Sermons

September 4 2005

New Orleans

Reverend Dr Cheri DiNovo

About 17 years ago, my family did a little family trip. We were heading to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and we started in the north of Florida. It was a road trip and the first place I remember stopping was Biloxi, Alabama and there we saw the film, "Mississippi Burning". It’s a film about the murder of civil rights activists and we watched it in a theatre where half were black and half were white and everybody applauded in the right places and everybody cheered at the end of the movie and I thought, "This is a healing moment!" because that movie was about events that happened not far from Biloxi and some even, in Biloxi.

The next stop we made was in a little town called Pas Christian, such a beautiful place overlooking the gulf of Mexico. Pas Christian contained some stunning houses, Tara-esque places that even back then were very inexpensive. They were so inexpensive and so beautiful I remember Don and I looking at each other and thinking, "We could live here!"

Then of course, we ended up in New Orleans for Mardi Gras where we went to eat at all those amazing restaurants: Antoine’s, where Oyster Rockerfellers were invented, Paul Prudhomme’s where we bought his cook book and spices and of course we had Po’ Boys because you have to have a Po’ Boy when you visit New Orleans. We also went to a legendary nightclub called ‘Tipitina’s’ where we saw Dr. John, one of our favourite performers and the Neville Brothers who sang that evening.

We were in heaven and it just got better because after that the parades started. People had warned us, "Don’t take your children to Mardi Gras" but we found au contraire, that the children loved the parades. They were very little at the time but they loved them, and all the people and floats threw them beads and ‘swag’ so that Damien and Cesca got all this loot. They were in heaven.
I think now as we witness all the pictures in the press about all of these places, Biloxi flattened, Pas Christian, no more, New Orleans, flooded, I had one of those "Yeah but…" moments. The first "Yeah but…" came when the first footage came out and we all realized how bad it really was. We knew before we knew how bad it really was there that people had been warned and that people with money were able to leave the area. The first, "Yeah but…" moment came when I thought, "Yeah but, why didn’t they take the poor people with them?" A childish question but obvious. "Why did they leave the poor people behind, the people who couldn’t afford to leave town?"
Then when they herded 25,000 or so into the Superdome another "Yeah but…" moment came; "Yeah but…how come it took 5 days, 5 days to get any food or water to them?" I mean food and water that can be dropped from a plane pretty easily. Why wasn’t it dropped to them?
There were other; "Yeah but…" moments like the time when a young man stole a school bus and managed to fill it and take the occupants to Houston to safety and then was immediately arrested for stealing a school bus. I wanted to say; "Yeah but…why?" I wanted to ask; "Yeah but, why is considered ‘looting’ if it’s a black person looking for food but ‘looking for food for your family’ if it’s a white person?" like a rapper shared.

And why, you have to ask, are folk looting Ipods when there is no electricity and sneakers when you are up to your knees or waist or necks in water?

Then wouldn’t you know that the lectionary has us reading what we’re supposed to be reading. I had a "Yeah but…" moment as I read this passage from Matthew where he says, ‘If you can’t work it out with the people in your Church then treat them as ‘those people’ (remember we talked about ‘those people’ last week). Treat them as if they were Gentiles and Tax Collectors.’ And I said to myself, "Yeah but…isn’t Matthew himself a Tax Collector?" This is Matthew’s Gospel. So what is he saying here? ‘Treat people like me, a follower of Jesus Christ, one of the beloved? Wasn’t Luke a Gentile? "Yeah but… wasn’t Luke a Gentile?"

It only makes sense you see if you read the next few lines which for some reason were not part of the lectionary passage, because then it makes sense. In what we know about Jesus, it makes sense. Jesus often said the equivalent of, "Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect." Before you get to that point, where you treat folk as ‘those people’ you forgive them "seventy times seven" which in Biblical numerology means, ‘forever’. It never, ever comes to a point where you treat someone as an outsider.

I think of poor Matthew and I was thinking of Pogo, an opossum, another southern character, who said famously, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Matthew writing these words, Matthew the Tax Collector, with that variety of self-loathing that he must have felt many times in the presence of Christ and saying, "I’ve met the enemy and he’s me."

One of my favorite authors, Dostoyevsky, talked about his moment of conversion, the moment when he ‘got’ that he was not only Christian but that there was a God and that that God loved him and that he was the recipient of astounding, endless, grace. The moment in Dostoyevsky’s life went like this. He was a student activist, active against the Tsarist regime and the Tsarist troops arrested him and a number of other student activists, and they lined them up against the wall and blindfolded them and you could hear the cock of their rifles and Dostoyevsky heard everything leading up to the order to fire when all of a sudden, there was silence. He had been reprieved. The blindfold came off, everyone was released. I thought, "Imagine what that does to a person?"
What that does to a person is what every Christian should experience. Every Christian should experience once, if not daily, the experience of being absolutely and utterly forgiven, absolutely and utterly loved, not because of anything we do but because of what was done for us.
I used the example in Godtalk yesterday of the justice system. Imagine if you were a murderer, you had killed someone in cold blood. You knew you had done it. You knew you deserved punishment. You went into the courthouse. The evidence was clear. The judge stands up and says, "I find you absolutely guilty and you’re free to go." Not the kind of incident you’ll ever see in a human based justice system but that is God’s justice system. That’s what it look like! Every single one of us has been ‘let off’ and every single one of us has been ‘set free’.

So you get this very strange push and pull in scripture about what it felt like to live that moment, which they all had, and then the question arises, "What to do with the rest of our lives?" Then what happens? It’s not that scripture is not full of contradictions. It is. Was there one angel at the empty tomb, or two? Did Jesus appear to Mary first or to the disciples? Did the world start in the Garden of Eden with a snake and apple or was it the creation of an earthling? You have your choice. It’s beautiful that there are contradictions throughout scripture. That’s how you know it’s not a fabrication. Just like eye witnesses everywhere, we contradict each other when we describe the most common of events. That’s how we know ‘something’ happened! If the evidence had been cooked, we’d all agree.

It’s wonderful that there are contradictions both in scripture and in our lives. This contradiction points to a problem that has its roots from Christianity’s earliest days and that is, "What do you do when someone calls themselves a Christian but goes on behaving in a most un-Christian way?"
Dostoyevsky and Peter could not imagine that when you walk from a place where you have been given the ultimate reprieve, where you get that your very existence is an act of grace, where you get not only that there is a God but that this God loves you, and then can go on as if nothing has changed? How can you do that? Somehow it happens all the time. Just watch the news. I’m sure that most of the people shooting at each other in New Orleans, call themselves, Christian.
To conclude, I wanted to share a vision I had, while watching the news. It was a vision of what Toronto would be like if this happened here. Of course, disasters, especially natural ones, can happen at any time and in any place and for any reason. What would our response be, as Christians, to that same set of circumstances?

Here’s a prayer and it’s a dream. It’s up to all of us to make it actual if that day ever comes. You know that if that day comes, that each one of you and I have been called to really live their faith. That’s the day, that day of catastrophe, when we are called to really, really be Christian, not just mouth the words but act the part. Not just say we follow Christ but actually follow Christ and Christ is as present in New Orleans right now, as anywhere. What would Christ have us do as Church?

Well it’s interesting because I went on the United Methodist website and The United Church of Christ, our sister Churches, to see what they were doing. What were their Churches doing? Some of them, the oldest and most venerable Churches of all Christian Churches, cut and ran. How else can you see it? They boarded up Churches, secured valuables as best they could, and left town. It doesn’t take much to see that they also left behind the poor people. But other Churches stayed and kept open as long as they could. They helped their neighbours. There are Churches, as we speak, feeding people three meals a day.

I saw a beautiful example of a Christian at work on the news. It was a young woman, a police officer, holed up in a school. She had lost everything. She was looking after a 10 year old child who for all intents and purposes had been orphaned. They didn’t know where his parents were. Of course she wasn’t being paid. The banks weren’t working and even if she had been it wouldn’t buy her anything. Where was the food? Her shift was over a day or two ago and she should have gone home but there was no home to go to. She could have gone looking for her own family however. But instead, she stayed. She made sure that the people in that school got food and she made sure that the people in that school were protected from what was going on outside. She did her job and that’s in fact, how she described it. "I am just doing my job."

What is our job? So here’s the vision and the prayer. I thought this Church is a well built place. I don’t care what the catastrophe is, this place has a better chance of surviving it than most of the places we live. If Lake Ontario flooded Toronto, this Church is also pretty tall, perhaps 40 feet, and remember that even in New Orleans there were tops of some of the taller older buildings in the French Quarter and other places that one could inhabit. What if we stayed and we didn’t cut and run? What if we stayed and made sure that this sanctuary was available for, as it is now, all people and particularly poor people. Guess what, because it is a Sanctuary for all people and for poor people even now, we have three freezers full of food! Let’s assume that the electricity is cut, a pretty reasonable assumption, and the food began to thaw, it would still keep us going for a week or two. We could feed families here. We could entertain children here. Even if there were no lights, and increasingly in our sanctuary there aren’t, we could still light candles, and if we ran out of heat and it was cold, we have lots of wood in this place we could chop up and burn. Imagine this place being a real sanctuary in a time of crisis!

That gives you an idea of why we’re here this morning. Why we’re here in a time of plenty and affluence and blessing, because, in fact, you know what, there will come a time of crisis, even if it’s not on that scale. In each and every life of those gathered here this morning, including me, some catastrophe will fall, even if it’s very personal. Guess what, when that happens, we will feed you! We will house you! We will love you and we will be family for you! We will just do our jobs.
Isn’t that a vision? Isn’t that a prayer?

Amen