“Bridging the Chasm”
June 19, 2005
Scriptures: Micah 6:6-8, Ephesians 2:11-18, Luke 16:19-31
Our scripture regarding the Rich Man and Lazarus rings a familiar bell for many of us today. Its message speaks clearly. The Rich Man invests in luxury, status, and position during his life. Poor Old Lazarus survives by begging, living on the scraps from the Rich Man’s table. It speaks of inequity, injustice, and advocates for a retributive sort of justice after death where things are evened up in the great beyond.
It reveals parallels in our own day regarding the inequities in life. We see them clearly. Over 20 years volunteers in the Westmoreland Volunteer Corps face those realities daily. To a lesser degree, mostly by proxy, so do Board members.
Frankly we could spend the rest of this sermon recalling stories of inequities by the score. We can think of Lazarus-like people we have met over the past 20 years who fit right in.
And we can go on to lament the lack of sensitivity by the rich as well. Look for example, at how the Rich man, suffering the tortures of hell, still doesn’t get it. He wants Lazarus to be his servant, dipping his finger in cold water to relieve the rich man’s suffering. When that doesn’t work he wants Lazarus to be his messenger to help save his family. For him, despite the pain, he misses the point. He continues to treat Lazarus as a slave – as one born to serve him. Luxury, status and position exert powerful holds on all of us that even suffering cannot seem to change.
So we could spend the rest of our time today following out these themes. Not today, however! Instead focus on a more obscure part of the scripture where Abraham speaks about the chasm, the unbridgeable gap that exists between the Rich Man in hell and Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom.
Westmoreland Volunteer Corps threw itself into that chasm when it formed in 1985. Even before a volunteer showed up at our old parsonage, the Board spent a night in a shelter at Luther Place, mostly because of pesky Ken Lutterman’s nagging. Even today they speak of that overpowering exposure to the gap, the chasm, if you will. It set the direction they wanted to take, especially when they discovered one of the homeless women had been a former student of Jim Weaver’s at American University. Somehow just that fact alone narrows the gap. It heightens one’s sense of “Save for the grace of God there go I.”
So look at some of the chasms we cross even now, 20 years later. Focus, first, on the socio-economic chasm. Every day volunteers in this program travel from the tree-laden streets and comfortable homes of Western Avenue in Bethesda to the central city – to dinner programs, to shelters, to youth rehab centers, to pregnancy aid centers, and to outreach centers providing medical and economic assistance. Every day they hop on the Metro with lawyers reading the Washington Post and by the time they have reached their destination they are the only white people in the Metro car. That daily plunge into the socio-economic chasm of this region raises all sorts of questions – all sorts of dilemmas for volunteers about poverty and affluence and their own lives.
Board members of the Corps face another chasm. Call it the time chasm. Time comes as a precious commodity in this type-A city. Westmorelanders often feel stretched between work and family commitments. Often they feel they cannot squeeze another thing in.
So consider this question! Given the tension, why is serving on the Volunteer Corps Board the easiest position to fill in the organizational life of this church? It proves to be a coveted volunteer job for many members of the church. Why?
Somehow spending time in a way that contributes to addressing “the gap” seems important to many. They wouldn’t say this but I will. It comes as a consideration of personal stewardship and an expression of what it means to take their faith seriously.
Two ways to be a volunteer exist in this program. The volunteers provide direct service. Board members provide support services. Since time demands prohibit “direct service” for most time-stretched board members, providing “support services” seems important – an exercise of personal stewardship of individual gifts, a sharing of a very treasured gift – time, a way of contributing to crossing the gap.
Consider a third chasm this program crosses – the generational chasm. Board and volunteers retreats two or three times a year prove to be times of personal meeting and connecting. Recent graduates and adults who were their parents and grandparents ages often cross the generational chasm. They move from being strangers to being friends.
And then, consider the educational / vocational chasm. I don’t know about you but when I entered the work world I painfully realized things were not like they said in college and seminary. The whole question of what I needed to be about raised its head, practically and not just theoretically. One of the most satisfying evaluations volunteers give us in this program is how it helped them sort out life goals and directions.
Finally the gap between religion and faith exists. Religion often appears to be about right belief and practice. It is by necessity institutional – a human creation imperfectly expressing the deeper visions of faith.
Thanks to sensitive spiritual directors in the program we discover faith has more to do with trusting a loving spirit that leads to compassionate service and justice and the task of living in community.
Turn your attention now to our passage from Ephesians. This too, speaks about a chasm that exists and God’s relationship to it. Hear these words:
13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility . . . 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Hear the Good News of the Gospel: In Jesus God bridges the chasm. The Good News proclaims that a dividing wall of hostility has been breached. Let me speak personally here.
For five years, I conducted a writing program in the middle of DC at the Dinner Program for Homeless Women.
I remember the first day I hopped on the Metro to go from North Bethesda to Tenth and G Streets in the heart of the city. I knew I was leaping into the chasm and a dividing wall became immediately evident. I was male, they were female. I was white, they were almost entirely black. I was privileged and they were poor. I realized it would take a lot of patient listening and openness to relate in that setting and I’d better be ready to learn.
Here are two experiences. Near the end of the first year a woman who demonstrated unusual writing talent and insight came to class. “OK,” she said, “Give me a writing assignment. I am on empty.” I never gave assignments in that program I vowed I would never give an assignment until I had earned their trust. I just asked them to write their life. So I took her request as a sign of a deepened trust between us. Since it was the Wednesday before Father’s Day I said “OK, write about your father.”
She paused, glazed over for a minute. I was sure I had gone too far. Then she picked up a pen and began to write furiously. When she had finished she handed the work to me, filled with defiance. With hostility dripping from her voice she asked me what I thought about it. I told her it was both well written and moving to read. She wept. When I asked her what was going on she said, “For years I have talked about this. Putting it on paper moved it outside of me – where it belongs. I feel freer about it.”
I would like to think this is a happily ever-after story but it isn’t. The foster child program and the social service system beat her down. Finally, she quit, disappeared onto the street and I haven’t seen her in three years. I continue to keep twenty of her best poems on my computer in hope she will return. The chasm is great but at one point the dividing wall of hostility was broken.
Permit me a second story – one Sally Smith and I share together. We both know a Shiite Islamic Iranian woman who has been in poverty for a long time. She has lived on the street for many years and only recently found housing. She is a nurturer. She comes to the program at Calvary and at First Church. Every week she shares her food and her care and compassion with others freely. Often she will braid another woman’s hair. She never writes a word in my writing class. Instead she listeners to others and gives them encouragement. For me she embodies the Islamic ethic of compassion and charity. A dividing wall tumbles: personally and religiously.
Dear brothers and sisters, the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ engages in the business of closing gaps. Call God a chasm-closing God, one who breaks down dividing walls and makes one human family out of a divided humanity. So let me close this sermon with a challenge for the future – for living in these dangerous and apocalyptic times.
Anything that widens the gap in the human family does not come from God. No argument here. It is simply true. It comes from something less than God. If religion divides and breeds hate and disdain it is not from God. Again, no argument here. It is obviously true. If government uses religion to divide it is not from God. And if religion is rushed in to further the plans of empire it is not from God. No argument here. It is simply true, Why? God is a gap-closer. God bridges the chasms in life.
Secondly, the Christian life is about bridging the human gap. It is about compassion, justice and peace – personal and communal. Today the definition of moral values seems limited to personal decisions about sex. I am so sick of that I could die. Christian faith includes such concerns but goes well beyond them. We speak not just to the individual about purity. The Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus’ day did that. We also speak about Community. And we speak not only about righteousness but also about justice and compassion, and peace, and the value of each person as a child of God. Over the last 20 years the Westmoreland Volunteer Corps witnesses to that. May it be so for many more!
And may it grow, and grow, and grow.
Let us pray.
