Crisis
My friend, Jeff, sent me a link to a sermon Byron Porisch preached this past week. I have known Byron for about a decade. I first met him when I was a high school student in the youth ministry at Faith Lutheran Church in Troy, Michigan. He has shown me a lot about grace, and I love him dearly. I had the privilege to work with him (and Jeff) at St. Luke Lutheran Church here in Ann Arbor.
Byron preached on the text of Luke 16:19-31 in which Jesus tells the parable of “The Rich Man and Lazarus.” (If you are unfamiliar with it, go ahead and read it now. I’ll be here when you get back.)
That particular parable has always been a favorite of mine. It’s funny. I think it’s the only one with a punch line:
“If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” (Luke 16:31, NIV)
Maybe it’s not so much ha-ha-funny as it is sad-funny.
Listening to the sermon, I was reminded of an open letter I wrote on the occasion of the September 11 attacks to all the students on campus at the Lutheran university I attended.
The line from Byron’s sermon that reminded of the letter was, “God knows their name, but do we?”
We are quite comfortable to be “expensively dressed in the latest fashions, [and] wasting [our] days in conspicuous consumption” (as Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message). We are like the rich man ignoring Lazarus at our gate. Inexplicably, Lazarus sure looks a lot like that annoying guy I work with, the quiet girl at church, and every single person I ignore every day.
But let’s not build any kind of straw man here. As Byron points out, “Poverty is not a virtue. This is not about money, it’s about your heart.” And my heart doesn’t seem to be exceedingly concerned with knowing my neighbor, let alone knowing my neighbor’s needs.
“‘Comfortable’ keeps the gate closed,” Byron says. “If we don’t see it, then we don’t have to deal with it.”
Wow.
How true.
Hits a little close to home.
We all want to be comfortable, but at no point does Jesus ever promise us that if we follow him we will be comfortable. If you look at his track record, following Christ will probably land us — well, ask Paul.
I’ve worked much harder, been jailed more often, beaten up more times than I can count, and at death’s door time after time. I’ve been flogged five times with the Jews’ thirty-nine lashes, beaten by Roman rods three times, pummeled with rocks once. I’ve been shipwrecked three times, and immersed in the open sea for a night and a day. In hard traveling year in and year out, I’ve had to ford rivers, fend off robbers, struggle with friends, struggle with foes. I’ve been at risk in the city, at risk in the country, endangered by desert sun and sea storm, and betrayed by those I thought were my brothers. I’ve known drudgery and hard labor, many a long and lonely night without sleep, many a missed meal, blasted by the cold, naked to the weather.
(2 Corinthians 11:23-27, The Message)
And dead.
Don’t forget dead.
Martyrdom was par for the course for many in the early church.
It still is in many parts of the world.
So we see the world from here. We think of all those who lost their lives in the September 11 attacks. We think of AIDS victims in Africa. We think of the children without food and water in third world countries. We think globally, but can we act locally?
I don’t want to minimize anything that you or anyone else is doing to further justice in the world. I praise God for you! But let’s not ignore the needs we encounter every single day at our gate, or front door, or workplace, or school.
I share with you now the full text of the letter I wrote nearly eight years ago.
Because we understand our fearful responsibility to the Lord, we work hard to persuade others. God knows we are sincere, and I hope you know this, too. Are we commending ourselves to you again? No, we are giving you a reason to be proud of us, so you can answer those who brag about having a spectacular ministry rather than having a sincere heart. If it seems we are crazy, it is to bring glory to God. And if we are in our right minds, it is for your benefit. Either way, Christ’s love controls us. Since we believe that Christ died for all, we also believe that we have all died to our old life. He died for everyone so that those who receive his new life will no longer live for themselves. Instead, they will live for Christ, who died and was raised for them.
So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.
The recent events in our country have truly bothered me but not just for the reasons we all share in common. I started thinking when I attended the service in the chapel Tuesday night September 11 at ten o’clock. At first I was touched by the large turnout and still am. However, the longer I sat in the service, the more I felt as though I was going to vomit.
How is it that we can all come together in a time of crisis to mourn the loss of thousands we have never met and pray for their families, yet when we see certain people with whom we interact every day we give them the cold shoulder? Then again, the problem is that we don’t interact with them; we ignore them. We pay no attention to many people with whom we share a campus, dorm, or even bedroom. It saddens me deeply that this can be true. No, it causes me to grow physically ill thinking about it. My stomach wretches, and I sometimes wonder if I would not be better off being one of those people in the crashes than feel this way.
We shudder to think that a human being could be capable of such a heinous act, but each one of us is guilty of sins equally as horrible, myself included. When we pass judgments upon groups of people, stereotyping them as unlovable, we kill their character. We attack their souls by, in our own minds, deeming them unworthy of God. When we look at subcultures like punks, goths, skaters, and the homosexual community — anyone different from ourselves — and reject them, we are crashing our planes of prejudice into the skyscrapers of their souls. “I tell you the truth,” Jesus insists, “when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.” (Matthew 25:45)
Let me be clear that I am not pretending for a moment to be better than anyone else. Sometimes I feel like I am worse than others simply because I am guilty of the very things that I speak out against. Most people are guilty of them but are not being hypocritical about it like I am. I say that I abhor judgmental beliefs and behavior against people who are “different,” but in the very same breath I find myself looking past someone because they are “normal.”
Have you ever wondered why the world does not want what we have as Christians? It is because they see us killing each other. We are fighting one another! Who wants to associate with a bunch of back-stabbing, narrow-minded pricks? Nobody does. That is why we do such a pathetic job witnessing. We barge into a group that we feel needs our help — not God’s help, but our help because, we tell ourselves, we are the ones in charge — start preaching that we are right and morally superior, and start condemning people to hell. Have you ever tried to just love someone unconditionally? Without condemning them? Without accusing or judging them?
I have friends who drink, do drugs, have premarital sex, dress “differently,” and use some of the worst language you have ever heard. God loves them just as much as he loves you. As a matter of fact, those are the people Christ came for, not holier-than-thou, self-righteous lovers of pietism. Read the Bible. Who was Jesus hanging out with? The tax collectors, the prostitutes, the “scum” (as the New Living Translation puts it).
Jesus didn’t look at the tax collectors and prostitutes and say, “Forget you, I’m here for the really good people.”
Even when the Pharisees asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with such scum?” he said, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor — sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.” (Mark 2:16-17)
Neither was Jesus saying, “Well, I’ll be here for you for a month, and then if you haven’t stopped ripping people off and having sex for money, then forget it. I’m through with you.”
He never gave up on them, ever! Why? Because he had a genuine love for them, and that means enduring through every single fault that someone may have that pisses you off. Love endures through the way “he” dresses, or the language “she” uses, or the excessive drinking “they” always do, and the way we judge! That is true love.
“Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.” (1 Corinthians 13:7)
But what do I know about love? I know this much: Jesus Christ loves the terrorists behind the attack on September 11. Most of us don’t. Jesus Christ loves Osama bin Laden just as much as he loves our campus pastor. Surprising isn’t it? But Christ died for everyone “no matter who we are.” (Romans 3:22).
For God in all his fullness
was pleased to live in Christ,
and through him God reconciled
everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.
(Colossians 1:19-22)
So what is the crisis? Obviously when thousands of people are injured and killed, there is a crisis, but let us not use one crisis to ignore another crisis right in front of our faces. Do not let the devil puff up our egos, allowing us to think that we are such good people for being so concerned with people we have never met. We must concern ourselves with all of God’s people including those in our midst. Let these events bring us together, and by God’s grace may we stay together!
Many of you will think this is all just melodramatic sensationalism and ignore me. You may write me off as a radical. In all this, however, I write along with Paul, “If it seems we are crazy, it is to bring glory to God. And if we are in our right minds, it is for your benefit.” (2 Corinthians 5:13)
αγάπη,
Khad Young
