Monday, September 29, 2025

A Reflection on Lazarus, the Poor and Indigenous Justice

Given at St. Margaret New Toronto, September 28, 2025 

I was confirmed in the Anglican Communion at the age of twelve by the Episcopal Bishop of New York, as my family was sojourning in Ithaca New York while my father studied at Cornell University. We attended the Cornell campus Chaplaincy, and when I was confirmed the congregation bought me a silver cross. My mother asked why they would do that, and they answered, simply, “He’s ours.”

I have often thought about what that must have meant to my mother, a sojourner in a foreign land with a neuro-divergent child. I tell it to you, here, because for me it speaks to connection: the act of love and inclusion by a community that shaped me. I am telling it today because the thread binding the themes of our worship today, from the season of creation to the day of reconciliation, to the Gospel story of Lazarus we have just read, is connection.

Lazarus the beggar is cut off from the rest of his society by his illness and his poverty. He does not choose these; the circumstances of his life impose them on him. The rich man, on the other hand, has layers of possessions, prosperity, ease, and material security. The rich man uses these things to shield himself from having to deal with the pain in his community, particularly that of Lazarus. In doing so, whether by deliberate intention or by following what seemed like the easiest path, he chose to cut himself off, just as the illness and poverty of Lazarus cut him off.

When Lazarus dies, his death puts an end to the physical pain and economic poverty that had broken his connection to the community, so that in death he is restored. But the rich man carries his choices with him. In death, he remains the person he had chosen to become. Even his entreaties never reach beyond himself and the welfare of his immediate family. And he is buried.

As the story tells us, Moses and the prophets warn us against cutting ourselves off, for when we sever our connection to our brothers and sisters, including those who need us most, we also cut ourselves off from God. Since then, we have had the Gospels, the Acts, and the letters of Paul and hundreds of Christian preachers down the centuries carrying the same message.

We all know the threads of our connection to one another, to the many communities here in the City of Toronto and well beyond it, which we are bound to. If our care for the poorest and the sick among us falls short of the mark, it’s not always because we choose to barricade ourselves behind a wall of luxury and ease. We make an effort to build a table open for all. We work to offer more than crumbs: not just food but the supports we can offer, as outward signs of our love, or caring, and our connection.

Members of the Pine Ridge Lakota Nation taught me an expression: Mitakuye Oyasin. It means “all my relations”, and is often held to express our connection to all things. Yet there is a reason we translate the phrase as “all my relations”. We are not simply connected, we are related, joined by the outstretched hand, the grief or the hope shared, the meal eaten together, our lives lived.

The Hebrew prayer the Shema “Shema Yisroel, Adonai Elohineu, Adonai Echad”, “Hear oh Israel, the Lord your God is one God,” is the Jewish statement of faith, which also begins Jesus’s summary of the law. I remember a Jewish person saying the Shema implies the same thing Mitakuye Oyasin states: we are all relations, because we all spring from the dust of the Earth, matter forged in the ancient furnaces of the stars, linked together with the farthest of the galaxies by one, incomprehensible act of creation by One God, the Lord Alone.

It is this the rich man’s possessions cut him off from, this his choices made impossible for him, and this was the tragedy of his abundance. What does our abundance cut us off from?

The technological cocoon we live in as city dwellers very effectively cuts us of from much of creation. I remember a story of a blackout in Los Angeles in 1994, where the local observatory fielded a flood of calls about a strange cloud; that cloud was the Milky Way, which many people had never seen through the light pollution. That one example can stand for the huge number of ways the way we live severs us from Creation.

In the winter of 2003 – 2004, I spent a week in Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, Grassy Narrows First Nation, learning the history of the place and the people. I learned about residential schools, about how, in the 1940s and before, the community had maintained a simple life by trapping, hunting, and especially fishing. The money they made came from work as fishing guides at the local fishing lodges, the wild rice and blueberry harvests. Ontario Hydro harnessed the river for electric power and incidentally destroyed the rice harvest; logging destroyed the blueberry harvest, and in an act of extreme industrial negligence, a chlorine plant upriver dumped several tons of mercury into the river system, poisoning the fish, and thus the people. The catalogue of harms done to the people of Grassy over the years was not, as it seems, the result of some diabolical sadism, just as the Gospels record no overt hostility by the rich man to Lazarus. It only took a conviction that only the values and way of life of relatively wealthy people of Southern Ontario mattered.

Over twenty years of activism of various kinds in support of my friends in Grassy, I have met elders who were young activists at the time the terrible symptoms of mercury poisoning first discovered; I have seen the young activists I first met grow older in poverty, I have seen the victims of mercury poisoning grow old and die. In all the time, governments have refused to do what justice or common decency demands: clean up the river and stop the exploitation of the traditional lands that have supported the people of Grassy since time immemorial. It is time for us to take note of the people, and the world, who lie at the gates of our prosperity.

Monday, April 21, 2025

The stone

Easter sunrise, Toronto 2025
He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.

The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, ‘Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, “After three days I will rise again.” Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, “He has been raised from the dead”, and the last deception would be worse than the first.’ Pilate said to them, ‘You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.’ So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.(Matthew 27, 60-66)

All the gospels agree that after the crucifixion of Jesus, someone closed the tomb where His disciples had laid him with a large stone. Not all the gospels say who placed the stone or what reason they had, but all agree the women who went to anoint Jesus on the morning of the first day of the week worried about how they would move it.

The stone has always struck me as an apt metaphor for the futility, the folly of human concerns in the shadow of eternity and the face of the Almighty. If a neutron star could have been brought to the Earth, it would not have held that tomb closed. 

Thursday, March 06, 2025

Fasting and Justice

A cross made of ashes, placed on a congregant's forehead for the Ash Wednesday observance.
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten season. By Christian tradition, Ash Wednesday is  a day to contemplate the reality of our lives: our mortality, our faults, our weakness, and begin a process which, as we hope, we will move toward redemption, reconciliation with the world, the universe, and God who created it. 

By tradition, fasting is a part of that process. We speak of the Lenten Fast, and some of us speak as though Lent was the fast and little more. Long ago, the question of what to give up for Lent morphed into a humorous reversal: many of us claimed to have given up giving things up for Lent. 

Friday, February 14, 2025

The wrong man

Picture of Premier Doug Ford with a poppy and a Canadian flag behind him.
Doug Ford is a people pleaser. His government works on that principle. He doesn't conceal the fact; indeed, he proclaims it. He is "for the people". If the people want to drink, he'll have alcohol, including  pre-mixed cocktails, available in corner stores. If people want to drive, he'll build a highway. If people want a spa and water park, he'll arrange it. If the people want entertainment, he'll lease out the waterfront venue to a promoter (never mind the promoter in question is a predatory monopoly).

That has made Doug Ford popular with an enthusiastic base. It also makes him extremely unsuited to lead during what look like the very hard times ahead of us. There is very little that is pleasing about our situation. Doug Ford will have very little to offer in the way of gratification if Donald Trump follows through on his threats. We don't need a premier who promises us everything we want; we need a premier who can rally us to stand together, even if the government can offer us nothing but toil, tears, and sweat. 

Monday, January 20, 2025

January 20, part 2

President Donald J. Trump joins G7 Leaders Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte; European Council President Donald Tusk; Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe; United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and G7 Summit host French President Emmanuel Macron during a G7 Working Session on Global Economy, Foreign Policy and Security Affairs at the Centre de Congrés Bellevue Sunday, Aug. 25, 2019, in Biarritz, France. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)


Just a few hours from now, Donald Trump will take the oath of office, and we will learn which of his threats, or promises, he intends to carry out.

In my last post, I wrote about the hazards of taking Mr. Trump's implicit promise to make Canada a state with caution; I believe that if we surrender before Donald Trump's economic aggression, we would find ourselves residents of a territory, not a state, and Canadians, or former Canadians, as we would be if we surrendered, might well find ourselves classified as US nationals, rather than citizens with voting rights. 

But if too many Canadian commentators have been mistakenly optimistic about our prospects should we surrender, we have been unreasonably pessimistic about our ability to face the kind of economic pressure Trump's government could or would bring to bear. 

Saturday, January 18, 2025

January 20

A picture of and American flag flying beside a Canadian flag against a blue sky
On Monday, Donald Trump will take the presidential oath of office and the reigns of a president's very considerable power under the American system.

He's also set to be the first American president to seriously question Canada's sovereignty. Some Americans have always regarded Canada with an kind of uneasiness and suspicion, because we contradict their favourite narratives. If, as some American conservatives actually believe, Americans represent the pinnacle of humanity, if everyone aspires to American citizenship, then why do forty million Canadians fail, indeed refuse, to petition for admission to the union? Plenty of American pundits have expressed hostility to the idea of Canada. Most American presidents and lawmakers, on the other hand, have had a real degree of affection and respect for Canada. Even where US presidents have disliked our politics or politicians, the decencies of international relations have kept these sentiments out of official United States policy. Until now: Donald Trump has made it quite clear that, at least when it comes to rhetoric, he has no intention of abiding by the old restraints.