Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Amos 6:1-7 Alas for those who are at ease, for whose who feel secure
Psalm 146 Lauda, anima mea - Praise the Lord, O my soul!
1 Timothy 6:11-19 Take hold of the life that really is Life.
Luke 16:19-31 Remember that in your lifetime you received your good things

Revised Common Lectionary (trial use):
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.
Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16 Qui habitat - Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
or
Amos 6:1a, 4-7 - as above BCP
Psalm 146, as above, BCP
1 Timothy 6:6-19, as above, BCP
Luke 16:19-31, as above, BCP

The various "reversal of fortune" stories in all sacred Scriptures are amongst the favorites of humankind, especialy since most of us finally (if not resolutely) identify ourselves with Lazarus. Though few of us are millionaries, the booming economy and lax tax laws in the U.S. have made it possible for there to be many more six digit incomes, at least. Until recent events, the government even refunded money to our affluent taxpayers, whilst cutting benefits to the poor. Just as the poor are not noticed, so they are not needed. Middle class citizens in Europe and the various Americas have had the hope of "faring sumptuously every day" held out to them, and more and more of our unseen neighbors in the slums and ruins of the world lie with festering wounds just outside our gate. They continue to feed themselves with the crumbs that fall from our tables, and the dogs of vengeance lick their sores.

Most of us who hear or read this story think first in individualist terms--as our religions have taught us to read sacred scripture. So we think of the rich man as someone really exceptionally rich: "Rich as Rockerfeller" or scandalously, outrageously rich, like Anastasio Somoza, who claimed Nicaragua was his "finca", his farm. Or the Duvaliers in Haiti or Ferdinand and Ismelda Marcos in the Phillipines (remember her thousands of pairs of shoes, his gallons of the finest caviar, left rotting on their shelves when they fled the raising of Lazarus in Manila? .The prophet's "Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory" surely applied to them--for on the evening news we learned that Ismelda's bed was bigger than the house of a Filipino peasant. Such examples allow us to see ourselves as poor by comparison ("it's all comparative" is the plea we have ready to recite at the Last Judgment). We pick at the delicious scraps of such stories as dessert, while we have fully fed on arrogance and vengeance as our entreé.

We are further refreshed when we are told, as most preaching on this lecton today will declare, that "riches in themseves are not bad, but only the 'inordinate' love of them." Television's religion hucksters baptize riches as God's blessing, and see them as rewards for fundamentalist religion, shiny suits and bee hive hair-do's. So the Ease of Zion is claimed as a patrimony, 'though the prophets and apostles saw it as a curse. The U.S. believed that its gigantic military budget, which gave it a National Security State, also gave it invulnerability. When some of us named that as the arrogance and blindness which led to the Twin Towers destiny, we were castigated as subversives, traitors, heretics. The prophet Amos warns us across the centuries: "You think to put off the day of misfortune, but you are hurrying the rule of violence" (Amos 6:3). Try reading the whole of the Book of Amos in place of the Sunday Times today--it's only ten pages in the Oxford University Bible. You'll learn more about the news of the week there, to your surprise, than in the Times Week in Review.

Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) wrote a poem to Dives, the traditional name for the rich man:

               "Dives, when you and I go down to Hell
                Where scribblers end and millionaires as well,
                We shall be carrying on our separate backs
                Two very large but very different packs;
                And as you stagger under yours, my friend,
                Down the dull shore where all our journeys end
                And go before me (as your rank demands)      
                Toward the infinite flat underlands,
                And that dear river of forgetfulness--
                Charon, a man of exquisite address
                (For as your wife's progenitors could tell,
                They're very strict on etiquette in Hell),
                Will, since you are a Lord, observe, "My Lord,
                We cannot take these weighty things aboard!" 
                Then down they go, my wretched Dives, down--
                The fifteen sorts of boots you kept for town,
                The hat to meet the Devil in; the plain
                But costly ties; the cases of champagne;
                The solid watch, the seal, and chain, and charm;
                The working model of a Burning Farm
                To give the little Belials; all the three
                Biscuits for Cerberus; the guarantee
                From Lambeth that the rich can never burn,
                And even romising a safe return;
                * * * 
                Then tell me, Dives, which will look the ass--
                You or myself? -- Or Charon?  Who can tell?
                They order things so damnably in Hell. "    
                  

That's an exaggerated example of the way in which the Scripture is reduced to "Dear Abby" consultations, and self-improvement hits as substitutes for a theology of the liberation of the human and other races, like the dog in the story, reduced to licking sores. Whenever you read "salvation" in the Bible, read "liberation" instead, and you will read the Scriptures through the Third World eyes of the people who wrote it.

There's a meanness of spirit in the air of "Security State democracy" which licenses the willingness to discard and despise the poor of the earth as undeserving and merely envious of the rich, and 'our way of life' and the very idea of questioning the right to bumper sticker blasphemy is thought subversive. "Christians Prosper", one bumper sticker read, and a vanity license plate I saw in Chicago the last time I was there said simply, "GREEDY". Somoza owned the Mercedes-Benz franchise for Nicaragua, and in his day all the police cars were that brand. His own armored model was destroyed by a terrorist's bazooka in Paraguay in 1980, incinerating his dynasty. Jesus tells a hauntingly similar old folktale from ancient Egypt. There are many such tales, for ancient religion preoccupied itself with them, although religious leaders have always found it profitable to comfort more than castigate the rich, and every religion has found it wiser to patronize rather than to empower the poor. The teeth of Jesus' parables are continually extracted or buffed to nubs by theological dentistry. Lazarus is usually told that "God helps those that help themselves," and this is preached as if it were a bon mot Bible verse. But Jesus taught that God helps those who cannot help themselves for ."Lazarus" is a fabled name that simply means "God helps". (In the rich man's redaction of the parable, popular in Prosperity Theology, it is Lazarus who would be in Hades and the Rich Man in paradise, and betwen the two there is as well a great gulf fixed, by the class system.")

Luke gives us Jesus' gloss on this old folk tale, a lesson about the lesson. He adds the plea of the rich man from his torment, that the hearts of others of the ruling class would change at once if only religion would provide more miracles: if only Lazarus should be sent as an errand boy, to rise from the dead and preach to them. But Jesus knows Abraham's answer, and it is the answer of all the prophets and apostles of all true religion. If the behavior of the unjust will not be changed by the venerable institutions of the law and the gospel-- the vibrant ethical and moral teaching of Moses and the Prophets, of Muhammad and the Muslims, of Buddha and the Enlightened, of Jesus and the Apostles, then neither will they believe with Resurrection Now, nor even by a Revolution Now in which the dead are brought to life, and the poor restored to dignity.

Will any of us receive gladly the risen spectres of those whom we have left at our gate to die of poverty and disease? Or will we be led gladly into Paradise by the resurrected Lazarus, once poor? The lesson of history is that the privileged flee from the open graves of the 'desaparecidos' -- the ones who were disappeared from our history, for the news of reversed fortunes is not for them a gospel but a horror flick and they flee from it "as dry leaves before the hurricane fly." So the ghosts of the petty tyrants whom the U.S. imposed for its sullen century upon the world now wander the earth as unclean spirits, seeking rest.

Would any of the ex-presidents who sat together recently for the Prayer Service in the National Cathedral* remember the name of Lazarus? Jimmy Carter would, for he is a Sunday School teacher. Would they remember the name of Agosto Cesár Sandino, the Lazarus of Nicaragua? Can any of them remember the name of Ninoy Aquino, brought to life again in the Phillipines by his widow, Corazon to overthrow a dictator? The names of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Oliver Tambo? There are voices speaking for the poor in the U.S.A., at our own gates. But they will not be heard by the mass media, owned as it is by the rich. The rich do not tune their TV's to station W. O. E. -- Woe to you who are Rich now. They are now at ease in Zionism, and Tel Aviv, and Washingon. Amos called them the "Me-First World' when he named them as "the first of the nations."

By a wonderful serendipity, at a memorial service in San Francisco, for the victims of terror, a former city Supervisor was named Amos, Amos Brown, and he preached a blistering attack on U.S. foreign policy which had the assembled politicians squirming. and grinding their dentures. Reports said that the crowd cheered at the Billy Graham Civic Auditorium on September 17th, when the brave pastor of the Third Baptist Church asked, "America, is there anything you did to set up this climate? America, America,. what did you do -- either intentionally or unintentionally -- in the world order, in Central America, in Africa where bombs are still blasting? America, what did you do in the global warming conference when you did not embrace the smaller nations? America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the the world conference on racism, when you wouldn't show up? Ohhhh -- America," Brown said, drawing out the words, "what did you do?" As the church cheered, Paul Holm, former life partner of terrorist victim Mark Bingham, who died on one of the fatal flights, objected to the politicians there that "This was supposed to be a memorial service." Senator Diane Feinstein and Governor Gray Davis got up and left. Their private grief was more important than the gospel truth hidden in the disaster but revealed in the praching of Amos. "He could have chosen another venue or a different way of saying it," said one leading liberal. Yes, and the original Amos could have had more tact, and his Abraham could have chosen other phrases, other occasions, other words of comfort, a message of Ease in Zion, instead of challenge and rebuke, to the rich man now weeping in his grave, the rich nations mourning in their grief.

The fellow who wrote to Timothy, the 'godlover' in the name of the Apostle Paul, wrote a letter that is still being forwarded to the rich by apostolic (whence we get 'post' office) preaching. We get a chance to read other people's mail every time we pick up our translation of the Greek Scriptures: "As for the rich in this world, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on uncertain riches but on God, who richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good deeds, liberal and generous, thus laying up for themselves a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life which is Life indeed."

But is this other people's mail, or is it a letter to us here in River City?

When Albert Schweitzer heard the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, he was converted. He saw at once that Europe was the Rich Man, and that Beggar Africa starved at his doorstep. He heard Moses and the Prophets clearly, and went off to a hospital in Lambarene, to tend the running sores of poverty and oppression and to serve the Risen One. Most of the privileged of the world, individuals or nations, have not followed Jesus or Albert into that service. We North Americans have a Lazarus at our gate in Latin America, and we have had warnings from the religions we hold dear--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Oscar Arnulfo Romero could not have been clearer in his begging the U.S. to stop sending guns to the oppressors of El Salvador, and the prophets have been a a lonely voice (unpublished in the rich man's newspapers, rebuked by clergy and politicians when they try, like Amos Brown, to speak out for Lazarus.) The news of the presence of Lazarus at the gate is not 'new'. It is the inescapable and inexorable warning to our Me First World of rich and religious privilege. The insistent call of the Torah the Prophets, the Gospel, the Apostolic Witness, and the Qu'ran is a call to 'lay hold on the life which is really Life." And to fight a good fight, a divine jihad. We were called recently in the United States to a fight--a long fight to pursue terrorists in an unending war, and our trademark name for it, for a few hours, was "INFINITE JUSTICE,." which the Networks quickly decided was inappropriate talk, along with "crusade" for their Wanted Dead or Alive poster for Osama Bin Laden. The bombast was quietly diluted by the PR department. For all our religions tell us that Infinite Justice is in the hands of God, and not in those of Donald Rumsfeld or Colin Powell or Dick Cheney or George W. Bush. No one officially joins "crusades" anymore but fundamentalists. The worst popes convoked them to destroy Islam. Even the worst no longer use that word in public, though it is their secret path. .

Our torment of the soul in exile until the coming age, our agony of the spirit now, is shared by our God who is on the side of the poor in the world today and one day soon the Lazarus at our gate will be raised to life, comforted and strengthened, and will burst into the song, "I'm gonna rock-a-my-soul in the bosom of Abraham."
------------------------
(* Its real name, not available to the TV public, is the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the saints whose preaching overthrew another empire.)

GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni

• The Series: Father Gallup's "Homily Grits": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html
• The Series "Joy Anyway!": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joy.html
• Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
• Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
• Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

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