Chasm Crossings

Beloved in Christ, 

This past Monday, I woke up with the intention of taking a day off to reset after two weeks out of the country, followed by a weekend traveling in the diocese.  But I actually spent most of the day switching back and forth between trying to catch up on e-mail, getting my things unpacked and back in order, and trying to rest. The result was cartoonish and predictable: by mid-afternoon I was overwhelmed and in a thoroughly sour mood. So I shut everything off, picked my son up from school, and we went to a coffee shop and played board games for a few hours. By the time I got home, I felt like a new person.

Trying to do too many different things at once is a good way to ensure we won’t be much good to anyone or anything. That’s true of our daily lives, and the way we approach the wider world around us. All of us are assaulted all day, every day, by an endless wave of advertisements and social media feeds brilliantly engineered to make us feel restless and dissatisfied. And life in our nation these days is one piece of bad news after another as political violence escalates, the marginalized are targeted, and the mimetic outrage across the political chasm escalates higher and higher.

In a world that demands we attend to everything all the time, the way of Jesus calls us to be about one thing: embodying God’s economics of radical generosity in a world ruled by the economy of greed and exploitation. Our gospel lesson for this Sunday is the graphic parable of the unnamed rich man and the desperately poor Lazarus, whose positions and conditions are directly reversed in the afterlife. God’s indictment of the rich man is not his wealth as such, but his unwillingness in life to cross the chasm that separated him from the poor man suffering right outside his door. The chasm that can’t be crossed in the afterlife is simply an extension of the chasm he wouldn’t cross when he was alive.

The point of the parable is not to give us a picture of the afterlife. It’s to remind us that we are made by a God whose fundamental business is traversing chasms of sorrow and injustice with love, and to call us to be about the one thing of chasm crossing in our own lives.

The hard truth is that I will never be caught up on the personal and professional tasks set before me, and I will never be able to rid the world of injustice and suffering. But I can remember in every moment what is the one thing I’m for: investing myself in God’s economy of love that is always in the business of subverting the world’s economy of greed.

In a moment when every day can just shred our energy and our spirits, liberation will not be found in winning some victory over our lives, or our perceived opponents. That victory has already been decisively won by Jesus Christ. Our liberation will only be found in making our lives about one thing: following the way of Jesus, and resting on the tidal wave of his power that even now is crashing into the world.

Grace and Peace, 

The Right Rev. Craig Loya