19th and MLK

Transcribed from the sermon preached September 25, 2011 

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Exodus 17:1-7, Philippians 2:1-13

 
This morning our lectionary brings us another episode of the Israelites complaining in to Moses and God in the wilderness, and the powerful early Christian hymn of Philippians 2, which shows via the example of Christ Jesus, how, humility leads to exaltation.
This Friday morning I came into the office to catch up on mail. I planned on working a few hours in the office and then heading home to work on my sermon. Since I came up blank on inspiration on Wednesday I was hoping Friday I could get into a groove. So while in the office, I said a little prayer: “God, I have all sorts of things on my mind and distractions and anxiety is clouding my vision and faith. Please show me the Word; despite myself, may your Word be preached.
Sometimes saying a prayer itself helps to narrow your focus and set a course of action. I grabbed my bag and headed out the office door. Just outside, sitting in a lobby chair, was a man I will call James. I have known James for at least the last five years, for he is one of the folks who come in periodically for some kind of help. I thought to myself, God, make this quick so I can get onto my sermon.
James is a little slow, but he is kind, positive, honest, and a hard worker. He grew up in Oakland and did pretty well for a while. At one time he was in charge of a hundred plus ATM machines here in the Bay Area. He said he loved the job and would work all night and into the next day just because the work was so fulfilling. Then the company went out of business.
Sometime after he lost that job, a fight broke out in a location in his neighborhood. One of the men reached into his coat as if he was going to pull out a gun. The other man quickly grabbed a baseball bat and swung it, hitting James instead of the man he was fighting. James woke up in the hospital with brain damage. Now he speaks slowly and with a slight stutter.
“Pastor Max,” he said, “I need a little bit of your time.” I sat down and he proceeded to tell me what was up. The place where he lived had been condemned for, among other things, lack of ventilation. “It wasn’t a nice place,” he said, “but the rent was cheap so I didn’t complain. But now I am out on the street.” A neighbor said he could stay with him if he could come up with a little rent. Welfare gives him $120 a month but it doesn’t come until the sixth. The lady at the Catholic Church helped him file for Social Security back in June, but he had heard nothing yet. James has a brother who lives in a nice house out in Concord and works for the Oakland shipyard as an IT guy. But, James said, his brother just recently lost a daughter. She was hiking and had an asthma attack. He and his wife were still deep in grief. He might be able to stay with his brother, but he preferred to stay in Oakland anyway, near the Catholic Church with his social worker and near the hospitals that have been treating him.
Over the Summer James had a stroke and his kidneys failed. He lost a bunch of weight and I could see his hip and shoulder bones sticking out from under his clothes.
We went into the office to use the telephone. I put it on speaker phone so I could help if need be. First we called his brother. When he answered there was a lot of noise and voices in the background. James’ brother was quickly annoyed: “James, why are you calling? I am at work and very busy.” This made James nervous and it took him longer to get to the point, which annoyed his brother further. James, I have to talk with my wife before I can do anything, and this is a bad time. I gotta go, goodbye.
Next we called the social security office to see if perhaps they had processed his claim. After fifteen minutes going through the voicemail maze, we heard a live voice. Then just as we had given him all the information he needed to check the status of the application, the phone cut out. After another twenty minutes, we found that his application wouldn’t be processed until November, so he was to call back then.
We gave up on the phone, got in the car and caught lunch on the way downtown to see if the people with the room were at home. It was a small shack of an apartment with a door right to the sidewalk down at 19th and MLK (well I fudged the address a little). I have been down there a few times on similar trips with other people. To say it is a tough neighborhood is putting it mildly. James got out to knock.
“Pastor Max, come on in, they are home.” It was one room, maybe 12 by 12. There was a dirty cement floor, stains on the walls, a dresser in the corner piled with junk all around, a TV playing a reality show rerun, and a double bed with a middle aged couple upon it. They both looked as if they had had a tough life. The man was tall, stretched long and leaning on an elbow with his head propped up against the wall. The woman was sitting on the edge, one leg hanging over the side. Between them sat an ashtray, full of butts, with another cigarette burning.
There were not chairs so James and I stood in front of the TV. “There is an extra room in the back”, the woman said, and if James could come up with $120 dollars he was welcome to stay. The woman had also recently had a stroke, and it would be good if James could be around to help her out. “Pastor,” she asked, “could you help us out too?”
“Well,” I said, “how about I come up with a $120 for James, and he can pay you rent with it. And I can bring you some food.” “That would be great, they said.
It is sad to see anyone live in such conditions, and my heart ached at the thought of dumping James off there. I was struck by the irony of being on MLK Blvd. This was not the Promised Land Martin Luther King so eloquently spoke of. This is still the wilderness. “One day,” he said, “we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas; we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths.
“It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, “That is not enough! But I was hungry and ye fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me.”
So off we went back to the Church to tap into the Deacon’s Fund. I grabbed $120, a couple Safeway gift cards, filled a box from the food pantry, and back we went. In the car on the way James spoke. “Pastor Max, thank you very much. I am a simple man. I don’t need much to be happy. I never have. Give me a roof over my head, a bed, a TV and a shower and I am happier than most people with ten million dollars.”
I don’t know why there is a wilderness between captivity and the Promised Land. Maybe it is so we have to face our false positives, those things that kind of help us cope and sometimes make us happy, but have shallow roots that dry up when things get tough and complicated. Maybe it is God saying, time to drop the unnecessary baggage you dragged with you from Egypt. Sin explains some of the hardships of life. Certainly perseverance, hard work and clean living go a long way. But sometimes, when we find ourselves hungry or thirsty or battered by the sun and wind, it is nice to know the people of God can get away with a little complaining.
Life has a jagged starting line. And chance favors some and not others. There is some truth in the notion that we are where we are because of the work, sin or faith of our parents and grandparents, because of the hard work and relatively freedom and justice of our nation, and or the racism and violence. It may be true that we worked for what we have, but there are poor who are just as good, just as faithful, and work at least as hard, and they are still poor. No child chooses its parents. No child chooses which nation they want to be born into. No child chooses to be born into the slum or the ghetto. Hindu Karma speaks only to a small piece of the truth of life and held too. Some might say James shouldn’t have been watching the fight. But the same logic would have to say the little girl shouldn’t have been in here house during a drive by, and we should have gotten dad to a specialist sooner, and those people shouldn’t have been watching the air show, and those in the twin towers shouldn’t have been American capitalists Sin doesn’t account for all the difficulty ad pain in life. It is not easy but it is wise to realize often people are one class or another and one dies and another lives for no moral reasons.
Class is not the only privilege or challenge we face. For whatever reason, we are born with different gifts, with different looks, dexterity, strength, coordination and intelligence. And for whatever reason those gifts are nurtured to greater and lesser degrees. Some would say we have to look after ourselves; it is survival of the fittest. And we do want to work to nurture our gifts and we do want to survive.
But privilege is a gift, even the knowledge and satisfaction from hard work is a gift we are blessed with. We can take pride in our gifts and give thanks even as we know we are no more and no less loved by God because of them. Pride is not the opposite of humility. But arrogance or conceit is. Judge not that we may not be judged. What positive can we take from all this. Regardless of the position we find ourselves in, in the palace or in wilderness. With the grace of God we nurture our gifts, face our weaknesses and challenges with courage and grace, seek to give back and contribute to the peace, prosperity and justice of community, and give thanks for all that sustains both great and small.
Part of the difficulty of preaching such a powerful passage as Philippians 2 is that it is hard to pretend we can follow it with anything more powerful or profound. So today I do not even try, but leave it with you as our conclusion:
Philippians 2:1-13
2If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, 2make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. 5Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
   did not regard equality with God
   as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
   taking the form of a slave,
   being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death—
   even death on a cross.
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
   and gave him the name
   that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
   every knee should bend,
   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
   that Jesus Christ is Lord,
   to the glory of God the Father.
12 Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; 13 for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.