites, Jena's white establishment bears
the responsibility for letting conflict escalate between black and
white youth. By crying for prison instead of building bridges, they
don’t just allow the chasm to grow, they dig the grand canyon of
division.
It would be tempting to dismiss the Jena story as representing the
vestiges of racism in small-town Louisiana -- but Jena is America. (3)
The chasm between the rich man and Lazarus is alive and well.
Closer to home – did you see the article on front page of this
morning’s Washington Post about a 14 year old boy shot by a police
officer in SE DC – “Slain Youth, Officer Were Neighbors Worlds Apart.”
They lived a 90-second drive apart, the officer in a gated community.
How do we overcome it? How do we cross the chasm, bridge the Grand
Canyon?
At the end of Luke’s gospel, there is the story of two disciples
walking along the road to Emmaus, the evening of the resurrection. They
were joined by a stranger, who spoke to them of Moses and the prophets,
and when it came time for the evening meal, they invited the stranger
to join them. As they shared bread, they recognized Christ in the
stranger. Perhaps if the rich man had invited Lazarus in, had tended to
his needs and shared food with him, he might have understood the
imperatives of Moses and the prophets, and discovered something of
their common humanity, closed the chasm.
Charity is a start. But as biblical scholar George Buttrick wrote
nearly 80 years ago and still relevant, important as it is to share
food, this parable is about an even deeper and more pervasive attitude
of neighborliness towards others. “The story offers no support to the
glib assumption that (the rich man) would have fulfilled his duty had
he dressed Lazarus’ sores and fed his hunger. True charity is more than
flinging a coin to a beggar. It is not spasmodic or superficial.
Ameliorations such as food and medicine are necessary, but there is a
more fundamental neighborliness...” that is the barometer of our souls.
(4)
These days that “fundamental neighborliness” is called justice. But it
is a justice marked by compassion, and the understanding that in the
end we are all of one blood, one family, the human family, a
relationship that transcends all the grand chasms of our own making.
It’s not always easy, I admit. I find myself giving the beggar in the
Metro station a quarter not because of any fundamental neighborliness
but in hopes that it will make him go away. This summer, I read a
novel, at the behest of my wife and children, How to Be Good, by Nick
Hornby. It tells the story of what happens to one British family when
the father, who had previously been known by the title of his newspaper
column, “The Angriest Man in Holloway,” gets religion, of sorts, after
an encounter with a mysterious man known as DJ GoodNews. He has a
change of heart, which causes him to take the imperatives of faith
quite literally and do things like take homeless persons into their
home, and propose that if everyone in his neighborhood with a spare
bedroom did the same, homelessness would no longer be a problem. Of
course it doesn’t quite work out that way, is not so smooth or simple,
but it does raise the question of how can we be good, how can we do the
right thing when there are no easy answers. At least the mother in the
novel, a physician, begins to take her patients more seriously as human
beings, not simply as cases or names on a chart, and their children
make friends with people they previously shunned. There is no clear
path or easy answer.
But I think it begins with a change of heart, of attitude, and with at
least entertaining the idea that neighbors really are neighbors, and we
begin to ask questions of charity AND justice and take some simple
steps.
Our Volunteer Corps is one way of doing this. The Volunteers who come
to us each year make a different in this city, but are themselves often
profoundly changed, and then gradually, through them, we are all
changed a bit and the chasms become less grand. Some of us head down to
the Marie Reed Learning Center each week and spend an hour one-on-one
with young persons who seemingly live in very different worlds from
ours, but in the relationships we make, bridges are built across the
canyons. The efforts of our “Green Group” to help us as a church lessen
our carbon footprint and combat global warming grow out of more than a
love of nature – rather a profound recognition that we all inhabit this
planet together, and that climate change, while in the end affecting us
all, in the short term will harm the poor the most. Even lighting our
Partnership Candle, or buying Palestinian olive oil is a start,
especially if it leads us to think prayerfully about the growers each
time we sit down to supper, and perhaps lead us to a more personal
engagement with people who live in the Holy Land. For the fundamental
truth is this is one world and we are all in it together. The fate of
the “least of these” is our fate, by and by.
One way to finally understand the meaning of Jesus’ parables is to ask:
Where are you in the story? Which character are you? While many of us
may have some of the rich man’s resources, and other of us experience
hungers or wounds like Lazarus, in the end they are both dead and we
are still very much alive. I think, then, that we stand in the place of
the five brothers, left on earth and worried about by with rich man in
his torment. Like them, we have Moses the prophets, but even more, we
have Jesus, as well as the witness of the saints down through the
centuries. Fire and brimstone isn’t necessary, and certainly not what
you’ll get from me. We have eyes to see and ears to hear. So what will
we do with our hearts and our hands?
Notes
(1) description follows “Love of Money,” by Joyce Hollyday, Sojourners.
(2)”Lazarus at our Gates,” in Sojourners.
(3) “Jena is America,” Beliefnet blog by Lydia Bean, 9/2007.
(4) New Interpreters Commentary on the Bible, Vol. IX, p. 320.
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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