Br. Lain Wilson

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 21C)

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
1 Timothy 6:6-19
Luke 16:19-31

When I came to the Monastery three years ago, the big television show at the time was Succession. I loved it. So when I saw that the showrunner had a movie coming out last year, I jumped on it.

Mountainhead, like Succession, is a dark satire of the contemporary ultra-ultra-rich. It’s one of those movies in the genre of “horrible people doing horrible things in a beautiful setting.” Four tech bros gather for a weekend at a mountain retreat. Fellowship quickly descends into sniping at the relative size of each others’ fortunes and disingenuous shows of empathy for a world set on fire by forces at their literal fingertips.

It’s a hilarious and horrifying depiction of power, narcissism, and inhumanity, all reinforced by the distorting and destructive effects of technology. Even the most sympathetic character is just as reprehensible as the others and, at the film’s end, we as viewers frankly aren’t left with much hope either that these men are capable of change or growth, or that they—or the forces they represent—can be a source of healing for our own fragmented world.

Like the film, our parable this morning of the unnamed rich man and the poor Lazarus reveals a society of haves and have-nots: rich and poor, those inside the gates and those without, those with power and agency and those denied both.

Both film and parable pose a similar question: where can we find hope in a fragmented world?

The parable continues a theme we’ve explored over the last several weeks of how Luke foregrounds the materially poor in Jesus’ revolutionary preaching and proclamation of the kingdom. The gate, separating the feasting rich man from the starving Lazarus, acts as the unbridgeable gulf between these two men, echoing the “great chasm” in the afterlife that separates them. Death is a pivot point, reversing their fortunes.

Like our reprehensible billionaires, the rich man of the parable doesn’t change; he doesn’t grow. He attempts to behave in death as imperiously as he did in life, demanding first water to slake his thirst, then a messenger to warn his brothers about his fate. He is not a dynamic character capable of the conversion of heart that Jesus proclaims, or that Paul advocates in his letter to Timothy: “As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Timothy 6:17). Jesus and Paul are speaking to living, breathing people, capable of change; their message is meant to effect a conversion of heart in its hearers, including us.

This, then, is the first source of hope in our world: that we are empowered, indeed, that we are commanded to grow and change, that we are called to a conversion of our own hearts so that we can be agents of reconciliation.

How are we to do that?

The parable is fundamentally about how the use and misuse of wealth. But wealth is just one of many power dynamics. So many others exist in our world, that we face or participate in day by day. So many seemingly impassable gates or unbridgeable chasms separate the haves and have nots, those with power and those without. We are empowered in so many ways, expected and unexpected. And we may suffer silently, unseen, disempowered, in so many ways, expected and unexpected.

We can be drawn, entirely unintentionally, in so many ways into complacency and acceptance that we deserve the blessings of our power and the suffering of our powerlessness.

Where do you have power in your own life, maybe even in ways you don’t expect?

How might you, completely unwittingly, be ignoring those who are powerless?

In our conversion of heart, Jesus and Paul call us to break out of our complacency and assumption of deservingness. They remind us that all we have—wealth or ability or power or position or whatever—is a gift, a gift given so we may use it for others, and for the glory of God. When we discern what we have been given, and know that it is not ours, we may begin to fling open our own gates. We may begin the work of constructing bridges.

To hope the conversion of our hearts can be a reconciling force in a broken world is to participate in God’s own kingdom, in God’s own future.

In discerning our power and inviting those denied power, in whatever form, to participate in it, we ourselves participate in God’s own “almighty power,” in the words of today’s Collect, chiefly declared in “showing mercy and pity.”[1]

And in laying the foundation of bridges between haves and have nots, we lay a good foundation for our own future, as Paul puts it, taking hold of “the life that really is life” (1 Timothy 6:19).

But even more than that, in our reconciling work in the world, we express our faith in our ultimate hope as Christians. In working to make the world more just, in even the smallest ways we can with the power entrusted to us, we express our hope, as the catechism puts it, “to live with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and to await the coming of Christ in glory, and the completion of God’s purpose for the world.”[2]

We will soon sing this hope in God’s purposes, in our offertory hymn: “O Master . . . make haste to heal these hearts of pain . . . till all the world shall learn thy love, and follow where thy feet have trod; till glorious from thy heaven above, shall come the city of our God.”[3]

Our first lesson this morning anticipates this hope in God’s redemptive plan for the world. The prophet Jeremiah hears the word of God commanding him, in the middle of the siege of Jerusalem, to redeem the land of his kinsman. The enemy is at the gate, and he is being told to invest in land that may soon pass beyond his control! Why should he throw his money away?

The answer is hope, hope founded upon trust in God: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (Jeremiah 32:14-15).

Whatever loss you may suffer now—however the world may change, whatever darkness you may encounter—you may dare to hope that houses and fields and vineyards will again be bought. You may dare to hope that God will put it to rights. You may dare to hope—we may dare to hope—because God is faithful.

Jeremiah is commanded—and empowered—to participate, through his actions, in God’s redemptive plan.

And so too are we commanded and empowered, through our own actions, through the use of the power given to us, to participate in the fulfilling of God’s purposes, so that we may be “partakers of [God’s] heavenly treasure.”[4]

We are called to be fundamentally a hopeful people. To be bearers and beacons of hope for those who may sit unseen and unheard outside our gates by using our power to throw open those gates. And to live out our own hope in the confession of—in the conviction of—God’s redemptive purpose for the whole world: “till all the world shall learn thy love, and follow where thy feet have trod; till glorious from thy heaven above, shall come the city of our God.”

Amen.

[1] The Book of Common Prayer (New York, 1979), 234.

[2] Book of Common Prayer, 861.

[3] “Where cross the crowded ways of life,” The Hymnal 1984, no. 609, stanzas 4-5. Words by Frank Mason North (1850-1935), alt.

[4] Book of Common Prayer, 234 (Collect for Proper 21C).