Reading Francis

Luke 16:25-26 – “My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented. Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.”

Sometimes at lunchtime, I’ll go to daily mass at a church about 5 blocks from my office. It is mostly a factor of my laziness and partly a factor that I live in a place where a 5-block walk will turn you into a sweaty mess during most of the year, but I always drive to mass, even though in reality it turns out that it takes less time to walk.

This week, I walked.

Plenty has been said about how you see the world differently when you walk places rather than drive to them. My friend Peter Kageyama is one of many who has entire books on the value of walkable cities, so I won’t make those points here. 

Next to the church there is an exit ramp from the interstate, so you have to wait for the crossing light in order to get across the traffic. As I approached the intersection, I saw a man standing a few feet up the ramp from the intersection with a little cardboard sign asking for money from the cars he hoped would have to stop at the light. We didn’t make eye contact or talk; I wasn’t really his target audience.

Then we got to the Gospel reading at mass, which was the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. I’ve written more about that story (in fact, I tied it to a theme in Ted Lasso, which is about as on-brand as I can be). But this quote pretty much smacked me in the face.

I sat through the rest of mass, but I really wanted to jump up and yell “Stop!” because if you hear that reading and remember back in Matthew 5 that Jesus says, “if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift…” then we probably all should have called timeout, go out to the intersection to take care of that guy with the sign, and only after we knew he had what he needed could we have gone inside and resumed mass.

But that’s not what happened. I did find the one bill I had on me (who uses cash anymore?) so I could give it to him on my walk back. But when I left, he had gone. 

I’m hoping he went to the Salvation Army up the street that serves hot lunch every day, but in some ways, that isn’t the point. The point is, I had a chance not to be a hypocrite about what I believe, by walking a few steps out of my way, saying hello, getting the guy’s name, and giving him what I had, but I didn’t.

I share all this not solely as a way to confess my guilt and pass it along to you all. I share it also to say that sometimes the slow work of holiness wades through a lot of what looks like hypocrisy. It’s only by being confronted again and again by the stark disparity between what we do and what we’re supposed to do that some of us slowly bend toward the better.

During the Super Bowl, there were a few ads by a group called He Gets Us that tied Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and commanding them to do the same with images of people in the most divisive of settings washing feet instead of yelling at each other or much worse. I have friends who think that this campaign is a devious strategy to absolve allegedly Christian groups who are at the forefront of the culture wars from their actions, because, at least early on, the He Gets Us campaign was funded by people who have wrapped their faith around political positions that run contrary to the message of the ad campaign. And, look, maybe. But I’ve learned that I’m a lot better at making up motives for people that fit my worldview than I am at truly understanding why people do what they do, short of asking them directly.

If the He Gets Us ads smack you with the hypocrisy they expose, maybe it’s worth considering that the folks who fund the ads are getting smacked by that too. Whether that leads them to act differently in the future, who can say? But, unlike the rich man in Luke 16, they can’t say that they didn’t know the standard that they, just like I, are failing to meet. And we can hope that knowledge leads us all, in time, toward the better.