Before It's Too Late - Homily for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time - C

23 Million. 23 million is the number of refugees that are currently in the world. Over 5 million of them are from Syria and over half of them are children under the age of 18.

Many of you know that I was privileged to go with Catholic Relief Services to Greece and Serbia earlier this year to work with the Syrian refugees – to see their plight, to hear their stories, to provide what aid we could. So I was very interested to hear about the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants that was held earlier this week.

At that Summit, President Obama read a letter from Alex who saw the picture of 5 year old Omran Dagneesh, a casualty of the bombing in Aleppo, as he sat filthy, bloodied, and dazed in the ambulance. Here is what the letter said:

Dear President Obama,

Remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria? Can you please go get him and bring him to [my home]? Park in the driveway or on the street and we will be waiting for you guys with flags, flowers, and balloons. We will give him a family and he will be our brother. Catherine, my little sister, will be collecting butterflies and fireflies for him. In my school, I have a friend from Syria, Omar, and I will introduce him to Omar. We can all play together. We can invite him to birthday parties and he will teach us another language. We can teach him English too, just like my friend Aoto from Japan.

And I will share my bike and I will teach him how to ride it. I will teach him additions and subtractions in math.

Thank you very much! I can't wait for you to come!

Alex

6 years old

“We will give him a family and he will be our brother”.

I was thinking about Alex and about the rich man in the parable. Alex was willing to share his toys, his time, his home – and make him his brother. The rich man behaved as if he wasn’t even aware of Lazarus lying at his gate, and if he was aware, he was too complacent to care. What had happened to the rich man? Where did he lose the compassion and the kindness that even 6 year old Alex could display? Had he grown into a life of cynicism? Was he ruined by a habit of self-indulgence? Did he just react to people like Lazarus out of fear?

The rich man is not named in the parable – maybe he could be any of us. It’s not his wealth that’s the problem – it’s his indifference. He isn’t able to reach across the gap that separates him from Lazarus, and as a consequence, that gap becomes an enormous abyss in the afterlife. After death, he recognizes Lazarus, he even knows his name, but it’s too late. The abyss is already too large to get across.

There is a gap, too, between us and young Omran and all the Syrian refugees. In a sense, these refugees lie at our gate, perhaps not covered in sores, but wanting only to take some of the crumbs that fall from our very, very, rich table. They are:

·       Ahmed whom I met in Serbia - an electrical engineer and who had to move his family three times to escape the bombing and the violence that threatened him, his wife, and his four boys

·       Hiatt – whose husband was killed in this brutal war, and who was making this trip with her 5 children. Her children hadn’t been to school in three years because of the war, she explained, and she was trying to find a new home where, in her words, her children could learn, and not just learn war

·       Or Samir – a young boy of about 8 who lost his shoe when his foot got stuck in the muck as he got out of the overcrowded rubber raft that had brought him and his family from Turkey to Greece. Since we didn’t have any shoes to give him, we tried to make a new shoe out of 5 or 6 pairs of socks

·       Or Saad, Nabil, and Hussein – three young men in their 20s whose families had sent them all on ahead to be “ice-breakers” as they are called – to find places to live for their families to establish a base so that they could pave the way for their Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters, Grandma and Grandpa.

In commenting on this parable earlier in the year, Pope Francis said that as long as Lazarus was lying in front of his house, there was a chance for salvation for the rich man – but once they are both dead, the situation was irreparable. It was too late.

The rich man had squandered his chance to do the right thing. He had missed the sign of God’s kingdom in the everyday affairs of his life.

We must reach out to Lazarus, and Ahmed, and Hiatt, and Samir, and Saad, and Nabil, and Hussein and bridge the gap – “give them a family and make them our brothers and sisters “– and we have to do it now - before it’s too late.