How much work (to heal the world)?

Thumbnail image by StockSnap via Pixabay

Juli Belian

16th Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 18, Year B)

 I have dreaded and looked forward to preaching this particular Sunday for a long time – probably about 40 years, since I first sat in an Episcopal Church on the date of Proper 18, Year B.

 As I’m sure you all know, we hear each lectionary selection only once every three years. Some scriptures get a re-run even within a single year, or are read every year on particular feast days or during particular seasons, but generally, the portions of the Bible that we hear each week come around, at most, only three years. And because there are often options, then, depending on your rector’s selections, you may hear some scriptures even less often than that – or, possibly, never. The entire Revised Common Lectionary for Sundays, including all feasts and special commemorations, covers only 20.6% of the entire text of the Bible.

 With regard to the options, the choices the rector gets to make regarding the Hebrew Bible, I have learned that the lectionary provides two parallel tracks: the complementary (in which the reading from the Old Testament is thematically tied to the Gospel lesson) and the semicontinuous (which allows for a more sequential reading through the major stories and themes of certain biblical books). The semicontinuous track is designed to allow us to hear to hear and preach the narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures in their biblical context, rather than following a theme.

 This particular constellation of readings focuses on God’s liberation from our weaknesses. Isaiah prophecies the day God comes and heals all infirmities and satisfies all needs. Psalm 146 echoes that idea in its last three verses, and the Gospel clearly is a story of the miraculous healing power of Jesus.

 But you get a hint of the other track in the early verses of Psalm 146, and the letter of James is – well, pretty darn clear, and at first glance, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with healing. It doesn’t seem to fit well in this collection of readings. In the other track, however, the “complementary” track, the Hebrew Bible lesson, the Psalm, and James all echo the theme of righteousness, which means doing certain things, primarily, caring for the poor. I mention that only because I think these two themes actually work well together. Those in our society who are poor often either are poor because of the physical challenges they face, or face physical challenges because their poverty prevents them from obtaining appropriate medical care.

Whichever lectionary salad you chop it into, however, James stands out like a beacon. Some branches of Christian theology focus on the themes in James because they believe we are, in fact, saved only by our works. Other branches de-emphasize James because the message of James is more difficult to harmonize with the belief that God saves by faith alone, and not by works. I sometimes think sermon writing is akin to baking a cake, and depending on which cake you prefer, you vary the amount of the ingredients provided by the lectionary. Following that analogy, the James cake is often baked with a healthy measure of what the Methodists (and others, I am sure) call Sanctification Theology. This view sees God as calling us to different sorts of things before and after we are “saved.” You are saved by faith alone, but after that, you darn well better get busy with some works, or you could wind up backsliding into a load of trouble anyway.

And that is why I dread these readings every few years: Because I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t want to do even that which I know I should – but that is, in large part, because I don’t know how. I know this doesn’t make sense yet; it’s a vicious cycle that starts going in my mind, and because I suspect at least some of you step into that same whirlpool from time to time, that’s what I’ve always wanted to preach about on Proper 18B.

God has saved me. But I continue on with my life, perhaps not exactly the same as before, but still retaining the vast bulk of my resources, whatever they may be, for my own use and that of my family. I am not particularly generous. I’m not saying I don’t give anything to anyone, but there is, in my mind, a very steep and very slippery slope, and because I don’t know how to navigate that, I don’t try. And it eats me up inside.

Most of you know our car got seriously damaged two weeks ago when I was driving home after church. The insurance company is going to repair it, and thank God for that, but it won’t be ready for quite a while yet. The insurance company says October 22, the repair guy says he’s doing everything he can to fix it sooner, and we’re trying to take the long view and settle into what is, frankly, a very inconvenient few weeks with no car. I am taking the bus to work, we are walking or riding our bikes to do local errands, we are relying on friends when it isn’t too inconvenient for them, and we’re rescheduling things that we cannot take care of through one of those approaches.

For us, it is inconvenient, and we see a point in the future where we know this inconvenience will end. But my return to daily bus riding has thrust me right back in the maelstrom of the gospel and of James. If you are a daily bus rider, especially into and out of the city of Detroit, you already know what I’m talking about. If you’ve never had that experience, I commend it to you as a lesson in humility and, for me, oftentimes shame. Riding the bus in Detroit has become a very Jamesian experience for me.

First, for reasons I can only guess may have to do with budgets and labor shortages, the buses do not run at wholly predictable times. There is a schedule, certainly, and we all understand schedules can change over time; but the relationship between the schedule and reality for metro Detroit buses seems tangential most days. For example, the bus that brings me home from work is supposed to pick me up at my stop – the last on the line – at 6:35 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Because I have enough experience to know that 6:35 is more or less an approximation, and because the next bus after that is an hour later, I get myself out to the stop at least 10 minutes early. The bus has, so far, run approximately 10 minutes late on most days, even later on some. This means I stand at the corner of Jefferson and Beaubien for at least 30 minutes most days. Added to the actual transit time, plus the time to walk home from the transit center, I spend significantly more than an hour each day on a trip that, at that time of day, usually takes no more than 15 minutes in the car. Second, guess what? The same thing is true in the morning. So take that hour-plus cost and double it. That is a lot of time that cannot be spent earning money or taking care of your family – or even kicking back, relaxing at home.

And I am taking a single bus one direction only twice a day. Last Thursday, I spoke with another person waiting downtown; she had been waiting for an hour already, she said, and had already missed her connection with her next bus. She expected it would be at least another hour before she would get home. I don’t know what she had to do downtown, but if it was working, that’s comparable to living past Lansing while working in Detroit. Some do, but most of us wouldn’t if we didn’t have to.

Now, that woman was sane and pleasant. Not very well off, clearly, but able to hold a rational conversation and not altogether lacking in means. The people on the bus are generally pleasant, mostly working-class citizens getting to and from their jobs. In other communities I have lived in, such as the Twin Cities of Minnesota or the Bay Area of California, transit is full of professionals like me, who take public transportation because parking is too scarce, or because traffic is too dense, or simply because it works for them. That is not true in Detroit. White professionals are few and far between on public transportation. And let me be clear, it’s not the people who make the bus so challenging; what I’m pointing out is that because so few people with political power ride the bus, the people who directly suffer the inconvenience of this poorly managed system seem to be people who lack the political power to change it. Perhaps they have sufficient power but not enough organization – I don’t really know – but I can’t help but notice the correlation: In cities where everyone rides transit, it tends to run on time; in cities where it doesn’t, those of us with resources make other choices, and those without resources … wait.

But not all people who ride the bus are sane and pleasant. The city of Detroit lacks sufficient mental health services to provide for everyone who needs them. The shelters lack sufficient beds to house everyone with nowhere to live. These two facts produce a fairly large group of people whose grip on reality is tentative at best, people who are often, and quite understandably, very angry. There are many days when my walk from the stop to the law school is accompanied by someone shouting at me as I walk. Our law school shares a party wall with Ss Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which runs a warming center that serves meals each weekday. They have, in the past few years, gone from serving about 150 people a day to serving nearly 300 a day, and although most of those people then go on to whatever else they need to do that day, a certain percentage hang out because they have nowhere else to go. When I drive, I pull into a fenced, gated, locked parking lot from which I go directly into the building. When I take the bus, I walk several blocks and must walk through and sometimes with the people waiting for the warming center to open.

There is a highly fraught set of calculations involved in one’s interactions with many of these people. Lacking sufficient income and often addicted to anything from cigarettes to alcohol to other things, they need cash they do not have, and so many of them beg. Most are very polite in their approach – “Excuse me, miss, I mean no disrespect, but do you have enough money for me to buy a meal?” I know, we all expect they are often not spending the money they collect on food, but you know what? Neither do I, and no one is able to criticize me for that. So I don’t worry about that part. The part I worry about is, What do I do? “For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.”

As it happens, I often simply have no cash on me. When I say, “I’m sorry, I have no cash,” I am either cursed or invited to go to an ATM to get them some cash. When I do have cash, if I offer a single bill or two, I am often given a look of intense disdain – and I can’t really blame them. What can they buy with a dollar? The cigarette someone tosses away half smoked has more value.

But if I do give them cash, where does it stop? There is no end to the line of people who want and need it, that’s for sure. And I could go on and on, but it comes down to this: How much am I allowed to keep above my own most basic needs? Must I become poor to help the poor?

I don’t think the answer is Yes, but I also don’t think I’ve found the right answer yet. I do enjoy a lovely lifestyle, nowhere near as rich as some, but with food and shelter every day of the week. I give mostly to our parish – not even at 10% yet, but working on it – but I worry that isn’t enough, because, frankly, giving to the parish mostly runs the parish and does not make significant inroads on the many social problems in our community. It certainly doesn’t affect transportation.

As it happens, a former student of mine whose area of expertise is autonomous vehicles is speaking at TedX in a couple of weeks. She invited me to attend, but, as I explained, I can’t get there, because that is a day I need to be downtown, and there aren’t enough hours available to leave and come back on public transit. I told her, “Tie autonomous vehicles to serving the poor and you will become the perfect Detroit Mercy graduate.” In fact, she does plan to speak to that, but while I was waiting to hear back from her, I had a crazy thought. What would AI say about this?

As it happens, ChatGPT has thought about this! I typed in the query: How can autonomous vehicles improve transportation for the poor? And within seconds I got a very thorough answer that touched on issues and ideas even I had not thought of. And I mean, very thorough – so thorough that I could use it as a guide to asking questions of political candidates, as a guide to voting, as a guide to where to direct my money to help make solutions like this available.

And so this is the good news I have for you today. We are not Jesus. We cannot simply say, “Be opened,” and heal the deaf. We cannot simply say, “Your faith has healed your daughter” and go on our way. Many if not most of us have no idea what to do to bring the good news to this incredibly broken world of ours.

But we have access to technology and ideas like never before in history. Between the internet and AI, despite the scare-mongering over each, even those of us with absolutely no idea how to help on a particular issue can run a query and quite possibly get quality ideas that can help us leverage our own limited resources in ways that do what the gospel has always asked us to do: Heal the sick. Feed the hungry. Help the poor.

May we make it so.