Building Houses

This is a meditation given on October 13th based on Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7.

They were homesick and heartsick, the Jews in Babylon. They had been taken from Jerusalem. They could not go home. They were in exile. And we can hear their lament echoing in the Hebrew Bible – particularly the Psalms. “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” And “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” They asked.
It wasn’t an idle question. For the Jews of the time, God lived in the temple built by Solomon in Jerusalem. But now in exile, the temple destroyed, and without even the ark of the covenant that their nomadic ancestors had carried so they would know God had a home with them, where was God? How could they sing? How could they worship? It just wasn’t right. It wasn’t like it used to be.
They were surrounded by people who weren’t their people, who didn’t believe as they did, who didn’t talk like they did, who didn’t worship their God.
So they camped out in Babylon and waited for God to save them, to answer their prayers and put things back the way they were. Their God was a powerful God – it could happen. And they loved to listen to those who told them soon, “anytime now,” they would be going home.
Time passed, but the lament went on. Long enough for Jeremiah, who was back in the land of Judah, to hear. Now Jeremiah wasn’t the most popular prophet with the Jews. He kept telling them things they did not want to hear. But he also kept being right.
So Jeremiah writes a letter to these homesick exiles. And his letter contained God’s words of salvation – just not the words the exiles longed to hear. Shockingly blunt, the prophet told them that God said, “Your old life is gone. Your new life is in Babylon. Suck it up. Deal with it. Stop living out of your suitcases and camping out in tents. Build houses to live in, grow your own food, marry, raise families. Work for the welfare of the city and all who live in it, because their welfare is your welfare. Stop living in the past. You’re going to be here a while. Settle in. This is your home now – act like it.” Harsh, right?
And yet, these were words of salvation and hope in more ways than one.
As I read this passage, I keep coming back to that moment in seminary where I learned about the Greek word for “tradition.” I’ve mentioned this before. What I learned that struck me so forcibly, and which I’ve been trying to process ever since, is that depending on the context, the same Greek word can mean either “tradition” or “betrayal.” And so the question that keeps running through my mind – and my life – is when does holding onto what was, to something from the past, cross the line and become a betrayal?
This text provides some clues. Perhaps the line is crossed when holding onto the past keeps us from living as God’s people in the present. The exiles were in a holding pattern. Stuck in a kind of warp bubble – neither in the Jerusalem of the past nor a part of Babylon in the present. They were surviving – but their lives were on hold – less like living and more like the living dead.
But mere survival isn’t enough. God wants us to thrive – to build homes for ourselves in the present where we and our families can grow. To plant gardens to provide nourishment for today and for the future. To live with love and create new life. And through our lives to witness to God’s greatness and God’s love.
But when the Israelites remained stuck in survival mode, the God seen through their lives looked small and ineffectual, and maybe a little bitter.
Tradition – betrayal. Perhaps that line is also crossed when we spend so much time and energy focusing on what the present situation lacks – comparing it to what used to be in the past – that we miss or reject the abundant gifts God gives us today. All the Jews could see was that Babylon was not Jerusalem, it’s people were not Jews, their ways were not their ways, things were not the way they used to be, not the way they wanted. But God, through Jeremiah, told them they had all they needed to live and live abundantly – what they needed to build houses, what they needed to plant gardens, what they needed to grow families. But they couldn’t see it because their eyes were trained on the past, on what they lacked, not what they had.
The reason we remember the past, the reason for tradition, is not so we can look at the present and judge it wanting, but so we can know that the God who provided in the past will also provide for us today and tomorrow. God was with the Israelites back in Jerusalem, but God was also with them in Babylon – as God is with us today.
The text also suggests that perhaps the line is also crossed when our yearning for what used to be leads us to pray only for what we want, a return to the past, instead of praying for what is needed not only by us but by our neighbors here and now.
       The Israelites had expectations, assumptions of what their lives were supposed to be. Led by the false prophets, they prayed and prayed for God to send them back to Jerusalem, and waited for it to happen – like ordering something on-line and waiting for it to arrive in the mail. And when you don’t get it you assume there’s something wrong – something wrong with you, like you didn’t have enough money in your account – something wrong with the method of communication, like your order got lost (maybe you didn’t pray enough) – or worse, in your disappointment your come to feel there’s something wrong with God. The store is closed; there’s no one there.
But God doesn’t work like that – and prayer doesn’t work like that. Prayer is about connection – opening ourselves up to God and to those we pray for – and trusting God. Prayer is one way we train our eyes to see God working in us and our world now – today. So even when we find ourselves in a place we didn’t want to be – like Babylon – if we can let go of our expectations and learn to thrive in surprising places – we may learn what those who have come before us have learned over and over again – that we can count on God never to forsake us, to see us through whatever comes our way. No matter where we are – we belong to God – and God is with us.
The Israelites wanted and prayed to go home. Through Jeremiah, God tells them they are home – and tells them how to live there. Their prayer was answered – they were home – just not in the way they wanted.
So then Jeremiah refocuses the Israelites’ prayer life not on themselves but on the world around them – on the city of Babylon, their new home. “Seek the welfare of the city where you are in exile,” he says, “and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  Welfare. When we hear the same word repeated over and over, we need to sit up and take notice.
The word translated here as “welfare” is the Hebrew word shalom. It’s a word often translated “peace.” It’s a word of healing, of wholeness, of thriving and flourishing in God. If the Israelites were existing like the living dead, what God, through Jeremiah, was offering them was nothing less than resurrection. But – and this is a big “but” – their salvation, their welfare, their shalom, was integrally connected to the salvation, the welfare, the shalom of those foreigners and that foreign city. The Israelites needed not only to build their own houses, but to work for the benefit of the whole neighborhood – the whole city that was now their home. To be blessed with shalom they needed to be a blessing. And the more they are involved and connected to the wider community, the more it will feel like home.
This is a powerful scripture for our times. We live in a country full of exiles. If you think about it, our country was built by exiles. And then we took the native people who were already at home here, and made them exiles in their own land. And over and over again each group of exiles has eventually learned to build houses in this foreign land, to find nourishment, to make connections, to find their place and work together with their new neighbors to make it better.
But today, there are many in our country who feel like exiles – they didn’t move, but the world has changed and shifted around them leaving them alienated, strangers in a strange land – longing to return home – but don’t know where it is. So they band together, listen to false prophets trashing the “Babylonians” all around them, and promising them that soon, “anytime now,” they will be able to return to the way it was before – if they just hold on to tradition, stand firm, keep their eyes on the past. And they want and they pray so hard for that dream, that when it doesn’t come to pass in the way they want and expect their anger and bitterness spills over and scorches everyone and everything. We can see it in our society, we can see it in our country’s politics, we can see it in modern Christianity. The modern church in the West is, after all, really a church in exile.
But there is a way forward; there is the possibility of healing, of wholeness, of shalom. And it begins, says Jeremiah, by recognizing that we are already home, and begin to act that way. To build houses in which God can be seen here and now, and God’s family can thrive.
I read a story in the Dallas Morning News this year (August 5, 2013; Dinesh Ramde, AP) about two men building such a house. Arno Michaelis is a 42-year-old white male from Wisconsin who came of age in the white supremacist movement. He was the lead singer in the white power band called Centurion. He tattooed his body with hate messages and swastikas. Like most white supremacists, he likely longed to return to a time when white men reigned supreme. And he hated – all those who were not white, Christian by his definition, hated all that was foreign to him.
And that hating was exhausting, and kept him isolated and alienated from the community around him. He couldn’t watch pro football games, including the local Green Bay Packers, because blacks and whites were playing together. He couldn’t watch TV because Hollywood was a Jewish conspiracy. He loved Seinfeld but he had to record it on a videotape labeled “Amber’s second birthday party” so his white-supremacist friends wouldn’t know he liked a Jewish comedian.
Then a couple of things happened to him. A friend of his died in a street fight, bringing the cost of hate close to home. And his daughter was born, and that new life, his new role as father, opened his eyes, and he knew he had to change his life. And he took steps to make it that way, including getting new tattoos to cover the old racist messages.
In 2012, he heard about how a gunman walked into a Sikh temple in Milwaukee and killed six people. He saw how the gunman’s white supremacist background was nearly identical to his own, and he lay awake agonizing that the gunman might have been someone he’d recruited into the white power movement or inspired when he was the lead singer of a hate band.
So with love for his daughter in his heart, Arno reached out to a different child, a son whose father died in the Sikh temple that day, and Arno invited him to dinner. Pardeep Kaleka is a 37-year-old, clean-cut American of Indian heritage who teaches high school social studies.  And yet, he was part from mainstream America, separated by his ethnicity, his religion, the color of his skin. It wasn’t easy for Pardeep to meet Arno, but he wanted his father’s death to be a catalyst for peace, and he saw in Arno someone who could help him carry a message that it’s possible to turn hate into love.
They formed an organization, serve2Unite, a community group that forges relationships, that seeks the welfare of the city, that works to counter violence with peace, and hate by sowing seeds of understanding and love.
       Singer Martina McBride has a song with the line, “Love’s the only house big enough for all the pain in the world.” Arno and Pardeep are building a big house. A big house indeed.
And in the building, and the planting, and the raising and remembering of family, and the forging of relationships – there is healing, there is wholeness, there is shalom – and there is God. And the exile white man and the exile Indian man are exiles no longer – but neighbors and brothers.
      “And thus says the Lord . . . to all the exiles . . . Build houses and live in them,” thrive and help those around you to thrive. Build houses of love, not hate – of hope, not bitterness – of life, not death. Houses of love – that’s our real tradition. Build houses – and come home. Amen.

Seeing is Believing -- a Meditation on the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus

The following is the text of a sermon on Luke 16:19-31 given on September 29th by Rev. Christine Ng.

I love the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that series of books from the 1980’s by Douglas Adams. I love the BBC radio play and tv series too. The more recent movie – eh – not so much. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the extraordinary story of one extremely ordinary Englishman named Arthur Dent. But it’s also the story of a book, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – which is kind of like the space traveler’s bible – full of all sorts of information, stories and advice written by travelers over time to help other travelers on their way. It has the words “Don’t Panic” written in large, friendly letters on the cover.

One of the things that you can learn about in the Guide is the SEP – which stands for “Somebody Else’s Problem,” and refers to the natural tendency of people to ignore things they don’t like, don’t understand, don’t accept or which would cause them too much trouble if they were to recognize it.
According to the Guide, true invisibility is almost impossible to achieve – Star Trek’s cloaking device and Harry Potter’s cloak notwithstanding. So instead someone came up with a device that creates an SEP field, which encourages this tendency. Apparently, there’s been a spaceship covered by an SEP field sitting in a cricket field in England for years and no one has noticed. It’s somebody else’s problem, so it becomes functionally invisible because of the blindness of those refusing to see. It was possible to see it, but just be catching glimpses out of the corner of your eye.
       Our own Bible is kind of like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to a Life of Faith, with information, stories and advice written by travelers over time to help us in our own lives. Our guidebook doesn’t have the words “Don’t Panic” on the cover but perhaps it should.
        In today’s parable, our book describes same thing an SEP. The rich man passed by Lazarus everyday, without ever really “seeing” him. Oh, he knew Lazarus was there – he even knew his name. But he never let the evidence of his eyes really connect with his brain, he never let it impact him or his life. And the result of his willful blindness is a widening chasm between him and Lazarus – a chasm that eventually become impassible. It’s like the two live in different realities, and eventually they become so different there are no places where they can connect, can find common ground.
And when the rich man finally understands, too late, he wants to send a message back to save his family from his fate. We wants evidence that will open their eyes, so they can see. He wants a sign so clear, so unambiguous, so miraculous that no one could possibly misunderstand or doubt that this was God’s own truth.
But Abraham tells him, “no.” That message has been given, over and over, in the words of the prophets. It’s right there in the book. The evidence has been in front of them all the time. If they have chosen to ignore it before, they will continue to ignore it no matter what new facts, signs, or miracles are sent. The fault is not with the message or the messengers – it is also the responsibility of the listener to hear, to accept, to believe the message and to act accordingly. You know the phrase, “seeing is believing” – well you have to see first – and they don’t or won’t.
The warning of this story, though, is that too often we open our eyes and see the truth – too late. Too late. By telling this story, Jesus, and the author of Luke, puts us in the position of the 5 brothers – the ones still alive – the one’s for whom it is not too late – if we but open our eyes and see.
We all have a tendency toward what one writer calls “ignore – ance” – not just “ignorance” but “ignore – ance” – a kind of willful blindness or deafness. It’s not just a passive thing – but is, at some level of our consciousness, a deliberate choice – a choice not to see, not to hear, not to know – because of what it would mean for us if we did. But it would disrupt our carefully balanced lives – it would blow our reality apart.
       We say we just want to be sure – we want “better evidence” – clearer facts. But our search for certainty becomes an excuse for not acting. There is no evidence, no signs, no miracles that can overcome our own choice to turn our heads the other way, plug up our ears or hear what we want to hear and go on with our lives as they are.
And our culture doesn’t help – but instead tends to desensitize us – like a global or cultural SEP field. Studies have shown that violent media – like violent movies, video games, and even television coverage of actual war – makes people numb to the pain and suffering of others, and therefore less likely to offer help to people in pain or need.
       In one stunning study in 2009, participants played video games – some violent, others not – for 20 minutes. After that, while they were filling out a questionnaire, there was a loud fight outside the door of the lab. It was clear from the sounds that one person was badly injured in the fight. People who played the violent games took much longer to help the injured victim, rated the fight less serious, and were less likely to even admit to hearing the fight, compared to those who played the non-violent games. It became an SEP -- and that was after only 20 minutes!
       We can also become desensitized by the magnitude of a problem. Some problems seem so overwhelming that we can’t see how anything we, ourselves, can do can make any difference. The size of the problem becomes another excuse for inaction.
       Perhaps something like this happened to the rich man. Perhaps he saw so many poor people, begging, everyday, that he had become desensitized to their pain. There is nothing in the story that suggests the rich man was evil – just that he never really saw Lazarus – and went on with his life as if Lazarus wasn’t even there. Lazarus was someone else’s problem.
       One of my favorite poems is by W.H. Auden. It’s based on a 16th century painting by Pieter Breughels, called The Fall of Icarus, which Auden saw in the Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium. Auden names his poem after the Museum. If you haven’t seen this painting before, take a moment, and see if you can find Icarus. In the story of Icarus, Icarus was the boy who took the wings his father made to help them escape imprisonment, and instead of simply flying to freedom he flew too close to the sun. His wing’s melted and he fell to his death. It was a tragedy.

Can you find him? He’s down in the bottom right hand corner of the painting, and all you can see are his legs as he enters the water. Here’s the poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating
or opening a window
or just walking dully along.
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood;
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run it’s course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life
And the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance:
How everything turns away
Quite leasurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship
That must have seen something amazing,
A boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

It was not an important failure. Didn’t affect their lives. It would cause too much of a disruption to turn the ship around and try to save him. They didn’t know him. His suffering, his father’s suffering, didn’t touch them. It was someone else’s problem.
       To what are we blind? Where are the invisible people, the invisible problems, the invisible pain in our world? Where are the chasms growing wider – dividing us from each other? Once you start looking you can see them all over – like cracks that form during earthquakes – breaking up the foundations of the world all around us.
       Since our scripture story today was about the rich and the poor lets begin there – with income inequality and the widening gap between the rich and everyone else. I just saw the new movie Inequality for All this weekend and recommend it if you want to understand what is happening in our economy and our country.
       But there are other blind spots. Like global warming – which many still deny even though scientists have been sounding the warning for decades, and even though it has now long been the scientific consensus – born out but new data everyday.
       Like racial inequality – as studies show that a majority of white people think they are more likely to suffer racism than those of color despite voluminous evidence to the contrary.
       Like those who continue to believe that homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice,” a matter of preference or disease. Like our wounded warriors and first responders – heroes for the moment, then all but forgotten later.
       There are plenty of blind spots for us as individuals and as a society. Plenty of SEPs. Make your own list – but check other people’s lists too – because remember, you don’t know what you don’t know.
        Sometimes those blind spots or SEPs can be closer to home. Ariel Castro held three women hostage for years in a house in Ohio, and no one in the neighborhood noticed. It’s not unusual for people to notice strange behavior in those who would later commit mass murder – but shrug it off: it was someone else’s problem.
       “Ignore – ance.” SEP. It’s not new. Perhaps that’s why Jesus kept saying things like “those with ears to hear listen.” But this the story of The Rich Man and Lazarus suggests that regardless of the causes of our blindness, it can have devastating consequences – for all of us. The worst outcome they could image in the first century was to suffer the fires of hell after death, with no chance at redemption. But the story works just as well without a literal heaven and hell – because the consequences of the kind of blind spots I mentioned are dire indeed – torture, death, suffering, revolution, the end of the world. Our ignore-ance can be fatal.
Our parable for today is an apocalypse – which literally means “to uncover” or “to reveal.” It’s not foretelling of the future – but a story designed to help us to see – to see before it’s too late.
       Because seeing is the first step to action, to making a change. If you really see, you cannot sit idly by and do nothing. And it begins with seeing what is right outside your door – in your home, in your neighborhood, in your community. The rich man wasn’t condemned for his failure to save “the poor” – but for not seeing, and therefore helping, this one specific man – Lazarus. For letting the gap between them grow. For not recognizing him as neighbor, brother. The problems may be huge – but our response begins one step at a time.
       Who or what is your Lazarus? Who or what situation has been given to you to help? What do you pigeon-hole or dismiss as “someone else’s problem.” Guess what. It’s your problem too. Pay attention –your Lazarus is there. If you look carefully you may just be able to glimpse him out of the corner of your eye.
       And when you do, don’t panic – just see. Because to see is to believe. And to believe is to do. Amen.

On that which divides us . . .

Abraham said . . . “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

I’ve been thinking a lot about chasms – or gaps. Big gaping holes or gashes in the fabric of the world separating us from each other. Partly because I preached on Luke 16:19-31 last Sunday – the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. [I’ve been asked to post that sermon and I will post it separately.] And I saw the movie Inequality for All this week, which made income inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor, the 1% and everyone else, starkly visible – and just as scary in it’s way as the chasm between the Rich Man and Lazarus in the parable – in this life and the next.
But today, it’s a different (though in some ways not unrelated) gap that is on my mind. Whatever you think about the government shut down – whether you think it is cool as cream cheese and are rubbing your hands in glee or it makes you angry about our leaders’ inability to act as reasonable responsible adults or it makes you afraid for the future of our economy and democracy or it simply makes you sad. Whatever you think about it – it is clearly an apocalypse in the traditional sense of the word. It is a revelation, a revealing or uncovering of the chasm that divides our country.
We are (at least) two different Americas – we see things differently, we get our information from different sources, we watch different tv channels, we live in two different realities. We demonize those on the other side, those who disagree with us, painting them as somehow less than us – less American, sometimes less human. And there seems to be no point of connection, no way for one to cross over the divide. We are separate and apart – just as the Rich Man and Lazarus are in the parable. One in “heaven” and one in “hell.” But we even disagree on who is in which.
The image of a chasm separating us is very graphic for me. If it were a wall dividing us, there might be chinks or holes in the wall through which one might see, or pass notes to those on the other side. Walls can be knocked down with the right tools by someone on either side.
But what has been going on in Washington recently is more like people running full out and having to pull up short because suddenly in front of them is the edge of a cliff – with a huge chasm or gorge between them and the other side. So there they are – on the edge of a cliff. Stuck. While exactly the same thing is happening on the other side of the chasm to a different group of people. If they had known the chasm was there, they could have run in different directions. But now it is too late. So the two groups stare at each other across the chasm and have nowhere to go. No good choices. Nowhere but down, off the cliff, into the abyss.
And yet – with people on both sides of the chasm there is another way. A rope can be thrown by the people on one side and caught by the people on the other side. Tied off and secured on both ends it becomes the beginning of a bridge. But that takes people on both sides, working together to bridge the gap. It takes a willingness to look at the faces on the other side of the chasm and see our own reflection.
In the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Rich Man begs Abraham to send a message from beyond the grave to his still living brothers to warn them not to make the same mistakes so they don’t end up in hell too. Abraham says, “No.” He says they have been warned – it is now up to them. And yet the parable itself is such a message to us. A warning. Turn back. Change your ways. Before it is too late.
Events like the government shut down, and the upcoming debt ceiling fight, are warnings too – as they highlight the looming cliffs ahead, and the chasms that divide us.
Chasms that are like gaping wounds in our country, with America’s lifeblood flowing out with each day they remain unhealed. But the process of healing begins with each of us. Throw enough ropes back and forth across the gorge and they become not just a bridge, but sutures to stitch our wounded country back together again – drawing the edges carefully back together into wholeness.
Anyone got some rope?