SUNDAY SERMON

September 26, 2004
Proper 21, Year C

I AM BUT ONE

The Rev. Tom Momberg

Gospel: Luke 16:19-31

A Tennessee priest helped birth that ministry. Joe gave it a name. He called it the Jubilee Café, after a similar café at a church in New Orleans.

As the years passed, other ministries took root and bloomed at Jubilee. One church member, a nurse, offered to check blood pressures. Choir members sometimes sang for their breakfast. And some of the café guests became my friends.

One of those friends was Kevin. Kevin barely managed to live above the poverty line, working here and there, never at one place for long. He ran a clothes closet for awhile. Then he volunteered at the farmers' market. A man about town, seen at all hours of day or night, he had lots of energy. He also suffered from mental illness, was usually unmedicated, and was emotionally volatile and unpredictable.

Kevin's temperament got him into lots of scrapes with local folk, including me. One morning, after a café breakfast, he and I were out on the church lawn, nose to nose, jaw to jaw, pointing and yelling, each insisting that he was right about some point that now escapes me. The thing was, when we finished, he turned into a pussycat. In fact, whenever we parted company, he usually asked if he could give me a hug.

Kevin started worshiping at our church. One day, he joined our contemplative prayer group. Sometimes, we were the only two people in silence together. In those times of prayer, when we never spoke, I learned he, too, had a deep desire to know God.

One day, my children, their mother and I were eating at a restaurant, seated by a window. Kevin came by, saw us, and began shouting at me through the glass. Before I could respond, he came inside and continued his diatribe at our table. When I asked him if we could talk later, he said something about that being just like me, mister rich man, and stormed off.

That's the closest Kevin ever came to joining my family for dinner. Although he and I had many a meal together at church, I never invited him to my house. Maybe he'd say something to hurt my children, I thought, or perhaps he'd insult their mother. Maybe he'd get sore at something I'd say or do. To be honest, I was a little afraid, and I just didn't want to deal with him. Keith never tried to talk with me again.

We have no way of knowing what was going through the mind of the rich man in the story Jesus is telling us today. One writer suggests it could go something like this:

"Lazarus is a bum. If I help him, he'll just keep showing up and disturbing my family. Any money I give him will turn into alcohol or drugs. I'll just be enabling his shiftlessness and dependency. Besides, there are places for folks like him to go. Let those bleeding hearts down at the Mission take care of him" (H. K. Oehmig, adapted from Synthesis, 9/26/04).

Maybe I was too afraid or too timid or too unsure or too confused to respond to Kevin, one of the Lazaruses in my life. But Albert Schweitzer, a German doctor of medicine, music and theology, heard the story of the rich man and Lazarus and was converted. He received his medical degree in February of 1913. One month later, he established a hospital in Lamberene, Africa, devoting the remaining years of his life to the care of native people with polio, leprosy and other debilitating diseases. Here is what Schweitzer says about his conversion experience:

"I gave up my position of professor in the University of Strassburg, my literary work, my organ playing, in order to go as a doctor to Equatorial Africa. How did that come about?

"I had read about the physical miseries of the natives in the virgin forests; I had heard about them from missionaries, and the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed to me that we Europeans trouble ourselves so little about the humanitarian task which offers itself in far-off lands. The parable of (the rich man) and Lazarus seemed to me to have been directly spoken to us! We are (the rich man), for, through the advances of medical science, we now know a great deal about disease and pain, and have innumerable means of fighting them….Out there in the colonies, however, sits…Lazarus…who suffers from illness and pain just as much as we do, nay, much more, and has absolutely no means of fighting them. And just as (the rich man) sinned against the poor man at his gate because…he never put himself in his place and let his heart and conscience tell him what he ought to do, so do we sin against the poor man at our gate" (On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, p.1, quoted in Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, p. 245).

My experience with Kevin and this story of Albert Schweitzer puts me in touch with the gap between my creed and my deed, between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, between what I believe and how I actually live my faith. Maybe that's why, of all the words in today's parable, there's one two-word phrase that has me caught up short, haunting me as I prayed with it over the past few weeks. Here it is: "great chasm."

Remember the story? The rich man has died and gone to Hades. He's begging father Abraham to send his "water boy" Lazarus to help quench what is now his eternal thirst. Abraham says that's not going to happen: "…between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us" (Luke 16:26).

But what is this great chasm? What is this gap of which Abraham, father of the Jewish and Islamic and Christian faiths, speaks? And how did it get there?
We find some answers, I think, in a Southern take on this parable. It's from the pen of Clarence Jordan, the author of the "Cotton Patch Gospel." Jordan, as you may know, founded Koinonia, an interracial farm and community near Americus, Georgia, in 1942. A Greek scholar and a farmer, he divided his time between fields and books.

In the Cotton Patch version of the rich man and Lazarus, Jordan doesn't use the word "great." He calls it a "yawning" chasm that separates the rich man from Abraham, Lazarus and salvation: "There's a (yawning) chasm between 'em….The bridge is blasted. We can't get to you. You can't get to us.

"Who (blasted that bridge)? (And) who dug that chasm? Where did it come from? That rich man knows who dug it. HE dug it! And why did he dig it?...He dug it to keep out guys with sores. He didn't want the value of his property to go down when sore people moved into his neighborhood" (Cotton Patch: Parables of Liberation, p. 67).

Sisters and brothers, now there's Good News that's hard to hear. The yawning chasm is the chasm we create when we yawn. It's the chasm we create when we pretend to be bored and say, "Let those bleeding hearts take care of him." It's the chasm we create when we just want to pull the covers over our heads and go back to sleep, because we get wearied and overwhelmed with all the suffering in our world.

And it's the chasm we create when we think we can only go somewhere far away to answer Jesus' call, when Jesus may be calling us to look right outside our gates. Years ago, in a passionate moment, I told a friend how I wanted to spend some time in Africa, to minister to children whose parents were beginning to die of AIDS. "Don't you have a family?" she asked, knowingly. "Are they called to go to Africa, too?"

My friend said something else I needed to hear. "Tom, you don't have to go to the Africa across the ocean. You can go to the Africa of your own heart."

The farthest distance, the greatest chasm, the longest gap in the world is the twelve inches between our heads and our hearts. It's trite, and it's true. In fact, neurological and biological research today shows that there is a deep natural connection between mind and body, between head and heart. It's natural, and yet, we fight that connection, digging and fixing our own personal yawning chasms.

We love to make our chasms as great as possible, so that we don't have to see and think about and admit how we, compared to the rest of the world, are so very, very, very rich. We want our chasms to be big enough to avoid the people with sores. We want our chasms to be so yawning that we can't possibly consider how Jesus might be calling us to put down our well-crafted philosophies and psychologies and theologies, our self-righteous, sinful certainties - how Jesus wants our narrow, small minds to descend into the breadth and width and depth of our hearts.

"You know," says the Cotton Patch Gospel, "you'd better be careful how you dig (chasms) to keep people out; you might want to cross them yourself some day."

The Bad News for the rich man is: it's too late for him. The Good News is: he has five brothers. It's not too late for the rich man's brothers. But they will have to listen to Moses and the prophets.

And so it is with us. Sisters and brothers, it's not too late. But we are going to have to listen to the Bible and the preachers, as Cotton Patch puts it. We are going to have to listen to Jesus.

At times, we will feel overwhelmed. And then what will we do? Or, as theologian Sharon Welch puts it, "What does it mean to work for social transformation in the face of seemingly insurmountable suffering and evil? How can we sustain energy, hope and commitment in the face of an unrelenting succession of social and political crises?" (A Feminist Ethic of Risk, p. 1).

Jesus was one man. Albert Schweitzer of Africa and Mother Teresa of Calcutta and St. Francis of Assisi were each just one person. And yet just one life, laid down in love for our friends and neighbors, can make all the difference in the world. I am reminded of the prayer that the women who call themselves the Daughters of the King pray each time they meet:

I am but one, but I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
What I can do, I ought to do.
What I ought to do, by the grace of God, I will do.
Lord, what would you have me do?

I am convinced that prayer changes things. Prayer may be the only way to bridge those self-protective gaps between our heads and our hearts. Prayer is the way to our own Africa.

And prayer is our way of admitting that we really do need God's help. The name Lazarus comes from the name Eleazar, which means "God helps." Whether we see ourselves as helping a Lazarus or we see ourselves as a Lazarus, whether we see ourselves as rich or as the sore-covered beggar, let us remember: God helps. We can do nothing to bridge our yawning chasms without opening ourselves to the love and mercy and blessing of our God.

No matter how wide our chasm yawns, let us pray. Let us dare to ask for that help. Let us dare to ask for energy, hope, commitment. As we consider the Africa to which we are called, be it far or near, be it delivering flowers to the homebound or wielding a Habitat hammer, be it considering a pilgrimage to India or the amount of our pledge this year, let us dare to ask, each and every day, for God's help.

We are but one, but we are, thank God, each one of us, one of God's beloved children - just like Katherine, who will be baptized this morning, just like Kevin, just like Lazarus.

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