 |
||||||||
| ||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|||
 |
|||
Trash and the CityAugust 30, 2009 Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost Listen to part one of this sermon Listen to part two of this sermon The old adage says we are what we eat. That may be true, but it’s safe to say that we are also what we throw away. NYU professor Robin Nagle claims that landfills are, in fact, modern day museums – the place where the story of our lives are perfectly preserved, captured through the artifacts we discard. Landfills say a lot about who we are, what we value, and what we wish not to believe about ourselves. I remember a visit to a landfill in Leon, Nicaragua a few years back. It was possibly one of the most disturbing experiences of my life. I was there with a group of roughly 25 people visiting with a local church that had developed a feeding program for the residents of the city dump. Yes, I said residents. As a matter of fact, an entire residential community had developed at this site, where people lived off the discarded remains that eventually made their way to this final resting place. Grown men and women, and countless children, could be seen combing through the mountains of trash that stretched as far as the eye could see – they were looking for food, for things to sell on the street, for anything that would ease their lives. A cloud of smoke billowed off the side of mountain perpetually as the city’s refuse was set aflame; its stench could fill one’s nostrils from miles away. We were there to offer a well-balanced meal – the only one they probably ate all week. Prior to our arrival, I anticipated a happy reception. Instead, what greeted us were innumerable faces, young and old, with blank, almost lifeless expressions. They frightened me. They were dirty. They smelled. I felt as if I were at cemetery among the dead. I remember thinking that I too might feel lifeless if I had to live in a dump; a thought followed by another: ‘so this is what all our stuff does to people. No wonder we want to get it rid of it so quickly.’ I remember my thoughts being focused on the people who lived there, and it took a while (a long while) for me to make the connection that we were all there, everyone of us. We had all contributed to that reality, each of us curators of particular exhibits within that sullied museum of life. The trucks kept rolling in, dumping the trash of some that would become the treasure of another. As we stood there watching this unfold, one of my fellow team members leaned over to me and said, “So, this is what Hell looks like.” Did you know that there are only two man made structures visible from space? One is the Great Wall of China, and the second is the Fresh Kills landfill – right here in New York City (Staten Island to be precise). Fresh Kills is actually the single largest human-made structure in the history of the world. Think about that. Although we closed it in 2001, it remains our largest physical achievement – a garbage dump! And it’s right here in our own back yard. Don’t worry, my point this morning is not to berate you about our consumption or waste; there’s a time to consider that, but not in a sermon. Instead, what I want to probe is the connection between our trash, the people closest to it, and us. There is an undoubtedly direct correlation between the three. How can there not be? We consume and purchase, and as soon as we possibly can we discard the remains. We don’t want to be near them; we don’t want to see them. We take them to the curb, where two kinds of people are nearest to our refuse – people who live on the street and the people who remove our garbage from our presence. If we’re honest, we will admit that our conception of “street people” and sanitation workers is not favorable. We don’t even see most street people, even when they’re right in front of us. Sanitation workers we rarely see, and that is by design. Professor Nagle, who is quoted on the front of your bulletin, tells us that there is a deep sense of community and camaraderie among sanitation workers. Yet, most of them rarely tell their neighbors what they do for a living, and although they wear a city uniform, most know that it is a stain, a mark of shame that stigmatizes them. Which leads me to ask – Why do we stigmatize a whole group of people we depend on daily simply to survive? What do they remind us of? Bruce Chilton, in his book Rabbi Jesus tells us that it was only after finally fulfilling his dream of entering the great temple in Jerusalem and receiving God's grace and family acceptance, that Jesus felt his own worthiness which compelled him to flee the temple and his family and live among "those of my Abba"; the discarded, hidden, marginalized - the trash of Jerusalem. This is Jesus as homeless beggar in the lower city of the great and most urban Jerusalem. This is where Jesus made his community – among the discarded, outcast, trash of his city. Thus, Jesus experiences first hand the song of his ancestor Hannah (and the Psalmist who later quotes her) when she sang, “He lifts the poor from the dust and the needy from the garbage dump. He sets them among princes, placing them in seats of honor.” While in conversation with a colleague this week about these matters, she wrote me saying, “The new perspective this offers me is not as much the obvious: we need not see people as disposable utility tools (trite but true). What strikes me is that maybe we all struggle with treating ourselves as trash. We all think that the undesirable parts of ourselves should be disposable or are unworthy of love and acceptance instead of loving the whole, unconditionally as God offers us. That perhaps "the trash in us" should not be disposed of or even rejected, but embraced as evidence of the imperfect creatures we are who are loved completely.” You can hear echoes of Paul in this when he says, “What I don't understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise... I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question?” Paul too struggled with “the trash within him” and believing that he was loved completely. In our Gospel lesson Jesus says some words that are hard to stomach. “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off! It is better for you to go through life maimed than with two hands into the fires of hell.” He says the same of a foot, and then an eye. Someone in my Disciple class recently suggested that in this passage Jesus sounds more like a member of the Taliban than the Good Shepherd. What does Jesus have in mind when he refers to hell? What would his hearers have thought when they heard this word? What does it mean for us today? What, if anything, does this have to do with trash? Just southeast of Jerusalem there is a deep, narrow gorge called ge ben hinnom. In this Ben Hinnom valley rebellious and unfaithful Israelites once offered child sacrifices to pagan Gods. The Old Testament books of 2 Chronicles and Jeremiah tell the story. King Josiah, one of the great Kings of Israel who tried to reform the cultic practices of his people, condemned the Ben Hinnom valley as an eternally unholy place.* Later the valley was used as a garbage dump by the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus the valley of Ben Hinnom became known as the place of destruction by fire in Jewish tradition. The Aramaic word for [ge ben hinnom] is gehenna, translated into the English language as "hell," commonly used in the New Testament for the place of final destruction and eternal punishment.* This valley was also an image of hell due to its association with the place to deposit the bodies of those slain in battle by God's judgement...Gehenna, or hell, is thus a place of rot, of mutilated bodies and revulsion. To this the Old Testament adds the image of burning...related to the idea of purging, of sacrificial fire destroying something that is offensive to God.* This was the conceptual backdrop that Jesus had in mind when he talks about hell. "He doesn't actually call it “hell”, he uses the Aramaic name Gehenna, that place just outside the walls of Jerusalem, a place with which those who came to listen to him would have been very familiar...By the time of Jesus, Gehenna had become the town dump. Rubbish, bones, decaying carcasses, filled this desolate valley. [A constant fire raged in order to destroy the waste]. Thus, Jesus says literally, it would be better to pluck out your eye and go into the kingdom of God missing part of your body, than to have your whole body thrown on the garbage heap of Gehenna.* Gehenna was a detestable, rotten-smelling, disgusting place in Jesus' day. Imagine the thought of spending eternity in such place, just another piece of trash that isn't worth saving. Imagine your mortal remains lying in rest with the remains of the criminals of our day, with dirty diapers, old tires, cartons of left over food, not to mention the roaches and rats, all being combed through by men, women, and children who live off waste. Imagine that and you'll have a general idea of what Jesus and his listeners had in mind. The English word 'hell' just doesn't capture it. A more accurate translation might have Jesus making reference to “Fresh Kills” rather than “hell”. Jesus was actually saying something quite loving, quite gentle and caring, not judgmental as it seems at first. The wonder of Jesus is that he lived his entire life trying to save people from wasting their own. His whole life was an attempt to eliminate every excuse people might have had to give up on God and the life God calls us to. Mark has him casting out demons, curing the sick, restoring sight to the blind, eating and drinking with sinners, touching and restoring the unclean, challenging the wealthy about how they spend their money and what they value, and giving hope and sustenance to the poor, pulling people out of the dump. He chose to make his community among the people at the dump, the outcast, the reviled. He was regularly making choices about a life larger than his own, a life worth living well because it was the only life he had. This was the only way his own life could be saved from the dump. And these are the choices he confronts us with today. Hell for Jesus was life wasted by poor choices, a life unable to see the horizon because so much stands in the way, so much grime and waste that block the beauty of what lies within and ahead. Jesus lived his life trying to save you and me from Gehenna, the dump, from an eternal hell that is probably much worse than anything Dante or Milton could have ever dreamed up. And guess what? He also did that for the people we fail to see, or to value, those we despise and exploit. No one is beyond the scope of God’s all encompassing love, and as a result Jesus was determined that the city dump would one day be empty! It's not a coincidence that Jesus was crucified on Mount Calvary, which sits just across the way from Gehenna. As he hung on the cross he could see Gehenna clearly. His own deepest experience of Gehenna (the fiery pit) was Calvary. As he hung on the cross he had a clear view and a stark reminder of what his sacrifice could mean. He hoped that one day Gehenna would be empty, cleared of all human debris and waste and stench. That was his hope. That is why he lived and died—so that we could be spared a meaningless existence, that we might choose instead to live and to love as God intended, to allow ourselves to be loved completely and fully, and to fashion a world that burns with the fire of God’s love and justice and peace. Hmmm…lots to think about the next time you take out your trash. ___________ Previous sermon: Life Together in the City • Next sermon: Work and the City All past sermons |
| ||
|
|