When is the last time you felt really alive? Can you think of a “peak experience” when you may have thought, “This is it, this is what life is about.” To quote our reading from 1 Timothy, when did you feel that you had taken hold of life that is really life?

What were the elements of those times for you? People you loved? Or strangers? Were you in nature or in the city? Was it simple moment or something grand?

If you’re like a lot of folks, it’s the simple moments with people you love or people you’re connected to in some way. Yes, our big days can be glorious but so can simply sitting down to a basic meal with friends or family. Nothing special, but just the basics are often the elements of these special moments.

Our advertising world would have us believe that we need the right new car to take hold of life that is really life. Or our political world would have us believe that we need all the right people in power with the right policies firing on all cylinders for us to take hold of life that is really life. Some of us might say that what I need to really take hold of life that is really life is to have my family be a certain way or my health be a certain way or my waistline be a certain way or my job be a certain way.

But often this is not how life is and I don’t think it’s how God is. We don’t need anything in particular to take hold of life that is really life other than to be aware of the gifts that surround us and to be in right relationship with others. Or we could say, if we’re speaking in the language of the church, we are to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and to love other people as ourselves. After all, if we were to describe the experience of loving the Lord our God, we might describe it as being present, being aware of the gifts that we are given, and being grateful to the mysterious source of life for those gifts. It’s looking at our life, our world, and this exact moment with an awareness of the gifts that are given along with gratitude and perhaps a little awe and humility sprinkled in there. And to love our neighbors (aka everyone) as ourselves is to see that they too are fully included in God’s abundance, just as we are, which makes us neighbors and family.  

We can all do that now. We can all have that experience today and every day. Perhaps the everyday life doesn’t have that “peak experience” feeling when you’re flooded with the awesomeness of God or of Life. However, the gifts are given every day. We can give thanks for the reality every day. We can look for the gifts every day. And we can practice knowing that our fellow man and all of creation is included in this promise, as siblings in Christ, siblings in that abundance.

The call of Jesus in our lives is ultimately that simple. Love God, love Life (with a capital L), and love each other as Jesus loves us. The rest of the stuff we fill our lives with is just detail, really. And despite all the noise and hype of the world, these details will not deliver the joy of living a life that is really life, again to quote our 1 Timothy reading.

Even so, even though we know this, we get lost in the details. We get distracted and drop the work that is really ours to do, which is to love God, love others, and to stay awake to all the ways we can love people and the world.

In our gospel, the rich man feasts abundantly every day and ignores Lazarus’ suffering at his gate. Does this sound like a world we might recognize? There’s a detail here that’s different than the world we’re familiar with, however. In the ancient world, outside the gates of the mansions of the wealthy, there was a place for the poor to sit and wait to be fed the remainder of the sumptuous feasts that happened inside the house. These places were built into the structure of these compounds. Feeding the poor at your gate was a basic part of the social contract of the society that the rich man did not meet. It’s almost as if he would have had to go out of his way to not feed Lazarus. He would have had to tell his servants in the house doing the work of the feasts to not feed Lazarus, because that was just what was done. That was the norm and it was a basic part of life.

 And it sounds like it wasn’t just him in his family behaving so poorly in his community, but all his siblings, as well. They too needed to be reminded of the basics. This wasn’t complicated or going outside life as usual, even if life as usual was still full of injustice. So, not only was this not good behavior on the rich man’s part, it was perhaps an active refusal to acknowledge Lazarus’ existence as a fellow human, a fellow son of Abraham.  

As we listen to this dialogue unfold in the gospel, the rich man is still not getting the basic reality of his shared brotherhood with Lazarus. Did you notice, he only speaks about Lazarus and not to him while he is right there. Rude. But he also demands that Lazarus leave the loving comfort of his current situation after all the indignity he suffered at this man’s hands to tell the rich man’s greedy family to shape up. The rich man believes it’s Lazarus’ work to save his family from their fate because they are busy not doing the basics, as well. In the rich man’s mind, only certain people are precious, apparently, and that still does not include Lazarus, even as he is held in the bosom of Abraham.

I love Abraham’s response to this. The siblings have what they need to do the basics. They have Moses and the prophets. They know what to do. They just don’t do the basics.

And it is basic for us to see the humanity, the inherent dignity of another human, to see their need and try to meet it. It’s part of who we are to do this.

But somewhere along the way, we get distracted. We get confused about what is important and central in our lives. We forget the basics and prioritize whatever it is that we prioritize. The Luke gospel, in general, is very focused on economic disparities and injustice. That is a problem still today for sure. We too get distracted by money. We chase it, hoard it, idolize those with it, and look down on those without it. All that happens. But that’s not the only way we get distracted from loving the Lord our God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. We have many ways we do this.

Lately, I’ve heard a lot about the growing hate in our society and I assume you have, as well. We hear about the growing divisions, the growing dissatisfaction we have with each other, sometimes even calling each other the enemy from within and other slurs. These lines of division we take so seriously can be political, economic, gender based, racial, generational, or religious. It can even be football teams or even Ford vs Dodge (Is that still a thing?). We humans are endlessly creative about how to draw lines that define who we are to love and who we don’t or perhaps who to actively hate and reject.  

But all our divisions are made up details that distract us from the basic call to love the Lord our God (aka love Life and all that is with awe and humility) and to love each other regardless of circumstances or details. These are the basics.

I’m about to finish reading a book called “Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork”. It’s the diary and letters of a young Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Holland. Through her diaries, we witness the slow tightening of the screws of Nazis action against her Jewish community until her diaries give way to letters from Westerbork, an internment camp close to Amsterdam that imprisoned people until they were shipped to Poland by train car. She describes the suffering and the dark realities of her life in the camp. And yet we also witness her unfolding spiritual awakening through her writing and how she continues to see and experience the beauty of life. Etty is wonderfully focused on the basics and what is most real. She wrote in a letter to her friend Maria:

“Many feel that their love of mankind languishes at Westerbork because it receives no nourishment – meaning that people here don’t give you much occasion to love them. “The mass is a hideous monster; individuals are pitiful,” someone said. But I keep discovering that there is no causal connection between people’s behavior and the love you feel for them. Love for one’s fellow man is like an elemental glow that sustains you. The fellow man himself has hardly anything to do with it. Oh Maria, it’s a little bare of love here, and I myself feel so inexpressibly rich; I cannot explain it.” (Page 323)

This is an expression of life that is really life within the barbed wire of an internment camp. This is an expression of a woman who knew her own life, and the life of her whole family and the majority of her friends, was condemned to death by the Nazi war machine. This was a woman who studied her Bible, who knew Moses and the prophets, and had the basics down. And she practiced them, even as she was eventually sent to Auschwitz and was killed within 4 months of writing this letter.

The call of the gospel on our lives some days feels complicated. And yet the basics are pretty straightforward. We are to love God, love life, and love each other. This is what it is to take hold of life that is really life. This is the promise of God for us, regardless of circumstances. We too can be inexpressibly rich every day, carried and loved in the bosom of Christ. We can indeed focus our hearts on the basics and be at home with God.

AMEN