September 27, 2007
Warning
Pent 18/21C Lk 16.19-31
“If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Lk 16.31).
Grace Cangialosi, a good friend and colleague of mine, recently reported via the cyberwireless about a two-page ad in the Washington Post magazine. It said that the Sprint cellphone people are promoting what they call, “A new class of cellular luxury — the world’s first $10.5 million phone — a limited-time offer for billionaires.”
Apparently fearful that even this might not catch a billionaire’s eye, Sprint threw in a bonus — buy a phone and get a private island all of one’s own. “When you’re in the business of dominating this quaint little popsicle stand called planet Earth,” Sprint suggested to its anticipated audience, “you need the technology that keeps you acting fast.” And then, the clincher, “Island offer is available only to the wealthiest one hundred people on planet Earth. Offer expires next Saturday.”
In the light of this opportunity, the story about the rich man and Lazarus in our gospel today literally screams out the reminder from the past that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This gospel parable is a story about warning and about how the security of wealth can blind one from seeing the handwriting on the wall. In this Sprint ad, a contemporary parable in its own way, one can rarely see the handwriting on the wall of the very environment that makes so much of all that wealth possible in the first place.
The offer, preoccupied with its own tempting expiration date, did not add, of course, that this planet Earth, this “popsicle” may well be on the verge itself of expiring, maybe not next Saturday, but a lot sooner than one might imagine. Further, had they been thinking at all, they may well have picked another metaphor than one that melts even faster than the glaciers themselves whose disappearance already shows how easily they could turn that island into a mere sandbar.
Characteristic of many like himself, the rich man had little use for Lazarus alive or dead save as a servant to make his life easier. Not because he was wealthy. It is not wealth that’s being disdained in this parable or even in the ad exalted, but in both, the use of wealth, the blindness and false security that wealth can so often cause. Such wealth prevented the rich man from heeding the warning of Moses and the prophets that had been there all along and, as well, prevents us from seeing all the warnings that remind us of the importance of our stewardship of life.
And it is these warnings that we so often do not heed and that cause us such inevitable anguish. The list is so obvious. Smoking. Environmental pollution. Diet. Exercise. Education. The balance of powers in our exemplary constitutional system. Over forty million of our fellows without even the meagerest health insurance. Our international geopolitical relationships. And additionally for us churchers, not only Moses and the prophets, but some two millennia more of evidence and experience down to our present time.
How easily does the wealth of our scripture and tradition and this experience distract us. Not, of course, in itself, but in how we treasure it, how we use it, how we learn from it, and what we expect from it. Do we use it to exclude others by taking from it what was only relevant in the past and making it relevant in the present against all evidence to the contrary? Or do we measure its value immersed into and enriching the way we value our times?
The rich man in the parable ignored Moses and the prophets and, indeed, as Abraham warned would neither heed even someone “risen from the dead.” We have this risen Christ in us and in the lives of all his faithful followers down through the centuries. How will we witness to him? Will we send our Lazaruses or will we go ourselves to tell it on the mountain by what we do as well as what we say, not only by our wealth of matter and spirit, but how we use it?
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos