Sermons

The Sum Total

Deborah Hughes                              Third Presbyterian Church
September 4, 2005            Matthew 18:15-20, Romans 13:8-14

In July, when I was preparing the order of worship for today, I engaged in preliminary studies of the lectionary texts (those Biblical passages selected by an ecumenical committee to be read on a particular Sunday of the church year). As I outlined the sermon direction and chose my title, I thought that we’d “go easy” on Labor Day.

It is, after all, a holiday Sunday.This is a Sunday when we expect a rather intimate gathering of the very faithful who make it “up and out” on the last Sunday of the summer. I decided we’d skip the Exodus passage (in which the first-born Egyptian children are all slaughtered by a plague as the Hebrews flee to freedom). I thought we’d stick with the Gospel and the passage from Roman’s, which I find to be one of Paul’s clearest.

Let’s have a Sabbath, on Labor Day Sunday, from the hard teachings and complex theology of other weeks. Let’s focus on The Sum Total of the Biblical message, as presented by Jesus and restated by Paul. The Sum Total of the law is this: love your neighbor as yourself. And let me loosely paraphrase and expound on the very particular examples Paul lists from the ten commandments:

• Stick to your covenants and respect the relationships of others.
• Don’t spend your days concerned about what your neighbor has and how you can get your hands on it. Especially don’t resort to stealing it. Not through direct means such as robbery or by indirect means such as extortion, deceit, or manipulation of the market.
• Respect human life, and the lives of others, not just your own.

It’s good, solid material, and the cornerstone on which to build a life of discipleship and a society of decency and respect. And it would make a solid, but easy message for a holiday Sunday.

However, while I was enjoying a wonderful week of camping, hiking, and canoeing in the Adirondacks--tenting away from cell phones and computers, radios, newspapers, and even modern plumbing--a hurricane named Katrina was whirling its way toward the Gulf Coast.

By the time we had returned to civilization and the news, much of civilization--as New Orleans and Biloxi have known it-- was in rubble or submerged beneath 15 feet of filthy water. We don’t need to be reminded to love our neighbors this morning.This is a congregation that take’s the call to demonstrate love through action and service very seriously.

We don’t need to be motivated to have compassion for those we are seeing, hearing, and reading about. Like Jesus, the core of our being turns inside out when we see images of people suffering and dying from lack of food, water, or simple medical attention. The stories are heart-rending, and we are not insensitive. We are not in denial this morning. And these neighbors are close. We’ve been to New Orleans. We’ve watched games in the Superdome. Yet, we are just beginning to comprehend what the images we’ve seen this week represent.

We are frustrated wondering what we can do—or how we can do it—or when we should. It is so evident that so much is needed. We have resources, time, and compassion. Yet, it’s not yet evident what we can or should do.

So, the faithful come to worship this Sunday with heavy hearts. We have wept. We are praying. And we wait.

I was a resident of New York City on September 11, 2001, living and working on the upper west side of Manhattan. But on that Tuesday morning when the twin towers collapsed, I was in Pittsburgh attending a continuing education conference. “You were so fortunate to be away,” people told me.

But when tragedy hits your home, you are not grateful to be somewhere else. The compulsion to go home and be with your family, your community, is overwhelming.

But I couldn’t go home that day. There were no flights. There were no rental cars. And the word coming from New York City was, “Stay away. Don’t use the phones to call home; we need the lines. Don’t come back into the city; we need to keep the bridges and highways clear for emergency workers and vehicles.”

When there are people you love in crisis, the hardest thing to do is to do nothing.

Right now, emergency agencies are telling us that the greatest need is prayers and for cash that can be used to address the great variety of needs.

Why are cash donations best? (from the Church World Service website):
• Monetary contributions allow responding organizations to purchase exactly what hurricane survivors most urgently need – and help to cover the cost of logistics and/or transportation necessary to distribute the supplies.
• Needs can change rapidly and purchases of goods locally helps the local economy and is easier to transport quickly to disaster-stricken areas.
• Material donations -- especially used clothing -- tend to pile up and become a “second disaster.” Things like clothing, house wares and other donated items tend to get stockpiled and are eventually thrown out. There are also not enough personnel to process these donations.
• Packing and sending donations without going through a response group can be a problem because such donations have no way of getting to people who need them the most.
• While the need to want to volunteer is understandable, showing up to volunteer at hurricane-stricken places is also ill-advised, especially in the wake of the immediate disaster, when search-and-rescue efforts continue and the local capacity for housing, water, and food is already overtaxed.
• Cash donations help sustain long-term recovery efforts, allowing CWS and other groups to respond to unmet months from now, after emergency relief groups have left the scene.
So now, the most important way we can respond is with our prayers and our cash donations. But we can all see that will not be enough. And, in the coming days, weeks, and months, the needs will become much clearer, and we will be called upon to respond. Here’s some of what we can anticipate.

Victims will need comfort and resources. More than anything, they will need to know that they are not alone in this. When your home is under stress, you might go to work for relief. When work is stressful, you seek the repast of home. But when everything that has been a part of your routine is disrupted, removed, or destroyed, when you wake up in shock without food, or water, or a place that is safe and clean and dry, and don’t even know where to begin, then those who are fortunate enough to be standing on solid ground must give you a hand. And that very outreach will be a lifeline.

Relief workers will need relief. If we’ve been affected by watching the news or listening to the radio, imagine what it must be like to be witnessing the devastation and desperation first-hand. I can tell you that the stories that people in New York City told one another after 9/11—about what they saw, and what they heard, what they felt—never made it into the press. They were too real and too surreal to share. Volunteers will be needed with skills and labor.

People will ask hard questions, and people of faith will be challenged to respond. Those who are living or dying in the midst of chaos have already cried out to God, “Why, O Lord?” “Why me?’ “Why us?” “Why this?” Some ask: “Why did God let this happen?” Others will ask, “Why did God make this happen?”

Some have already responded with accusations: “God is punishing the Big Easy for its sins.” “God did this because God is angry with us.” “God did this to those who deserve it.” Some are celebrating this as a sign of the end time, “This is another sign of the time of tribulation that indicates Jesus is coming again.” Others have and will conclude, “There must not be a God.”

We are being called upon to profess what we believe. Now, that may sound a little frightening to some Presbyterians. I suspect that only a few of you would consider yourselves evangelists. But there will be conversations around the grill tomorrow. At the office coffee station, at the lunch gathering, and even on the tee, friends, family, and colleagues will be raising the questions, trying to get a perspective on Hurricane Katrina.

Don’t let the voices of condemnation and doom be the only voices heard. As people open up questions of faith and conscience, dare to have a conversation about the God you love. Tell them about the God that you believe loves every man, woman, and child with the same compassion and concern.

Not too soon, but when the time is right, remind people that there are natural forces out there that are greater than the strongest nation, the mightiest building, the wealthiest individual. We come into this world with nothing, and we go out with nothing.

Wind, rain, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, ice storms, droughts and blizzards: these are the forces we human beings take on like Don Quixote facing windmills. Though science and Doppler may give us information about storms brewing, they cannot stop the wind or even begin to harness the storm.

The truth is, it is humanity that engages in these struggles with the forces of nature. We build dykes and levees, buildings and bridges, highways and tunnels. We especially like to locate near great bodies of water. What is it about human nature that drives us to challenge or manipulate the elements whenever we can? We move into the dry air of the desert, and then we bring irrigation for our lawns and gardens. We take a marshland or swamp and fill it with a stadium or housing development.

As the real impact of this disaster unfolds, we may find ourselves personally affected. It is likely that our heating bills will serve as a reminder that the Gulf Coast is a major source of refined petroleum and natural gas. The impact on our financial systems is not yet known.

In the coming months, we will have an opportunity to learn important lessons.

Our culture has been moving in a direction that frightens me. In two generations since the Great Depression, we’ve moved back from an acknowledged interdependence and commitment to cooperation to isolated independence and arrogance. It’s the age-old story of that silly tower of Babel, or the golden idol. We humans love to think we are in control, and we strive to be at the top of our own little mountains. But, that age-old human story has predictable endings. Some people end up at the bottom. Even in this country of great wealth and power, we found that it was the poor and elderly and those with disabilities who were left behind.

Then, we saw what is most frightening and dangerous about our human nature played out in the violence in Louisiana. What we saw looked like individuals responding in terrifying, irrational ways to their trauma.

I hope that in the aftermath of Katrina we will learn this: it reveals is a systemic problem that we must work together to address.

Surely, it would have made more sense to spend a hundred million dollars to strengthen the levees around New Orleans than to lose perhaps thousands of lives and spend tens of billions of dollars, after the fact. But we live in a culture that increasingly values personal wealth over sacrifice for the greater cultural good. We have lost sight of the reason that we are a commonwealth: for the better good of our citizens—all our citizens. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law,” says Paul.

As we have watched the looting and the violence, are we prepared to examine the fabric of our society? Are we prepared to look closely at the issues of poverty, access to health care, and hopelessness that come out of desperation and poverty? Are we prepared to look across the divides of class and race and education and consider building bridges that will allow people on the other side to cross over?

And is there a lesson to be learned about our relationship to God’s creation? What about our use of natural resources? What have we done that has contributed to this crisis? If we have built a world economy and an agricultural distribution system that benefits a few but is not renewable or sustainable, are we prepared to address that head-on together? Could this hurricane be the first of a new wave of powerful storms fueled by global warming? Is it time to wake up to the energy crisis that we are already living in?

What does it mean to be a nation so in debt, with vast sums of our resources being focused on war and destruction rather than compassion and construction? Are we willing to look at the rather thin ice of an economy built through debt and sustained by a military-industrial complex before we fall through?

Close to home, the violence reported in our news can sound like the news in Louisiana. Can Rochester learn something about the affect of poverty on community and culture and dare to rebuild this community together?

We have an opportunity to learn important lessons. We have an opportunity to change for good.

In the second half of the Romans passage that we read, Paul calls the community to “wake from sleep.” Now is the moment, the kairos moment—God’s moment—for us to wake up. “Lay aside the works of darkness,” Paul pleads, “and put on the armor of light.”

One of the ways that a community heals through trauma is by the way they tell the story. We will tell this story to our children. Let the story be this: when the hurricane came, we woke up to so many things. We realized that we had forsaken our true calling: to be God’s stewards and to be drawn together through what we have in common. More than anything, we realized that the most important thing we could do was love our neighbors. And we didn’t quite know how to do it.

But we began the work. And on a labor Sunday that was supposed to be a “day off” we committed ourselves anew to our greatest calling and a challenge that seemed overwhelming in its simplicity and prohibitive in its complexity. Alice and Coco Wilder, youths from this congregation, with a friend from Camp Cory, got going already. Maybe you read about it in Friday’s Democrat & Chronicle. They heard cash was needed, so they baked cookies and hawked them on the street with a big sign. They raised $100. So, let’s follow our children.

We are called to love our neighbors. All our neighbors. As we would want to be loved ourselves. Amen.