The Good Work

Matthew 18:15-20

A Sermon Preached by Peter Ilgenfritz

September 4, 2005

University Christian Church – University Congregational UCC - Joint Worship Services

Seattle, Washington

We have been here before and we shall be here again.

Gathered this Sunday following a catastrophe.

We are especially reminded of our need for each other and the church at times such as these. We need this space and time to cry out to God, to wait upon God and to listen for a word of hope.

Today we listen and pray with almost a million Gulf Coast refugees who sit in strange churches far from their homes.

We seek as they do to draw comfort from this company of God’s people of which we are a part and pray to hear and make real God’s word of hope.

With them, let us be silent and pray…..

Amen.

Catastrophes rip away and expose.

They expose emotions that we didn’t know we had.

They expose our fear and our faith; our doubt and the depths of our despair.

They make us grateful for all that we have.

Catastrophes expose brave acts and just plain goodness.

But also images of ourselves, our communities and our world we wish we had not seen.

Catastrophes rip away and expose life as it really is – and much of life that we don’t want to see or feel.

We have been here before and we shall be here again:

riding the storm of bombings in the London underground,

the unbelievable suffering in last year’s tsunami,

the ongoing death and violence of the war in Iraq that seems to keep taking more and more and more away,

grief and rage from an electoral process that divided an already divided and angry nation, September 11, 2001.

We have been here before and we shall be here again.

We live in times of exposure: of ripping away much that we have taken for granted, much that we relied upon as solid ground and images of who we are as a nation and as God’s people.

As Michael Harrington named 40 years ago, we are not one America but two. And Hurricane Katrina blew the roof off our illusions that by ignoring the divisions of poverty, race and class, these two Americas been healed into one. Whether we wanted to or not, this week we saw the other America: 28% of New Orleans’ residents are poor – twice the national average. 70% are African American. And Katrina took on a direct hit on the poorest of New Orleans’ neighborhoods. One reporter noted that in the New Orleans Superdome he saw only four whites among the 16,000 refugees there.

The storm blew the cover off the illusion that we are one nation and it exposed that we are indeed two. There’s one America that most of us here today are part of - and another America that is poor, and disproportionately inhabited by people of color, women, children, the elderly, and the infirm. One group that has money and the means and access to refuge in the midst of many of life’s storms. And one group that does not.

During this past week, I thought as many of you might have, about what I’d have taken if we were told to evacuate Seattle. I thought about the clothes I’d grab, the one or two photo albums I might have taken, my teddy bear that’s older than I am. Most of us have at least one car. So we could have evacuated the city: we could buy gas, have money to stay in a hotel, buy food – and make it at least for a little while.

But as I was going over my list of what to take, my day-dream was interrupted by a woman on the radio who had not evacuated New Orleans and now sought refuge in the Superdome. The reporter asked her why she hadn’t left when told to do so. “What was I supposed to do”, she asked, “I had $20. I had to choose between buying gas and buying food for my kids. Guess what I chose to do.”

Katrina exposed the lie that all the billions and billions of dollars we have spent on so-called security measures can keep us secure. Katrina blew the roof off the myth that the most powerful nation on earth really can do everything. Yes, we can invade and conquer a nation halfway around the world. But we fumble and stumble at rescuing and caring for our own people.

The hurricane exposed a deep divide and a seething rage that is just below the surface of our country. It is a rage that insists we will not be secure in any sense until we as people become one America instead of two. We cannot be secure as a people and nation until economic justice for all our citizens is as high a priority as fighting terrorism. There is a fervor for justice that will not be stilled and will not be stopped.

We never see news about the poor in this country. It’s just not news. But for the past six days, poor, African-American America has been headline news. We are more used to and comfortable hearing news like that on the cover of Parade Magazine last Sunday, “What Makes Jody Foster Happy”. We have been able to be blissfully ignorant of the choices millions of Americans and billions of people around the world face everyday.

The sins that have been exposed in this catastrophe are real.

The sin of how poverty, race and class divide us as a people and nation.

The despair we have felt and seen as the other America has finally gotten the attention of the media is real and I pray will not go away.

As followers of Jesus, we know what it is like to follow a Savior who suffered because of and for the sin of the world. And as followers of Jesus we know that we cannot be faithful unless we commit ourselves to live in such a way that despair does not have the last word.

The Gospel today reminds us of our call as church in such a time as this. The Gospel calls us to confess the sin of allowing and even contributing to the perpetuation of two Americas in this land of plenty. And the Gospel calls us to seek forgiveness and turn our lives and our priorities around so we can help heal God’s broken world.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says:

If someone has been sinned against, she should go to the person who wronged her and seek to make it right with that person.

And if that person doesn’t listen, she should bring a couple of friends along to confront the person.

If he still doesn’t turn around, she should bring the whole church to witness the charges of wrong-doing.

And if he still doesn’t listen, Jesus says, treat them as tax collectors and Gentiles.

Christians in Matthew’s time might have interpreted this passage to mean they have Jesus’ blessing to exclude or excommunicate such an unrepentant sinner.

But in our day, we cannot read it that way. For we know how Jesus treated tax collectors and Gentiles. He invited them to dinner. He reached out to them, befriended them, and said, “To such belong the kingdom of God.”

Today, we are the people who have sinned and the poor have come to witness against us. We have allowed our nation to continue to be divided along lines of race and class. And we have benefited economically from allowing that division to continue. Although we usually don’t have to look at them, this week we have seen the results of our sin – seen the rage, the despair, the hopelessness, the deaths. Seen the poor left behind while those with means were able to evacuate to higher ground. Confronted by the fruits of our sin, we must seek forgiveness. And we must repent, which means committing ourselves to turning our lives and our attitudes around. For we have treated the poor as the tax collector and Gentile.

We need to turn around and follow Jesus once again.

The poor we have seen are not in some far away place but they are our neighbors. They are there in the Yakima Indian Reservation where our middle schoolers went to work this summer. And they are right here. It is the other America that is as close as the entry way to this church where a man sleeps during the day, and a hundred line up to get food from the Food Bank housed in this church’s basement. It is as close as the homeless schizophrenic man who comes to coffee hour seeking something to eat. It is uncomfortable and it is close and no, we don’t know what to do or how to respond.

We will only live into God’s dream for our world when not just some of America but all of America has a way out of the storms of life. Enough resources, yes enough money and enough friends to see it through.

I don’t want to have to look at my privilege as a white, upper-middle class male. I don’t want to have to acknowledge my freedom and ability to just walk away from the other America, my freedom and ability not to see them anymore. And yet I know doing that only adds to my sin.

Instead of leaving us in despair, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a hopeful one. It reminds us we cannot do the work of forgiveness and repentance alone. We need each other. We need to make the promises of God not just mere words but real: God is alive, God is here, God needs us and we need God. That the promise of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is true: that death is not the last word but the very love of God, a love that cannot let us go.

The storm is inviting us once again to gather: two or three is all it takes and dream together, work together, work piece by piece, person by person to bring some healing and hope to a broken and despairing world.

What would have happened if all the people who drove out of New Orleans had picked up one person to take with them? What would happen if we found one person – some stranger or outcast whom we made room for in our life?

What if our nation saw as its duty to not just to issue warnings about impending hurricanes but to provide the means for people to get away from them? What if we worked together for such political change that is necessary to turn our nation and its priorities around?

This past summer our Senior High youth went to Leavenworth to work on a Habitat for Humanity house. We met Pedro, a neighbor and resident of another Habitat house who worked with us during the day. On our last day, as we sat down for lunch and to say goodbye, Pedro said, “Many of you will go on to fancy jobs as lawyers, doctors, businesspeople. But when you do, don’t forget us.”

I don’t know how to remember him other than to tell his story.

And I don’t know how to honor him without making room for the poor in my life in a concrete and tangible way.

I need that.

I believe you need that.

And to be the church of the resurrection, we need to be about that together.

May God help us. May we be God’s repentant people so that we will turn our lives and nation around so there really is justice and peace for all. Amen.