Sept 25, 2016 Sermon: "Repairers of the Breach"

Stephen Baldwin

OT: Isaiah 58.12

NT: Luke 16.19-31

Repairers of the Breach

             

            This week, my heart has been in Charlotte.  Surely, many of you have watched what is happening there on television.  Kerry & I used to walk those streets.  We had our first date near the downtown protest site.  One of our classmates is on the police force.  Others are clergy and teachers who participated in the protests.  So we see it from both sides. 

            When we lived in Charlotte, we attended a Presbyterian Church in what people called the “bad” side of town.  This church was so poor that a wealthy congregation on the other side of town paid their pastor for them.  But they had the most amazing gospel choir you’ve ever heard in your life!  They began each service with joys & concerns, and it was not uncommon for people to rejoice about getting out of jail so they could be in church or people asking for prayers because they’d just been diagnosed with AIDS.  Joys & concerns alone usually lasted half an hour.  Needless to say, our preppy white faces stuck out like knots on a log.  But they loved us, and we loved them. 

            A boy named William lived in the projects beside the church.  I was his mentor for three years.   William would be about 25 years old today.  I worry about William.  I pray he is alive, safe, and loved.  He told me I was the only “cool white dude” he’d ever known.  William’s dad was in prison; his mom was…I don’t know…absent.  In three years of mentoring William, which involved going to his apartment as often as every week, I never even met her.  Once I asked William if I could.  He looked away and changed the subject.

            Even as a young, naïve college student, I was aware that William and I lived in different worlds.  Even as a 12 year old boy who failed school most years, William too was aware that he and I lived in different worlds.  One time I drove into the projects at night to drop William off.  “Just drop me off on the corner,” he said.  “Don’t go in.” 

            “Why?” I asked. 

            “Just listen to me, man.  We don’t want no trouble.”  We lived in different worlds.  I wasn’t comfortable in his, and he wasn’t always comfortable with me in his. 

            He wasn’t comfortable in mine either.  One day I brought him to our college for a basketball game.  We were driving towards the campus and I could tell he was just enthralled as we drove through the neighborhood.  He said, “Man, you stay here!?!  This is like the movies, man.”  It was only 10 minutes from his house, but he had never been to that part of town.  He had never been more than a few miles from the projects.  Then a police car passed us, and William ducked down in the seat.  I asked him what he was doing.  “Man, don’t you know somebody like me ain’t supposed to be here.”  We lived in different worlds.  I feared for my safety in his world, and he feared for his safety in mine. 

            I’m telling you about William not just because of what we’ve seen in Charlotte this week, but also because of this week’s story from Luke.  The rich man and Lazarus live side by side for years, but they live in different worlds.  The rich man inside the gate of his mansion; Lazarus sitting outside begging for crumbs.  They pass each other.  They encounter one another.  But they do not engage each other.  They share very little other than space. 

Sound familiar?  The world may have turned since then, but it hasn’t changed much.  We share space—and little else—with a great many people we encounter everyday.  This is a world of many worlds…and they’re colliding all the time. 

            Back to our parable.  When the rich man and Lazarus each move on to the next world, once again they can see each other.  Now the rich man is sitting outside the gate and Lazarus is inside the palace.  They have proximity once again.  The roles are reversed.  But there’s still a breach between them. 

            Parables are meant to shock us.  What’s so shocking about this one?  People would expect heaven to be everything this world isn’t.  They would expect the rich man and Lazarus to live happily ever after, right?  So Jesus tells this parable as a way of saying, “If you don’t learn how to live happily ever after now, what makes you think that will change later?”  Jesus wants the rich man and Lazarus, people from different worlds living in the same space, to make things right now.      

            Friends, this broken world is filled with breaches.  Walls between us and people in our proximity.  Space between people because they have different skin color or a different culture or different numbers beside their bank accounts.  William and I lived five miles apart just outside downtown Charlotte.  Yet our lives took very different paths.  How many people do you see each day that live in a totally different world? 

            It’s easy to watch television, proclaim the answers, and go on with our lives.  But the Christian life proclaimed by Jesus in today’s parable is much more involved than that.  With the prophet Isaiah ringing in his head Jesus’ parable proclaims that we are to be repairers of the breach.  Our work as Christians is to see a thing from both sides, minister to people on both sides of the breach, and offer love to both sides.  We as Christians are to be repairers of the breach. We are to live in between two worlds, building bridges on behalf of God. 

            I was heartened to see that our college chaplain took her students to downtown Charlotte this weekend to deliver coffee and bagels to police and protesters, provocateurs and pastors, the poor and the politicians this weekend.  That is our calling as Christians.  We are to be repairers of the breach.  We are to love fully, love wholly, and love unconditionally. 

            What breaches exist in your life?  What walls keep you from making things right?  Repair the breaches this week.  The ones in your homes, in your families, in your workplaces, in your circle of friends.  Our calling as Christians is to occupy the space between two worlds.  That’s what it means to be in the world but not of the world.  We are to stand in between the breach and bring people together, for in so doing we enact the bold love of God to a world which desperately needs it.  Amen.