Sermon for the Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Proper 21 C ~ September 30, 2007

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Are you better than these kingdoms?

…O you that put away the evil day, and bring near a reign of violence?

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

    This summer’s theme of non-attachment to possessions and money reaches a kind of climax today. And it’s pretty rough. All three readings zero in on the spiritual peril of wealth. Last week, we heard clearly that one cannot serve both God and money. One or the other; not both. Today, the Gospel depicts the consequence of serving wealth instead of God. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. But the rich man was merciless. Tradition calls him Dives, which I think just means rich. And he lived in a great big McMansion and dressed in the expensive clothes and drove Lexus and drank $100 wine and ignored the poor homeless guy, dying on the street outside. Because Dives was merciless, there was no hope for him. A great chasm is fixed between him and the merciful. Lazarus might well have taken pity on him, as might Abraham. They were merciful, after all, and they would want to help him. But they couldn’t because of the great chasm.

Could it be that the chasm that even Abraham and Lazarus could not bridge is the difference in consciousness between the merciful and the merciless? Between those who serve God and those who serve money? In life, Dives was so preöccupied with his own consumption that he didn’t even notice Lazarus. Why should that change with death? Why would Dives suddenly become merciful? In fact he didn’t: he was still concerned exclusively with his own comfort. Well, maybe he did change a little. He asked Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers. “If one comes back from the dead, they will change their mind.” But no, said father Abraham, it would do no good. All of God’s messengers have been endlessly telling them, as they told you, about the necessity of mercy and it has had no effect on them. Even if someone were to come back from the dead, they would not change their mind.

I heard last week about the reïnstitution of slavery in the United States: immigrants forced to work for almost nothing. It is illegal, of course, but the current régime doesn’t like labor laws and its Labor Department is hopelessly understaffed and couldn’t do much about the new slavery even if it wanted to. I found myself thinking, “Well, if slavery is to be revived, then why not flogging? Televised flogging of convicted slave-traders and the big CEOs who contract with them. After a couple of those spectacles, you can bet the market for slave labor would dry up pretty quick! As you see, I become entirely merciless, when I believe I am right.

Maybe that’s why I find the tirades of the Holy Prophet Amos so satisfying. Those self-absorbed, filthy-rich oppressors, slippery with oil and distracted by singing, luxuriating on their ivory beds. Boy are they going to get what they deserve! But who are they? Well, they are the merciless. But who, really are the merciless, if not people like me who like to see other people get what they deserve? Pogo was so right: “We have met the enemy and they are us.” Or, as Nathan told David back last summer, YOU are the man. OOPS! In my enthusiasm for reviving punitive torture I have condemned myself! (But then, as a friend commented: “It is healthy every once in a while to get in touch with our inner axe-murderer!”)

Last week also, the Bush Régime asked for another two hundred billion dollars for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. A sum to be omitted from the annual budget and to go right on the national debt. That makes 600 billion so far. More than a half a trillion in bonds sold to China in order to pay the likes of our mercenary Blackwater outlaws and Cheney’s friends at Halliburton. But don’t you dare pass a bill that will get more children medical care! Why? Well, it’s philosophical. The Leader is philosophically opposed to socialized medicine, and there is a great chasm fixed between him and most of the rest of us. But there may be some saving grace in this on-going calamity: the illusion of American exceptionalism is exposed as the impious foolishness it is, and the monstrous wedding of American evangelical zeal with the Neo-conservative project to remake the world is discredited. I think there is some hope in this.

There had better be, because otherwise ~ if we remain at ease in Zion ~ Amos’s ancient curses on the merciless really do fall on us. Will we heed the prophets and forsake our sins? We who delight in low prices for food and everything else, we who rely on the global market to deliver those goods at those prices, regardless of who is enslaved, who is devoured? Will we continue to participate in the worship of this idol, this Moloch of Market, who demands human sacrifice? We, who avert our eyes from the wretched, sore-riddled Lazarus at our doorstep? We, who put away the evil day and bring near a reign of violence? Maybe the catastrophe to which this kind of thinking has brought us will cause us to change our mind. There are some signs that it may. Let’s hope so, because otherwise, we will be the first to go into exile. As a nation, we will end up alongside Dives, and there will be none to help us. Like him and those at ease in Zion, slithering around on their ivory couches, the United States of America will find itself in a very unpleasant place. For mercy is obtained by the merciful, not by slave-drivers and those who would rather not know about the cost of their luxuries.

We who are rich in these present circumstances must listen to Paul:

[Don’t] be haughty, or set [our] hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God, who provides everything for our enjoyment. [We] are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for [our]selves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that [we] may take hold of the life that really is life.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!