Weekly Mutterings.  People in the United States are among the most generous on earth, giving of their abundance to many worthy causes. At the same time we are also among the world’s guiltiest – that is, we feel guilty about our many advantages and blessings. I know this is true because sometimes I feel a twinge of guilt about living in the big house next to the church. Should a priest live in such a nice place, even if it is not his own? Perhaps you wonder about such a thing, too. Is there something wrong about being comfortable when there are so many poor and suffering people in the world, and in our own city?

The lurking suspicion that there is something wrong about being comfortable can make us very un-comfortable. Somewhere along the way, we absorbed the idea that God doesn’t like people who are successful. Jesus told a remarkable parable about Dives and Lazarus. Dives is a rich guy, comfortably well-off and well-fed. Lazarus lives in the same neighborhood as Dives, but is poor, sickly, and uncomfortable. Jesus does not say that Dives was a bad person because he was rich, or that Lazarus was morally superior because he was poor and sickly.

What bothered Jesus was that Dives simply didn’t care about people like Lazarus. The crime that sent Dives to the underworld, was that his prosperity gave way to indifference. It still happens today, of course. The poor suffer, and the comfortable simply change the channel. You and I are very fortunate people. We have advantages not available to many millions of people around the world, benefits that have made it easier for us to prosper. For this we are very grateful. But with great blessings comes the responsibility to care about those who are less blessed, and to avoid the danger of self-righteousness, or indifference, or the temptation to only spend time with people like ourselves. In Jesus’ parable, the rich man dug that chasm between Lazarus and him with his own two hands. The tragedy is that it never occurred to him to build a bridge instead.