Scripture: Luke 16:13-31
The question for this morning is what the Jewish holidays of Rash Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the opening of the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, and the lectionary scripture reading about a rich man and a poor man have to do with each other…besides the fact that those three topics and the fragments of thoughts that went along with them found their way into my consciousness this week. As I was letting them sort of bounce around in my head during the week, I decided that they actually did have something to do with each other and that I would try to turn those fragments into a sermon. I don’t know if I’ll be successful in connecting those things for you, but there’s a connection for me that I want to at least try to talk about.
Let me begin with a personal story. At the end of the sermon last week, I was talking about the importance of our finding ways, developing practices that would embed our values in our lives day by day so that those values don’t just cause us to do certain things from time to time but become part of who we are. One of the examples I used was about race. I commented, as I have on a number of other occasions, how easy it is for white people for matters of race not even to make it into our consciousness. We don’t think about it because for the most part we don’t have to think about it. We have the option to choose not to think about it, and if we want that not to be the case, we have to make a conscious effort to make anti-racism not just something we do but a firm part of who we are.
Monday afternoon Lee Walters and I went off to Harrisonburg for a meeting of the Shenandoah Association Church and Ministry Commission which we both serve on. After the meeting was over, I was standing around talking with a few members of the commission and one person let us know that she was going to Washington for the celebration surrounding the opening of the Museum of the American Indian that was taking place the next day, Tuesday. Earlier in the meeting as we were doing opening prayers, she had asked for prayers for all those traveling to the ceremonies. And it was clear in what she was saying after the meeting that this was a very important event to her. She said she had been disappointed the previous day because her pastor hadn’t said anything about it. I thought to myself that she would have been disappointed in me too, because I also didn’t say anything, though ironically I had been talking about certain things that don’t make it onto white people’s screens. As she was talking I felt…a little sheepish.
Now some of you, in your heads, are probably already coming to my defense. There are all sorts of things going on in the world that might for one reason or another receive mention in a worship service. We cannot mention them all every week. There was nothing going on in the life of Sojourners last week that would draw our attention particularly to the opening of the Museum of the American Indian. And we forget and neglect a thousand things everyday. This was just one more. No big deal. And yet…
I want to make clear that I’m not beating my breast over this, but I also didn’t want to just skip lightly past it either. The truth is that I didn’t have much choice in the matter, because once I started thinking about the museum opening I couldn’t help but have all sorts of thoughts beyond the issue of not mentioning it in the worship service. Without making a huge big deal about it, the issue of not mentioning the museum opening was an issue of racism as I see it, because that is one of the things that racism is about: not being seen, not being acknowledged, not being included in even in one’s speech or thinking, not being taken into account. And of course that’s what the Museum itself is all about, correcting all those “nots”, giving the indigenous peoples of the Americas public visibility, giving them at least some kind of official recognition, a place among the symbols of American life that are present in all the monuments and museums around the mall in the heart of the nation’s capital. And I’m sure that’s why it was a joyous day and a meaningful one to the many tribal representatives who participated and all those who came to support them. So on the one hand I do feel my omission was significant enough to note, and the Museum something to be applauded and celebrated.
At the same time, I found myself resonating with the reporter from the Washington Post who wrote about the celebration the day after. The article was not a great example of objective reporting and I didn’t care for the tone of all of it, but some of what he said was where I was too. He said, “…the opening festival for the National Museum of the American Indian had to it a meandering, pleasing friendliness, almost like the last 500 years or so had just been some odd misunderstanding.” I don’t know what it was really like to be there, and I don’t want to minimize the importance of having such a place or the importance the event may have held for many first Americans and others. But there is also this sense inside me that while a museum may be a good thing, it doesn’t get rid of the pain of 500 years of history and the pain I still feel when I think about it. And you know, neither does giving a sermon that recognizes the injustices done; that doesn’t get rid of the pain either. The truth is the pain is there and it doesn’t go away and it comes up in me whenever I allow it to or whenever I can’t help it. And with the pain there are questions: granted that a museum is a good thing, is a museum the best we can do as a response to what has been done? How do you capture the tears from the trail of tears and put them into a museum? What kind of response is the right one here? The reporter went on to write, with I think more than a touch of sarcasm: “The news at least here on the mall is that we’re mostly good now…” Surely that is not the message we need from the museum or from our history. But what is?
Then there’s this story Jesus told about a rich man and someone named Lazarus. This is just a story. Jesus told lots of stories to illustrate this point or that. In this story, as you remember, he described a situation in which a rich man was living in the lap of luxury, dressed in the richest clothes and eating the richest food and generally enjoying life to the fullest, and just outside his gate was a man named Lazarus who had nothing. It’s implied that he was there all the time, so he didn’t have a home. He had sores all over his body, obviously no health insurance to cover the medical care he needed. No source of food other than what the rich man ended up throwing away. In just a few sentences Jesus describes a situation in which two human beings inhabit essentially the same space but live in different worlds, a situation in which they could almost reach out and touch each other but where the gap between them is bigger than a thousand grand canyons. Is there anyone here who sees a connection between this story and the world we live in? Is there anyone here who does not see such a connection?
Very often the stories Jesus told were about the kingdom of God, and he was trying to give people clues and insights into what it would be like for God’s reign to come and God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven. Sometimes, Jesus spoke about the way the world actually is and tried to give us eyes to see things we often don’t want to see or have grown so accustomed to that we have a hard time really seeing. This story is one of those about how the world is, not how it was meant to be, and of course it describes a reality that is as true in 2004 as it was in first century Palestine. That there is a gap between the rich and the poor is something we all know. That that gap is enormous is something we all know. That that gap is growing and its consequences becoming more serious is something we all know. The problem is that this is all “something we all know”. We know it so well we don’t have to look. We know it so well we don’t want to look. We know it so well we may have lost some of our ability to look and to see. Here is what I hear Jesus saying to me in this story: “Look.”
Just a word about what this story is not about. Jesus goes on to describe how both of these people die and the poor man is swept up into the bosom of Abraham and the rich man finds himself in the torments of Hell. But this is not a story that is for the purpose of threatening rich people with eternal fire because they are rich. If that were true then there are a whole bunch of us here in this room, even some who don’t think of themselves as all that well off, who are in big trouble. But that’s not what Jesus is about here. What he is about in the way he speaks to me is asking us to feel the pain of this situation. And it is a pain that does not easily go away. It does not go away by saying to ourselves that that’s just the way things are. It does not go away by saying to ourselves that we’re doing our part by leaving some leftovers for Lazarus. It does not go away by having Lazarus go and tell the rich man’s brothers how things really are so that they will understand. It does not go away by asking people of color to bear the burden of educating the rest of us on what it’s like to live as a person of color in our society, or asking the poor to tell us what it’s like to be poor. I note that in this story Jesus does not ask us to do anything. There is no lesson about some magic something that will make the pain go away. To my ears, I hear him saying: Just look, and let yourself be haunted by what you see.
Here is where Yom Kippur comes in. It is known as the Day of Atonement. It is connected to the celebration of the Jewish New Year, and the idea, I think, is that as the new year begins there needs to be some process of dealing with the sins of the past, some process of seeking forgiveness, of atoning, some process of letting go or of getting past the sins of the past, so that a fresh start is possible. I am thinking that if one approaches Yom Kippur in the proper spirit, that this is not a matter of making sort of a blanket confession of sin (please God forgive me for all the things I’ve done wrong—I can’t actually think of any right now, but I’m sure there are some, so please forgive me), no casual confession of sin and no easy-going forgiveness either—no ok God, buddy, let’s just wipe the slate clean here and start over and God saying sure, that’s right, can’t dwell on the past can we? .
But we can, and in some ways need to. The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is known as the Days of Awe, and as I understand this time, it is specifically a time, very much like Lent is supposed to be for Christians, where you do your best not to be forgetful or oblivious or suitably vague about your sins, but where you do your best to look clearly at what is broken in your life and in our lives, so that it can begin to be mended. That sometimes requires a large effort of the spirit. And it connects to what I was wrestling with in connection with the place of American Indians in our society and in connection with the gap between rich and poor. The first spiritual task is to look, to bring things to consciousness, to call up the pain and not to rush to do things that will take it away, or to think that there is something that can. It is an important spiritual task and it goes against the grain a bit, because it doesn’t offer us that good feeling we sometimes expect from spiritual things, the sense of uplift or inspiration.
In cases like this, and these are just two examples of many we could talk about, atonement doesn’t come easily. We don’t undo more than 500 years of history filled with wrong by building a beautiful museum. Not that it’s a bad thing, just that we can’t allow it to make us feel good and tell ourselves that we are all mostly good now. We don’t do away with the unbearable gap between rich and poor by making excuses to ourselves or finding ways to smoothe it over with our words. In cases like this, if we get to the place of feeling good, there’s something wrong. And yet, there has to be some way to get over, to get beyond the history, get beyond the pain, beyond the brokenness.
The Jewish people have something called a midrash, which is an interpretation or a teaching based upon a scripture passage. I read a midrash once on a story that I believe is part of the scriptures for Yom Kippur. It has to do with Moses coming down from the mountain after receiving the 10 commandments and discovering that the people in their anxiety and frustration have built a golden calf and have begun to worship that because they had given up on Moses and Moses’ God. Moses, according to scripture, was so angry that he threw down the tablets on which the 10 commandments were written and they shattered all over the place into tiny pieces. The midrash says that the reason this happened was to remind us that we don’t make the will of God come true all at once. And it’s not just a matter of following ten rules for a good life, though that’s hard enough. It’s a matter of putting the vision of God for us, that desire that God has for us, it’s a matter of putting the whole will of God together ever so painstakingly, piece by tiny piece. We are called to live with the pain of our history and the sometimes disheartening realities of our world and not to turn away from them or try to take them away. But all this brokenness that we live in the midst of, it is made up of the things of God. And though the past will continue to haunt us, as it should and as it must, we continue to work away, little by little, at mending the brokenness of the holy pieces of our lives, and pray to God that along with the pain, we will find joy too as we do. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 26, 2004