Retinal Veins and seaside Snaps - Sermon 30th September 2007
What is it about catalogues?
I came across a catalogue on the internet the other day, of exhibits you could buy for your college, or science museum. One item in particular caught my eye.(1) In several senses! It was a fancy stand, basically a lectern, with a strong penlight dangling from a hanger and a glossy big card on the reading desk explaining what the exhibit was about. It was entitled "Blood Vessels of the Eye", and it illustrated something I'd noticed years ago, and asked a doctor friend about.
Driving back to the manse at night, I'd stepped into the headlight beam as I went to open the gate. I suddenly saw what looked like a maze of tree branches right across my field of vision. I'd seen it before, under similar circumstances, but this time I actually remembered to ask someone about it. The explanation is simple, but intriguing, and it's exactly the phenomenon that that exhibit in the museum equipment catalogue is designed to illustrate and explain.
Basically, the "tree branches" are the blood vessels at the back of your eye. They are always there, but your brain has learned to "edit them out" of what you see - because of course, they never move. They are a permanent pattern over your retina. But what happens if you shine a moving light on them - either using the penlight on the museum display, or by walking in front of the car headlights - is that they cast a shadow. A moving shadow. And this is something that the brain can't edit out. As the blurb in the catalogue says:
Even though these vessels are always in our field of vision, we normally don’t see them because the brain, coupled with fatigue of the eye’s receptor cells, eliminates them from view. In this exhibit, visitors press a small penlight against their closed eye lid and move it around. Any light entering the eye must pass through the blood vessels to reach the retina, casting a shadow on everything we see. If the penlight continues moving, the eye can’t adapt to the image, and dark reddish lines (like tree branches) will appear which are actually the shadows of the eye's blood vessels.
I find that fascinating! That the brain can be looking at something all the time, and yet just not see it. Because it's always there.
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus...
He looked at him every day, but never saw him...
File that away...
Jesus' parables are fascinating in the way they work on us. Some of them are quite impersonal. We were looking at the Parable of the Lost Sheep a couple of weeks ago. It illustrates something profound about the love of God without in any way putting us inside itself. You aren't invited to imagine that you are the lost sheep; you're certainly not invited to imagine what relief the lost sheep must feel as the shepherd appears and picks it up. That's not how that parable works.
Other parables do invite us to take up positions within the parable, to imagine the story from one or more points of view. Think of the Good Samaritan. Who do you identify with, when you hear that story? Probably the Samaritan, in the first instance; the model for how we should treat others, even others who may hate us just because of what we are. He sees the need of the man fallen amongst thieves. And yes, he sees a Jew, whom he as a Samaritan is supposed to hate - but more fundamentally than that, he sees a human being, in need. So putting ourselves in the Samaritan's position is a perfectly good way of exploring the meaning of this parable for us.
But it isn't the only one. Remember, Jesus' first hearers would all have been Jews, and would have put themselves in the position of the man who was in need of help. So would the smart-alec lawyer whose question - "But who is my neighbour...?" - had elicited the parable in the first place. He'd have been as discomfited as anyone there by the slow realization that the real question is "Who did the right thing as measured from where the man who fell among thieves is lying?" Put yourself in his position, and you find yourself having to admit that there are people whom you'd usually just have written off as the scum of the earth, whose life and conduct is full of compassion, and therefore of the goodness that God demands. You don't see that from the Samaritan's position.
In a way, a parable like this reminds me of those huge big boards put up by beach photographers that used to be so popular at seaside resorts in the fifties and sixties, where you went behind them, usually with someone else, and put your head through one of two or more holes - and found that, painted on the other side of the board, was a comical cartoon body, often a very fat lady in a bathing suit, or a weedy little man with rolled-up trouser legs, a string vest, and a knotted handkerchief for a sun-hat - or maybe even the family dog. Or any one of a number of variants some much less salubrious than this!
And you could stick your head through any of these holes, and adopt any of these bodies. Usually it was considered very funny if a female got the skinny little man's body, and a male got a temporary female form. It didn't seem to matter who became the dog...
This idea of sticking your head through a hole, and emerging into a universe in which you are for a moment someone else, is actually a fascinating one. One of Jesus' parables gives you two holes, and more or less invites you to try one and the other in turn:
Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, `God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, `God, be merciful to me a sinner!'
Which one feels closer to God, to you?
But our parable today is a bit different. There is, actually, only one hole in the board. And when we put our head through, we might be a bit shocked, to find out who we are, in this story, in this universe.
The one person you can't identify with in this parable is Lazarus. The gaze of the parable is on him - which means that you are obliged to look at him from inside the parable, which means that you can only be the only other person in the parable - the rich person. You stick your head into this parable, and you find that you are the rich person. I suspect that that's one of the reasons he doesn't have a name. He is whoever sticks his head through that hole, and into the parable. He is you. And he is me. He's sometimes called Dives - but that's just Latin for "Rich man"...
Lazarus, on the other hand, obviously does have a name! But it's not known to the rich man. In fact the rich man doesn't even see him. One of the odd things about this parable is the weird sense that we are looking through the rich man's eyes, not at what he sees, but at what he looks at without seeing. It's as though we can see ourselves not seeing what it is that the rich man never sees. And maybe we can catch ourselves suddenly seeing the things we can't see. Or at the very least, we suddenly see that there are things we don't see...
And that does two things. It puts us in the position of the rich man. And it lets us see, clearly, what's wrong with it.
Because ultimately, in the parable, what makes Dives Dives, is what makes the rich man so empty. He just can't see. He can't see the poor man as real. He can't see this other, this different, other human being, as being like him. Even in his torment, as this profoundly Jewish story of Jesus goes, having fallen away disastrously from everything that could make him a real, rounded, authentic human being - because in life he never saw Lazarus as a real human being - the rich man still doesn't get it.
In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.'
He has no way to put his head through the hole and become Lazarus. He has no way of imagining what it is like to be what Lazarus is. He has no way of "feeling with" Lazarus. To use the word we get from Greek, he has no sym-pathy. To use the word we get from Latin, he has no com-passion.
And that shocks us.
Because we are suddenly put in the position of being someone - someone else, someone other than ourselves - who just doesn't see what's there, we find ourselves uneasily thinking that maybe I, too - the real, actual me - am someone who isn't seeing what's right in front of me.
It's as though the parable has shone a moving light in our eyes and we suddenly see the patterns that are always there. Our techniques for screening them out are suddenly ineffective.
Today is our Harvest Thanksgiving, and the lectionary offers us the choice of Harvest readings for that festival whenever in the Autumn we want to do it. But I couldn't get away from the ordinary-Sunday readings for today, and in particular this parable. This idea of looking at what's there in front of us and not seeing it, of not being able to see the patterns of our lives that are constantly before our eyes simply because the patterns are so well known to us that we can "edit them out" - it seems to me to be key to a realistic understanding of what God is actually saying to us; of what we need to hear, for our twenty-first century Harvest Thanksgiving to mesh with the reality of the world in which we live.
So many patterns. We buy milk and meat from vast hypermarkets, while farmers are caught into patterns of dependence that we know are one-sided and unfair. But we like our cheap food, and we don't see the patterns that we are looking at day and daily. Our patterns of consumption suck in cheap clothing from countries where it's produced in conditions we don't like to hear too much about - women, and often children, toiling for pence in sweatshop conditions. And behind it all, the ultimate unsustainability of the way we choose collectively to live. We take our heads out of the hole, to pull out of the bleak, empty world of the rich man of the parable - but we are still Dives. In this world, the world of real life, we are still stuck living in patterns which we refuse to look at.
But for a moment, we have been made to see...
The moving searchlight of the parable has swept over our retinas, and we have glimpsed something that is always there - but something towards which we can change our attitude. Dives never had that.
I wonder if that isn't the deep value to us of our covenant with Zimbabwe - that here is somewhere we can't look through as though it isn't happening... Here is somewhere we are forced to look at.
It was William Temple, the wartime Archbishop of Canterbury, who said that the Church was in the world to "comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable." And sometimes the job involves doing both things at once. We live in a restless, uneasy world, ill-divided and in so many ways deeply unjust. But however uneasily, most people seem able to get by, because they don't actually see the patterns they are looking at all the time. Jesus doesn't leave us that option.
Maybe at Harvest time we need to be unsettled. We need to see that it isn't enough to thank God for his blessings, when Lazarus is in so many ways at our gate.
But the crucial thing about the way the this parable works, is that the rich man never sees... If the parable works for us, then we do see... And in the moment we see, whoever and whatever else we are, we are not, in that instant, the rich man. We have seen.
The question is - what happens next? Having seen - what do we do about it? Disturbed or comfortable - which are we? And which do we need to be?
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