(This is the homily I gave on September 25, 2022, the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time. The readings were Amos 6:1,4-7, Psalm 146, 1 Timothy 6:11-16 and Luke 16:19-31.)
The theologian Bruce Epperly wrote about a plaque on a wall in a Paris hospital that said, “The dying taking care of the dying.” That phrase reminds me of something you’ve probably heard me say before, that we’re all in this together.
This guy in the gospel story, who had it all and then some, he didn’t have the grace to notice Lazarus on his doorstep who didn’t have anything.
Notice the poor man’s name is Lazarus, the name of one of Jesus’s best friends. That tells us that Jesus is friends with the suffering, people who are hurting and vulnerable. (Which means, all of us.) This poor man is the only character in all the parables who actually has a name.
Notice the rich man in the story has no name – because he’s defined by his possessions and his comfort, not by his relationships. He didn’t think it was up to him to take care of Lazarus. He probably didn’t realize Lazarus was dying, because he didn’t give him any thought. He certainly didn’t think it was his responsibility to do anything about his suffering: He didn’t cause Lazarus’s problems; he just didn’t care about him. The rich man comes to regret that indifference, after it’s too late for him to do anything about it.
The rich man didn’t realize that he was dying too, that his chance to do what God asks of us in this life gets away from us.
Complacency was his problem in life, and it became a bigger problem for him in the afterlife. A lot bigger. Complacency is mentioned right in the first breath of the first reading today.
This is how you get my attention: get me worrying about complacency. Am I doing enough? Am I seeing the presence of God in other people?
So the rich man remonstrates with Abraham in the afterlife. With his first thought, he’s still coming from a place of privilege; he wants Lazarus to come and ease his suffering. Abraham explains to him, you had your shot. The rich man comes back, “Okay, I blew it; I get that. But send Lazarus back to explain to my five brothers not to miss their chance like I did.” He doesn’t want others to make the same mistakes he did.
Then comes the dagger, when the rich man says to Abraham that people will listen and change their hearts if someone comes back from the dead, and Abraham says he doubts it. If people won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t be persuaded by someone rising from the dead either.
Whoa.
What about us? Are we willing to listen to someone who came back from the dead?
We get invited to do that every time we come in here to Mass, every time we open up the gospel. And what does Jesus, who did rise from the dead, suggest we do? Well, we know it isn’t to be complacent.
What the Risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit whisper in my ear, is “You can do this. You can help ease someone’s suffering. It’s going to require courage, work and sacrifice of you.” Our Saints heard inspirations like this, and they responded with courage, work and sacrifice. Sinners like me, we allow ourselves to be talked out of them. Because of complacency.
The story of the rich man and Lazarus, told by a man who would rise from the dead, and written down by one of his disciples after that actually happened, warns us against complacency; it tells us not to miss our opportunities to ease the suffering of those right in front of us.
Dorothy Day, who someday will be revered as a Saint, said the possessions we have beyond our own needs are stolen from the poor. That haunts me. She didn’t just make that up either: St. Gregory the Great said that “When we provide the needy with their basic needs, we are giving them what belongs to them, not to us.” St. John Chrysostom, who got that name by being a way better preacher than I am, taught this: “Not to share our wealth with the poor is to rob them and take away their livelihood.” The things we possess beyond our own needs are not just ours; they are theirs. Last week’s gospel suggested that we can be shrewd and creative in the ways we use our resources, and our resourcefulness, in the service of those in need.
Mother Teresa, a Saint many of us got to see, took care of the poorest of the poor in Calcutta, because she was able to see Jesus in them, even though they looked like Lazarus in the gospel story lying in the street. Her way of taking up the cross was to make someone else’s cross lighter.
The one who came back to us from the dead says we should take up our crosses and follow him. One way to do take up the cross is to take the burden off of somebody else. If we refuse to do that, we are going to find that we never carried the cross at all. We’re going to end up like the rich man, suffering and full of regret.
Here’s the hard part, at least for me, but I think it’s the key that makes it all easy: the poor, the suffering are not strangers. Each has a name; each one is one of us. I don’t know if I even have the vocabulary for it, because my sinfulness tries to make me think of other people, especially other people with problems, as “them”, as “other”, as alien, as somebody else who isn’t my responsibility. Each of the suffering people in the world has a name.
That’s one us lying in the streets of Calcutta. That’s one of us on the busses from Texas. Each refugee has a name. That’s one us looking for a job and worrying about how to feed a toddler and a new baby and pay the rent. Each suffering person has a name.
We are “the dying, taking care of the dying.” We are the hurting who need to take care of the hurting. While we still have a chance.
Belonging 