21st Sunday after Pentecost

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So there are sometimes gospels that are appointed that present a challenge for the priest who is trying to give the homily. Amen. So there are sometimes gospels that are appointed that present a challenge for the priest who is trying to give the homily. And today is the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and it reads, “There was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate, desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores. So it was that the beggar died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried, and being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom.”

And then he cried and said, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.” But Abraham said, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things and likewise Lazarus evil things, but now he is comforted and you are tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.” And then he said, “I beg you therefore, Father, that you would send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.” And Abraham said to him, “They have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them.” And he said, “No, Father Abraham, but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.” But he said to him, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.”

So what’s complicated about this is that obviously our Savior was in a certain space and a certain time, and so we have to apply this to our own circumstances. And I think one of the things that complicates it is the degree to which our Western society has deteriorated. And when we think about it, it’s not something that happened in the last election cycle. I’m supposed to smile. It’s been going on for a very, very, very long time. And certainly the Great Schism in 1054 was an indication of a departure from divinely revealed truth and a departure from the unity of the Church. And of course, this is a hard lesson for many, because when people often think of the history of the Church, they think in terms of their own experience. And they get back to the Reformation and they realize that the Latin Church had some very, very obvious and serious problems and departures from Holy Scripture and departures from the spirituality of the Church. And so there was a reaction, an understandable reaction from a human point of view, against all of this. And what it led to, however, was disunity.

I don’t know how many denominations there are in the world today, but I’ve heard in the thousands, but let’s say there’s hundreds. And disunity, in any case—if you had disunity in your family, it would destroy the family. If you had disunity in your community with people challenging one another’s views of things, it would destroy the community. Disunity destroys unity, and unity is necessary because there is only one God and there is only one Lord Jesus Christ. And the Holy Spirit is at one with the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit together, the Trinity. And the unity is a fundamental doctrine that has been divinely revealed to us. And the thing, of course, is what does this have to do with the rich man and Lazarus? I think we’re going to get there in a little while.

But the thing is, is that we live in this world of disunity, and it’s become so disunited that it seems to me there’s a mass psychosis, literally, that people are consenting to believe in things that are totally irrational. And rationality isn’t the only standard of truth—we have to understand that—but that are totally destructive of children, of parents, of family. And you look and you just—no, I mean, transgendering children at, you know, 14 or 15, apparently many would like to do that earlier, is absolutely destructive. It completely destroys not only the child, it destroys the family, it destroys the society. And somehow or other there’s this—I like to call it a psychosis—that people actually believe that this is something beneficial.

And then, of course, freedom. And freedom, you know, it’s a remarkable thing. In the Holy Church and faith, you know, we believe we’re free when we’re at one with God and we’re at one with His teachings. That’s the standard of freedom—that we’re at one with—and then we become free. Free from what? From corruption and sin and degradation. And so the idea of freedom is that whatever your impulse is, you do it, and that sets you free. And of course, “my truth” and “your truth” are different, which is, you know, absurd, because it can’t be that way. I mean, the bottom line is you cannot have civilization without shared universal principles and truths that have to be shared universal principles and truths. And they have to be honored and respected by the civilization or the civil society we live in. And if we don’t have that, what’s the outcome? Conflict. And sometimes the conflict becomes profoundly angry and it can become violent and abusive.

And you go back to this concept of truth, and forgive me, I don’t want to be—I don’t want you to think I’m very political, because in a sense I’m not very political. But when people actually think that they can make up whatever they think is going to benefit their cause and proclaim it to be true in the media, you’ve got a serious problem. That just doesn’t work. And what does it lead to? It leads to darkness. That is darkness of mind and soul. And it leads to conflict. There’ll be conflict. There’s going to be a lot of conflict. It has to be conflict because that’s the fruits of this absurdity.

And so here we have the rich man who is clothed in fine purple and linen and fared sumptuously every day. And we have the beggar, whose name is Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate, desiring to be fed from the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. And it says that the dogs came and licked his sores. And so it was that the beggar died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. But the rich man also died and was buried, being in torments in Hades. And he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom.

So there’s consequences. This is the point. There are consequences to departing from the Gospel of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. And I think while they don’t give you a whole lot of details about the rich man, it seems that the result is that he was very much interested in himself. His concern was himself. He was very, very careful about his beautiful purple robes and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day. But in his demented spiritual state, he completely ignored Lazarus, who was filled with sores and suffering.

And I think about this and it seems to me that what we have done in our society—forgive me for dragging this up—but what we have done in our society is that we’ve created some institutions, as it were, to take care of people, which has separated them from community. And I mean, I’m sure that Ariadne remembers in her experiences, and I remember in my experiences where, you know, when I was a child living in New Hampshire, we had poor people around us and you could feel their poverty. You could feel their pain. It was visceral. You knew who they were. And that feeling, that living feeling that you had caused people to be kind to these folks and to make sure they got food and to pass clothing on to them. And it enriched the community. That is the life of unity. It enriched it because these people—you thought of them. You knew them in the deepest sense. They were there and you knew their children and you expressed your love and kindness. And it had this marvelous effect, which is the people that were struggling with their poverty and their disadvantage and oftentimes sicknesses were taken care of. But they were taken care of with love, and the people who took care of them had an experience of that satisfaction of doing something for someone else.

So you have this institutionalization of the separation of the poor and so on from the society, right? Sort of like the rich man who has an estate up on the hill. And yes, money gets through taxation and even through donations and so on, but money gets to other people. But there’s no sense of unity. There’s no sense of community. There’s no sense of Christian charity. There’s no sense of the Holy Spirit of God moving you to actually act in regard to someone that you know is suffering. And so we are in this remarkable place where we’re separated to a large degree from all of this. And yet we’re in a place of tremendous crisis, a crisis for our society.

And I want to say something about—so it turns out that the rich man who had no feeling and no compassion for his neighbor, so he ended up in a place of torment. So when he died, he went into this abyss and he was separated completely from God. And it says, “Moreover, the dogs came to lick the sores, so it was that when the beggar died he was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom,” which we can only understand, I think, as the community of the faithful on high in eternity. “And the rich man died and was buried, and being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom.” And it goes on. It says, “And Father Abraham, have mercy on me. Send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in the water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things and likewise Lazarus evil things, but now he is comforted and you are tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.’”

This is, in terms of an image of judgment, this is, I think, for me at least, the most vivid image of judgment in the Gospels in a sense—this divide. And those who have disregarded and not participated in the caring of their neighbors and loving them and so on end up in this darkness.

So what does one do? And I think it’s pretty obvious we’re not going to reorganize our communities and neighborhoods around a Christian model. That’s not going to happen. So what do we do? And what do we as Christians do? And what I would like to offer is that we—let me reference the Feast of Holy Protection, when Constantinople remarkably was under attack by the Slavs who converted just a few years later after the attack. And the Mother of God—what happened is the attack was so tremendous that people rushed to the church and they packed the church and filled it completely and offered prayers all night long. Services were going on continuously. And there, Andrew and his companion saw the Mother of God holding her hands up, protecting the city, and the attack withdrew. Not only the withdrawal, but I think 70 years later the Slavs converted to the Holy Orthodox faith.

And so what I would like to suggest is that what we need to do is we really need to produce and participate in the life of the Church. We have to do that. And we have to do it much more than we do. The Church day, you know, starts in the evening and lasts 24 hours. It’s Sunday, actually, technically. And you know, obviously, television and sports events and everything else, you know, they’re on Saturday nights and there’s always things so people are drawn away. But what I really do believe is, is that if we want to see a change in our community, we need to join in prayer as often as possible. And if we can’t be here, we need to say our prayers at home. And if we do that, the Holy Spirit of God will come upon us.

And we have been very blessed. We have Vespers every night at 5 p.m., except for Wednesdays, which is 6. And then Saturday nights are different, of course—starts at 5:30. And we have Matins every morning at 6 a.m., except on Thursday. On Thursday we have Liturgy at 9 a.m. And then of course, Saturday and Sunday. And what we are doing is—and we’ve been doing this for a very long time, actually, for years we’ve had a lot of services here. But we’re having services. And the reason we’re having services is because it’s in the image and likeness of the Holy Protection of the Mother of God. We are asking our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ and for His Most Holy Mother and for the communion of all the saints to come down, as it were, not physically, but to shine their light upon us, to illuminate us, and to unite us so that we become one mind and one heart grounded in the true law of God, the law of love and the law of self-sacrifice.

And if we’re unwilling to struggle in this life toward finding unity in Christ, we’re not going to find unity in the world. I’m sorry to say it’s not going to happen in our generation for sure. But we need to find unity in Christ. And if we find unity in Christ, we will come to know and understand His gracious love and gifts that He gives to us. And as that light shines on us, it’s like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise. What St. John of Damascus says is that—I’ve said this before, but I like it very much, so I repeat it—their job was to lay all care upon God. So the light came down into their hearts, this is before the fall, and radiated out. And it created order. The lion and the lamb lay down together. Everything grew beautifully and perfectly until the great temptation and the fall.

Brothers and sisters in Christ our God, on this day when we remember the rich man and Lazarus, of course, let us understand that we have a choice. The choice is to enter into union with our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ through prayer and divine services, through family life that is truly Christian, and by, of course, turning off a lot of things that are big, big distractions. We are invited to do this. And the consequences of us disregarding this are very clear. There’s an abyss. And those who turn away from God, turn their back on God, it seems to be from this account, end up in this abyss, separated from God eternally. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.