Lenten journey: Surplus government American cheese

      The Gospel for today is the great story of the rich man who lives a magnificent life while a man named Lazarus lays outside the man's gate begging for scraps while dogs lick at Lazarus' oozing wounds. Pretty vivid.

      The message here might be two fold. One is that while these two men lived polar opposite while living, the roles are reversed on death. Lazarus lays at the bosom of Abraham and the rich man is sent to hades. A very interesting topic for discussion. If you have some great ideas about this message, I'd love to hear it.

       The second message is a bit more subtle.  As Jesus has said, we will always have the poor among us.  So I raise the question of whether the rich man knew about Lazarus or not. Surely the rich man's guilt is not simply being rich and eating well. If so, I have the 'eating well' pretty down pat, I might want to start preparing myself for a drastically warmer climate while I have a chance. Actually I think God would be happy if we were all rich but we are not, for a whole host of reasons.

      The answer then is, the rich man was supposed to know that either Lazarus was at his doorstep if only by simply opening his eyes or that his wealth should have been used to help others, the poor, the needy, the starving. We are all given gifts and God expects us to use those talents or gifts - for His glory. The other point is that we need to look around. What is going on around us?

      I used to live in a bungalow community. There was a good mix of very old people in these bungalo's as well as young couples who found the housing was good as a starting point in life. You might not know it but many of the older people went hungry.  On fixed incomes and dwindling or no savings, food was not always plentiful. These seniors had to be savy about church breakfasts, soup suppers and free givernment hand outs. I know many took advantage of huge bricks of cheese which were labelled as government surplus.  If you stayed to yourself and didn't angage anyone you might not realize your neighbors could almost literally be starving around you.  We need to look around and see what is going on.

       The message then is that we have no excuses not to be concerned with our neighbors and our fellow man. God loves them at least as much as He loves us. We are God's hands here on earth. We need to use our gifts, talents and treasure.