Hope For The Future

Written by Ed Kauffman

In a Cleveland OH, enewsletter “Scene”, I found the following article which began,

It was just last week that the Foxhole club in Warsaw (Ohio) and the New Beginnings Ministries church were national news for the protests and counter-protests between strippers and the church's flock. The congregation had camped out for four years at the Foxhole parking lot, intimidating patrons, threatening to post pictures of faces and license plates, and generally making a nuisance of themselves in hopes that they could shut down the stripclub. The strippers, in the best example of 'tit for tat' in the history of mankind, then started protesting on Sundays in front of the church, cooking hot dogs, wearing bikinis, and generally looking like strippers.

(Cleveland enewsletter Scene, August 19,2010)  Sorry, no pictures.

 The article goes on to report on a meeting between the two groups, aided by several women who preached.  Said one congregational member, "The girls inside really had an impact," New Beginnings member Kim Johnson said of the sermon by Brown and Donewald. "They made me realize I need to be more compassionate."  Unfortunately, the article has an update that notes that no agreements were reached, and the groups plan to continue their protests.


At several of the last Assemblies of Mennonite Church USA, we have met in large urban areas, often with street people close at hand.  In San Jose, there were numerous stories of assembly goers who befriended these street people, but in each case it was also clear that there were limits on what could be done. For Example, you couldn’t invite them in to join in a meal, because meal tickets had to be purchased well in advance. And in Columbus, OH last year, one of the events, a hymnsing, was only open to those who had a nametag, badge because security was tight, it being July 4, a national holiday in the US.

We’ve probably all seen pictures, or examples of churches with tall fences and signs, perhaps not as explicit as this, but with the same idea.  I recall one church that had a large sign on their parking lot that read, “Parking for Church Members only!”  and it wasn’t just on Sunday!

Jesus story of the rich man and Lazarus was told to the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day who were extremely concerned about keeping the faith pure.  While the story is often portrayed as related to wealth and poverty, and indeed Luke places it in a section that deals with issues of money, it is interesting to note that nowhere in the story is that explicit.

 We are introduced to two characters.  One is simply described as a rich man.  Dressed in purple, fine linen, and who ate well every day.  We are not told that he became wealthy through evil means.  In fact, to Jesus hearers, they would have assumed that this man'’ wealth was a sign that God has blessed him.  If you do good, you do well.

 The other character is a poor man named Lazarus.  The Greek implies that he was brought there every day, in fact one translation says he was dumped there.  His hygiene was bad, he was hungry, and his only friends seemed to be the dogs who came – and he wasn’t even strong enough, or didn’t even have the will to fend them off.  The fact that he is given a name, while the rich man goes nameless, however, would have made Jesus’ listeners begin to wonder. 

 Both these characters die, and in what would have seemed a strange turn of events, the rich man finds himself in torment, while Lazarus is portrayed as being in the presence of Abraham.  And we heard the rest of the story.  The distance between them is too great,  Lazarus can’t help the rich man, and while the rich man longs for someone to return from the grave and warn his brothers, Abraham notes that the brothers already have Moses and the prophets, and if they won’t listen to them, then even someone rising from the dead won’t convince them otherwise.

 But what were they to be warned of?  Well, I don’t think it was just about being wealthy.  In this parable, at least, there is really no condemnation or commendation of being wealthy or poor.  That doesn’t seem to be the rich man’s problem.

 Rather I would suggest, it is the rich man’s seeming obliviousness to the plight of the poor man that should grab our attention.  The chasm that is fixed between the rich man and Lazarus is not just a comment on the future, but it is a chasm that was created even during their lifetimes.  It was a chasm that grew every time the rich man passed through his gate and ignored Lazarus who was lying there.  One can hardly imagine that he didn’t see him. But like many, I presume the rich man chose to ignore Lazarus, or maybe he was even a little afraid of him.  Who knew what disease he might carry?  Dogs were considered unclean, and so coming in contact with them would have been a problem. And besides, maybe Lazarus was faking it and just waiting for the chance to gain entry and steal what he could.

 Now the easiest thing would be to take this parable and point to all the rich people who don’t help the poor.  And we could do that, and go home feeling good about how much we give to charity, and how we help people through al kinds of means.

 But I’d like to direct our thinking about this passage a bit different direction.  As I noted, this was told to the religious leaders of the day, to the religious folk who God had given a message to, and told that they were to be a blessing to the world.  Maybe the parable has something to say to us, the religious people of today.  We have been blessed with riches, not only in a material sense, but also with spiritual riches. And for what end?

 Stuart Murray, in the book referenced by Harvey Weiler in the latest First Contact, The Naked Anabaptist, lists as one of the criticisms of Anabaptist groups a tendency toward separatism.  He writes, “At its worst, Anabaptist separatism has conveyed disregard for wider society and concern only for the maintenance and survival of their own families and church communities.” (p.164)  We have also bought into the fear that seems to grip our society – a fear of anything that is different from us or strange.

 Peter Wadell, professor of religious studies at St Norbert College says,

 “How do we convert hostility to hospitality, exclusion to embrace? How do we create Christian congregations and communities that do not mimic and mirror the discords, divisions, and discriminations of our societies, but work to overcome them by witnessing something more hopeful and promising, something truly of God? How do we forge bonds of friendship with the very persons we are trained to view suspiciously? The fundamental work of God in
Jesus, particularly through Jesus’ cross and resurrection, was reconciliation and peace, and anyone baptized in his name is called to do the same.”

 What are the walls surrounding us, and who are the people lying at our gates that we pass every day without seeing?  Gates are the point of connection with the “outside”.  If we have walls, or fences, it is through the gates that we can have contact with the world around us. 

 Peter Wadell goes on,

 “In a world that has grown frighteningly guarded and harsh, Christian congregations are called to imitate the “table manners” of Jesus by being sacraments of God’s hospitality in the world. But this is not easy because the hospitality of God is radically unlike the hospitality of Martha Stewart. Christian hospitality is modeled on the hospitality of a God, who “even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:5), and patterned on the hospitality of Jesus, whose fearless love knew no bounds. Christian hospitality is a matter of welcoming, caring for, and befriending the stranger, the poor and needy, the homeless and destitute, the unloved and the unlikable, the weird and the strange, in gratitude to God and in imitation of Christ. It may be the most important

Christian calling for our times, but it is one we easily neglect unless we are part of faith communities who make it their aim. For Christians, hospitality is not an occasional gesture but a whole way of being. It is not an interruption

to our normal way of life but a habit, practice, or virtue that ought consistently to characterize our lives. How do we become this kind of person and these kinds of congregations in the Church and for the world today?

 The primary aim of the Christian life is not to feel safe but to be faithful. If hospitality to the poor and needy, the homeless and the troubled and the stranger, distinguished the early Christian communities from their surrounding

society and became a characteristic of authentic discipleship, then perhaps that is the calling of Christian congregations today.”

 In a world filled with xenophobia, a fear of strangers, the church is called to practice xenophilia – love of the stranger.  Not only to notice those who lie outside the gates and perhaps give them a handout, but to actually build a relationship with them.  Not only going outside the gate, which we sometimes are afraid to do, but also inviting them to come in through the gate and experience God with us.  The truth is, God is on both sides of the gate and sometimes we need to go outside the gate to truly experience God’s presence.

 Shortly before we left Sioux Falls, it was our congregations turn to help prepare and serve a meal at The Banquet, a local meal ministry of the churches in Sioux Falls.  One of the things that I liked about this particular experience at The Banquet, was that there is an emphasis on meeting the folk who come in for a meal.  That is, rather than just preparing a meal and then standing behind the counter dishing it out, all the volunteers are encouraged to find a time in the course of the evening to also get a plate of food and go sit down and talk with people, listen to their stories, join them. And I’ll be the first to admit its not always easy, and not my first inclination.  Sometimes it’s downright uncomfortable. But it is in those encounters that I encounter Christ at The Banquet.

 The hope we have in Christ demands action on our part.  Last week I talked about Jeremiah’s identification with his people and the hopelessness they felt in the face of the oncoming Babylonians.  Yet, in spite of that cry of desperation, “Is there no balm in Gilead?”, in today’s passage from Jeremiah, we find him doing a rather audacious thing.  The Babylonian army is bearing down, defeat seems imminent, exile is an almost foregone conclusion, and Jeremiah buys a field!  That seems a bit like buying stock in a company who’s stock is already on the way down and bankruptcy seems imminent.  Who would do such a thing?  It’s just seems dumb!

 Yet Jeremiah persists, and follows the custom of the day, finding witnesses, signing two copies, and sealing one away for future reference.  Why? Because he has a hope in the God who has said the future is different than what it appears in the moment.

 Frank Yamada of McCormick Seminary in Chicago said it this way, “Perilous times require the faithful to put into embodied action the hope that God has announced, which is already here, but not yet.”

 We too have that hope, and next Sunday we remember the source of that hope as we share together in the Lord’s table. We recall a Christ who ate with sinners, who touched the untouchable, and who healed the sick.  We have not only the words of Moses and the prophets, but also the teachings and example of Jesus.  If we won’t listen to them, someone coming back from the dead won’t convince us either. 

 We recall the purpose of God, that all people would be saved and come to know the truth.  And we believe that the church is called to further God’s mission to the world, even to those whom society ignores, the outcasts, the untouchables.  We recall that some of us have been in that situation, and yet God loved us. 

 And so we ask, “Who are the Lazarus’ lying unnoticed outside our gates?”  And what have we done for them lately?  Or I would ask, “What have we done with them?”, for God is active both inside and outside of the gates, and in joining with the Lazarus’ of the world, we too can join God in God’s mission in the world.  We are called to act on our hope, just as Jeremiah was.  To practice audacious acts of hospitality both for and with the stranger, the poor, and the oppressed.  It is only when we close that chasm in this life that we can be assured that the chasm will not exist in the life to come.