September 28, 2025 Dcn Janice Hicks

Well, I've accomplished one St. Anne's tradition already this morning before I go, and that is I got locked in the columbarium. So thank you, John, for getting us out. It seems that in this late season of Pentecost, the lectionary keeps giving us passages about riches, not just about money, about what life itself is for. And if we're honest, if you were thinking that you identified more with Lazarus, most of us here are considered rich in the eyes of the world. But these texts are not meant to scold us. They are invitations. Invitations to think about how we relate to the material world and how we relate to each other.

And today we heard it in two different kinds of voices. In the pastoral letter to Timothy, it came as a direct invitation, plain language. And in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus gives it to us in the form of a parable. Now the pastoral writer tells Timothy to seize the life that really is life. And that's a phrase worth lingering over. The writer is drawing a contrast between two ways of living, destructive life and true life. Destructive life is marked by the pursuit of riches as an end in itself. The writer warns those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by the many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. And notice the word he uses for people is tus anthropos, in the Greek, all people. And by that he means not just the people who are chasing wealth, but the people who are damaged in the process.

I was reminded of this when I recently visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. If any story exemplifies lives destroyed by the relentless pursuit of wealth, it is the American story of chattel slavery. Millions of lives diminished so that others might prosper, and the slave owners were diminished even more. That is destructive life. But our epistle offers an alternative: the true life, a life marked not by accumulation but by generosity. And we see glimpses of this today. Did you hear that Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, donated $70 million to the United Negro College Fund? Acts like this remind us that wealth can serve life when it is reoriented towards generosity.

But why does the epistle writer consider generosity and good works to be the more true life? In our capitalist culture, doesn't giving money away make you less powerful? The theologian Paul Tillich gives us insight. He said, wealth and power are unreliable objects of faith. They are fleeting. They cannot offer hope in the face of death. That's his litmus test. What is good in the face of death? As we are reminded in the letter to Timothy, echoing the Jewish wisdom tradition, we brought nothing into the world so that we can take nothing out of it. And that should be obvious and plain, but it has to really sink in deeply. The danger isn't money itself, but the letter calls it the love of money. The danger is distraction, letting possessions consume our imagination, leaving little room for God. And in contrast, generosity and good works affirm real life. They flow from trust in God's eternal life, a life given, being given, and always given. To be generous is not a loss, but an affirmation that life itself is abundant, that what we release will be made whole again.

When I was first coming back to church, and I didn't get the whole part about giving money to church, so I was learning that. And in a good sermon, one of our preachers at St. Margaret's convinced me, so I upped my donation by several thousand dollars. I was so inspired. And then the next week, I got a check in the mail from Honda, who said, we overcharged you for this service, and it was like around $2,000. I was like, when is the last time you got a check from your car dealership giving you money back? I was like, okay, God, you got me on that one. That was a good story. God has a sense of humor. The pastoral writer urges Timothy, pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness. These can offer hope in the face of death. This is the life that really is life.

And the gospel gives us the same lesson, this time in story form. Jesus tells of a rich man who lives inside the gates of abundance and of Lazarus who lives outside the gate in misery. There's a wall between them, a clear boundary. Lazarus longs only for crumbs but receives nothing. When both die, the situation reverses. Lazarus rests in Abraham's arms. The rich man suffers torment and still tries ordering people around, but it doesn't work. And once again, there's a boundary, a chasm that cannot be crossed. On the surface, this sounds like a simple reversal. The poor rewarded, the rich punished. But notice something. Jesus does not give the rich man a name. But he does give a name to Lazarus, to the poor man, Lazarus. Not to be confused with his best friend, Lazarus, but this is another Lazarus. It is Lazarus who is known, Lazarus who is remembered, Lazarus who has dignity. The real issue isn't money, but relationship. The rich man never saw Lazarus as a fellow human being, even though he was right there at his gate. And so once again, the readings remind us this is about how we relate to others and how we relate to our material goods.

So this brings me to a story about story. Writer Donald Miller wrote a book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, subtitled What I Learned While Editing My Life. He writes, if you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn't cry at the end when he drove off the lot. Nobody remembers that story. Yet we spend years living lives of those kinds of stories and expect them to be meaningful. What makes a story meaningful are things like rejection, forgiveness, sacrifice, love, and redemption. That's also what makes a life meaningful. Miller discovered this when two filmmakers came up to him and said, we'd like to make a movie out of your book. And they started with the screenwriting, you know, from his book, started writing the movie script, and they started altering the details of it. And Miller was like, you can't change that, that's my life. And then they said, well, we're just trying to make a good story. And that has struck him. If you can edit a story to make it better, you can edit your life to make it better. He was in his 40s, no partner, out of shape, drinking too much. Miller began taking risks. He hiked Machu Picchu. He biked across the country. He faced challenges that pushed him out of his comfort zone. And these adventures gave him courage and opened friendships. These activities may seem self-focused still. But actually they were giving him courage and self-confidence to do other things.

And Miller notes, you become like the people you interact with. Eventually he confronted the deeper wound of his life. He had grown up fatherless. And out of that pain and with new courage, he sought reconciliation with his father. And out of that, he founded a non-profit to help other fatherless children. He learned that we can participate in shaping our own lives into better stories. And as Christians, there's more. We believe something even more profound. We believe there's a writer, capital W, outside ourselves, whispering a better story into our lives. And Miller put it this way, evil wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching people that life is only about who has the most power and money and toys. But God wants us to create beautiful, meaningful stories, teaching that life is always worth living. And doesn't that sound like the epistle's call to seize life that is really life? And it sounds like Jesus' words. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. Every great story, every epic, shows us that even conflicts and suffering can be woven into redemption if we face them with courage. Think about your favorite story, Narnia or Star Wars. Viktor Frankl, writing as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp, said, The plot is heading towards redemption, and we are all participants. That's the story the Bible tells from Genesis to Revelation, from creation to recreation, from life to life abundant.

Now, not all of us will start non-profits. Not all of us will give away millions. Not all of us will write books. But the invitation is the same: to live lives that bear fruit. And fruit shows up in small choices, in generosity, in listening, in seeing the person at our gate, right? Christian love is not simply a feeling. It is a disciplined habit of care and concern for self and for others. Jesus said, as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love. To abide in love is to let our lives be stories of redemption. And this is why we gather at church, and we know church is not the building, it's the congregation of the seeking. I like to think of church as a laboratory, a place where we can experiment with what God calls us to do and to be. And sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed. But all of it is part of a larger story.

So John and I had a professor in seminary who noted that in baseball, a batting average of 333 is considered excellent, an elite hitter. So you can fail two out of three times and still be a great player. Failure is part of the game, and discipleship is no different. The point is to step up to the plate. And Jesus said, you did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. And that is our calling, to live meaningful lives, to weave stories that reflect God's redemption, to let generosity and love become the fruit of our faith. Richard Rohr puts it this way. The Christian enjoys union on all levels. We begin with small connections to people and to nature, and we grow into deeper connectedness until finally we experience full union with God. How you do anything is how you do everything. Without connectedness, we don't fully exist as our truest selves, and no one goes to heaven alone or it would not be heaven. Each of our lives and the life of this community together mirrors the great story of redemption. It is indeed, as Donald Miller titled his book, a million miles in a thousand years and more.

I want to say, as this is my last sermon with you as your deacon, thank you. Thank you for letting me walk some of those miles with you. Thank you for trusting me with your stories. Thank you for experimenting with me in this laboratory of church. And thanks to John for allowing me to serve and share the pulpit. I've seen generosity here. I've seen faith here. I have seen you pursue the life that really is life. So I leave you with this encouragement. Keep writing your story with God. Keep looking for Lazarus at the gate. Keep seizing the life that really is life. And keep abiding in Christ's love, which is always, always enough. Blessings to you all. Amen.