Lines, Circles, and Hope
When Lazarus the Beggar and a rich man both die, the rich man remains stuck looking at the world through his old paradigm–one that placed Lazarus on the other side of the line regarding his worth as a human being. What does it look like to challenge the way we categorize ourselves and others? How can we truly heed the Gospel’s call to transformation in a world that constantly calls us to division?
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Transcript
Give us eyes to see you
Give us ears to hear you
and give us hearts that can stretch far enough
to live into your dreams of this world
Amen.
Fr. Richard Rohr has been a wonderful influence on many, many souls during his lifetime, and I know many of you, scanning this group, receive his daily emails from Mark and the rest of the team. I’ve had the chance to be with him a few times, and I’ve been thinking a lot about something that he told me several years back that I’ve held close.
Several years ago, I had the chance to spend five days with him and others in Colorado, and I asked him, kind of on the spur of the moment with the two of us just sitting there, and I said, “Fr. Richard, this far into your life, into your priesthood, what advice would you have for someone who is newly stepping into theirs, at this point?” And he sat there for a while, and then he said this: “I would tell them this: there will come a certain point in your life, given the circumstances in which we find ourselves, where you have to stand and say what you feel you need to stand and say. And you’ll stand and say what you feel you need to, grounded in the tradition of the church, grounded in your own practice of prayer, and grounded in an awareness of God’s presence in your life. And when you do that, there will be one group of people who celebrate what you say because it affirms how they feel. But there will be another group who will push back against you because of the own struggles they have in their lives. Some will appreciate it, and others very much will not do so. But you stand and you say what you have to say, not out of any sense of approval, but out of your own struggling sense of what it means to be faithful to the Gospel.” I have never forgotten that. And I will hold that with me for the rest of my life and time as a priest.
Because we do find ourselves, we continue to do so, in really confusing times. Brandon and I spent three days this week with all of the clergy from our diocese and the Diocese of Georgia at Rock Eagle 4H camp, and so much of our conversation during those three days was around this sense of struggle. And we laughed and said, why do we get texts like this in the middle of stewardship season? We should get happy texts in the middle of stewardship season, or texts that just affirm and tell everyone “you’re doing a great job!” But we get these texts like we have this morning, and we’re challenged once more to reflect on the Gospel and how it calls us to live a transformed life. Because the truth is all that we do in this space, all that we do as a parish, whether it’s coming to worship, coming to pray, meeting during the week, going to visit each other in homes where the classes, whatever that it is, all that we do has one purpose and it is to nurture a transformation of our hearts so that we live more in line with the Gospel’s call. Full stop. And we nurture that through all of the things that we do as a parish, whether it’s from music, from children, from prayers, from outreach, from pastoral care–all that we do nurtures that transformation of our hearts. We don’t come to church to achieve merit, so that we can slip back out once we’ve come to Communion and just live the way we think we want to live, and then think back and say, “well, I earn some extra credits because I went to church.” That’s a shallow way to see what it is, why it is that we do what we do. We come to nurture a transformed heart so that we live more fully into the Gospel’s call. What that looks like is that we have to change. Certain things are made clear to us that need to be changed in each of our lives.
Being transformed means that we need to grow and change. And growth and change make us very, very uncomfortable. No one likes change. So being the humans that we are, we create a status quo and frameworks to reinforce the way that we already live so that we feel affirmed. And then we back our way into God’s blessing and think that just because we might have achieved certain things in our lives that God actually sees that as a blessing. “Hashtag blessed.”
But we are called to live transformed lives and to follow the Gospel’s call. We have no ultimate loyalty to any leader, no ultimate loyalty to the state, no ultimate loyalty to any sets of laws that may or may not be enforced. Our ultimate loyalty is to Jesus Christ, and the Gospel’s call on our life. Full stop. And what that means is that there will come times in our life where our practice of faith challenges the way we live in the world, and it’s meant to do that, to wake us up, to make us conscious of the ways that the Spirit is calling and challenge us to grow.
So this morning’s Gospel text highlights a particular dynamic that we have as humans across faith backgrounds, I would say. So look at it, if you will. Open up your bulletin and look at the Gospel, because it’s a fascinating snapshot of a moment in time and a particular way of seeing and living in the world. Two main characters: the rich man and Lazarus the beggar. And the rich man has set his life up in a way that he perceives that he has somehow earned what he has, with this image of Lazarus the beggar sitting at his gate, not able to cross the threshold. Sitting at the gate. And the rich man thinks that he has earned and is, in a sense, blessed in his life. But then both of them die, the story says, and they realize, both of them, that there’s a lot more to reality than perhaps they saw.
So you have a chasm, a line. And on one side of the line is Lazarus suddenly with Abraham, and on the other side of the line is the rich man. And the rich man still struggles. Notice that the rich man is still struggling to make sense. Twice, even in this short text, he asks Lazarus the beggar to function and live in the old way in which he lived. He asks Lazarus the beggar to do him a favor twice. “Can you send him over with cool water? Because I’m really uncomfortable.” When you can’t do that “can you send him back to my family? Or maybe if a dead man walks in, it will shake them up and they’ll realize that the way that they’re living isn’t the way they need to be living.” And Abraham says to both of those things “I’m sorry.” And then there’s that haunting foreshadowing in that last verse. Neither will they believe. Even if someone rises from the dead, which is immediately meant, of course, to orient us toward Christ’s own death and resurrection.
Here’s what I’ve learned from this text. Here’s what hooks me this year, this cycle: people who live their lives in terms of lines that get drawn, sides, let’s say, sides that get set up, people who live their lives in terms of lines and sides, who feel that they themselves are on the winning side, and others get categorized and placed on the losing side, or the objectified side, or the oppressed side… people who live their lives in terms of drawing lines and placing people on either side of those lines, should not be surprised that their own salvation and their own potential to be transformed will necessitate that they themselves find themselves on the other side of the line.
That’s a difficult truth to sit with. That somehow our own salvation, our own call to be transformed, demands that we ourselves get put on the other side of lines that we have constructed. That’s why we have talked for a while now about we are in a season of deep shadow work in the sense that we’re being called to pay very close attention and reflect on our own shadow, those blind spots that we have.
But that’s what hooks me this time. People who live their lives in terms of setting up and drawing lines and categorizing in terms of sides, should not be surprised if our own salvation, our own potential to be transformed, necessitates that we’re put on the other side of them. Only then will we see. And perhaps only then can we be healed.
So that’s one way to live life in terms of lines. But there’s another way to play with shapes, and that is circles. God lives and moves in terms of circles. There’s a wonderful image that’s attributed to Saint Augustine that says this: God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Meaning this: that the presence of God exists fully and equally in every human being that we meet, in every aspect of creation, and that God has no boundaries. God has no boundaries. There’s no limit to God’s love. And perhaps there’s no more radical thing for us to reflect on these days than the truth that God loves all people equally. Perhaps there’s no more radical thing for us to actually focus on, that God loves all equally, and we’re the ones who construct boundaries, frameworks, draw lines, and spend so much energy and time compartmentalizing and categorizing and judging.
So that’s what hooks me. So I think that Fr. Richard is right. There’s a part about this that will make us very, very uncomfortable. Very, very much so. But at the end of the day, friends, the deep truth that will save us all is the truth of our union. The truth about a union with God and with each other, and living into that truth is the only thing at the end of it that will save us.
And we will continue to be given opportunities to learn that lesson over and over again. So as we go into these days, that’s where hope is for me. Hope is for me that the lesson is always there, the truth is always there. And the challenge for me is always to ask myself, how have I fallen short and how can I step forward more faithfully? And what will that look like?
Let us pray.
We give you thanks, O God, for the chance, chance after chance after chance, to learn and listen to the Spirit’s call on our lives. To trust you more fully, to have our hearts stretched wide in us so we can live into your call and share this life that we all have together. Give us courage and give us peace, and remind us always of the truth of hope.
It’s through Christ we pray.
Amen.