Luke 16:19-31 Fr. Anthony reflects on the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, revealing how our blindness—born of sin and a materialist worldview—turns the world and one another into mere commodities. Yet when we learn to see with love and humility, tending creation as God's garden, we rediscover beauty, grace, and the feast of life already set before us. ---- The Gospel of Lazarus and the Rich Man Homily – gardening in love It is hard for us to live the way we should. From our time in Eden to now, we have failed, and the consequences to our hearts, our families, and our world have been disastrous. The world groans in agony. One of our challenges is that we do not see things as they really are. We do not see their beauty and we do not see how they are connected. Instead of seeing things as both intrinsically good and perfectible, we evaluate them based on what they mean for us; what we can get from them. We see through a mirror dimly, in part because of our personal sin, and in part because our corporate worldview is fallen. The two work together to blind us to the world and opportunities for grace. There is this idea that cultures that do not have a word for something, say for instance a specific color, then they cannot see it. Their visual system will receive the requisite frequencies for that color, but it will not match any concept within their minds, so it either gets mislabeled or simply missed altogether. This was certainly the case with the Rich Man in today's parable – somehow he missed seeing Lazarus and the opportunity for grace a relationship with him would have provided. Moreover, he and his community – here represented by his brothers – had missed the point of the entire religion that they claimed to be a part of. And Abraham says that even a great miracle – a man rising of a man from the dead – would not be enough to restore their sight. Humility is the root virtue of discernment; and in humility, we have to take it as a given that we are in may ways just like the Rich Man. And I say take it as a given, because if it is true, then we will automatically mislabel – in this case meaning justify – our misperceptions and the gaps in our vision. The Rich Man missed the purpose of his riches and his calling to serve the man at his doorstep; more than that, he missed the very purpose of his life; the thing he was put on this earth to do. We are like Him and his brothers – and we claim to know the truth of the resurrection. The Rich Man and his brothers had the same calling that all of us have. This is the calling given to us at the beginning; we talked about this yesterday. We were designed – made as God's imagers - to bring out the best in everything and everyone; to heal those that are hurt and to build up those who are already well towards perfection. But instead of this, our fallen materialist worldview and our sin combine, for example, to get us to think of things as objects and ourselves as consumers. We want to know what we can use things for and what we can get out of people. One of the results of this is that our souls are starving from - a lack of grace. We feast sumptuously on commodities, but cannot see the more real and and much more vital meal God has put before us. We feed our bodies, but take no thought of the food required for our souls. Again, let's go back to Adam and Eve. Think of how they fell. One of the ways to understand their fall (from St. Nikolai Velimirovich) is that they turned the thing they were meant to tend – the garden – into a commodity; from something that deserved respect and the greatest of care to something that was useful primarily as food. Even the thing God told them not to eat became a commodity to them: they wanted what it offered. And remember what they learned? That it "tasted good." What a loss. Hear me well: Adam and Eve were meant to eat the things that grew in the garden, but the availability of food was really just a side-effect (what economi