Strangers at the Gate

'C'  /  Pentecost 19  /  9-26-10  /  Celebration of Worship, Bethesda Presbyterian Church

Scripture      Luke 16:19-31

Strangers at Our Gate

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, by our somnambulant alienation from those we are afraid who might mug us.

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 Ann Arbor home in 1998. 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 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 very 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.

Perhaps most of us feel we are neither rich nor poor but middle class – the association-of-choice of the vast majority in our country. And everyone running for election or reelection this season with an ounce of political sense plays heavily to this mass identification.

Middle-class: Perhaps we can straddle the gate in this story today. Neither rich … or Lazarus. We can perch ourselves nicely, in the middle.

Veteran church consultant Loren Mead rattles the latch beneath us. 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.”

There will be a murmur. A sort of collective, “Wait a minute. What right has he to ask me that?” Then a few hands will go up, tentatively. Somebody will blurt out, “Compared to what?” If I hold the silence long enough, I’ll start to get comments such as, “With my mortgage and tuition payments, I’m darned near broke!” Nervous laughter. There is always nervous laughter.²

“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

“Are you rich?” The question threatens us because we know we are, yet we wish so very much not to be known as we are.

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: Compared with the rest of the 6.5 billion people in the world 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; this generation is far less formal than the one in which I was raised, where my mother would admonish me to “dress up for God” on Sundays. And yet, 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! Most overseas mission workers I know, on the other hand, feel as if they’ve died and gone to hell when they return from their assignments. It’s call reverse culture shock – almost always worse than the shock of leaving American and entering a Two-Thirds World culture. I experienced it, returning after only two months in Guatemala. My own wife, 20 years after returning from two-and-a-half years in the Congo, cannot to this day enter a Sam’s Club or Costco or Ikea without physically growing ill.

I understand Amy, here; I do not blame her. And yet, I ask those of you who have never been immersed in a Two-Thirds World land: Need we grow ill as Americans? Need we feel ashamed of our affluence? As the Apostle Paul might put it: By no means! Shame or guilt is a cop-out – an easy way out – a way of being that inhibits action. Our first step is simply to acknowledge that – globally speaking – we … are … rich.

Is that so hard? For many, it seems to be. This first step is the hardest for us to admit. To put a 12 Step program spin on it, the first step is to admit our addiction: We are powerless over our affluence – that our need for a growth economy to feed our affluence has become unmanageable.

The fact that we are rich is hardest to admit because, once we break out of our two-ocean-buffer of denial and drop our blinders to our distant neighbors to the South, 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. But what I sense is this: No matter how book-educated we are or how diverse a crowd we run with here in the Beltway, 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,” while Fear says to us, “You dare not look!”⁴

But we do need to pass that way – the distant neighbors at our country’s very gate. Many of them are passing our way. And so we’d better take a look. And we possess the abundant resources to do just that. The abundance to 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. (Umbrella Initiatives – Peru). 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 Washington, D.C.

Go. Just … 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.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

*        *        *

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.

Prayers of the People (partial) …

Lord, we are habituated.

Which, after all, is a nice way to say we are addicted.

No shame in that. No shame in the fact that (a) we are rich, & (b) because we are rich, others have to be poor.

How else can fifty percent of your world’s goods be used to feed and clothe and house and transport and entertain less than five percent of her population?

No shame in being rich. No guilt, here.

But we are tempted to be shamed – to remain locked in our loveless guilt –

if we do not respond to Luke’s gospel admonition:

“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded.”

Be we rich, O Lord: Let us look, love, and learn from the Lazaruses at our very gate …

Our distant neighbors, to our South – of late, in places such as Langley Park.

Our federally taxed yet not federally represented sisters and brothers in the District of Columbia – the tea party should be theirs!

The homeless at our Bethesda and Bethesda Presbyterian doorsteps.

The man named Graybeard, who inflated my son’s basketball last week.

The woman at the busy intersection – she’s always there – our social net cannot or will not catch her …

Lord, we are habituated.

Which is, after all, a nice way to say we are addicted …