Bridging the Divide
My first exposure to the Rochester area was in 2011 or 2012, I think. It was whichever year we had Annual Conference, our big yearly gathering of Methodists from across Upstate New York, in Rochester. I don’t really remember being in the city. I do remember that whichever hotel we stayed in was tall, and we had some great views of the surrounding area. I remember feeling like I was in the Big City, which I was, since Rochester is about 3 times the size of Schenectady, the city I was born in and grew up around. It wasn’t until I met Anna, my fiancee, though, that I really started to spend time around Rochester and get a feel for what it’s like as a place. I didn’t have a car back then, so I would ride the train out—which was fine for me, since I love the train. Anna would pick me up, and we’d spend our time taking trips into the city, when we weren’t poking around in the village here or wandering around Powder Mills or Mendon Ponds. We went to some of the places that were important to her—the Mad Hatter in the Park Ave neighborhood, the Memorial Art Gallery, Highland Park. She did a great job selling me on the city. Such a great job, in fact, that that’s where I live now.
Each time I visited, though, I was struck by how disjointed so many parts of the city felt. Going from the center of Rochester to many of the surrounding neighborhoods felt like going to the next town over. Neighborhoods like Corn Hill or the South Wedge, where I live now (not far from Cheesy Eddie’s) feel sectioned off from Downtown, with its tall buildings and abundance of parking lots. I remember one time walking from the train station to a coffee shop downtown when I was going to have to wait a little while for my ride. That was when I really got a sense of the partitioning of Rochester. On that walk, I had to cross over the Inner Loop—a literal chasm that has been fixed between Downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods. That same chasm contains interstate 490, which is what splits my neighborhood off from Downtown. I-490, which was designed to rush commuters from the suburbs right into the heart of the city, and get them out as quickly as possible. Freeways, sprawling surface parking lots, isolated train stations that are not well-connected with other modes of public transportation—these are symptoms and drivers of urban decay. These are the things that divide communities, that make connection more difficult, and that, no matter how many prophets we’ve had throughout the generations telling us it is so, we never seem to take seriously. After all, who wants to take 31 F all the way from Fairport to downtown Rochester?
The chasms that we, the collective human society, create are not always as dramatic or tangible as the chasms that scar the City of Rochester. If we look for just a moment, we can see the chasms of privilege that turn many of us into the wealthy man, clad in purple, who take for granted the workers who prop up our lifestyles. We take for granted the urban tax revenue that subsidises rural and suburban infrastructure, the migrant workers who feed us, though they often don’t make enough to feed their own families. We leave our gates locked to disabled people, who are too inconvenient to include. And sure, we can take the scraps, the leftovers from our table, and pass them through the bars of the gate or send them across the chasm. But doing so does not truly bridge the divide. It still leaves an “us” and a “them.” It doesn’t force us to actually draw our circle wider, to look into the eyes of God in our neighbors, or to be in any real type of relationship with those who are suffering, whom we keep on the other side of the chasm, behind the locked gate. Clearly, this is not all that we are called to.
But what, then, is the point of this parable? Are the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable, the sick, and the hungry supposed to take comfort in the idea that when they die they’ll have comfort then? Is Jesus, as portrayed by the gospel writer, banking on the wealthy and the privileged being so scared of eternal torment that they would make things right?
We really ought to look at this parable not as a cautionary tale, but as an observation of reality. The great chasm isn’t something that’s coming—it’s already here. It’s in Rochester. It’s between here and the city. It’s at the Southern border. It’s in our neighborhoods, in our churches, and in our hearts. We’re deeply disconnected, and it only seems to be getting worse. Polarization, political violence, and so on and so forth. A great chasm has, in fact, been fixed between us. But it wasn’t God who put it there as a form of punishment. We built the chasm—or paid someone else to build it. We dug trenches in our hearts, put up walls and barriers to keep those people out. If you want to know how I would define sin, it’s that. Sin is anything that separates us from one another and from the rest of Creation. It’s what happens when we do not honor the divinity in one another, when we stew division, when we reject community. When we see ourselves as more worthy than others, and see others only for what they can do for us. Our work then, in not sinning, is to address these divisions, these disconnections in our hearts and our world.
It also matters how we do the work of bridging the divide. Christ, through the character of Abraham, doesn’t seem satisfied with the rich man demanding that Lazarus cool his tongue. Bridging the divide is not just about getting over things. It’s certainly not about recognizing the value in others simply when it serves us. It demands that we become repairers of the breach, as the prophet Isaiah described. That’s not superficial work. It’s not passive work or temporary work. It is the work of revealing the Kingdom, of seeing God in one another and ourselves. Not erasing our identities, but uplifting and celebrating that which is different and that which is common. It means knowing one another—knowing each other’s stories, pain, struggles, needs, desires. That task is not mine alone. It is the work of this community. It can start right here, because there are chasms even here. But it needs to extend outside, as well. Where are the chasms between us and Fairport? Where are the chasms between Fairport and Rochester? How are we going to be true repairers of the breach?
These are not simply rhetorical questions. I want to know. John Wesley (or it could have been Charles, it’s not really clear) once wrote that “the Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness.” Oftentimes when we think of social holiness, we tend to think of social justice or works of mercy. But it really means that our faith, as Christians and especially as Methodists, is about how we interact with others. Everything we do, from our private prayer life to our public worship to our engaging with the sacraments, must relate back to how we live together with one another and all of Creation. We are called, not to be doomed to the chasm and to accept this as our unavoidable state of being, but to be repairers of the breach. May all that we do be done for the repairing of the breach. May this be our sign of loving well and loving right. May it be so. Amen.