NINETEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST 2016 LUKE 16:19-31
The journey on the London Underground from my apartment to the office where I worked was only 20 minutes, but that morning it seemed like hours. Anxiety will do that to you. It grabs the minutes and expands them until they are unbearably eternal. In the evenings, on my way home, the clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails soothed me, rocked me gently towards, and even into, sleep. This morning, however, each clickety reminded me of the frightening task ahead, each clack taunted me.

The train station nestled on the edge of a pocket park on the north bank of the Thames, about 400-yards from my workplace. Three days earlier, as I strode that quarter mile, I noticed a young man sitting on the street, huddled in a blanket, politely asking for money from passersby. I was used to homeless people. It was London. It was 1990. I was so familiar with this sight that I became hardened to it. Blind, even. Apathy had grown scales over my eyes, so much so that that I’d grown accustomed to not seeing. But if there was one tiny piece of my eyesight that had not become obscured by apathy, this man wandered into it and forced me to behold him. He was wearing surprisingly good clothes; he spoke with an educated accent, he had the look of a stranger to a life on the street. He didn’t belong there. And I passed him by. The next day he was there again. And the next. And I passed him by. By now he had crawled inside my head,
had squeezed his way into my eyes and was chiseling away at those scales that time and apathy had grown. He whispered in my ear, bugging me with questions. Why was he on the street? Did he have a drink or drug problem? Was he mentally ill and unable to manage life in conventional society? Had he been abused or treated cruelly by his family and run away from home? Where did he come from? What was it like to be him, robbed of his dignity, his comforts and the basic human right to have a roof over his head and food in his stomach?

I needed to know. And so, after three days of.... (read the full Sermon here: I can't be bothered with apathy.pdf )