Homily for the Week of September 26, 2010

Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2010

Am 6:1a, 4-7 • 1 Tm 6:11-16 • Lk 16:19-31

Every football team in the NFL has at least one chaplain to whom the players and coaches can turn for religious guidance. Father James Baraniak has been chaplain of the Green Bay Packers for 11 years. One day he watched a coach work with one of the players. The player was truly one of the greats, but his productivity had been flat. He had set records for sacking the quarterback the prior two seasons, but now a rookie on the team had passed him. The chaplain’s ears perked up when the coach began talking about today’s Gospel story.

“You know what your problem is? You’re like that rich man in the Bible. You’ve earned all you wanted and now you just sit back, letting something else be more important to you than this team! Lazarus starved to death on the rich man’s doorstep because the man didn’t care. You don’t care, and you’re going to let your team-mates starve because you don’t care about what is important to the team. Just wait until the end. You will be cut from this team and then like Lazarus you’ll beg to be re-signed. Sorry, but you’re digging a ditch between you and success.”

This slant on this Bible story caught the chaplain’s attention. He realized that we pay a lot of attention to many things in today’s story. We pay attention to the rich man’s feast and Lazarus’s hunger. We see Abraham in heaven, and we see the rich man in hell. We see the rich man ignore Lazarus in this world then treat him like a servant in the next. The chaplain wondered, though, if we ever pay attention to the great chasm that is established “to prevent anyone from crossing”?

We like seeing the rich man in hell. We like thinking that anyone who is so terrible is in hell. Unfortunately, when Jesus told this story, He used the illustration of the rich man to represent most of us! Maybe we should start looking at that chasm.

One of the things we know about St. Paul is that he was an athlete. We do not know how good he was, but his continual reference to sports shows that he clearly loved them. In our reading today, Paul makes reference to sports today when he tells Timothy to “compete well for the faith.” We do not know if Paul is making reference to running or wrestling, but the image is one of a very hard-fought, exhausting, physically demanding and possibly injury-laden competition — like pro football!

Paul was in prison awaiting execution when he wrote to Timothy. We might see Paul’s two letters to Timothy as his last instruction. We might also see them as a wise old pastor at the end of his career passing on his wisdom to a young pastor, for that is what Timothy was. Paul wanted Timothy to compete well because the prize was eternal life, though Timothy was not competing for himself. Timothy was in the contest for his parishioners. He had to be better than the competition for the sake of his parishioners’ faith. He couldn’t afford to sit back and reap the benefits of Paul’s work. Timothy had to continually improve his own life — “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness” — so that he would be an example worth following and lead the kind of life that made people listen.

Our passage today from First Timothy begins with verse 11, but the prior verse, verse 10, is good to note: “For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.”

Money is not evil; the love of money is. “Love of money” is placing possessions before everything else. This is a way of saying that anything we pursue more than God is the root of evil. This is the beginning evil in our own lives. We cannot improve as a person or as a person of faith if something is more important to us than God.

The prophet Amos was a wealthy man living in the southern kingdom of Judah. He looked at the northern Kingdom of Israel and did not like what he saw. He described a wealthy class who lived only for themselves. They were consumed with their own pursuits and didn’t notice that their own country had collapsed around them, the “collapse of Joseph.” Amos began his condemnation with the word “Woe,” the word used to begin funeral dirges. He was telling the north that they had made something else more important than God, and thus he was beginning their funeral hymn.

It has been said many times that the only things we can take with us at the time of our death are those things we have shared or given away. The rich man loved his life of luxury and squeezed it tightly like the grapes of his fine wines. He adorned his fragile body with the best that his money could buy. He was unable to move out, extend his hands, because he was too tight. Tight, because he was bound up with things and himself and so what he got in the end was what he wanted, just himself.

The story of the rich man and Lazarus is a story about anyone who has made anything in life more important than God. What is really awful is that Lazarus was a fellow Jew, and the rich man could not even help a brother! This lifestyle is the start of digging a chasm — one that will keep us from getting to God!