Book: Luke

The rich man in Jesus’ parable about Lazarus isolated himself in his wealth, never inviting the poor and the lowly to join him. The rich man’s greed separated him from Abraham across a great chasm in the afterlife, which could never be crossed. Christians living in 21st century America should be careful to consider how we, like the rich man, might be allowing our own arrogance to prevent us from loving God and our neighbor.

In our sinful nature, we naturally seek personal gain and prosperity over the Word of the Lord. We are tempted to fool God into thinking we are perfectly good (when we are not), just as we fool other people into thinking we are more righteous than they. But God will not be fooled by our human deceptions, and we cannot escape our own hypocrisy except through the Grace of Jesus Christ. Prosperity will always disappear, but the Word of the Lord stands forever.

With the passing of Queen Elizabeth, we lose one of the final links in the chain of history which binds us to the storied history and tradition, and indeed the greatness of Western Civilization, blessed by God and founded on Judeo-Christian principles, to which we owe nearly every comfort and luxury which we enjoy today. Listen as the Rector reflects on the life of Queen Elizabeth II.

Counterintuitive as it may sound, it is precisely the call to sacrifice which we must embrace and offer to the world today if we wish to see the church grow. People of my generation and younger especially have caught on to the façade of contemporary worship, for it is so clearly divorced from the reality of life, which is hard! Life is hardly ever holding hands and singing kumbaya, it is a daily struggle against sin, and pain, and grief, and shame. Christ delivers us from all those things, but only if we join Him in the fight.

We live in a time of great arrogance. We are an arrogant people, and arrogance comes from pride. Pride was not created for human beings; pride comes from the Fall in the Garden. Pride is the unwillingness to accept the truth out of our own insecurity. One defense against these temptations is humor, for it requires us to be poor in spirit, and embrace humility. Humor for the Christian is a serious virtue, for it teaches us to laugh at ourselves.

Our faith MUST be lived out in action, brothers and sisters! That doesn’t mean our problems go away, but when our hearts cry out, “how long,” we can drown out all those negative thoughts and voices that accuse us with the joyful song of the whole company of heaven. And we can run to the Sacraments and satisfy our spiritual hunger and thirst at the feast we share with all the saints who are cheering us on.

We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Do we hear them cheering for us? But what are they cheering for us to do? It isn’t for us to mope through life. It is for us to run the race with endurance. This is what we are called to do as disciples of Christ, in the good days and the bad. Our lives are filled with the endless, useless noise of sin. Only by cutting through the noise, and focusing on the call of the Lord and the cheers of the Saints, can we run the race with endurance.

The battle between good and evil must be fought within our own hearts each and every day. This is why our works can’t save us, because we can’t possibly do anything on our own merit to earn our salvation. Only one person lived that perfect life, and that was Jesus Christ, the God-man, who offered himself up as a sacrifice to God for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.

Our earthly lives are fleeting, and most people have great difficulty with that – a lament which is echoed by the author of Ecclesiastes. To cope with our mortality, so many of us resort to vanity – pride in our own achievements or appearance, and devoting our lives to worthless things. We pile up possessions on earth which we cannot take with us when we die. But our most prized possession should in fact be God. As the famous hymn says, “we are rich in things, but poor in soul.” But as Luke’s Gospel challenges us, we must instead be rich towards God.