Here's a homily from 2010 preached at Blackfriars, Oxford U.
26th Sunday OT
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
Blackfriars, Oxford
I resent beggars.* I avoid them
when possible and ignore them when they can't be avoided. When they
can be neither avoided nor ignored, I simply refuse them. Since I live
in Rome most of the year, avoiding, ignoring, and refusing the Eternal
City's legions of panhandlers has become something of an art for me. It
is almost possible for me to make my way to and from the priory without
feeling as though I have damned myself eternally. Almost. Living in
the mid-town district of Houston, TX helped to train me for the running
the begging gauntlet of Rome. Daily, nightly, all through the day
everyday, the doorbell of the priory would ring. My wife and kids are
up on the highway in our broken down car. I need $7.82 to buy a bottle
of oil. I am stranded on the interstate and need just $5 to buy some
fuel to get me home. Same story, different dollar amounts. Day in, day
out. Once, just once, an honest beggar said to me, “I'm losing my buzz.
Need a few bucks to buy some beer!” Without fail, I refused to give
them cash. Most of the time, they accepted my offer of food and water.
I don't resent beggars b/c they interrupt my work or cause me a bit of
trouble in the kitchen. 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, a memento of
impermanence—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 in the Corn Market a
pound 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?
Let's ask an existential
question: whether you are 16 or 60, who do you hope to become? Since
you are here this morning, 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 participation in the divine,
we become divine—perfected creatures made ready to see our Creator
face-to-face. Let's break that down a bit. 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.
*When I preached this homily, the irony of this opening sentence struck me. As a Dominican friar, I am a beggar!
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