Wednesday, October 30, 2013

A Norfolk Birthday

Abi Strait is the new 2013-2014 Micah Fellow at ECH!  She comes to us from Wisconsin via Lutheran Volunteer Corps in Delaware, where she worked at the Ministry of Caring. As a Fellow in the Life Together Program, she'll be splitting her time between ECH and our mother-parish, Christ Church Cambridge. 

I’m going to visit Ron, the incarcerated individual I write to and visit with as part of my work with HIPE (Harvard Interfaith Prison Education), tomorrow. As is our custom, I wrote to him early last week asking if the 31st would work for him and heard back a few days ago that, not only would it work, it would be his birthday and so he would especially love a visit. I hadn’t known his birthday when I worked to schedule the visit but was surprised and thrilled to learn of that happy ‘coincidence.’

Surprised and thrilled at first, at least.

My mind immediately started running around all the possibilities of gifts or tokens we could bring to mark that occasion. I could make cookies! Get balloons! Or a book relating to things we’ve talked about! But then, of course, reality had to set in and I realized that I couldn’t do any of that. When going in to see a prisoner, visitors can’t bring anything with them (except little gift cards for the vending machines allowing you to share a snack during your visit) so I couldn’t bring a gift for him with me. And there are strict regulations around what can be mailed to folks inside the prison - clearly sending him birthday cookies would be out of the question.

I felt the inequality of our situations very keenly then. Like Ron is Harry Potter - getting his uncle’s old socks for his birthday - and I am Dudley - flush with expensive things, surrounded by loved ones and taking all of it completely for granted. Realizing that I can’t help give Ron a good birthday, can’t at least making sure he gets more than Uncle Vernon’s discarded socks, was a bleak reminder of the contrast between our two lives. It made (and still makes) me feel helpless.

Not to say I’m not still so glad we’ll be able to give him a little company on his birthday. That, I think, while it may feel small compared to all the things I can’t do, will be a gift.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Why are we in church?


This sermon was given on Sunday, 20 October 2013, at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard, by Emily Garcia, the Kellogg Fellow. The readings for the day on which the sermon is based can be found here.

As many of you already know, I teach Sunday school at an Episcopal church in Charlestown. My little kids always ask a lot of good questions. A few weeks ago I was fielding questions on the story of Creation. We had just dealt with the problem of frogs, who are both swimming and walking creatures and were therefore possibly created over the course of two days—when a spunky three-year-old raised her hand. “Miss Emily, I have a question toooo!” Fidgeting in her seat she said, “Well—why—why are we here?” Fearing I might have a big existential question on my hands, I clarified: “. . . In church?”  “Yes!” she said. “Why do we do this?”

That’s a good question! Why are we in church? Why do we come to church?
Why do YOU come to church? I come to church because I work here, but I’m sure there are other reasons too.

Sitting there on my kindergarten carpet square, I fumbled through my options, calculating how long it would take to explain the word “sanctification” to a three-year-old. In the end, as usual, I returned to my Evangelical childhood for the best answer. I told my student: “I think we come to church because we need to know who God is, and we need to know what to say about it.”

We need to know who God is. And we need to know what to say.

There are many good reasons why we come to church; they change week to week or season to season in our lives. But I do think these are two of the simplest and most constant reasons, repeated in the Scriptures and in almost every liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer. We need to know who God is, and we need to know what to say.

Maybe I shouldn’t say “knowing God”—that makes it seem like a discrete piece of information. Better to say, “coming to know God,” or “seeing what God reveals of God’s self to us,” or “re-learning and re-learning and re-learning who God is.” In the same way that we grow out of our five-year-old understanding of the world into a more complex twenty-year-old and sixty-year-old understanding of the world, so our understanding of God changes as we grow.

And maybe I shouldn’t say that WE have to learn who God is, as if God were simply an object of our attention, like the meter in a sonnet or a type of amoeba. We know who God is not by studying him, but by wrestling with him—and God wrestles back. God is constantly at work in us, providing us with many, often difficult—often awkward, often uncomfortable—opportunities to know him. Some of these leave us wounded. But these are places where we can learn who God is.

Scholar and commentator Gerhard von Rad [in his Biblical Interpretation in Preaching] says that although this story of Jacob has “narrative elements of great antiquity,” probably part of a local cultic tradition, in its place in the book of Genesis and the story of Jacob, it is actually a story about Israel’s and our relationship to God. He says, “She [Israel] has set forth her relationship to God in the picture of that nocturnal struggle with the God who feigns a frightful mien yet promises an ultimate bestowal of blessing. In the vessel of that [more ancient] story, Israel is letting us see something of her experience with God, an actual experience of her being guided by him.” Genesis explains the name “Israel” as a name for a person who has striven with God and prevailed, but actually the etymology of “Israel” breaks into the phrase “GOD strives.” We strive, God strive with us. This is how we know him.

We wrestle with God in prayer, too, like the widow in Luke’s parable. The unjust judge couldn’t stand being bothered by this persistent widow, full of moxie, but I think God rejoices in persistence. Luke says the parable is about praying always, and not losing heart. Surely this is another way that we come to know God, from constant conversation with him.

We need to know who God is, and we learn from wrestling, we learn from prayer, and we learn from the holy mystery of Communion at the altar, and from the mystery of communion with each other, God revealing himself in our discussions, disagreements, differing experiences. Being a Christian alone isn’t FULLY being a Christian, as we need to whole body of Christ to help us learn who God is.

So we come to Church because we need to know who God is.

And we need to know what to say. Knowing God and being silent is not an option, as we hear in this letter to Timothy, as well as throughout our own Book of Common Prayer.

In today’s Collect, we prayed, “God, please preserve the works of your mercy, SO THAT we can persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name.” The letter to Timothy says that all Scripture is inspired and is therefore useful—for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” In case Timothy didn’t get it, Paul made it simple: Proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.” In our confession of sin we ask God to forgive us “so that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways—to the glory of your name.” In the collect for Purity, which we hear every Sunday, we ask God to cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, so that we “may worthily magnify your holy Name.” The older definition of “magnify” means to extol, to lift up, to bring respect or esteem to something. But I also like the more modern literal meaning—“magnify” like a magnifying glass. To magnify God’s holy Name makes me think that I should look at it very closely, that I should make it so big as to be comprehensible to me and others.

So: Confession of God’s name, training in righteousness, proclaim the message in favorable and unfavorable times, be patient in teaching, glorify God’s name, magnify God’s holy name. It sounds like we’re supposed to DO something with this knowledge of God that we’ve got! We need to know who God is, and then, we need to know what to say.

Don’t worry, I’m not gonna preach about converting all the heathen, or starting our own angry talk show about what God wants for America. I don’t find either of those options to be at all necessary or at all compelling.

But I do think we are supposed to magnify God’s holy name. I do believe that through Scripture and the community of the church, “every person who belongs to God can be proficient, and equipped for every good work.” 

This is necessary for the world because there are people who are in despair and need to know that there can be hope and meaning in life; there are people who are hurt and need to know that God loves them, that we love them; there are people who are vulnerable and need to be taken care of; there are people who need to be rebuked, for their cruel or harmful behavior; there are those who simply need to be encouraged in the hard work they do in the world. People need to know God’s Holy Name, because God’s Holy Name is Love.

And praise God, there are many ways to show the world who God is. I happen to be one of those people who likes to talk about God all the time, but this is just one way. We can speak God’s name over and over again throughout the day without ever saying it aloud. 
When we gently, tactfully defend someone who’s being gossiped about.
When we play devil’s advocate to a potentially harmful philosophy or viewpoint.
When we give to the homeless, the hungry, or to anyone in need.
When we mention that we go to Church—and that we like it.
When we bow in our heads in a short silent prayer before we eat in a public place.
When we show ourselves to be competent intelligent academics and then casually mention that we’re also Christians.
When we tell a friend that we’ll be praying for them.
When we have a respectful, curious, attentive conversation about religion with anyone, regardless of what they do or do not believe.
When we are loving, joyful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, or self-controlled—when we show these fruits of the Spirit, we are magnifying God’s Holy Name.

Because the “glory of God’s name” is not the institution of the church (although that’s pretty cool)—the glory of God’s name is love. All kinds of love and compassion manifested in all different kinds of ways, inside and outside the Church.

This is why we come to Church. We need to know who God is, and we need to know what to say.

All Hallow's Eve at The Crossing


Isaac Everett is a Postulant for Holy Orders in the Diocese of MA, a musician, song-writer, and author. He's working currently with The Crossing, "the new emerging church worship community at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral Church." We invited him to share with us about an upcoming event that's open to young adults in the Diocese.

Hello, Harvard!

A few months ago, a group of us at The Crossing were sitting around dreaming about the coming year, and we kept returning to the idea of reaching out to other, similar communities within the diocese to make friends. As a primarily young-adult congregation, we really long to be part of a larger community of folks who want to get together for worship, fun, and justice-making.

So, we began reaching to groups like the Harvard and BU chaplaincies, along with the young adult group at St James, and conspired together to start building relationships between our people! We figured an easy way to do it would be to get together a couple times throughout the year, each of us taking turns hosting, hoping that we'd see some of the same faces and build friendships. (For example, we'll be joining you for the Walk for Hunger later this year.)

Our first event, though, will be next week, on Halloween, and I really hope you can make it! We'll be throwing a pretty awesome All Hallow's Eve liturgy, followed by a dance party on the steps of the cathedral.

If you're not familiar with the Feast of All Hallows', it basically goes like this: if you believe that the literal body of Christ is broken on the communion altar (which you probably don't, but stick with me), then it follows that the celebration of the Eucharist occurs simultaneously with Christ's death on the cross. By the transitive property, that means that all celebrations of the Eucharist across all time and space happen simultaneously, and when we gather at the altar, we're gathering with everyone who ever has (and who ever will) stand at the altar. 

All Hallow's connects us with our past and our future, celebrating our connection with the saints who've made us who we are and the saints for whom we're still yearning. It's a way to honor and remember our past while also casting a prophetic vision for our future.

So to honor this communion of saints, we'll be dressing up as our favorite saints: past, present, or future. You can come dressed as St Augustine or St Clare of Assisi. You can come dressed as your grandmother or your kindergarten teacher. You can come dressed as the first female pope or the first church planter on Mars. 

Or you can come dressed as yourself. Whatever you do, we hope you come to dance, eat, worship, celebrate and make friends.

Isaac Everett 

PS 6pm at 138 Tremont Street, just off the Park St stop on the red line

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Next Steps

Abi Strait is the new 2013-2014 Micah Fellow at ECH!  She comes to us from Wisconsin via the Lutheran Service Corps in Delaware, where she worked at the Ministry of Caring. As a Fellow in the Life Together Program, she'll be splitting her time between ECH and our mother-parish, Christ Church Cambridge. 

I’ve been thinking about next steps recently. An intimidating line of thought at any time, but feels especially so as I’m only just beginning to feel “settled” in my new Boston life. As I look at potential grad school programs and think about possible careers, a snippet of poetry comes to mind frequently. It’s source, “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, is a frequently quoted poem, especially the last two lines (which, of course, are the ones running through my head so often). As I can’t offer any stunning insights or wise conclusions on planning for The Future, I want to share Oliver’s poem here in the hopes that it helps others figuring out their next steps as it has for me.


Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

When God is Late

This sermon was given by Pete Williamson, an M.Div student at Harvard Divinity School, on Monday, October 7th, at  the HDS Anglican/Episcopal Fellowship's service of Holy Eucharist.

I’ve noticed this little thing in my life. You see, I find that my classes have this annoying tendency of starting too early for me. Like, my 11:30am class starts at 11:40am, which is a good 9 minutes before I even arrive. How am I supposed to learn when my professors start teaching before I even get there?!?

That’s right… I am chronically late for things. It’s not about classes being early in the morning. It doesn’t matter if my first class is at 8am or at 2pm, I’ll find a way to be rushing in the door somewhere between 4 and 14 minutes after it starts. On some level, I want to start getting to things on time, but on another, much more influential, level, I want to keep being late. Here’s what happens: I actually wake up with heaps of time to get to class. I have time to run, shower, have my devotional time (because I’m very holy), check some emails, read some websites, eat a slow breakfast&have coffee. And BAM. late. It’s not because I’m not paying attention to the time. I know what time it is. It’s really just that I think I’m just a little bit better than I am. I always think that I can squeeze in that little bit more than I really can. Read that one more interesting, relevant, informative news article. Quickly get out that one little email. And a little part of me knows that I’ve been late in the past and haven’t died, so a little part of me gives myself permission to be late. A little, but influential, part of me actually thinks that getting that final email out, or finishing that article is actually more important than what the professor is saying at the beginning of class, or the respect I might lose by being late.

You see, really, when you think about it, my lateness is completely understandable. Completely justifiable. Isn’t learning so much more than hearing the first few minutes of a lecture? Isn’t being a disciple of Christ so much more than being seated, waiting for the opening sentences in church? Isn’t it obvious that I have a busy life and I have a lot of important things to do? Shouldn’t they be thankful that I even turned up at all? Obviously, my lateness is completely understandable.

Now, I want to talk about a completely different topic. So ignore all that. This is a completely unrelated topic. I run a couple of things in my life. Like, I host and lead groups. I’ve been running the GCF group that meets on Mondays. I run a church small group. I host some training sessions for my church. And, you know what, people are so rude. I’ve prepared everything, put good time into getting ready for the session. And the least the participants could do would be to turn up ON TIME. I mean, it’s not that hard. Sort your schedule out. You know what time it starts. It’s not my problem you can’t manage your time properly. You’re wasting everyone’s time when you turn up late. Show some respect. Show some dignity. Take some responsibility. It honestly is so frustrating. There’s just no reason for it.
But the most frustrating person to be late is God. Come on God. Sort your life out. This is what Habakkuk is struggling with.

“God, how long do I have to wait? Can you even hear me? I’m showing you the problems of the world so you can fix them, and you don’t even seem to care! How long will it take? I’m watching, God. Don’t think I’m not. What you going to say to that?!?”

I think we’ve all had this frustration with other people being late and we've all had this frustration at God. It might be God taking too long to find us that perfect job. That perfect opportunity. That time when we’ll truly ‘make it’. Or maybe to find that perfect partner. Or maybe God is taking far too long to heal a deep hurt. Too long to restore that relationship with that person. Too long to get that person to say they’re sorry. God is late in telling us what to do with our lives. Late in really showing Godself to be real.

Or maybe we stand closer to Habakkuk. God is late in dealing with injustice. Hateful people have run the show for too long. Get off your bum, God! Do something! God might seem slow to act on the issues which we care about.

So what do we do with God’s lateness? The Scriptures constantly orient us to the idea that God’s justice will come. Just on a completely different time frame than we expect. God’s response in Habakkuk reminds us that “If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come”. Our psalm tells us “Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; * do not be jealous of those who do wrong. For they shall soon wither like the grass, * and like the green grass fade away.” Though surely in the moment, the temporary nature of the evildoers is not obvious. In the midst of suffering, in 2 Timothy, Paul says that he is not ashamed, for he knows the one in whom he has put his trust, and he is sure that Christ is able to guard until that day. Hebrews 11 reminds us that Abraham died having not seen the nation he was promised. Moses didn’t enter the promised land. David didn’t build the temple he was promised. The false prophets said that Babylon wouldn’t take Jerusalem. But Jeremiah said that Jerusalem would fall and God’s judgement on Babylon would take longer than they expected.
If it seems to tarry, wait for it. It will surely come.

This is about trusting God, and trusting God’s providence. At the beginning of my message, I listed all of my pathetic insufficient excuses for why I’m late to things. Yet, despite me knowing my excuses, I struggle to afford other people the same grace. How much more so with God. The temptation is to give God no leeway. Yet God's reasons are infinitely more justifiable than my own. Infinitely more justifiable than someone who actually had good reasons, unlike mine. So we must trust God. Trusting implies ignorance. If we had full knowledge, there would be no need to trust. So we must accept ignorance. Our ignorance of the mind of God. Our ignorance of knowing what’s truly best for us and our world. We see it on a human level too. If you’ve ever been in charge of a church service or something you’ll know that if you surveyed the congregation you’d find out that they want a more respectful more formal service and a less formal friendlier service. They’d want more kids in main church service and more kids sent to other rooms so not to disrupt the adults. They’d want the music to be louder and quieter. They’d want the thermostat in the sanctuary to be set at a higher and lower level. But a good member of the congregation might give you their preferences, but will say to you, “But I don’t see the big picture, so you do what you think is best ultimately. I trust you.” But those people are few and far between.

But before God, we want to be people of trust. We must assume our own ignorance. We must say to God “I don’t see the big picture, so I trust you”. And ultimately, we must trust God even when God’s timing takes us beyond our lifetime. We will not find everything we’re looking for this side of eternity. Paul asserts that “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

I recently read Surprised by Hope by NT Wright, where he makes the case for the hope of Christ being something that isn’t pushed into the afterlife, but something that invests in our life here and now. That is such an important point if you’ve been brought up in a tradition, like the evangelical tradition, which tends to emphasize the importance of the afterlife - of storing up treasures in heaven - maybe at the cost of the here and now. But if your faith has little or no appreciation of God’s final restoration of justice, then I think you need the converse message. The message of Christ is not just about the here and now. God’s story is not complete until the end. We may not live to see the justice we seek on earth. Without an appreciation of the end when God makes all things right, I don’t believe we can truly validate the justice of God. If there is no end where God makes things right, then denying yourself in order to serve God at great cost - like the many martyrs throughout history - is ultimately foolishness. We must have trust in God’s final restoration of justice. God’s timeframe is just very different from our own.

If it seems to tarry, wait for it. It will surely come.

But we don’t need to go into the afterlife to understand this principle. I am constantly amazed at how distorted our perception of reality is. We are so focussed on the present that we rarely stop to look at the past or look to the future. My parents have an amazing marriage. I am truly blessed by it. But I remember when I was between the ages of about 10 and 13 that they’d fight a lot. I was convinced they’d probably get divorced. And then I remember thinking when I was about 20 that my parents had this perfect marriage. Many marriages go through multiple years of difficulty followed by decades of blessing. But once you’re into year three of difficulty, it’s impossible to see the decades of blessing waiting for you. Or friends who have worked through depression - to see them come out for good after years of darkness. But in a year of darkness, no-one can convince you that light is really coming. Friends who have endured abuse, and lived years of anguish trying to deal with it, but ultimately find joy again.

We really struggle to see time the way God sees it. We struggle to see far past the present. So we must accept our difficulty in this area, and trust God. If it seems to tarry, wait for it. It will surely come.

To build that trust, my only advice is this: take stock of God’s providence so far. What were you really struggling with that doesn’t bother you now? You have to stop and reflect, because we forget our pasts. If something isn’t a problem anymore, we stop thinking about it. But we have to think about it, so that we might see God’s providence in our lives and give God the deserved glory. What did you think would never happen, but did?

So what is it for you? What can you draw on to give you confidence in God’s provision even if God is late? Think on it now.

If you can’t think of anything, then take trust in the ultimate act of providence. When God provided for us by sending his Son to die on a cross so that we might have life and life to the full. God has done it. God is doing it. God will do it. When God is late, it’s not wrong for us to join the voices of the psalmists and the prophets and complain about it. That’s fine. But ultimately, we must also trust God’s providence and God’s timing.
And if it seems to tarry, wait for it. It will surely come.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

A Visit to Norfolk

Abi Strait is the new 2013-2014 Micah Fellow at ECH!  She comes to us from Wisconsin via the Lutheran Service Corps in Delaware, where she worked at the Ministry of Caring. As a Fellow in the Life Together Program, she'll be splitting her time between ECH and our mother-parish, Christ Church Cambridge. 

I went on my first visit to Norfolk prison last Thursday to meet with Ronald - one of the participants in BU’s College Behind Bars program that HIPE is matched with. It was great to finally get to Norfolk and meet Ronald. Along with it being my first visit to Norfolk, it was also my first time in any prison, and was an incredible eye opener for me.


My most clear impression, which illustrates how important this program is for the volunteers/students too, was how "normal" things were. I had this image in my head of talking to someone wearing an orange jumpsuit behind glass or surrounded by guards. Which was not at all the case - Ronald and I sat next to each other on plastic chairs, and everyone wore normal clothes.


He and I talked about his life in general, and a little about his educational goals. It was not a tutoring session, even though Partakers and HIPE are technically billed as “educational mentoring programs.” When we spoke about college and his education, it was in a general sense - where he’s been and where he would like to go - but not in a specific way of my editing one of his papers. Mostly, I listened to him share his life story with me.


So I left Norfolk feeling positive. Both because of my encouraging experience with Ronald, and the great community I observed in the visitor’s waiting room, especially amongst the "regulars" who come to visit someone quite often. I’ll share an example of this, in an interaction I observed before I was able to go in and see Ronald (I’ve changed the names here).  A lady sitting by me turned to another women approaching a chair behind her.


"Excuse me, are you Joey's mom?"


The second women looked surprised, and responded - a bit defensively- "Yes. Why?"


"I'm here to visit my son Sam. He and Joey are good friends! Sam asked me to look out for you, since Joey said it'd be your first time visiting. He asked me to show you what to do."


And so Sam's mom proceeded to walk Joey's mom through the steps to getting processed, talked her through what to expect in the security screening section, and sat with her while they waited. It was a sweet moment where human kindness shone through to brighten a fairly bleak place.

Now, I don’t mean this to sound as if I visited Norfolk and think prisons are happy places full of rainbows and butterflies. I mean to say that I had my eyes opened to the realities of what prison (or at least the realities of visiting a prison) and the folks inside them are like. My visit showed me the importance of seeing a correctional institution first hand - how it can be a way to break down all the societal views of what prisons or prisoners are like. To see the institution and people inside them for what they are and not how I expect them to be.

A Sermon from the Chaplain: Lazarus and Phillip



This sermon was given by The Rev. Luther Zeigler on Sunday 29 September at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. The readings for the day are available here

“And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table . . . .” Luke 16:21


At the lunch hour, I often stroll from my office at Two Garden Street over to the Market in the Square, that deli on the corner of Church Street and Brattle, to get a sandwich.  Most days, as I’m leaving the Market, I’m encountered by someone on the corner who is rattling a cup of coins asking for spare change.  Because it is a spot on the Square with a fair amount of foot traffic, it is a popular place for our homeless friends to situate themselves.

Nearly every day, I confess that I struggle with how best to respond to this recurring encounter.  Some days, I drop some money into the poor soul’s cup.  Other days, I stop, and rather giving spare change, I’ll offer the person half of my sandwich, thinking to myself that food is better than money since it can’t be used to fuel an alcohol or drug addiction.  Still other days, I’ll stop and try to explain where the nearest shelter or feeding program is located, believing that pointing to our city’s social services might be a better strategy for dealing with the situation than arguably furthering a dependency on handouts. 

But then, I’m ashamed to say, there are those days when I’m too distracted with my own issues to bother to stop at all; or in too much of a hurry to notice the person standing there; and there are even those times when I’m just plain sick and tired of having to face this depressing reality every day en route to lunch and secretly wish I worked somewhere devoid of such people and problems.  I’m not proud to acknowledge these feelings, but I suspect many of you struggle with this same mix of emotions and may be just as flummoxed as I am as to how to respond to these daily encounters.

But then, one day something different happened.  As I was coming out of the Market, with my sandwich and iced tea in hand, poised to drop my spare change in the cup of some obviously struggling young man, he raised his hand signaling that he didn’t want my money.  Instead, he gestured me to come near, saying, “Pastor, could you pray with me?”  It was midday, and the Square was filled with folks each on his or her own mission, and I admit I felt slightly self-conscious at this invitation to pray in public with a young fellow whom I did not know. 

But I somehow was given the grace to overcome these fears, and so I approached him.  And, as I did, he gently took my hands (and I’ll change his name here to protect his privacy), and he said to me:  “My name is Phillip and I’ve been out of work for years.  Would you please pray that I might find some meaningful job?  And I have a mother, named Dolores, who is struggling with a heart condition.  Could you pray for her too?”

And so, there we stood, in the midst of the bustle of Harvard Square, Phillip and me, praying together.

And that is when my eyes were opened to something that I should have seen long before.  Suddenly, this “homeless person,” this “social issue,” this “problem to be solved,” or even worse, “this nuisance to be avoided,” was a man named Phillip, with a mother named Dolores.  A man with a story.  Someone’s son.  Someone with hopes and dreams, as well as pains and disappointments.

The real question, I want to suggest, that we should be asking ourselves as we encounter our homeless brother and sisters on the streets of Harvard Square is not whether we should or shouldn’t give them our spare change, or something to eat, or some helpful advice about the nearest social program.  The question that we should first be asking ourselves is whether we are prepared to see them, know them, encounter them, and relate to them as human beings.  It is not an easy question, by any means, but it is the question Jesus poses to us in today’s gospel.

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is too often reduced to a simple morality tale about the dangers of wealth, the vice of self-indulgence, and the characteristic Lukan motif of an eschatological reversal of fortune, with the last being first and the first being last.

But this interpretation doesn’t do full justice to the parable.  While, to be sure, there is a stinging critique here of the oppression of the poor by the rich, there is a subtler and related message embedded in the parable as well – a message about relationship.

One of the most striking things about this parable is that it is the only one of Jesus’ parables in which he names one of the characters:  Lazarus.  This is not just some anonymous, faceless, impoverished man.  Indeed, in contrast to the “rich man” in the parable, whom Jesus does not name, and who is just one other rich man among many in Jesus’ parables, Lazarus is here given an identity.  Jesus knows him, implicitly suggesting that we should know him too.

Moreover, Lazarus is the Greek form of “Eliezer,” which in Hebrew means: “God helps.”  And Eliezer, you may remember, is the name of Abraham’s companion from Genesis 15, himself a model of faithful and hospitable service to Abraham and Sarah.

Read this way, the text invites us into a relationship with Lazarus, by naming him, by describing his plight, and by recalling for us the cherished relationship Abraham enjoyed with his loyal friend of the same name.  Indeed, the intimate nature of the relationship is modeled for us at the end of the story as we see Lazarus at Abraham’s bosom after he is carried to heaven.  The NRSV translates verse 22 to read that Lazarus died and was carried off by the angels “to be with Abraham,” but the better translation of the Greek is that Lazarus was carried by the angels “to Abraham’s bosom” – that is, close to his heart.

There is, in short, a great chasm in the parable between the loving relationship that Abraham and Lazarus share and the lack of one between the rich man and Lazarus.  The text vividly portrays for us how the rich man, so absorbed in his own pleasure, keeps Lazarus out of sight, physically separated on the other side of a gate.  The rich man seeks to protect himself from all the Lazaruses of the world, leaving them to be tended to by the dogs, who lick their sores.  The rich man literally doesn’t want to see Lazarus, keeping him at a distance, refusing to recognize him as a fellow human being, treating him like just another domestic animal.  There is no effort to know Lazarus, to encounter him, much less to share his bounty and be in relationship with him.

And notice this too:  even after the rich man is condemned to the fires of Hades for his callous self-absorption, and pleads with Abraham for mercy, the rich man never calls out to Lazarus directly for forgiveness.  Instead, he pleads with Abraham to send Lazarus as his messenger to save the rich man’s brothers, once again treating Lazarus not as a brother himself, but as a servant to be used for the rich man’s own purposes.

Again, the rich man’s sin is less his wealth per se, as it is his indifference.  He remains blind to the reality and dignity of his fellow human being, both in this life and in the next. 

Please don’t misunderstand my implication.  I’m not so naïve as to believe that each of us can have a relationship with all the poor and homeless folks we encounter each day.  We are frail and limited human beings who can only do so much, and who have other relationships and responsibilities that legitimately compete for our attention.  But perhaps if we start by looking at our neighbors a little differently – seeing a Phillip on the street corner, rather than just another nameless homeless person – by God’s grace we will gradually be brought into a deeper, healthier and more generous sense of community, as we are slowly brought into more authentic relationships with those with whom we share this earth.  And then, perhaps, we will be surprised that such a renewed sense of community and relationship suddenly becomes the catalyst we need to move us forward toward real social change.

St. Augustine once said:  “God gave us things to use and people to love; and sin is the confusion of the two.”  Maybe that is not a bad caption for today’s gospel lesson.  God gave us things to use and people to love.  The rich man’s terrible confusion, and ultimate sin, was in falling in love with his things rather than with his brother, Lazarus. 

May God help us from making this same mistake.  In the words of our epistle lesson today, let us not “set our hopes on the uncertainty of riches,” but rather, let us “be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,” so that we might “take hold of the life that really is life.”

Amen.