Selective Vision
Polk City UMC
September 30, 2001
Mark Haverland
Luke 16 19
"There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and
who feasted sumptuously every day. 20 And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus,
full of sores, 21 who desired to be fed with what fell from the
rich man's table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. 22 The
poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's bosom. The rich man
also died and was buried; 23 and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up
his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom. 24 And
he called out, 'Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Lazarus to dip the
end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this
flame.' 25 But Abraham said, 'Son, remember that you in
your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil
things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. 26 And
besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order
that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross
from there to us.' 27 And he said, 'Then I beg you, father, to send
him to my father's house, 28 for I have five brothers, so that he may warn
them, lest they also come into this place of torment.' 29 But
Abraham said, 'They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.' 30 And
he said, 'No, father Abraham; but if some one goes to them from the dead, they
will repent.' 31 He said to him, 'If they do not hear Moses
and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from
the dead.'"
The lesson of the story of Lazarus and the rich man is that
our vision improves when we find ourselves in hell. Or hind sight is better than fore sight,
especially when things go wrong. Or, we
see want we want to see.
It’s dangerous, of course, not to see what’s going on
around us. As I drive back and forth to
my home in Polk City, I listen to podcasts of Fresh Air and other digitized
books. The other day I tried a new route
down 12th St. to 5th Ave, thinking that it would take me
more directly to Business 20 and on out of town. I was adjusting my earphones, selecting the
right show and getting the volume right when I got to the intersection of 12th
and 2nd. I thought it was a
three way stop and was only barely conscious that I was entering the
intersection along with a car from the west.
My selective vision almost got me in a car crash. And I won’t tell you the details of the many
times talking on a cell phone almost killed me.
It seems that we really can’t multi-task while we drive after all. We can see only so many things at once. Paying attention to one thing keeps us from
noticing something else that might be even more important or unusual. We can get so preoccupied with our own little
world that the rest of the world just goes right on by us.
Why do we so often avoid seeing what is clearly very
important? For instance, one of the
great puzzles in life is the way men so often are brought to their senses by
their first heart attack - if they survive it.
I know lots of men who started to diet, began an exercise program,
stopped smoking, and renewed attention to their needs for rest and spiritual
nurture only as a result of discovering traumatically that they had heart
disease. But they practically had to die
first. There is no shortage of warning
this side of that pain which emanates from the chest and runs down the left
arm, but few men pay any attention until they find themselves in the hell of an
emergency room. There are prophets and
scriptures galore, but we men have to practically rise from the dead ourselves
before we see the light.
Men may be especially susceptible to this kind of
selective vision. I know that my main
approach to illness is neglect and denial.
Unfortunately, neglect and denial works often enough to encourage me to
resist medical attention in all but dire circumstances. It’s a good thing we have wives or men would
have died out long ago from lack of medical attention.
Neglect and denial are not exclusively a health strategy
for men, hoowever. All of us neglect and
deny what would disturb us or cause us to do something difficult or
painful. I attended a lecture by Nicholas
Kristof this past week. He is a
columnist for the NYT. His special cause
for the past few years has been Darfur.
He talked with great passion about the horrors of genocide in the Sudan,
where hundreds of thousands of African Muslims have been systematically raped,
tortured and killed by their government.
It was gruesome beyond belief to learn of the evil which humans inflict
on each other. Kristof is trying to
rouse us from the indifference and selective vision which allows this atrocity
to continue. If we were to see the
Lazarus at our gates in this case, we would be forced to act. We would feel compelled to write our
representatives in Congress urging them to act.
We would quiz the presidential candidates on their commitment to ending
the horror. We would press the President
to act more decisively to end the killing.
But by not noticing the suffering Darfur victims, we avoid getting
involved. We save ourselves lots of
frustrating and costly effort and involvement.
We see only want we want to see.
We exercise selective vision in lots of ways. A young man in Des Moines who happens to be a
part of a family well established in the business community and a member of
Plymouth Church where my wife works was seriously injured in an automobile
crash a few weeks ago. He is the lone
survivor from a car loaded with people coming back from the ISU football
game. The article the other day
mentioned that friends were trying to raise money for his health care costs
because he had no insurance. It’s
wonderful that his friends will help in this way, but why don’t they and we see
the 47 million other Americans without insurance, many of whom die as a result
and all suffer to some extent? We exercise our selective vision because
otherwise we would have to do something that would cost many of us money and
would challenge our political loyalties and beliefs. Only when we find ourselves or someone close
to us in dire straights do we abandon our selective vision and rise from our
lethargy to help the uninsured.
We see what we want to see, I’m afraid. In far too many cases we are the rich man
avoiding the beggar at our gates. I
suspect that the challenges posed by global warming are being ignored by those
in power in our country because it would cost them something they are not
anxious to part with: probably money, but perhaps something else, too. There can be no doubt that people feel
different about the war in Iraq when their own sons and daughters are involved. It’s no coincidence that the decision makers
in our country are the least likely to have a personal stake in the
suffering. They see only what they want
to see also. It seems to me that this is
changing some. The hell of this war is
now apparent enough that many are beginning to see it in a new light.
I read an article once[i] that
tried to explain why the United States stood by while 800 thousand Ruanda Tutsi
were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors in the 90s. Many observers think that a photo by Canadian journalist Paul Watson was
the cause. Paul Watson won the 1994
Pulitzer Prize with a now famous photo of a dead American soldier being dragged
through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia.
This photo so traumatized a nation and its president that we
chose not to see a genocide which we could have stopped. Most of us, even those who read the papers,
simply did not see the horror because we did not want to risk having another
American soldier die in Africa. Our
comfortable lives and our fears of involvement in the troubles of Africa kept
us from seeing their horror as our own.
We see only what we want to see.
Jesus talked a lot about people whose hearts were so
hard that their eyes could not see. On
one occasion Jesus performed a miracle by healing a sick person. All the religious authorities broke into a
big dispute over what right Jesus had to practice medicine. They couldn’t see that a life-giving miracle
had occurred right in front of their eyes.
We see what we want to see.
Elsewhere Jesus complained about people who could so
easily focus on the speck in their neighbor’s eye, while completely ignoring
the huge plank in their own. We see what
we want to see.
Today’s story from Jesus is first of all a story about a
great chasm between two men. Jesus goes
into some detail to show how sumptuously and elegantly the rich man lived. Jesus paints in sharp contrast a picture of
how the poor man lived in complete, disgusting, utter misery. I see these people on the streets around the
church every day of the week – but particularly when the Lord’s Cupboard is
open. On my first visit to the SPRC, a
car pulled up to a few of us standing in the parking lot. A young woman asked one of us for money to
buy gas. Two members of the church gave
her cash and directions to a gas station.
I knew right away I was coming to a church which practices what it
preaches. You are a people who are willing
to see what you probably don’t want to see.
Jesus says the poor man lay at the gate of the rich man
and would gladly have feasted upon the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s
table. But because of the gate, securely
locked, there was no way for the poor man to intrude upon the rich man’s
sumptuous table.
When the rich man’s life ends, he finds himself in
hell. The poor man is in heaven with
Father Abraham. It is only then that the
rich man seems to notice the poor man.
This seems hard to believe. After all, the poor man lay at the rich
man’s gate. He had to see him as he went
in and out of his house. He must have
seen him. But he didn’t. He saw only what he wanted to see.
But once he finds himself in hell, the rich man sees how
wrong he has been. He realizes that
God‘s world is not meant to be structured so that the poor can be so easily
overlooked. And so he pleads with Father
Abraham to send someone back from the dead to warn his rich brothers of their
peril. He wants them to see, before it
is too late, what now he sees.
Father Abraham doesn’t buy this suggestion. He comments to the rich man that surely his
brothers have read the Bible and have heard what Moses and the prophets say
about the great peril of riches and God’s great love for the poor and the
oppressed. If they couldn’t see what was
so plainly displayed in the Scriptures, how will they see even if someone comes
back from the dead?
Father Abraham knows that we selectively read the
scriptures, just as we selectively see what we want to see. We put a microscope over those verses that we
like, and we snip out those verses that we don’t like. Father Abraham is skeptical that even someone
rising from the dead would get our attention.
But I think Father Abraham is wrong. It is possible to hear and see those
unpleasant facts of life that we would like to deny. It is possible to look down and see suffering
Lazarus as we go through the gate into our well-kept, well ordered world. The saints of Ft Dodge FUMC are proof that
Father Abraham was wrong. The food
pantry in the church office building shows that we see some of the misery of
our neighbors. Perhaps we could do more,
but at least we do something. We see
these people in need because those of us who know Jesus have lost the scales
from our eyes. Those who follow Jesus
often see what they don’t want to see. We
see the hungry, thirsty, naked and imprisoned.
And we feed, clothe and visit them because Jesus has opened our eyes to
the great truth that we should love our neighbor as God has loved us. Ft. Dodge FUMC is faithful in many ways
because we see what many others don’t want to see.
If we're looking for ourselves somewhere in this
parable, we might try looking to the five brothers. Father Abraham refused to
send anybody back from the dead to warn the brothers, but by telling the
parable Jesus has warned us himself. We have the Scriptures. We have Jesus and
we have this parable. All these things serve as our reminders of God's coming
kingdom, of a just God whose nature is to turn the tables on injustice, a God
who extends no mercy to those who themselves extend no mercy. In fact, we are
better off than the brothers because we have more information than they did. We
now have overcome our selective vision.
Now that we do see what we don’t want to see, the only question is: What
will we do? Or as John Wesley might have
put it: what more shall we do, since as far as I can see, Ft Dodge FUMC is
doing quite a lot.
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Offertory Sentence On this day, of all days, let us give to God with generous
hearts and open minds. Our offering will now be received. |
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Offertory Prayer Warm our lives with your values and faith for the future,
O God. Carry all that we offer to you toward those most in need and expand
our loving concern for them this day. Amen. |