Act Four

Act Four

Luke 16:19-31

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA  9-25-2016)

In 2004, when I was called as pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, I entered a world new to me. Not the world inside the church building so much as the world camped on the steps, in the alley, and on the sidewalks outside the building.

Day and especially at night women and men, and occasionally children,  would roll up their clothes for a pillow, carve out cardboard for a makeshift bed and shelter, and camp out on cold concrete in the winter and scorching concrete in the summer. Every night when I left Central, I tried not to dwell on the nameless folks without a home who were camping on the church grounds, since I was about to return to a comfortable home, a soft bed, with a refrigerator full of food.

 Memories of the early years at Central, trying not to notice folks living outside the church, came rushing back this week when I read the parable Jesus tells in Luke’s Gospel. It is a parable that people often think is easy to pin down. I would suggest otherwise.

Some pin down this story as an anti-wealth parable. This theme is common in Luke’s Gospel. Mary sings in her Magnificat: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly” (1:52). In an early sermon in Luke, Jesus says that God’s Reign is for the hungry and poor, and woe to those who are rich. So some conclude the parable is about the problem of having too much wealth. Maybe, but I doubt it. 

Some pin down this story as the “Jesus loves the poor” parable. In this parable, poverty’s new name is Lazarus, from Eleazar, which means, “God helps.” In an old English carol based on this parable, when the rich man sends his dogs to chase the poor beggar Lazarus from his gate, a miracle occurs when the dogs do not attack poor Lazarus but instead lick his sores. So some conclude the parable is about God’s preferential treatment of the poor. Maybe, but I think the parable goes much deeper. 

          The poet Edith Sitwell pins down the parable in yet another way. In her poem, Still Falls the Rain, she presents Lazarus and the rich man not as opposites but as fellow sufferers, each in need of the mercy of God. She writes, “Christ . . . have mercy on us--/On Dives and on Lararus:  /Under the rain the sore and the gold are as one.” Maybe this is what the parable is about, that whether rich or poor, we all stand in desperate need of the mercy of God. While this fact is true, I believe the parable wants us to go much deeper still.

 So, let me suggest another way to read this parable. Jesus tells this story in three acts. In Act One we meet the characters:  a rich man whose wealth is defended by a gate and demonstrated by royal garments and lavish meals and a poor beggar, Lazarus, who waits each day for the trash to be carried out from the rich man’s mansion. In Act One, we see the world as many then and today see it, a world designed by God, where blessings in this life are a sign of God’s favor, while poverty and hunger are signs of human sloth and Divine displeasure.

Act Two shifts from this life to the afterlife. The poor beggar is treated like the prophet Elijah as he is carried on a chariot to the halls of heaven, while the rich man is buried and tortured endlessly by heat and thirst in Hell. In Act Two, the world as we know it is turned upside down, a world in which the poor prosper and the rich suffer. Yet, in a very basic way, Act Two is simply a repeat of Act One in a new location. The rich man’s interest in Lazarus is simply in how best the beggar can serve him.   

Act Three begins with the rich man pleading with Father Abraham to send Lazarus to visit his five brothers, like Jacob Marley is sent to warn Scrooge of his impending fate. The rich man wants Lazarus to tell them of the torture that awaits them, unless they repent. Clarence Jordan, a good Georgia biblical wise man, who retold the parables in a Southern idiom, interprets Abraham’s answer to the rich man:  “Lazarus ain’t gonna run no mo’ yo’ errands, rich man.”

 I want to suggest that this parable is not yet finished, but awaits Act Four. I want to suggest that this parable is not finally about the rich and the poor or about who gets a heads up that storms are coming. I want to suggest that this parable is less about the afterlife, about eternal feasting for the poor in heaven or scorching in Hell for the rich. I want to suggest that this parable is unfinished and its true meaning is revealed as you and I live out Act Four.

Read the parable closely and the sin of the rich man is not that he is rich or even that he can be mean, sending his dogs to torment the beggar. The great sin of the rich man is not noticing. The rich man never notices Lazarus. He is just another one of the countless homeless, the annoying beggars who are best ignored. Even after his death, even sweating like a devilish dog, the rich man never notices Lazarus as anything more than a slave to serve his needs or an errand boy to carry his message.

The great sin in this parable, the real chasm in this parable is not seeing, not noticing. Until you and I can see, can notice, those who are most often stereotyped or simply ignored, then we are the poor ones no matter how much money we have in the bank.

 I would like to think that in Act Four the brothers of the rich man notice what he never did, notice the kinfolk of Lazarus covered with cardboard, sleeping on city streets, without enough food, and with nowhere to call home. I would like to think that they start to lose sleep at night not over how to invest their latest dividends or where to go on their next vacation, but that there are so many nameless ones are eating their daily trash and sleeping under interstate overpasses at night. 

As I read this parable, it is not that the rich man did something wrong during his life on earth; the problem is that he did no-thing, nothing. I would like to think that Act Four is not finally about what the brothers of the rich man notice, but what you and I notice. Do we notice the millions in our land of plenty who die from hunger and malnutrition every year? Do we notice people of color who fear for their lives because they are not known by name but by category? Do we notice all who die because of limited health care and almost no mental health care in our land or those who die from chemicals we dump into rivers and belch into the air or who die because they are sent back to their deaths as refugees and immigrants, legal and illegal? I would like to think that the first step toward doing some-thing is for you and I to notice. 

After being tutored by wise, compassionate mentors in Atlanta, I started to notice, never enough, but I noticed. The folks sleeping in our Shelter and camped outside the building were no longer “the homeless” to me; they were Lucas and Larry, Mike and Teresa. They were children of God, loved by God as much as I am or you are. They had stories to tell that started to close the great chasm of not noticing and they would no longer let me excuse living on streets as an unfortunate reality. In time, they taught me to notice. As a result, they made my life richer than it had ever been before.

 A big part of me wishes that this parable were easy to pin down, that it were only a simple story about the rich and the poor and life yet to come, and not about how you and I are to live this life right now. A better part of me knows that this parable is all about seeing, about noticing, and when we do, Act Four begins and so does new life this side of the grave, a life worth living every single minute.   

                                                 AMEN

Sing Me to Heaven

Sing Me To Heaven

                                    Text: Revelation 7:9-17

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA, 9-11-2016

         

Toward the end of Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, Vladimir asks Pozzo: “What do you do when you fall far from help?” Vladamir’s question fits aptly into the absurdity of our 21^st century world. Years ago, we could simply “wish upon a star” or “talk, keep talk, keep talking happy talk,” but not now, not in a day when refugees are the fastest growing population worldwide, when the pipeline of young African American males to private prisons grows every day, when North Korea is testing nuclear weapons, when well-dressed looters prey on the poor on Wall Street. What do we do when we fall far from help?

          Fifteen years ago today was the hardest single day of my ministry. I stood outside my office at the Old Presbyterian Meeting House, near the Pentagon, as a plane flew overhead. Nothing new. Planes flew over our church more often than the train runs outside Cove, since our church was in the flight pattern of National Airport.

This was to be no ordinary day, rather an extraordinary day, extraordinarily horrific. In a matter of minutes, first in New York and then in D.C., chaos ensued and engulfed our nation and world. Fifteen years later, violence still runs loose like a wild beast. We struck back with vengeance in Afghanistan and Iraq, but chaos still looms large in those countries and regions. We invented a department of Homeland Security but most of us feel anything but secure. There is an underlying sense of malaise in the air, an ominous fear that haunts many of us as we wonder, “What’s next?”

I still enjoy listening to Rogers and Hammerstein’s old song of the cock-eyed optimist inviting us to “talk, keep talk, keep talking happy talk,” but it is Vladamir’s question that haunts me today:  “What do you do when you fall far from help?”  

Ask Vladamir’s question and you enter the world of Revelation. It is a world where normal assurances no longer work, where evil is not an occasional visitor, but landed gentry; where simple religious formulas no longer produce the desired results; where we pray fervently but heaven is silent; where we are faithful to God and compassionate to our neighbor and yet find ourselves accosted and accused, beaten and jailed. It is a world where madness is the norm and you wonder if God has taken the last train for the coast.

          D.H. Lawrence described the book of Revelation as detestable and our theological ancestor, John Calvin, wrote a commentary on every book in the New Testament, except Revelation. In his superb commentary on this bizarre book, Mitchell Reddish asks: “Would we not be better off distancing ourselves from this book that has been the fertile field for fundamentalist soothsayers, that helped fuel the fires at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, and that to some people seems more of an embarrassment than a work to be taken seriously?” (p. 2). 

          Reddish asks what many Christians practice, simply by not reading this book. And, while the temptation is great to lop off the end of the New Testament, ultimately, we do so at too high a price. For Revelation speaks powerfully and evocatively to Christians like us in the 21^st century, Christians living in a world gone awry, and to a church embattled from outside and within. Its language is strange and its images turn common sense on its head, but its promise is too much to set aside; it is the promise for which Christians and the church thirst when flood waters rise and life’s well is bone dry. 

          Logically, Chapter Seven should be the final chapter of Revelation. The last of the seven seals is broken and the end of the world should occur. Instead, Chapter Seven is a strange interlude, a holy pause with parallel scenes happening on earth and in heaven. On earth, angels are stationed at the four corners of the flat globe to hold back the violent wind of God, while in heaven, a multitude of too many to count saints hold a public concert. A slain Lamb rather than a marauding Lion sits upon the throne of God and saints in dazzling clothes not stained red but made white with blood sing a hallelujah chorus.

Welcome to John’s world, a world dancing with apocalyptic, not-to-be-taken literally, images. Unfortunately, many people read this bizarre book as a literal manual of the end time while others laugh out loud at such religious nonsense and dismiss it as a cookbook for kooks. Both groups miss the mark for what this revelation is all about and therefore distort the power of its message.

          In the second scene in Chapter Seven, the scene set in heaven, a multitude of martyrs cannot stop singing songs of praise and thanksgiving to God. In John’s vision, these choristers are the Christians, the unlikely saints, who kept believing when they had fallen “far from help,” who kept hoping when hope seemed foolish at best amid Roman tyranny, who kept witnessing to the non-violent love of God in Christ when Rome flexed its military muscles, and who kept giving of themselves in the name of the One who gave himself in love for the world. They died while the world laughed at their feeble witness. They died and yet now they sing in glorious praise around the throne of God.

Revelation assaults the senses with fantastic images that try to capture the inexplicable – how God redeems suffering, even the suffering death of Jesus. Revelation dares to ask Christians and a church to put their life’s trust in God, to believe in the good purposes of God, and to love God even in the midst, especially in the midst of terror and suffering, sin and storm. 

Believing in the redemptive, transforming power of God in Christ is always hard. It is much easier, though, when life is calm, when we are comfortable and can somehow equate our prosperity with God’s reward for our sincere faith. Believing is easier when we carry the biggest stick and equate our political and military prowess with God’s divine intention for our country. Believing is much easier when God provides a magic, protective bubble around us to deliver us from the paths of drunk drivers, from the guided missiles of cancer cells, from the horrors of suicide bombers, and from horrific storms that mock our preparedness.

          Revelation puts the church on notice that we are called by God to hone our faith in troubled times, not to escape suffering, not to dodge pain at all costs with one more pill or one more drink, but to suffer with those who would otherwise suffer alone, to pray for and bear witness to the love of God in Christ even to family and neighbors and co-workers for whom the notion of divine love is nothing more than intellectual pablum, to bind the wounds of those victimized by our warring ways, to raise our voices to those in positions to make peace, to get involved in the lives of those who are struggling the most, to gather here Sunday after Sunday to lift our voices in praise while the majority of people around us scratch their collective heads and wonder why we do.

          What do you and I do when we fall far from help? That is Beckett’s question. It is not ours, not in this century, not ever. For, the promise of Revelation is not that storms will hit elsewhere; it is instead the promise that for those who follow the slain Lamb, the one we know as Jesus, they will sing with the chorus of heavenly angels despite chaos and catastrophe, even in the midst of chaos and catastrophe, and will never be far from help, God’s help. It is the promise that God gives us voices to sing our laments and to sing our praises even to the doorstep of heaven, from this moment and in every moment to come.

So, followers of the Lamb, let us sing.

          Hallelujah!

                    Amen!

The Welcome Table

The Welcome Table

Text: Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

(Gary W. Charles, Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA, 9-4-2016)

Anne Lamott begins one of her essays with this statement: “On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death.”[1] When I first read Anne’s statement, I was struck by the image of eating myself to death. As someone who loves to eat but cannot eat sugar, I have a vivid image of what it would look like to eat myself to death. It would involve a trip to dessert heaven in Little Italy in NYC., where I would consume lots of pie, chocolate, coconut, cherry, apple, along with carrot cakes and German Chocolate cakes, extra-large milkshakes of numerous flavors, custards, puddings, along with a wide variety of exotic desserts found only in this tiny pastry shop.

“I decided all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death.” Anne, of course, was using her unique, often irreverent, humor to talk about something that is anything but funny. What do we do when despair creeps into our bones or grief just will not go home? What do we do when we are absolutely certain that we are alone in this world, surrounded by people who wish we were not here or who never notice we are? What do we do when the only thing that is clear is that all life is hopeless?

I have no idea what led the psalmist to compose Psalm 139, but I am as thankful for this psalm as any in the Psalter. To anyone who has ever battled or is battling despair and trying to climb out of the deep well of grief, who is convinced that no one understands them, no one knows them, no one cares if they live or they die, the psalmist sings: “O LORD, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.”

As a child and a teen, I found this psalm creepy. It felt like God was being portrayed as the head of some secret wiretapping organization and I ended up feeling guilty whenever my thoughts strayed toward girls or skipping school, and well the list goes one.

As an adult, I find few psalms more comforting. Eat enough of this psalm and it is the best antidote to the toxicity of despair and the soul-numbing power of grief. It is a way out and a way forward for any of us who decide, along with Anne, that that all of life is hopeless.

This table is set for all of us, but in particular, it is set to lead to just the opposite conclusion than the one that Anne reached on her forty-ninth birthday. This table is set for all who want to eat themselves to life; who want to taste the promise of the psalmist, “O LORD, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and rise up.”  

This table cannot be reserved for select, exclusive parties. It will never be my table or yours or Cove’s. At this table, the risen Christ is host, a host who invites us to meet the God who searches out our paths and is acquainted with all our ways, whether we were raised Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, one of the countless denominations of Protestant, or none of the above. At this table, we meet the God who searches us out, knows us by name, and will not leave us to choke on the death-dealing fare of despair or the life diminishing grub of grief.

Years ago I worked in migrant ministry for the Virginia Council of Churches on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. When I went to the fields, I would often hear these day laborers singing a song that was new to me at the time. Even though picking vegetables all day, these migrants were chronically hungry because they had little to live on and they were systematically cheated of their limited funds by unscrupulous crew chiefs. Even when they could scrape together enough change to walk across the street and buy a soda at the local Stuckey’s, they encountered a handwritten sign prominently posted in the window:  “Migrants Not Welcome.”

The song that these migrant workers taught me in the fields was actually a favorite freedom song of the Civil Rights Movement. It sings: “We’re gonna sit at the Welcome Table. We’re gonna sit at the Welcome Table one of these days, Hallelujah! No more hunger ‘round that table . . . all God’s children ‘round that Table. We’re gonna sit at the Welcome Table one of these days.”

Though denied welcome everywhere from Woolworth’s to the voting booth,

these migrants sang about a table that no one could deny them welcome, because it

belongs to the Lord of life who welcomes and does not deny access. You and I are

about to sit at that Welcome Table.

This is the Welcome Table where our host invites us to eat ourselves to life.

This table has no place set for despair and is just the right meal to assuage our grief. It

is the table where the psalmist’s song is always playing:  “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness

shall cover me, and the light around me become night’, even the darkness is not dark

to you; the night is as bright as day, for darkness is as light to you.” At this Welcome

Table, we taste the truth of the psalmist’s song that it simply is never true that life is

hopeless, even when we find ourselves in the darkest and most miry place.

None of the Gospel writers say, but I can imagine that when Jesus sat down at

the original Welcome Table on that darkest of all nights, when betrayal was guised as

a kiss, justice sprinted out of the city, and the sky went black, that he sang the

psalmist’s song. And, later, when he kneeled in the Garden of Gethsemane to pray

and walked the long path to Golgotha, he kept singing that song.

At this Welcome Table, we meet a God who not only searches us out, but who searches out every despairing soul on earth, even those like Judas, who gave birth to despair. At this table, by God’s plentiful grace, you and I eat ourselves to life, so that we can become the life-giving people of God’s justice and mercy and love in a world too often choking on despair.

At this Welcome Table, we feast on the promise that our God does not abandon us, even when we are feeling the most abandoned. We eat the psalmist’s promise: “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”

 So, come to this Welcome Table singing the psalmist’s song. And, if you happen to be in a place where you simply cannot sing, come anyway; we will sing for you.

Come to the Welcome Table and eat yourself to life!

AMEN

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[1] Anne Lamott, “Ham of god,” Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (NY: Riverhead Books, 2005) 4.