Year C
 Amos 6:1a,4-7
 Psalm 146
 1 Timothy 6:6-19
 Luke 16:19-31
May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

On June 23, 2013…  34-year-old Nik Wallenda became the first person to walk a high wire…  across the Little Colorado River Gorge in Arizona…  Wallenda wasn’t wearing a safety harness as he made his way across the quarter-mile long…  two-inch thick steel cable…  suspended 1,500 feet above the chasm…  he had performed other death-defying feats before…  but in some ways…  it was a cake-walk…  in some ways it was easy…  because in order to accomplish it…  although he needed to be careful…  although he needed to stay balanced and steady…  Wallenda didn’t really have to change anything about his inner life…

Some of you may remember that on June 20, 2017…  while Joel and I were visiting family in Puerto Rico…  I went on…  what was at that time…  the longest…  highest…  zip-line in the world…  7,234′ long…  and suspended more than 1,200′ above the valley floor…  I however…  was strapped into a harness…  and lay on my stomach in a canvas litter…  and don’t think I could have fallen out if I tried…  I didn’t try…  and I crossed a chasm that was both frightening and exhilarating…  I however…  felt changed by the experience…  I had overcome some fear…  and gained more confidence…  tried something new…  and examined some assumptions about myself…

Have any of you ever come up against a boundary that you just couldn’t cross…  an idea that became a line in the sand for you…  or for your denomination…  because there are some people who are certain that women’s ordination is still too irregular… as it was in 1974…  when eleven women were ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church…  some believe that putting Communion before Confirmation is as bad as putting the cart before the horse…  some believe that the way they do things in church is right…  and anything else is wrong…  and much of this reflects discomfort with a theology that is too broad… although it’s wideness that’s conveyed in Psalm 118:5… I called to God from my narrowness… and God answered me with a vast expanse… you see…  narrowness can be controlled more easily than vast expanses…

And so I ask…  when have you been confident…  or certain…  that you were right about something…  only to come face to face with evidence that you were not…  that you may not have had all of the facts…  all of the information…  and then you had to decide whether you’d step out onto the high-wire of repentance…  or the zip-line of vulnerability…  and cross the chasm of your humanity… but we want to be right in all things…  I think… 

And there’s an idea among some theologians…  that eventually your time’s going to run out…  and that you’re going to have to choose…  to get with the program or not…  that woven into the mystery of time itself…  of chronos…  which is linear time in finite space…  and that you’ll be forgiven seventy times seven times…  but not seventy times seven plus one…  that there’s a limit to God’s patience and forgiveness…

But in kronos…  God’s time…  in the eternal now…  time where there’s no space…  and space where there’s no time…  where as Hebrews 13:14 says…  this world is not our home…  for we are looking forward to our everlasting home in heaven…  then as Ronald Rolheiser writes in his book…  Wrestling with God… …  with God…  we never exhaust our chances…  and yet Rolheiser affirms that the Gospels can give us the impression that we can exhaust them…  after all…  Abraham replies that there is an unbridgeable gap between heaven and hell…  and no one can cross from one side to the other…

We also remember a similar message in the wedding banquet parable about the five foolish and the five wise bridesmaids…  and when the foolish took brought lamps…  they carried no oil with them…  but the wise took flasks of oil too…  the bridegroom was delayed…  and they all became drowsy and slept…  but at midnight the bridegroom arrived…  and all ten got up and trimmed their lamps…  but the foolish asked the wise for some oil…  but there would not have been enough…  and they went sent to the dealers to get some…  but while they were gone everyone else went into the banquet and shut the doors…  and when the five returned…  they said…  Lord, lord, open to us…  but he replied…  Truly I tell you, I do not know you… 

And Jesus’ warning seems to be that at some point…  the doors of the feast will be irrevocably closed…  but these passages have led to the common misconception that there is a point of no return…  that once in hell… it’s too late to repent…  but that’s not Rolheiser asserts…  what this text is about…  what the unbridgeable gap in today’s Gospel…  refers to…  is a gap that remains forever unbridged here in this world…  the gap between the rich and the poor…

Our passage from 1 Timothy says…  As for those who in the present age are rich…  those who are rich…  Pastor Martin Billmeier reminds us that that’s us…  and he provides a sobering point of reference… on a website he found…  called Giving What We Can…  I went there just yesterday…  and it has a calculator that helps puts things in perspective…  it reveals that a family of four whose annual US income is $25,000…  is in the richest 22.3% of the world’s population…  bump that number up to $50,000…  and you’re in the richest 10.6%…  $60,000…  and you’re in the richest 8%…  and it becomes easier to see that most of us are rich too… 

Jesus’ story of the rich man and Lazarus…  and the chasm which remains unbridged…  remains so because of our failure to change heart…  our lack of contrition…  and not because God runs out of patience with us…  it remains unbridged…  because…  habitually…  we become so set in our ways that we are incapable of change and genuine repentance…  it remains unbridged…  because of those who wear expensive purple robes and feast sumptuously every day…  who lie on beds of ivory…  and lounge on their couches…  and eat lambs from the flock…  and calves from the stall…  while the poor lay at their gates…  and this story actually draws upon a more ancient Jewish story that illustrates this intransigence…  in that story…  God does hear the rich man’s plea [ from hell ] for a second chance…  and grants it to him…  the rich man…  now full of new resolutions… returns to life… goes immediately to the market… and loads his cart with food…  and as he is driving home… meets Lazarus on the road…  Lazarus asks for a loaf of bread…  the rich man jumps off his cart to give it to him…  but as he pulls a huge loaf from his cart…  his old self begins to assert itself…  he begins to think…  this man doesn’t need a whole loaf…  why not just give him a part…  and why should he have a fresh loaf…  I’ll give him some of the stale bread…  immediately he finds himself back in hell…  he cannot bridge the gap… 

We heard just last week in Luke’s Gospel…  that we can’t serve both God and mammon…  a word…  by the way…  which was taken by medieval writers as the name of the Devil of Covetousness… but Jesus…  after stigmatizing the Pharisees’ reliance on successful law-keeping… simply reminds them that the law is not the great…  smiling friend they think it is…  since its demands remain perpetually holy…  just…  and good…  and since we are none of those things…  the law can only condemn those who rely on their keeping of it…  to save them… 

Fr. Robert Capon writes…  living well may be the world’s idea of the best revenge…  and it is certainly the human race’s commonest criterion for distinguishing the saved from the lost…  but in the mystery of the kingdom… it is precisely living badly…  being poor and hungry and covered with repulsive sores…  that turns out to be the true vehicle of saving grace…  because if the world could be saved by successful living…  it would have been tidied up long ago…  so some of us may need to ask ourselves…  what figurative high wires…  and zip-lines…  and what chasms are we willing to cross…  to be changed…  I wonder…