Good and gracious God, power of all creation, you have raised up before our sight the long suffering, little known, and often forgotten people of Myanmar/Burma, that we might be served by their example of courage before the powers and principalities of this world.  In making them visible, you call us to open the eyes of our hearts and minds, souls, and all strength, that we may better see and not take for granted those freedoms and benefits we so plentifully enjoy.  In revealing their courage, you call us to stir up our own, that we may embrace and support their hope, and discover ourselves useful in new ways.  In showing us the blood of their innocence spilled on their streets, you call us to remember Christ’s own, shed at the cross, that we may better know the extraordinary grace of your gifts to us of never failing love and new life.  Be now and always with the people of Myanmar/Burma, that they may find peace and know freedom at last.  Be also with us as we meet them in their struggle, even for the first time, that we will never again forget that in you we are called together to be one people, brothers and sisters and servants of Christ, through Jesus, our Lord and brother.  Amen.  

 

The Rev. Katharine Babson

Brunswick, Maine

 

 

I have been grieving this week.  I cannot get the vision of the violence in Myanmar out of my head.

 

In January of 2005 I spent about 3 weeks in Myanmar.  This country, formerly known as Burma, is run by an evil and oppressive military dictatorship.  It is a country in which both poverty and HIV/AIDS run rampant.  It’s a place where military men standing on the road with AK-47s are as common as taxis in Chicago or New York City.  A place where if you take a picture of a man in military uniform or any military vehicle, your camera will be confiscated and you will be thrown in jail.  It’s a place where your luggage is regularly checked for dangerous propaganda, like the Koran, or the Bible.  The three weeks I spent there changed my life. 

 

The civilian people of Myanmar are incredible.  They are by far the nicest people I have ever met.  Seriously, every civilian person I met was incredibly, unbelievably kind and giving.  It’s also, however, a country with the most oppressive government I have ever seen.   We visited several different cities throughout our journey.  One of the bishops we were visiting was woken in the middle of the night by military men who escorted him to the jail.  They questioned him about our group and why we were visiting him.  When we left that city the next day, men armed with AK-47s stood guard by our bus to make sure each of us did, in fact, board the bus, to make sure we all left that city.

 

And I grieve.

 

I remember the people there, the friends I made.  I think about Archbishop Samuel and his twin sons Paul and Saul.  I remember one bishop’s daughter who played the piano beautifully and wanted one day to be a bishop herself.  I think about the young women in the English class, who giggled about boys, and were wowed by my blond hair.  I remember the beautiful Burmese-style outfits they, with their meager means, made for everyone in our group.  I think of the trucks full of Buddhist monks, some just very young boys.  I think of the Buddhist monks and nuns walking along the streets. 

 

I think of the monks.

 

And I grieve.

 

If you’ve listened to the news at all this week, chances are you’ve heard or seen pictures of the protests going on right now in Myanmar.  The protest against this oppressive government in Myanmar started August 19th, and gained a lot of ground when Buddhist monks joined the ranks.  Can you imagine?  You and many of your fellow countrymen are protesting against an oppressive government.  Things don’t look so great, and then priests, and monks, and nuns, and bishops…these all gather to join your cause.  Imagine your elation.  Imagine your HOPE.  Many of the monks now have been drug out of their monasteries in the middle of the night, beaten, killed, jailed.  The remaining monks have been confined to their monasteries, many trapped in with barbed wire fences that the military regime has put up.

 

And I grieve.

 

Killing, tear gas, beating, jailing, oppression.  What are we doing?  What are we doing?

 

The Gospel passage for today tells us very clearly what we shouldn’t be doing.  There was a rich man who had everything he could ever need or want, and then some.  At his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus who was full of sores, and hoped to be fed with whatever crumbs might fall from the rich man’s table.  But the rich man never helped him.  The rich man was complacently self-indulgent.  They both eventually died.  The rich man finds himself in hell (or “Hades” as this passage says), and he lifts up his eyes to the heavens only to see Lazarus standing with Abraham.  The rich man asks for help from these burning flames of hell.  Abraham responds by telling the rich man that he had a good life while living, but neglected Lazarus, who had a poor life.  Now Lazarus has a good life and the rich man, for his complacent self-indulgence, is condemned to hell. 

 

How we respond to one another in this life affects how we live in eternity.  It’s not an image I like a whole lot.  I think maybe it was Mark Twain who said this, but I’m not sure, so don’t quote me on it.  He said something like this: “It’s not the passages in the Bible I don’t understand that disturb me.  It’s the passages I do.”  I’ve always sort of been of the mind set that all people will eventually end up spending a joyful eternity with God.  After all, God created us and loves us, and therefore wants us back.  But what if we don’t want God?  Or, what if we say we want God, but don’t act as though we do.  What if we profess a faith in God, but continue to live complacently self-indulgent lives?  What if we continue to sit in our living rooms, watching television and eating popcorn (that was me last night!), going shopping, having meals so big and rich that we cannot finish all that we eat…what if we do these things and all the while forget about our brothers and sisters suffering around the world? 

 

I have a story to share with you about my younger sister.  I love her deeply, so this story is in no way my trying to punish her or say she’s a bad person.  She’s actually quite an incredible person, but has been raised to be incredibly self-centered.  Because she’s a good person at her core, I have high hopes of her growing out of this self-centeredness when she goes to college.  As for the story:

My husband and I were visiting with my sister and stepmother in Panama City, Florida for a couple of days.  A couple of months prior to our visit a hurricane had come through the area.  For the most part everything was okay.  There was some damage, but it wasn’t anything really terrible, with one exception.  A restaurant was hit by some pretty high winds and was destroyed.  There were several Latinos in the restaurant at the time, and many of them were killed.  My sister was telling my husband this story, and she said, “Oh, it wasn’t really that bad.  Only a couple of Mexicans were killed. [pause] Well, I mean I guess that’s still sort of sad, even if they were just Mexicans.”

 

Now, this is obviously an extreme example.  But how many of us, myself included, sit in our nice homes, with our nice families, in our nice clothes, with our nice food, and forget about the people dying in Myanmar, Iraq, Afghanistan, in the genocide in the Sudan, from AIDS in Haiti?  How easy it is for us to forget.  How easy it is for us to have good intentions, but get so comfortable that we just forget about the poor man in need just outside of our gate.  And scripture tells us here that living in that way is not acceptable.  It’s just not.  Period.

 

As Christian people, we, more than anyone else, are called to do something.  I know it’s hard to know what to do.  But the reason it’s hard is because there’s so much.  It’s like picking a cereal.  There are so many cereals to choose from every time I go to the grocery store that I inevitably spend more time in the cereal aisle than any other aisle.  There’s so much suffering that it’s hard to know where to start.  Not being able to make a choice, though, and finally giving up and going back to our comfortable lives—that is not an option.

 

We are called to do something.  Perhaps we don’t feel ready.  And that’s not really any big surprise.  God has a habit of calling people who aren’t ready.  That’s what happened with Abraham, Moses, Paul, even Jesus.  Remember that it was Jesus who begged God in prayer to make it so he would not have to die this suffering death to which God the Father had called him.  Even Jesus wasn’t ready.  But even if we’re not ready, and chances are we aren’t (ready that is), we already have enough to go.  What we have is enough: “Jesus promise[s] to be with [us] always, and God bless[es] [our] efforts, as inadequate as they [are].”[1]  But we are called.  And we have no choice but to follow that call. 

 

To that end, for the next few weeks we all have homework.  I want us to ask ourselves these questions, questions that I will be asking myself as well.  Where do you feel God calling you?  What is the work in this world, beyond this community, that God is calling you to do?  What is the work in this world, beyond this community, that God is calling us, here at Trinity Parish, to do?  Pray about it, talk about it.  There are so many places in this world, places that we only hear about in the news.  And truly it’s much easier to forget about the horrid things taking place in countries other than our own, in countries where we’ve never been.  Truly it’s much easier to forget about mission to those whose lives, whose countries, do not affect our lives and our country. 

 

What is God calling us to do?  We have to ask ourselves this question, because as Christian people, as a Christian community, we MUST do something.


[1] Quotation taken from the Commencement Address to the Class of 2007 at Virginia, given by the Very Rev. Martha J. Horne.  Idea for paragraph taken from Martha J. Horne’s Commencement address.