26th
Sunday OT
Fr.
Philip Neri Powell, OP
OLR,
NOLA
On
my way to and from the seminary every day, I see five or six individuals
panhandling at different spots along the way. You've seen them too,
probably, holding up handwritten signs asking for help. The five or
six that I see every day have been the same five or six for almost
five years now. One of them – at S. Carrollton and Earhart – has
been pregnant for more than four years! I usually wave at these folks
and drive on. I never give them money. Honestly, there are times when
I resent them deeply. I don't resent them b/c they cause me any
trouble. They don't. Or b/c they don't have a work schedule to follow
like I do. Who wants to spend their days standing beside the road
begging for change? I resent them b/c they remind me just how far I
am from attaining the holiness that brings the peace of Christ, just
how much more there is for me to work on, to perfect, in order to
achieve the necessary detachment from fleeting things. Like Lazarus
outside the rich man's door, these beggars are a sign – no less
worthy of God's bounty than the rich man in his fine garments or a
friar in his only habit. In this world, we too are impermanent, a
vanity made to die. How should we live knowing this truth?
The
story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is not a story about the
blessedness of destitution and the evils of wealth. Billionaires can
be saints and beggars can be sinners. Jesus makes it clear that
holiness is more readily achieved in poverty b/c a beggar's heart and
mind are not focused on earthly treasure. However, a billionaire who
shares her wealth in love for the sake of Christ does holy work.
Beggars and billionaires both can lie, cheat, and steal. And both are
perfectly capable of great charity and mercy. We could say that the
question here is not what does one have or have not, but rather what
does one do with one's wealth or poverty? But these miss the point as
well. Maybe the question is one of attachment. Is wealth or its
absence the whole focus of your life, the defining quality of your
existence? Closer but still not quite right. What if the story of
Lazarus and the Rich Man is a story about how you choose to love,
that is, how you choose to manifest love in the world? By what means
– tangible, palpable, really-real – what ways do I, do you leave
evidence of God's love behind? Giving a beggar on S. Carrollton a
dollar or two may assuage my guilt, but have I loved? Organizing
meetings on the causes of poverty, protesting corporate greed, and
calling for the redistribution of society's wealth, all of these
might edge me closer to a feeling of “getting things done,” but
am I doing any of these for love, for God's love?
Here's
an existential question: whether you are 16 or 60, who do you hope
to become? Since you are here this evening, we can wager that you
hope to become Christ! That's what you have vowed to strive for,
promised to work toward. You died and rose with him in baptism, and
you eat his body and drink his blood in this Eucharist. If you are
not intent on becoming Christ, then you have come to the wrong place.
Why? By participating in the divine, we become divine – perfected
creatures made ready to see our Creator face-to-face. If God is love
(and He is), and we live and move and have our being in God (and we
do), then it follows that we persistently exist in divine love.
Whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, we live and
move and have our being in the creating and re-creating love of God.
If we are to become Christ – fully human, fully divine –, we must
participate wholly, fully. . .heart, mind, body, strength, intention,
motivation, completely and without reservation, holding nothing of
ourselves back, and shedding everything that prevents the light of
Christ from shining through us: false charity, self-righteous
indignation, token works of mercy, vicarious poverty, the delusions
of worldly justice. Becoming Christ is always and only about
becoming Christ for others and doing so for no other reason than to
be a witness to the love that God is for us. To become Christ for any
other reason is to become the Rich Man who steps over Lazarus on his
way to yet another sumptuous feast.
Earlier
on, I asked, how should we live knowing that we are impermanent
beings? We can take the Rich Man as our anti-example. Why does he
find himself in Sheol? Not because he's rich. But because he failed,
repeatedly failed, to love. Like us, the Rich Man lived and moved and
had his being in Love Himself. He was gifted, freely given, all that
he had and all that he was. While living and moving and being on
earth, he refused to allow the light of God's love to shine through
his words and deeds. Lazarus was for him a sign, a memento of
impermanence, a story about the vanity of all the things he held
dear. But he refused to see the signs, refused to read Lazarus'
story, and God honored his choice to reject His divine love by
allowing him to abide forever outside that love. Sheol, or hell is by
definition, one's “self-exclusion from communion with God and the
blessed...” God does not send us to hell, we send ourselves. Just
as the Rich Man places a limit on his love, so God honors that limit
after death. The chasm that separates the Rich Man from Lazarus after
death is precisely as wide and deep as the chasm the Rich Man placed
between the freely given love of God and the beggar, Lazarus. Failing
to participate in divine love while alive, the Rich Man chooses to
deprive himself of that love after death. And so, he finds himself in
Sheol begging the beggar for just one drop of water.
Our
Lord commands us to love one another and to go out and proclaim his
love for the world. He does not charge us with ending hunger or
fighting poverty or ending war. Our goal as followers of Christ on
the Way is not is turn Lazarus the Beggar into Lazarus the
Respectable Middle-class Worker. When we heed our Lord's command to
love, feeding the hungry and standing up for justice come naturally;
these arise as works uniquely suited to the witness we have to offer.
What could be more just, more perfectly humane than helping another
to see and enjoy the image of God that he or she really is! Poverty,
hunger, war, all work diligently to obscure the image of God placed
in every person. But they are all just effects of a larger and deeper
evil: the stubborn, cold-hearted refusal to manifest the divine love
that created us and re-creates us in the image of Christ, a refusal
that God Himself will honor at our death.
How
should we live? As if we were Christ himself among the poorest of the
poor, enthusiastically loving because we ourselves are so loved.
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