Faith | Cats | Hope | Grace

Sermon for September 28, 2025 (Year C)

“Why didn’t anyone tell me!” How many times after disaster has struck—big or small—we hear someone say those words. Or, if we are honest, how many times have we said them. The rich man from our Gospel reading today has fallen into that trap. Oh, if only someone had warned him, he would have lived his life differently. If only he could have prepared differently. But now the roles have literally been switched between him and Lazarus. The rich man must now lift his head to Lazarus and watch as Lazarus is comforted. And then in a kind of breathtaking temerity the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus down to Hades to bring him the comfort of cool water. I almost admire the gumption. Once the rich man realizes the story has been written for him, he turns his worry to his five brothers. You get the feeling that these five other brothers are of a similar mold to the rich man of today’s Gospel. The rich man feels that if someone from the dead goes to them, they will listen. That they will have the time to amend their lives. And Abraham tells the rich man that, like he had, the brothers have the words of Moses and the prophets. And if they won’t listen to them, then they probably aren’t going to listen to the words of one who came back from the dead.

And that is a very human thing to do—that selective hearing. The things we hear or don’t hear because of who is speaking that truth. When we are lucky, pre-disaster, we hear something that pulls us up short and allows us to course correct. Or if we are not so lucky, and we are sitting in a Hades of our own making lamenting that if only this person had spoken to us, or the message had been delivered in this way, or if or if or if, we wouldn’t be where we find ourselves.

It can be hard to hear hard, inconvenient truths. The truths about injustice in our communities that we ignore. The truths about our inattentiveness to our relationship with God and with each other. How many times had the rich man stepped over Lazaraus? How many times had the rich man heard the urging of Moses and the prophets to care for the needy and bind up the broken. The rich man had actually been warned multiple times. The first through a distant and maybe even clinical hearing of shared scripture. And then he heard it through the immediacy of Lazarus’s body at his doorstep. The problem isn’t that no one had warned the rich man, it was that he hadn’t listened.

And it is right at this moment that things are feeling bleaker than they already were at the start of all this. Don’t worry. There is a lifeline. Through our beloved Redeemer, we are always offered a lifeline.

We started by diving head first into this parable. Right into the meat of the moment. Let’s zoom out a little bit and remember, this is a parable told to a gathering of listeners. We along with countless listeners in our shared history have been and are being told this story. Maybe we didn’t hear Moses and the prophets. Maybe we wouldn’t have been able to hear the pleas of Lazarus. Maybe we will be able to hear the voice of Jesus speaking to us. Here is yet another voice, another time we are being called to live out the lives we are supposed to. Here is another opportunity where we are being pulled back from a precipice. While by rights we have been given the path we should follow and that alone should be enough, God never stops seeking us out. Never stops trying to bring us into right relationship with themselves and to bring us into right relationship with each other. God is wise and knows his creation and creatures individually and collectively, and he knows we sometimes need help to hear.

At the Certain Women gathering last week, I shared a passage from the chapter on prayer from Marjorie Thomson’s book Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life where she compares prayer to conversation and says that God is always speaking to us, we just have to be attuned to listening. But here is a moment where the limits of human language and understanding might get us into a bit of trouble. Where trying to map what a human conversation is onto the divine conversation falls short. Yes, there may be times when God speaks to us through human language. But if that is exclusively what we are listening for, how often do we then miss God speaking to us in the sunrise that always comes–even after a night spent wakeful and watchful from the anxieties of this world. How often do we miss God speaking to us when like the rich man we step over the body of our fellow human in need and distress. How often do we miss God speaking to us in the scriptures that have been collected, preserved, and shared for our mutual flourishing. And that is the wonder of God. They are not limited by the finiteness of human language. God is speaking to us in ways without number. We have only to listen. If we attune ourselves just right we can see all of our life as an opportunity to be in conversation with God. For all of our lives to be a living embodiment of prayer.

So what do we hear in our Gospel and in the letter to Timothy? We hear about lives that are misoriented. The rich man’s focus was on a life of sumptuous living while ignoring the needs of others. In the letter to Timothy we hear that the love and pursuit of riches is the root of all evil. But we have to be careful of only halfway engaging in a conversation with God, or being captured by a soundbite and not hearing the whole of what is said. How often have we heard and been reminded that riches are the root of all evil? And how often has that verse been used as a silencer or a cudgel to those who were trying to say that their needs weren’t being met. It is not that we shouldn’t expect to have our needs met—our needs for food, shelter, and clothing. We can depend on our loving creator to provide for us. The problem is a bottomless thirst and hunger. An acquisitiveness run amok. As we heard last week, mammon.

I think a generous, but still accurate understanding of this drive of the love of wealth is fear. A fear that our needs won’t be met. That we will be left wanting. That we will be the ones who others step over in our time of distress. And let’s be clear, that is genuinely terrifying. But we are called to trust in our Creator. And if we are worried that our needs won’t be met except by our own exclusive work and industry, we can become overly focused on the tool—riches and wealth—that meet our material needs. By thinking that it was exclusively through our own work and industry that met our materials needs, we can become unwilling to share the bounty we have been given. Our long-term plan was never intended to be ephemeral riches of this world. Our long-term plan was, is, and will be eternity. Our true wealth is a generosity of spirit and resources, a love and hunger for justice, a desire for the Kingdom of God. All of which is a profound answer to and outpouring of our love of God and response to the grace we have been shown.

But I’ll admit, saying that is all well and good, but we are human and that trust can be hard to live into even when we so desperately want to. So I offer us this. One of my favorite hymns, perhaps even my favorite, is His Eye is On the Sparrow. There are a number of arrangements and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a bad one, but I’m particularly fond of the Sadin arrangement sung by Kathleen Battle. You can find it on YouTube and it is utterly lovely.

And while I might be stretching my interpretation a bit, I think it still can speak to us in this moment. The first verse says,

Why should I feel discouraged?
Why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart be lonely
And long for heav’n and home,
When Jesus is my portion?
My constant Friend is He:
His eye is on the sparrow,
And I know He watches me;
His eye is on the sparrow,
And I know He watches me.

God loves the entirety of creation even down to the sparrow. We are all under the watchful caring eye of God. Thanks be to God.