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As I was reflecting on today’s scriptures, particularly the challenging scriptures, the opening first reading from the prophet Amos, and the difficult story line of the gospel from Luke, I found myself remembering an old friend of mine back in northern Virginia.

What came to mind was an incident several years ago. Steve, as I said, lived in northern Virginia and he had been in a terrible car accident. Physically, he was fine but the car was destroyed, declared “totaled” by the insurance agency. With the little value given to it by the infamous “Kelly Blue Book” and still owing a couple of years of car payments, Steve didn’t have even enough money to put down as a down payment on a used car. His brother Jack and his wife heard about Steve’s dilemma and when they did, they decided to help him. Jack and his wife were expecting their second child and had talked about getting a larger car than the one that they had, as their family was growing bigger. When they heard about Steve’s situation, they decided to give him their old car and go ahead early and buy a new one. It was really a great car. It was a fully loaded two-year old Nissan Stanza with a great silver finish. It was a great-looking car, even had the sun or moon roof, whatever you prefer to call those things.

A couple of weeks later, Steve is out running a couple of errands and he parks his car in front of the curb while he is in the store. When he comes out, he sees this boy, eight or nine years old, he thought (But as we get older it is tough to decide how old other people, younger than we, are actually.) .... He saw an eight or nine year old boy, looking at the car and sort of examining it in all its detail with a sense of wonder, if you will. So, when Steve came out and went to his car and put the key in the door, the young boy looked up and said, “Is this your car, Mister?” And he said, “Yeah. Sure it is.” The boy just looked on it with amazement and said, “This is a great car!” And then with all of the honesty and curiosity and perhaps maybe even lack of social grace that young kids may have, he went on to say, “How much did it cost you?” Steve looked at him and said, “Well nothing actually.” And the young boy’s eyes just got wide and he said, “You mean you got this great car and it cost you nothing?” Steve said, “Well, it was a gift actually.” ...“From whom?” ...“A gift from my brother.” And he looked at Steve with wide eyes and he said, “Wow! I wish I had....” and he stopped. Steve found himself not listening to the boy but imagining, knowing, he thought, what the boy was going to say, “I wish I had a brother like that.” But that is not what he said. The boy said something completely different. He said, with those wide eyes open, looking at that great car, “I wish I could be a brother like that!” What a remarkably generous spirit, embedded into the mind and heart of an eight year old, a nine year old, so deeply rooted in his mind and heart that it was a spontaneous impulse to want to be as generous and as caring as he could be to a person in need. And what a contrast we have with the rich people in our reading from Amos and in our gospel story today!

I think the key to the message from our readings today is an image that is found in our gospel story from Luke. That image is the image of the gap, the chasm, the abyss that exists between the rich man and his purple garments and his fine linens and his sumptuous dinner table each day and Lazarus in need. And that distance between the rich man and Lazarus grows into a huge abyss at both their moments of death. And it is that time, a time of judgment, a time for the moment of truth and the rich man stands guilty of indifference and complacency. The abyss in which he finds himself is that gap of complacency between those who have power, those who have knowledge, those who have connections or riches, and those in need. It is a gap, the gap of indifference or complacency, I am sure all of us have experienced sometime in our lives when no one seemed to care about our particular need, our particular worry, our particular pain. In other words, this rich man is condemned, not because he hated Lazarus. He doesn’t kick him off of his property. He doesn’t object when Lazarus wants the food from the table, the scraps from the table. He doesn’t call him names. He doesn’t spit at him, kick him as he passes him by. No, he ridiculed Lazarus because he ignored him. The rich man is simply ignoring him, simply accepting the poor, diseased man as a prefectly natural part of his landscape. The rich man is not guilty of anything he did, but of something he didn’t do, what we Catholics call a “sin of omission,” indifference, complacency, not really caring, not noticing, not wanting to know what is right before our eyes, not wanting to find out the facts, not caring enough to take a stand or to take some action. This is the true opposite of love.

As I reflected more on our readings, I found myself thinking, where do I, where do you and I, find ourselves being complacent, indifferent, avoiding painful and difficult situations of need? Is our complacency and indifference evident in not speaking out to our work colleagues when justice or honesty is being overlooked? Is our complacency, our indifference played out in our avoidance of seeing people in hospitals or nursing homes because we don’t think we can handle the pain of watching them in physical or emotional torment? Is our complacency, our indifference, played out in our choosing not to exercise our faith-filled citizenship by not voting in the upcoming elections because we seem overwhelmed by all the complexities and the issues involving a choice of a presidential candidate, or with all of those propositions on the California ballot and all their complexities? Or is our complacency, our indifference, manifest in not caring for our infirm parents but leaving it to the professionals or perhaps, as an indictment to men, leaving it to the women in the family? Is our complacency in avoiding the poor on our own street, on Monument Blvd., or as I have even seen, among some parishoners or an occasional staff member on Monday through Friday, late afternoons, when ten or twenty at a time of the poor come to our parish house, seeking the generosity of this parish and the volunteers of St. Vincent dePaul? Where do you and I find ourselves being complacent, indifferent, really not caring, avoiding difficult situations of pain of those in need?

The message of today’s scripture is quite challenging, not impossible, however. We gather here this morning because we believe in a God who certainly was not indifferent to us, a God who plunged into the world of human need to remind us that pain and suffering and sin and death do not have the final word. The message of our scriptures is quite clear this morning. You and I are called to remember, to remember that the measure of our Christian belief, the measure of our emotional maturity, our spiritual maturity, the measure with which we will find God is the measure with which we will lose ourselves in loving others in need. So, let us pray, pray this morning, this week, that we may have the desire to be as caring and as generous as the young boy wanted to be. And let us pray to be aware of the resources we have, not only to desire to be as caring and as generous as the young boy, but to act decisively, even boldly, in the name of generosity and care.