Sermon for 16 Pentecost 2005

I am under compulsion to preach the Gospel, but I hope you will understand that it is impossible, and would be offensive, if I were to speak to you today without addressing the events of this last week since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. We are living through the greatest natural catastrophe in our nation's history. Ever since I agreed to preach today, I have been as you probably have been, consumed with the news from New Orleans and Biloxi, and trying to think of what to say. And all this time, two thoughts have been insistently given to me -- so insistently that I have come to believe they are of God. First: "It is time for us all to decide who we are." That's the opening line of a song from my favorite musical, Les Misérables. The leader of the radical students is preparing them for an uprising against the oppressive monarchy and in favor of a democratic republic. The students are well-off and upper middle class, but they are siding with the poor and the wretched. The students gather in a café and their leader stands up and sings:

"It is time for us all to decide who we are.

Do we fight for the right to a night at the opera now?

Have you asked of yourselves what's the price you might pay?

Is it simply a game for rich young boys to play?

The color of the world is changing day by day . . ."

Second: The first question any human being asks of God in the Scripture: "Am I my brother's keeper?" The whole rest of the Bible is the answer to that First Question.

Like all of you, I have spent many hours this past week watching pictures of New Orleans drowning, of people on roofs and in water holding up signs pleading for help, scenes of thousands of our fellow Americans in flight, homeless, with nowhere to go, with nothing -- refugees. For the first two days, that was the shock. This could not happen in America! We expect such things to happen in Bangladesh and Africa, but not in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This is America! And such is our faith in our society and our technology that we assumed it would be taken in hand swiftly. Only gradually did we come to understand the scale of the disaster. Over a week the true dimensions of the catastrophe have disclosed themselves. For two days we watched in horror as New Orleans descended into anarchy, and looting and raping and snipers on rooftops shooting at those trying to assist, the horrible conditions for thousands at the stadiums and convention centers where thousands of refugees were being held, and the inability to get them out. People dying of dehydration while walking through waist-deep water. No cell phones, no communication. Corpses and feces floating in the water, rising anger, accusations of racism in the treatment of the victims.

The moment when I first lost my composure and the tears began to come was Thursday, when I saw the journalists reporting on what was happening lose their cool. In spite of all their professional training, the reporters and news people started to get angry right on the screen. I am sixty-one years old and have lived through the entire television era but I have never seen that before. Then I saw the New Orleans police officers breaking down and weeping on camera. What had started as a natural disaster on Monday had become by Thursday a story of colossal human failure. A national failure. A moral failure. In my country! I never thought that in my lifetime I would see hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million Americans as refugees. Refugees are in the Sudan and in Afghanistan and Bosnia, not in places with names like Slidell and Biloxi.

True, four years ago the attacks on New York and Washington made us all realize that terrorist attacks might have such an effect. But we forgot that natural disasters, or our own blindness and folly, could be as catastrophic as a terrorist attack. We are all still reluctant to admit it, but our assumptions about our own ability to control nature and bend it to human purposes were very wrong. And our confidence in our own ability to remain civilized has been revealed once again as vanity. The hurricane happened, coincidentally, on the twentieth anniversary of the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The Titanic - the ship that is the poster child for the lesson that pride goeth before a fall, that we risk disaster by our overweening confidence in our own technology, and whose lifeboats are a stark reminder of both our human capacity for selfishness and our ability to sacrifice ourselves for others.

You know what the next phase of this will be. The blame game is already starting. Whose fault was it? Who should have known, who should have done this or that? Who should have spent millions of dollars to build up the levees against the possibility of a category 5 hurricane? Not that we ourselves would have approved such a great expense of taxpayers' money at the time, but in hindsight, someone should have. Wherever there is great anger, there will be those who will try to direct that anger against someone else and deflect it from themselves. And the stakes are very high for the politicians, who need to persuade us to blame others and not them.

The blame game will come. But first, one hopes, there will be a positive moment, a turning towards the victims as human beings. In fact the outpouring of support is already enormous. Nothing has happened like this since 9-11. Americans have already given hundreds of millions of dollars to the Red Cross and other relief agencies, and the first impulse of many people has been to load up a truck with supplies and drive down there. In the midst of the images from the Gulf Coast, it was so heartening to get Major Andy Davis's e-mail. Let's go! Let's go now! We can sleep later! Friday I went to a meeting of representatives from all the local voluntary disaster relief organizations and churches in this area, to start coordinating how we will deal with at least hundreds, perhaps thousands, of long-term refugees in the Shoals area. The representatives from the Red Cross and the FEMA told us that the phone is ringing off the hook with offers of food, money, and places for people to stay. This American people is a generous people, a good people.

But I am convinced that this response does not come only from our generosity. It comes also from a recognition that there are times when the color of the world does change, and that this is such a time. We all remember the last such time. The images of towers over 100 stories high collapsing straight down in Manhattan are still burned into our mind from that Tuesday morning almost four years ago. Our throats still catch at the words from the airline passengers who probably saved the U.S. capital or the White House: "Let's roll!" September 11 was such a time. But this Friday I started to hear people say something amazing. Independently, and only a few minutes apart, two of my friends, both of whom were had been weeping, said to me "this is worse." This is worse than 9-11. It is worse because four years ago we could direct our anger outward. They were responsible. This time we are going to have to get angry with the person in the mirror. As we look at the pictures of those thousands of people living in filth for days, hospital workers trying to keep diabetics and dialysis patients alive, we are going to have to face the real spiritual question, the Pogo problem: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Who are we? Who am I?

After Sept. 11^th, because we could direct our anger outwards, Americans could come together as never before. One of the most emotional moments for me after 9-11 was when I saw an interview with a Black man in New York City who said with this firm-set jaw and enormous conviction, that he had never before been willing to say that he was an American pure and simple. He was an African-American, a Black American. "But no more," he said, "no more." But after Katrina and the flooding and the people in the water, and the Superdome and the snipers and the hospitals left without power and water, and the busloads of refugees and 40,000 national guardsmen, and, to be sure, the helicopters rescuing people from rooftops, and the willingness of Americans to open their hearts and their homes and their pocketbooks - after all this we will have a different set of questions to ask about who we are.

Ezekiel was told by God that if he spoke God's word, and the people did not heed, their deaths would be upon their own heads. But if he failed to speak the prophetic word to the people and they were lost, their deaths would be upon his head. Standing here under instruction to preach to you from these texts, it is impossible for me not to take this as an instruction to speak bluntly. In the epistle to the Romans, Paul tells us to contribute to the needs of our fellow believers, to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, not to be haughty but to associate with the lowly. And here am I, speaking to you as one of you, one of the dry, safe, relatively privileged people, one of the well-intentioned children of God, but one of the well-off children of God! And I have to tell you that thousands of our fellow Americans are going to be streaming out of the disaster area. Many will have nothing. Their homes, their jobs, their businesses -- all gone, and they will take many months, perhaps years, to rebuild. Meanwhile, they are going to have to depend upon the kindness of strangers, as Tennessee Williams put it. Not for days, not for weeks, but for months and months.

This is put-up or shut-up time for the Church, my friends. Who are we? Who am I? Do we fight for the right to a night at the opera now? Do we complain about the price of the gasoline needed to drive our SUV to the lake home? Or do we come together as the Body of Christ in the world and donate our money, our blood, our homes? Our church itself? Yesterday I received an e-mail suggesting that we cancel the 2006 General Convention of our Church and donate the money it would cost to refugee relief and the hotel rooms we would take up to house the refugees. Who would have imagined such an idea a week ago? The colors of the world are changing day by day . . .

Our Gospel reading today is addressed to the Church, the Beloved Community of believers. Behind it lies the Jewish tradition of learning to reprove and to accept reproof from others. The Greek word translated here as "another member of the church" is adelphos, which means brother. "Am I my brother's keeper?" asked Cain. Jesus here is telling us to be gentle with our brothers, our fellow believers, if they sin. The sin separates you from your brother. So if your brother sins against you, first go to your brother privately, and if he accepts the reproof, you have gained your brother. If he does not accept it, still don't give up on him. Take two or three others with you and go to him again. Jewish law held that "one witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, . . . : at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall a matter be established." So if he remains unwilling to reconcile, he is duly warned that there will be adequate witnesses to accuse him. If he refuses to accept reproof even from the witnesses, then and only then bring your complaint to the ekklesia, the Church. No one is to be condemned on the testimony of one person. Don't be hasty. Don't take him to court and sue him. Jesus is telling us to deal with our fellow believers gently, in a way that allows reconciliation; the goal is not victory over your brother, not punishment or vengeance, but regaining your brother. To take it to the church does not mean that the Church's function is to sit as a court and condemn; the assumption here is that the ekklesia is in fact a group of Christians who will work in love and seek to reconcile the parties. So this is not a set of instructions on how to win a dispute with another member of the church, but a manual about how to prevent sin from destroying your relationship with your brother. But to do that the Church needs to be the Church. It needs to have authority.

The authority of the Church is described in this passage from Matthew as the power to "bind and to loose." The authority given to Peter in Mt. 16:19 is now given to the whole Church. Remember that Jesus told Peter that whatever he bound on earth would be bound in heaven and whatever he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven. "In rabbinical language to bind and to loose is to declare certain actions forbidden or permitted." Whatever you forbid on earth shall be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you allow on earth shall be allowed in heaven. Eugene Peterson's spunky version The Message puts it this way: "a yes on earth is yes in heaven; a no on earth is no in heaven. What you say to one another is eternal. I mean this." So the passage means that "the relationships which we establish with our fellow men last, not only through time but into eternity - therefore we must get them right." [William Barclay].

The truth of this you know in your heart from your own life, from the things you wish you had not said or done. Yesterday I heard a story on the radio about a man named Tom Matthews whose first memory was of the day his father came back from World War II. The child was on a surface several feet above the ground, and this man he had never seen came up to him held his arms out and said "jump." The two-year old was afraid and could not do it; whereupon the father turned and walked away saying "no son of mine is going to grow up to be a coward." It took that man and his son half a lifetime to overcome those words. What we bind and what we loose upon others have consequences that last and last.

How does this Gospel passage apply to our changed world, a world in which Americans can be refugees and our assumptions about our ability to control nature are revealed as illusions? What we bind and forbid, what we loose into the world by saying yes and no, will have lasting and eternal consequences. Take this seriously. That's what the Gospel is saying to us in this place and this time. We will be asked to send money, but we will be asked to do more. Our brothers and our sisters are coming. They will be unknown to us. They will have no homes to go back to and no way of paying us if we give them shelter. They will need everything to survive and they will need it for months, not weeks. Many of them will be broke and many of them will be Black. They will have medical and emotional problems. They will not always be grateful and submissive. They will need care. They will be strangers to us and we will have to overcome our own fears to reach out to them. What will we do? If we turn our backs on their cry for help and try to pretend that the world has not changed, this Gospel tells us that our 'no' will have a lasting significance. But if we bind our fears and our prejudices and give these our brothers and sisters a place to stay, work, dignity, or even a cup of cold water, that 'yes' will be part of us forever. For what we bind and what we loose, what we say and what we do not say, will stand for all time and eternity.

And we can pray. Jesus says that if even two of us agree in asking for something in prayer, the Father will do it. Because where two or three are gathered in his name, he says, I am among them. This does not mean simply that Christ is present, watching from the ceiling as we pray. It means that Christ is among us, praying with us. I am there among you, Our Lord is saying; I will be praying with you. It does not matter if you are few in

number, you are still my Body in the world. He is here with us in this place, right now, praying with us, weeping with us, hoping with us.

Standing here in my momentary role as Ezekiel, I address you my brothers and sisters as the Beloved Community, the ekklesia. The Church will be asked to respond to this disaster, to bind and to loose. We have to get this right. We have a choice. We can give a little money, feel pleased with ourselves, and continue to watch it on television; or we can recognize that life in America is no longer just a game for rich young boys to play, that we are not fighting for the right to a night at the opera now, that the colors of the world are changing day by day. It is time to answer the First Question. It is time to see what it means to be the Body of Christ for the people He redeemed. It is time for us all to decide who we are! Amen.