Sermons

“A Hard Hope”

Luke 16:29-32; Matthew 5:23-24; Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – September 25, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might truly embrace your call to make whole the body of Christ and seek the hope that comes from reconciliation. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.

This is not going to be an artful sermon. There just isn’t time. I’m going to lay out some basic truths about what I think we’re doing here today, and then I’m going to make some observations about our scripture readings, in the light of our current situation. Then we can all choose to lay our gifts down on the altar or not.

Every year around this time, we join with Disciples across the US and Canada in celebrating and donating to support our denominational office of Reconciliation Ministry. This offering and that office are dedicated to dismantling racism. It precedes and is part of our church-wide priority of becoming a pro-reconciling, anti-racist church. Each year, the office of Reconciliation Ministry sends out the materials you’ll find in your bulletin, offering envelopes and flyers, along with posters and such, with the year’s themes and scripture references. They gave us a lot to work with this year. In addition to the two verses we just heard from Matthew, Reconciliation offers us their interpretations of these verses, in the form of a few slogans. “Be Reconciled,” they say, pulling that one directly from the scripture. We are “Disciples, called to be together in Christ.” We should “Move Together, Heal Together” and be “Bound Together.”

These catchphrases seem very Disciple, don’t they? As a church, we have always been very focused on the unity of the Body of Christ. We believe in “together”. We might even say that our faith doesn’t really allow any alternatives to “together” so it’s just a matter of how we do “together”. Usually, we aim for the purest form of “together”, the kind found in I Corinthians 12, where we read that “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it.” We like to think of ourselves as a community that laughs with those who laugh and weeps with those who weep, extending our hearts and hands to everyone to share the highs and lows of life as one, unified body.

But we also know that we often fall short of this ideal, which is why we turn to Matthew 5:23-24, the verses that inspire the ritual act of reconciliation we call “The Passing of the Peace of Christ.” “The peace of Christ be with you.” “And also with you.” We say this to one another before worship, as a symbolic way of reconciling with our brothers and sisters before bringing our gifts of praise to God. This is another, perhaps more human way of being the Body of Christ. We know that we will hurt one another, but we also know that we can’t just let those hurts fester. In order to be faithful to our unity as the Body of Christ, we must seek reconciliation, confessing our sins and asking forgiveness for our wrongdoing. In order to truly be “Bound Together” as the Body of Christ, we must, as this year’s Reconciliation themes suggest, “Move Together” – that is, truly see each other – and “Heal Together” – that is, seek and extend the mercy that makes us whole. In the context of racial justice and the current state of the nation, this is a tall order.

At this point, I am too numb and heartbroken to even recount the details of any particular killing. Whether it’s because of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa or Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, or the countless previous victims in other cities, or the ones who will die in the weeks and months to come, we have to recognize and confess that something is very broken in this country. We’ve been over the statistics, we’ve seen the videos, we’ve heard the tired excuses, and even made some of them ourselves. But what we need to be hearing right now is that when one member of the Body suffers, we all suffer. And if we’re not recognizing that, then we’ve probably got some reconciliation we should be seeking.

Given all of that, I want to get into our other scripture readings and make some observations. There are some surprises and similarities there that I believe can help us. The story of the Rich Man and Lazarus starts out with a surprise. It’s right there in the title. The rich man is never personally identified, and poor, diseased Lazarus is the one who gets a name. That right there is a signal about whose side God is on.

As we’re noticing that, let’s name one of the similarities this story has to our present situation. Lazarus was right outside the rich man’s gate, right in front of his eyes. The point is that he should have been really hard to ignore. Those who are lying dead from gunshot wounds may not be right outside our houses, but unlike the rich man in this story, our lives are full of video screens. Those who are suffering and dying these days, even though they may not be at our gates, are nevertheless, suffering and dying right in front of our eyes. I’m pretty sure Jesus thinks that should be hard to ignore.

If we’re looking carefully at the subtleties within this story, there’s another surprise. Lazarus dies, sure, but he was starving and disease-ridden. Of course he died. What’s crazy is that the rich man dies too! Of course, we knew he would eventually, but doesn’t he sound like the kind of guy who kind of thought he was immortal? I’m fairly certain he was shocked. What he doesn’t seem all that surprised by is his destination. He doesn’t argue or express indignation that he ended up in Hades. He just wants a little water. And here’s where we see another unfortunate similarity to our present day society. Even in death, even in the torment of Hades, the rich man doesn’t get it. He’s still looking at Lazarus as someone who ought to be serving him, rather than the other way around. Couldn’t he just bring me some water? Couldn’t he just go warn my brothers? Shouldn’t he be trying to help me? We used to be neighbors! Even in the fires of hell, this guy is still clinging to his posture of privilege, expecting others to help him, despite the fact that he never lifted a finger for anyone else in his whole life. Privilege is really hard to let go of. As we are struggling to figure out how to move together and heal together in a racially divided nation, the privilege that so many of us obliviously live with is one of the major barriers to true reconciliation.

The last observation I want to make about this story has to do with that argument at the end. Send Lazarus to warn my brothers, pleads the rich man. It won’t make any difference, says Father Abraham. They won’t be convinced “even if someone rises from the dead.” Now, as Christians, we proclaim that Someone did rise from the dead, and it did make a difference. That chasm that Father Abraham talked about, for instance, was demolished by Christ’s resurrection. But Jesus’ is not the dead body I’m concerned about today. In the context of September 25, 2016, in the context of our Reconciliation Special Offering, the argument about the power of post-mortem Lazarus to effect transformation raises a haunting question: How many dead bodies will it take to make a difference? How many brothers and sisters do we have to see suffering and dying in our streets before we will repent and change our ways? Why weren’t Moses and the prophets enough? Why wasn’t Jesus enough? How many more deaths will it take? If our hearts aren’t already suffering because our brothers and sisters are suffering, can we at least admit that they may then “have something against us” which we need to reconcile before we can seek the wholeness of the Body of Christ? Or will we give up on our calling as Disciples to “be together in Christ”?

Lest we feel mired in despair, trapped in our privilege and fear, overwhelmed by the scope of the violence in our world, unsure what to do to help, let us turn to the prophet Jeremiah for a word of hope. That’s an unusual suggestion right there. Jeremiah has a reputation for being something of a downer. But this story today is different. Here’s what you need to know. Jerusalem was under siege by the army of Babylon, a much bigger, more powerful country. Jeremiah was imprisoned because he’d been insisting on telling the king over and over that not only he was going to lose this war, but that it was God’s will that he lose. Unsurprisingly, King Zedekiah didn’t appreciate such prophecies. Things are bad. Things are going to get worse. It was the kind of moment when most people would be drawing up their last wills and testaments.

But what does Jeremiah do? He buys a field, a field his cousin owned in Anathoth. And he doesn’t just give his cousin some money and shake on it. He weighs the money and draws up the deed, with all the official accoutrements – weights and witnesses and official seals. And then he calls his friend and has him put both copies of the deed into an earthenware jar for safe and long-term keeping. Why? Because God has told him that “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Jeremiah isn’t just being hopeful. He is publicly acting out his hope, in front of the king’s guard and the official witnesses and everyone else who happened to be sitting around. What looked like an act of foolishness was really a powerful testament to faith in God, to the hope that good days will yet come, though all around us seems desperate and irreconcilably lost.

That is the kind of hope you can get your teeth into. This is a “put your money where your mouth is” kind of hope. And it’s exactly the kind of hope we need in these difficult days. Seeking reconciliation is hard when we’ve been ignoring the suffering of our brothers and sisters for so long. Systems of repression that have been entrenched for so many centuries can seem impossible to break down. It can see overwhelming to know even where to begin. But our hope is in Christ, and it is a hope that does not disappoint.

Though weeping may last for the night, joy comes with the morning. The city may be besieged such that you can’t even get to that field out in the country, but buy it anyway, for some day all people will come and go in peace. Christ did rise from the dead, and he did remove that chasm. We can listen to the cries of the suffering and the dying and be changed. It is not too late. It is not too late for us to reclaim our calling to be together in Christ, to be reconciled, to move together, heal together and be bound together as the Body of Christ. Let us set our hearts to the task, though it may seem foolish, though others may scoff and jeer, let us act with the compassion and hope we know in Christ Jesus. Alleluia and Amen.