I am currently laid up, having gone through a weekend feverish with a cough that sounds like it emerges straight from one of the deeper circles of Dante’s hell. While I wait to hear from my oncology team to see if they want me to come in to be checked out properly (my money is on pneumonia, but we’ll see), I thought I would share another hand-wringing, guilt-inducing homily with you. I’ve really been on a tear lately.

Anyway—having this Sunday off from my usual duties at St. Paul’s, I was invited to preach at one of our neighbour churches, St. Cuthbert’s Presbyterian. Truly a lovely congregation. The last time I preached for them was during COVID-tide, so I haven’t actually been back there in-person in quite a while. And the streak continues! Because of my aforementioned afflictions, I did as much for them as I could to assure the message would still be heard even without my corporal form germifying their space. I recorded a video between coughing fits and sent that along, but I also just included the manuscript itself in case Something Went Wrong.

And indeed it did, from my hearing. So I had the honour of this homily being read aloud by none other than famous Canadian woodworker John Terpstra. I hear he also writes pretty good poetry, too. At least, good enough to get a lifetime achievement award this year from the City of Hamilton.

If you wanted to hear that reading, you should’ve been there in person, I suppose. I won’t even get to hear it. It’s gone, floating into the aether, and the sound waves are gently shoving electrons out of the way as they traverse outer space by now.

If you want to hear my inferior reading of it, you can watch my recording here. If you want to read it yourself and pretend I sound like Christopher Walken, or Elmo, or something more fun than my usual voice, well, that’s your call.

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Proper 26 – 16th Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 6:1a, 4–7; Ps 146; 1 Tim 6:6–19; Luke 16:6–19
St. Cuthbert’s Presbyterian, Westdale
28 September 2025

I want to start this morning with a poem. I know with this crowd this is not a novel thing. I’m not trying to be endearing or cute. I was just sort of taken aback by the correlation between our readings this week and the events in the news that led to the creation of these verses. This is a poem by Lyndsay Rush entitled “I Was Told There’d Be a Handbasket”:

This is the bad place, we joke online
while secretly terrified it’s true
To be fair, 2025 does have purgatory vibes
so I see where we’re coming from
Could be that this is all a government experiment
or the aliens are toying with us or we’re in a simulation or
the multiverse or this is all in your head and mine
Maybe the rapture will actually happen tomorrow
and the best, oops, rest of us will be left behind
to replenish our empathy resources and
reboot humanity with a little more humanity
or maybe we’ve been doing this song and dance
forever and ever and we always end
up accidentally building billionaires and bigotry
Mary Oliver said
the world did not have to be beautiful to work
but it is
What the hell
do we do with that?

What do we do with that, indeed? I have to be careful here, because as an American, the last few weeks have caused me to want to preach angry, Jonathan Edwards-style homilies calling down fire and brimstone. Not in the same way that some down there are currently doing that, in a wretchedly blasphemous way. But I am reminded of two things this morning, as I think about the state of *gestures vaguely* everything, and I try to reconcile the disgust I feel with so much of what I see and read with the beauty of God’s Kingdom, a sort of life to which we are called that feels ever in tension with what surrounds us.

First, even though we are neighbours and we feel the effects of everything that happens down there, Canada is not America—for which I am extremely grateful, for a host of reasons; notwithstanding my ability to be treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma these past two years with no financial burden beyond the taxes I have already paid into the system. And occasionally having to pay for parking. The parking fee is an outrageous price when you’re just going to visit someone, but when you’re a patient receiving a treatment that would cost you $400,000 elsewhere, it starts to put things into perspective.

There is, however, a second thing I am reminded of. There is an almost universal tendency for us to think that what is happening to the world is always someone else’s fault; or someone else’s problem. That none of the things happening in America—certainly in other places, too—can happen here, can happen to us, because Canadians are better. We have healthcare and other social assistances, our public policy isn’t tied to religion in the same, way, etc. But there is the same heart problem with all of us.

It’s easy to read these passages this morning and reductively think: ok, having money means you’re headed to hell. Amos is pissed off at the rich people in the divided kingdoms, Jesus is pissed off at the rich people in Jerusalem (Jesus has a lot to say about the difficulties of being rich from a heavenly perspective), and Paul is pissed off at the rich people everywhere else in the Mediterranean. Having grown up extremely poor in the American south, that’s basically what I implicitly learned from reading passages like these. The problem though is that we were all inherently hypocritical; we didn’t hate the rich people, we hated that we weren’t them.

So it’s easy—for most of us, I’d wager—to read Amos’s woes and shout “yes! Amen!” He’s just a shepherd and farmer, he’s not a rich guy—he’s one of us! He’s living right on the border between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Amos never got to experience a united kingdom; his only reality was north vs. south. And the south did not like the north. King Uzziah is sitting in Jerusalem in the southern kingdom, he’s the pinnacle of kingly reign, he’s the second coming of King David (and, foreshadowing, like David he’ll make some grave mistakes). But sitting in Samaria…Jeroboam II. Oof. Real bonehead. Had absolutely no problem with the blasphemous, idolatrous worship going on daily in Dan and Bethel. Conquered more territory for the northern kingdom for the express purpose of generating wealth. Built up as much capital as he could while alienating Israel’s neighbours—hedonistic, materialistic. Would do anything for a shekel. It would be extremely easy for a prophet to self-righteously dunk on everything happening in the northern kingdom.

But listen to what Amos says:

Woe to those who are at ease in Zion and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria.
Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and lounge on their couches and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the stall,
who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp and like David improvise on instruments of music,
who drink wine from bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!
Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile, and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away.

It’s not just the northern kingdom getting the blame here. Anyone who values riches and comfortability and not caring for the land and its bounty and its creatures—these are the people being exiled, akin to being abandoned by YHWH. They have set their hearts on earthly things, have completely ignored God’s calls for justice and peace and righteousness. Amos is talking about both a physical and spiritual exile here, a disconnection from the God of their ancestors in more ways than one.

I wonder if Jesus is saying the same thing, in different words, in our Luke passage. It feels a bit more pointed, a bit more focused, even, on just the spiritual foibles of being a rich person. But I think there’s something more going on.

There’s an unhelpful gap between last week’s Gospel reading and this week’s that actually gives us more context for Jesus’ words here. The greater context introduced by verse 1 here in chapter 16 tells us that Jesus is speaking to his disciples; but in verse 14, which is skipped, we see that the Pharisees are eavesdropping. You may remember from the reading a few weeks ago when Jesus has his night-time heart-to-heart with Nicodemus, a Pharisee, that Jesus is very, very good at tailoring his message to his audience. So while here he might be speaking more or less directly to his disciples, he knows there are listening ears on the periphery.

Who were the Pharisees, those listening ears? Yes, they were big fans of living by the letter of the law; yes, they were hypocrites in Jesus’ eyes. And he’s contextually framed this lesson by talking about the afterlife—now that was something the Pharisees were really into figuring out. The Pharisees were laser focused on knowing what was “next”—they did it in a way that exposed their particular interest in thinking they’d unlocked some secret “code”, that there was way more to life than just this life. Before the Pharisees, there wasn’t really a cohesive Israelite or early Jewish picture of what happens after we die. There’s this notion of “Abraham’s bosom” that pops up in some places—which is really just some place you go where Abraham also lives. It wasn’t hell, but it also wasn’t like how many people now picture “heaven” either. I’m not sure how many of you might have caught the reference to this in the poem I read or seen the hit television show The Good Place, but, besides being very funny, it depicts something existing between heaven (the “good place”) and hell (the “bad place”) called the “medium place.” That’s Abraham’s Bosom. It was just kind of a…medium place. Jesus is adding to that notion here. He’s also describing something more in line with how the Pharisees’ imagination would’ve been shaped by the ways the prevailing Greek culture thought about this idea of Hades. He’s mashing these ideas together to great effect.

But why? I think Jesus is following in Amos’s footsteps here—I think he actually has the same message. I very much doubt any of his audience in this context were particularly rich—his disciples drew from all walks of life, but the majority of them would just be normal, average people. The Pharisees were probably in the middle class in Jesus’ day. So I don’t think Jesus is just telling a story here about not being rich. I’ll re-read the final verses of the parable. “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ He said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’” We are hearing echoes of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in John 3: if you can’t understand earthly things, how are you ever going to understand heavenly things? And of course, Jesus is foreshadowing the miracle of the Gospel: that after his earthly ministry, he will die and be resurrected. And if the hearers of his powerful message about this new way of life, about the righteousness of God, aren’t willing to change their ways to align with his while he’s standing right in front of them, what are the chances they’ll listen once he’s ascended? If they’re not willing to believe in God’s promise rooted in the unconditional love of the Father, embodied by the Son, poured out by the Holy Spirit, while God speaks that promise directly into their ears—how will they possibly recognize the victory of life over death? How will they see that they have, in actuality, been liberated from the shackles the world and its love of hoarding and pride and hate and …?

So I think what we see this morning is that love of money is a synecdoche—that’s one of those $100 words that tells people you’ve been to university, but please stick with me. Synecdoche is mentioning one thing as a stand-in for something larger. Love of money is bad, but I think it’s a synecdoche for all of the comfortability that comes at the expense of caring for the poor, of providing for widows, of welcoming in the foreigner. Do not get hung up on the being rich part; this is why I say that both Amos and Jesus’ messages are truly for all of us.

If the prophet Amos is talking about an universal issue here, of hearts divided and set against each other, of selfishness and greed and disregard for our fellow humans—on both sides—we must then be prepared to ask ourselves: what is our own sin, the thing we must admit as our plaything that distracts us from the life of the kingdom that has come in part all around us? The sin of the rich man in Hades was not simply possessing money—it was a complete obstinance and nearsightedness. Money is not the only thing that sets us against each other—I mean, admittedly I will be the first to say that capitalism has created a monster out of us, and altogether of the Church of Christ. But really, the love of anything that bypasses or subjugates the two loves Jesus taught us—for God and for our neighbours as ourselves—fits the mold just as well. And unfortunately we live in a world that is topsy-turvy from the Kingdom way of living. It doesn’t take a super-disciple of Christ to see that. I’m reminded of Tolkien’s adage, come from the mouth of Thorin Oakenshield on his deathbed, leader of the dwarves in the Hobbit who were set on retaking the Lonely Mountain from the dragon Smaug: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

The Good News of the Gospel for us this morning is this: God has taught us how to live with each other, and though it is difficult, it is made easier by recognizing that we are all together enabled by his Spirit to demonstrate what Kingdom living truly looks like—a united Kingdom of all the people who God has created, who God has called into relationship with him. May we be willing to set aside the things that distract us from this regal calling. May our hearts be open to riches that do not fade. And may we take the words of the prophets seriously, calling out sin and injustice and refusing to be tempted to temporal gains.

Amen.