Reflection for Sunday – September 28, 2025
Readings: Amos 6:1a, 4-7; 1 Timothy 6: 11-16; Luke 16: 19-31
Preacher: Marilyn Catherine
Raise your hand if you want to be poor.
I’m not raising my hand. In our world of “haves” and “have nots” being poor conveys a life of struggle, stress, lack. It’s not the side I want to be on; is that the side God wants me to be on? That’s the question I would always fear as I heard this Gospel. I was listening with my dividing mind, missing the perspective of the unitive and relational. A lesson in this Season of Creationhelped shift my viewpoint.
I had my second experience of watching a Monarch Butterfly evolve from egg to first flight. Previously I had learned what to expect with each stage. What struck me this time was the individuality of each of these creatures. I was familiar with how things could be alike and different in my own kind, but I never stretched my imagination to consider unfamiliar beings in the same way.
I was humbled to realize how limited my view was. I thought multiply the 8.7 million species on the earth by the possible number of organisms in each species and then remember that each of those organisms was unique—suddenly my mind leaped to the Genesis story of God creating a world teeming with life, overflowing with abundance, and infinite in its goodness, diversity, and interconnectedness. Creation is rich indeed and God gave these riches to us all.
Yes, we are meant to be rich but not in the way of haves and have-nots. We are rich in relationship. Rich in divine intimacy. God is part of every facet of creation operating in the world, from the smallest of organisms to the greatest mountain range, the air we breathe, the water that gives us life, all the creatures upon the Earth, including all humanity.
“The good life” is not for just a few. Today’s Scriptures offer us a blueprint for how everyone and anyone leads a rich life and warns us of how things can go wrong.
The Prophet Amos rebukes those who have selfishly and self-centeredly amassed the finest comforts, the finest food and drink, the costliest of goods for their own pleasure. This is a rebuke against the kind of attitude we would call “entitlement“ and the skewed behavior that follows from that mindset.
In contrast, the Psalm focuses our perspective on praising God, the true Giver of comfort, the first Provider of our needs, the loving Sustainer of the vulnerable and the disadvantaged, the Source of all enjoyment. It is not a sense of entitlement but a stance of humility and gratitude that shapes the foundation of a rich life.
In the second reading Paul exhorts Timothy to continue to enact the faith, to keep Jesus’ commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no room in this command, nor in God’s world, for self-sufficiency. The Trinity is relational, so is all creation—the bottom line written into all existence is interdependence. At the end of this chapter Paul puts it this way: command them…to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share…so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man Jesus yet again highlights that our human propensities are not always God’s ways. Immediately we can sense Jesus turning the tables. In the world of haves and have-nots, the names of billionaires are famous, but the other side are simply “the poor.” Jesus gives the poor one a name, a common name shared by many—and the rich man, well he’s nothing but a superficial description.
In the way he lived his life, the rich man himself created that “great chasm” that prevents Lazarus from crossing one side to the other.
The time for ecological conversion is now. We have the prophet Amos, the experience of the Psalmist, Paul’s instruction, the model of Jesus Christ, the cry of the Poor, the cry of the Earth, Pope Francis’ encyclical, Pope Leo’s message:
Environmental justice—implicitly proclaimed by the prophets±—can no longer be regarded as an abstract concept or a distant goal. It is an urgent need that involves much more than simply protecting the environment. For it is a matter of justice—social, economic and human. For believers it is also a duty born of faith…
What will it take to persuade us?
She is active in her parish and founded the Creation Stewards Ministry there in 2007.
She is a writer and storyteller with "Women of the Well."In her opinion some of the best homilies come to us through the arts.
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