Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Vivian Lewin, Spiritual Director in the Diocese of Montreal
“Against you only have I sinned…” [1]
Our gospel this morning is pretty strong stuff, isn’t it? The story is only found in Luke. “Between you and us, a great chasm has been fixed. No one can cross from there to here,” Abraham tells the rich man who ignored his poor neighbour and is now being tormented in the fires of hell. [You can watch the service on YouTube here. The sermon starts at 29:40]
Have I really come here this morning to talk about damnation? Well, yes!
The question I started with is, where is the good news here? That’s usually the way I start wrestling with scripture. When I came to this gospel about two weeks ago, it seemed so hard, so unforgiving and judgemental. We might even say unChristian. Is this the Jesus we believe in? The God we trust? And the rich man is coming to his senses, isn’t he? Even as he comprehends that for him it’s too late. He wants his brothers to be warned to avoid his own sorry fate. That’s a form of charity, of generosity isn’t it?.. but it’s too late.
If we get caught in the perspective of the rich guy, which is easy to do, we naturally think that the whole story might really be about us. About me. Am I really generous? Am I stingy? How much do I give? How much do I take? Do I buy lottery tickets, and if so, why? And so on and on and on. Am I a good steward? Do I tithe? Do I pass the beggar? Do I even see the poor on my doorstep? Am I like this one..or that one? Is my soul in danger?
But wait! What if the story isn’t about me? What if it’s about God … about our creator who made us from nothing and gave us everything that we have and more, surrounds us and sustains us with love ….beyond anything that we can repay in a thousand lifetimes! What then?
When we see the story from our point of view, we quite naturally get caught up in thinking that God is being unforgiving and mean. Angry. Judge-y. Vindictive, even.
Like those other old meanies, the Hebrew prophets, the first of whom was Amos.
Woe to those who are at ease in Zion… who drink wine from bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils but are not grieved … etc (Amos 6 NRSV)
I wanted to understand where they were coming from. Partly because John the Baptist, and Jesus himself say things very much along these same lines.
Listen to John the Baptist
You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Bear fruit worthy of repentance! Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees, every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire… (Matthew 3:7ff)
Similar, huh? Or Jesus:
You hypocrites! you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practised without neglecting the others. (Matthew 23:23 NRSV).
So I turned to a scholar who really did know the Prophets, a Jewish scholar named Abraham Heschel, who was born in Poland in in the direct line of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism.. the word hasid means devoted… a charismatic movement (note 2) within Judaism a couple centuries ago. His family was notable within Hasidism and even at a young age everybody thought that he was going to be another amazing leader, but he was also growing up during the enlightenment and he wanted to go to Berlin and study with the other religion scholars there, to learn to talk their language and read Kierkegaard. So he did. That’s how he managed to get out of Poland during the holocaust and come to New York. In the US, he eventually discovered likeminded associates. He founded a committee of clergy against the Vietnam war, when there was no strong religious opposition to it, and he was a great friend and compatriot of Martin Luther King. He went to the second Vatican council, and was responsible for part of the way that they revised their teaching about Judaism, correcting the view that it was an Inferior religion, and countered some of the antisemitism that had fuelled the Holocaust.
In his work on the Prophets, he starts by saying that ultimately sin is the abuse of freedom and God is filled with compassion, concern and pathos, whereas the tragedy of human beings is their indifference. “The root of sin,” he wrote, ” is callousness.” In his understanding, the prophets were truly God-minded. “They shared not only God‘s commandments, but God‘s compassion and God‘s desires for humankind.”
So I’d like you to indulge me if I share a little bit more of what he wrote:
“The knowledge of evil is something which the first man acquired. It was not something that the prophets had to discover. Their great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful. I am my brother’s keeper.
“The prophet is a person who suffers the harm done to others wherever a crime is committed, it is as if the prophet were the victim and the prey, the prophets’ angry words cry. The wrath of God is lamentation. All prophecy is one great exclamation: God is not indifferent to evil. God is always concerned. God is personally affected by what man does to man. God is a god of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God. The end of indifference. The message of wrath is frightful, but for those who have been driven to the brink of despair by the sight of what malice and ruthlessness can do, comfort can be found in the thought that evil is not the end. That evil is never the climax of history. This is the most vexing question in a world where the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper, Does God condone? Does God care for right and wrong? If the agony of man were a form of serenity, a mild assertion–a work of divine commiseration, a word of reprobation–would have been adequate But to a generation afflicted by the fury of cruel men, by the outrage of abandoning God, no condemnation is too harrowing. Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanour. To God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval. God’s reaction is something no language can convey
Man is what he thinks. we repeat clichés we remember platitudes. God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge. A rumor, as if it is nice to have him around. But God means defiance, rejection, as well as affirmation.
There have always been those who say the situation is too grave for us to do much about it, that whatever we might do would be too little too late, that the most practical thing we can do is to weep or despair. If such a message is true than God has spoken in vain. Such a message is 4000 years too late. It is good Babylonian theology. In the meantime, certain things have happened. Abraham Moses, the prophets, the Christian gospel. History is not all darkness. It was good that Moses did not study theology under the teachers of that message. Otherwise, I would still be in Egypt building pyramids. The greatest heresy is despair: despair of humankind’s power for goodness, our power for love.
It is not enough for us to exhort the government. What we must do is set an example. [In this hard time,] we are all pharaohs or slaves of pharaoh. It is sad to be a slave of pharaoh; it is horrible to be a pharaoh.”
Heschel takes on this warning, echoing the prophets he studied with so much love and care, and his sense of their transcendent perspective reminds me of Paul’s exhortation to “put on the mind of Christ” (Philippians 2:5ff).
And indeed we heard the letter to Timothy this morning telling us about the immense glory of Christ, and how easy it is, even in the face of that transcendence, for us to want to be rich and “fall into temptation and get trapped by many senseless and harmful desires.”
We have choices to make.
Money isn’t the only form of wealth or worldly riches. This life is perilous! There are many forms of wealth and many ways to desire the benefit of privilege that both protects us and insidiously sets us apart from others. Even being able to stand here and say these sentences, my dear friends, to find scholars’ books and Bible passages on the internet and shape them together into a sermon, may be as, they say, ‘a bit too rich.’
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy.
Amen
NOTES
The scriptures for this morning, the Sunday of Proper 21 (26) in the Season After Pentecost, September 28, 2025, are: Amos 6:1a, 4-7, Psalm 146, 1 Timothy 6:6-19, and Luke 16:19-31
The image, part of a fresco by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, is from Wikimedia Commons: Michelangelo -The Yorck Project (2002) 10,000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN : 3936122202 . His depiction of the prophet Jeremiah weeping over Jerusalem is said to be a self-portrait (discussion here.)
(1) Cf Psalm 51:4 “Against you only have I sinned…”
(2) Extensive quotes from Heschel are from Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings, selected with an introduction and commentary by Susannah Heschel. (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2011. Robert Ellsburg, series editor. It includes some unpublished writings by Heschel.) I skipped over specific references to the struggle for Black rights in the US in the 1960s, and rephrased or elided some passages. The book is still in print. You can also read it online at the Internet Archive.
(3) When I called Hasidism a charismatic movement I was speaking wildly. It IS charismatic in a general sense, but properly described as pietistic.