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.
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.jpg "US Government photo; public domain via Wikimedia Commons")
