S Reflection on St. Francis 2013

A Reflection for the Feast of St. Francis (Transferred) and Blessing of the Animals

All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC

September 29, 2013

Thomas Wilson, Rector

Galatians 6:14-18                                Luke 16:19-31

In the Gospel lesson for today, Jesus has a dream. “Wait”, you say, “It is not a dream.  Jesus is telling a story out of his imagination!” To which I would reply, “Out of the divine imagination - where do you think dreams come from?” Dreams come from where our experience joins messages from the divine imagination in order to give us a different view of the world that they jointly inhabit. The Divine Imagination is one of the places where the God within us unites with the human experience within us. As William Blake, poet, priest and mystic said: “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this universe is but a faint shadow.”

The Divine Imagination gives us this story of the unnamed Rich Man and Lazarus, the beggar. Now right away, the fact that the beggar has a name and the Rich Man has none should be a clue to you that you are invited to insert your name in place of “the Rich Man”. If we look at this story like we look at a dream, then we are invited to see ourselves in both the rich man and Lazarus.  Is this an internal conflict where the spiritual side of ourselves is allowed to starve and die of neglect by the side obsessed with getting things? Or is the dream about the world we live in as we are invited to live into the despair of Lazarus and the shallow self-absorption of our pursuit of riches?

Notice I am not trying to say anything about the “goodness” of each person. Some on the left side of the political divide want to see in Lazarus a symbol of the undeserving poor, the victims of greed in our capitalist system. Some on the right might see the rich man as a nice guy who saw Lazarus as a lazy person who did not deserve his charity. God is not a Democrat or Republican and the point is that they were both loved by God.  But the rich man created the chasm, the big ditch which no one can cross, which is between he and Lazarus in this life and the next. We all dig our chasms, one shovel at a time. We also fill in that chasm one shovel at a time.

The night before I give this sermon I will be doing a Memorial Service on the beach for a homeless woman who I first met during her participation in “Room At The Inn”, when we did a sheltering of the homeless during the winter months. She had many problems, some of her own making. She had a good heart, a fine imagination, a diseased body and a broken mind, but she was loved by God and she loved God. The name she went by was her middle name, Adrianne.  The root of that name means someone who is dark or who comes from the Adriatic Sea area. Her name fit for she knew the dark side of life and she came here because she loved the sea; her moments closest to God were at sunrises and sunsets on the beach. She and I are both broken in our own ways and thereby have a lot in common. During the last days of her life, I was proud of All Saints’ because, in that sheltering program, we helped fill in some the chasm between the rich side of ourselves and the poor side of ourselves.

A colleague of mine in Virginia, John Arms, said that, in addition to Lazarus and the rich man, there was another name in this story. He said he went to visit a parishioner of his in Nelson County, and the parishioner told him the dog in the story had a Biblical name, “Moreover”.  John allowed that he had not come across that name, and the parishioner pulled out the King James Version  of this story and pointed to Luke 16:21 where it reads “and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.”

This was the parishioner’s way of remembering that sometimes our animals have more compassion than humans do. I saw this church’s involvement with programs like “Room At The Inn” as being “Moreover” as we minister to the sores of our lives and our neighbors and fill in the chasms. The name of the beggar, Lazarus, comes from the Hebrew, Eleazar, and since Hebrew did not add verbs to words to determine tense until the Middle Ages, the name could mean past tense, “God had helped”, or future tense “God will help”, or present tense “God is my help”. It is an appropriate name for this beggar who was abandoned by humans and only God could help him.

I imagine that God had kept trying to help the beggar, Lazarus, while he was still alive. The Divine sent prophets to share their dreams and visions about caring for neighbor, but the rich man, you, me or that part of each of us, didn’t pay a bit of attention.. The Divine One sent Moses to begin writing the law about caring for the poor, but the Rich man, you, me, or that part of us, was just too busy. The Divine inspired the hearts of the Middle Eastern people before Moses that they were to give hospitality to the Stranger, as when Abraham entertained strangers and they were angels in disguise, but the rich man, you, me, or that part of us, had different priorities.

You see, there is this thing called greed, and in order for it to survive in our daily lives, we just shut our ears to all the messages that the Divine sends to our hearts. We nourish this illusion that, if we can just get a little more of whatever it is we want, then we can be happy, and the more we have, the happier we will be.  And so it goes, for there is never enough for us if all we see is a universe of scarcity. The more we have, this line of thinking goes, the more of a sense of power we will have. So, this line of thinking goes, we just need to cut back on such frills as compassion, or social cohesion, or just basic humanity, in order to keep more of whatever we want for ourselves.

Mahatma Gandhi had some advice for us - "Let us learn to live simply, so that others may simply live." But the modern day rich man, you, me or that part of us ignores that advice because Gandhi simply is not “one of us”, a Christian. One time Gandhi replied to a missionary attempting to convert him to Christianity saying, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” 

Except, Gandhi was just paraphrasing 19^th Century American former Episcopalian and converted Roman Catholic Saint Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton’s rule: “To live simply so that others can simply live.” Mother Seton had been rich and when her husband died, she was financially destitute. Yet, her spirit was rich and she devoted the rest of her life to helping the poor. 

Today we remember the 13^th century St. Francis of Assisi who had been born rich but left his father’s house destitute in order to give himself, the true self, the only thing worth having and giving, to his neighbor. He told his disciples, "It would be considered a theft on our part if we didn't give to someone in greater need than we are" and "If we can enter the church day and night and implore God to hear our prayers, how careful we should be to hear and grant the petitions of our neighbors in need."  
 Gandhi, Mother Seton, and Francis, all of them caught the same vision of the first century story told by Jesus for today which came from the Divine Imagination.

Today we remember Francis by the blessing of the animals. As we bless these animals, may we be blessed to be like “Moreover” who ministered to the sores of Lazarus, the one whom God helped.  Let us open our ears to the Divine Imagination in our true self and listen to the cries of our neighbor, our fellow creatures of God.