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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