Rich Man Poor Man

Luke 16:19-31
Rev. Este Gardner Cantor
Preached Sept. 30, 2007
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley

I had the pleasure of going to the Diocesan clergy conference with 200 other clergy folk from the Diocese of California this past week. There were many notable sages and prophets who gave us their words of wisdom. Our own Presiding Bishop, Kathryn Jefferts Schorri (the first openly female presiding bishop we have ever had!) was brilliant and moving and wise. Our own Bishop Marc Handley Andrus as ever, gave us a far-reaching cosmic view of creation and our responsibility to it.

But of all these prophetic luminaries, the one whose words stayed with me most was the fireball community activist, Marie Harris, a Baptist from Hunter’s Point in San Francisco.

Bishop Marc had e-mailed us several reams of reading material to slog through before the conference, and I managed about half of it. Fortunately, the half I read included the story of Marie Harris and the environmental victory of the community activists in Hunter’s Point/Bay View, the poorest and blackest section of the beautiful city of San Francisco. One reading introduced us to the complexities of "Environmental Justice" – the idea that health burdens and poor air quality and proximity to environmental hazards are disproportionately distributed by race and income. Although governmental agencies have begun to change policies to alleviate this injustice, it didn’t happen from a spontaneous burst of goodwill on the part of those in charge. It was the hard and faithful work of community organizers like Marie Harris combined with mounting evidence of their claims that caused the change.

The first thing Marie Harris pointed out was that the City of San Francisco is 49 miles square, and Bay View/Hunter’s Point is 2.5 miles square. In that 2.5 miles are all four of the power plants that reside in San Francisco. We, like the rich man whose table Lazarus the begger is huddling beneath, tend to be comfortable in our lifestyle, without realizing that the flames of hell are visited upon the residents of Hunters Point, Richmond and West Oakland, to name just our local regions of Hades.

The flames of hell are occurring right in their lifetime in the form of an industrial practice called “flaring.” When refineries want to burn off gas build-ups they let loose from the tops of their great smoke stacks vast plumes of flame, spewing forth pollution and illustrating in dramatically visual terms the reality of the environment these poor and minority people live in. And there are no refineries in affluent neighborhoods.

The flames of Hell come in the form of drastically elevated rates of cancer, asthma, and many other ailments. As Marie Harris put it, “You name it, we’ve got it.” The flames of Hell come in the form of infant mortality rates that no affluent neighborhood would ever tolerate. And the flames of Hell come in the form of a deafening silence on the part of the more prosperous city residents, who always seem to find the priorities of the poor their very last priority.

But like Lazarus, Marie Harris got her time in paradise, although she nearly died trying to get there. On May 15, 2006, Marie, along with many minority community members who had fought the system for 25 years, celebrated a glorious victory. PG&E had finally agreed to shut down one of California’s oldest and dirtiest power plants right there is Hunter’s Point. Another faithful organizer, Tessie Ester, was there celebrating with Marie. Like Lazarus looking at the faces of the angels carrying him to heaven she said, “When I look over at the those stacks and I see nothing coming out, I just can’t help but cry.”

Marie Harris is a modern version of Amos or Isaiah. She told us in no uncertain terms that now that we were aware of what was happening in Bay View Hinter’s point that she was now holding us morally responsible to do something about it- to help her, to join with her. She even made a connection between the high cancer rates in Bay View Hunter’s point, and the high cancer rates in Marin County. Marie said that it was in Hunter’s point that “Little Boy” the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was assembled. And that they stored the nuclear waste in steel drums and dropped them in the San Francisco Bay. The drums, she said, began after many years to drift up on the shores of Marin. So, as she said, we each share our own piece of Hell.

We can’t contain these flames of Hell in one area, even if we may want to.
It may seem, as our Gospel reads today that “A great chasm has been fixed” between the rich and the poor, between Hunter’s Point and Marin County. But no such chasm exists.

Bishop Marc, on the first night of the conference, laid out for us a fascinating presentation he has done many times before called “The Cosmic Walk.” A long rope was spiraled out on the ground, and candles were placed to delineate the great landmarks of creation- starting with the great flaring forth- the big bang, and ending with the advent of human history. Toward the end of this great spiral, we had the emergence of amphibians. As Bishop Marc said, the eye emerged from the sea and for the first time, the earth saw itself.

Today, we, as the earth are seeing ourselves again. What do we see?

We are all born the same- we bring nothing into this world, and we take nothing away, as Paul reminds us in our second reading. And I was struck, when I looked at Marie, with how rich she is. Rich in good works, certainly, but also rich in community, rich in passion, and because of her great charisma and passion, even rich in the blessings and success of her faithful efforts.

If we cannot listen to our modern day prophets, we may never hear the word from heaven that we need to hear. Father Abraham, in our reading of today tells the rich man that his brothers did not listen to Moses, who said, “Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor” (Deut 15:7)

They did not listen to the prophet Isaiah, who said:

Is this not the fast I choose:
To loose the bonds of injustice
To undo the thongs of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free
To break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
And bring the homeless poor to your house
When you see the naked to cover them
And not hide yourself from your own kin? (Isa 58: 6-7)

It is this last direction that seems to be the redemption of the rich man. In the end he begins to think of someone other than himself- his five brothers, also presumably rich men, oblivious to the needs of the poor, as he was. He realizes that they will meet the same fate that he has, if they are not warned. Abraham’s last words are that if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced if someone is raised from the dead.

But we, as Christians, presumably HAVE been convinced by someone who was raised from the dead. And Jesus echoes the words of Moses and Isaiah in so many passages.

There is no great chasm. Both the rich man and Lazarus suffer from diseases. Lazarus may have running sores, but the rich man has Affluenza. We all live in the same world, we all die.
But we can live in heaven or in hell while we do yet live.

At the end of Luke’s gospel we hear of two whose hearts were “strangely warmed” when they heard the stranger interpreting the scriptures for them. Then they recognized him in the breaking of the bread. If the rich man HAD followed the words of the prophets, if he had taken care of Lazarus and shared a meal with him, perhaps he would have seen the face of God who had long been a stranger to him.

Across the imaginary chasm are the strangers who are so like us. If we reach out to them, if we break bread with them, our lives will be changed, our hearts will be “strangely warmed,”
we may even be cured of our inner plague. We may even be able to bask guilt-free in the promises of our psalm:

You shall not be afraid of any terror by night
Nor of the arrow that flies by day
Of the plaque that stalks in the darkness
Nor of the sickness that lays waste at mid-day
Because God is bound to you in love.

Amen