|
First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
| Amos 6:1a, 4–7 |
Psalm 146 |
1 Timothy 6:6–19
|
Luke 16:19–31 |
As a young boy of ten or so, I looked forward to visiting my great aunt’s summer place, a square of twelve acres in the midst of Amish farm country. Along one side of the property by a sloping meadow was a lazy muddy creek, lined with tall trees that overhung the water. The oldest and tallest of them was one with a trunk whose girth was as large as this pulpit. Unseen from the front, but on the creek side, if you carefully held on and went around the trunk, there was a large secret cavity a small boy could easily crawl in and hide. To me the tree was like an ancient giant fortress whose branches stretched to the sky and protected my world. One summer, when I went down to greet the tree, its glorious trunk was shattered, its top was gone, and all that remained were jagged and shattered shards of wood protruding no more than four feet from the earth. Its roots could no longer support the tree and the wind with help from the eroding bank toppled it over into the water. The spring rains had washed away the majority of its branches and left the remaining splintered stump of a trunk holding on until the next high water when it too, would likely give way and be swept into oblivion. I, of course, had been impressed by its height and the girth of its huge trunk and I was enthralled by its supposed age and obvious prominence among all the trees lining the bank of the creek. I never gave a thought of its of its growing weakness even as it reached towards the heavens, of its roots being eroded away, and of the hollowness of the trunk being an increasing threat to its strength. Like the rich man, with all his possessions and trappings of security and permanence I never expected this fate to happen to my favorite king of trees.
The stereotypical portrayal of someone afflicted with leprosy is one whose limbs are deformed or truncated, and whose skin is horribly blistered. The reality behind the portrayal is that some forms of leprosy cause the victims to lose sensation in their body meaning that they cannot feel heat and hence can be easily burned, or if they sustain a cut or wound, it could get easily infected. Because they cannot feel pain, their body is constantly in jeopardy of serious, even fatal, injury.
In a real sense, those who cannot feel any pain are often very close to death, though they never know it. That, I suggest, is one of the important lessons of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. In his life on earth, the rich man seems to have everything. He is insulated from the anxieties and trials of larger humanity. He is unable to perceive and cannot even imagine the poor beggar Lazarus at his gate. The rich man did not go out of his way to be a bad person. He didn’t deliberately set out to be cruel and would be surprised if anyone so accused him. Nonetheless his senses were severely limited. Like me and my favorite tree, he paid attention to how high his branches grew, how big and fat his exterior grew, but things like roots, or the growth of the hollowness inside, or the erosion of foundations around him, was never perceived.
Herbert O’Driscoll, one of our outstanding contemporary Anglican preachers, has suggested that each of us has a rich, satisfied side, and a poor, empty side. When we don’t pay attention to what pains us, when we deny that inside of us is an empty space, or a desperate yearning waiting to be nourished, we are in danger of dying. He notes that it was when the poor man died, that the rich man died, not the other way around. The rich man continued to deny his pain until it was too late.
Societies too can become a lot like the rich man. Stainless steel and glass skyscrapers and bright shopping malls with exotic gardens often cover up real misery lying in the shadows. Societies can become insensitive, complacent, and arrogant, and like the rich man, can be unaware of how vulnerable and precarious they really are. The pain of people is a warning sign of something not right. Ignoring the warning signs ultimately courts serious consequences, even fatal ones, in one way or another.
Burma is a completely unknown and exotic country to most of us. An uprising of barefoot, robed Buddhist monks against a harsh well-armed dictatorial regime is a strange incongruity to me. I have no idea how these particular demonstrations of dissent will turn out, but I suspect at some point, the regime will be totally surprised and overwhelmed because they discounted and never bothered to alleviate, much less cure, the terrible pain and misery of most of the population. That’s how regime change ultimately happens.
Both the other two Bible lessons are not implying that riches and security are evil in themselves, but that in being consumed with the pursuit of them, our vision can easily narrow, so that we don’t see the cracks in foundations, or the pain in areas of our body, or the erosion of our roots. Because we are so obsessed with our own satisfaction and pride, we look no further, neither outward nor inward. Yet the workings of God among us are usually discovered in our despair, our perplexity, and in our frustration of failure. The workings of the Spirit help us grow by stretching our perspectives and raising the shades of our security blankets.
What is Jesus saying to us today? How would one describe our society? Are there those outside our gates? Do we see or pay attention? Whether it is inward or outward are we acknowledging and seeking the causes of the pain, or trying to cover up the cause and just give economic or spiritual morphine for the pain.
In later years, I have wished that I had taken a picture of that magnificent tree on the banks of my great aunt’s summer home and also a picture of its jagged remnant of a stump futilely clinging to the shifting bank before it was swept away. As I remember the fate of the tree, I can understand Jesus’ parable of long ago and the warning it gives.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
