Lazarus’ Sores

A response to Luke 16:19-31

It is never a bad time to call out the wealthy, the one percent, the winners in society but today, with Greta Thunberg and the rest of our restless prophets and activists standing up for our earth, it is particularly fitting to not only point our fingers at them but to demand change, to demand equality.

And for the first time in history we are actually starting to hear from the very voices that were once silenced. These voices gained traction through events like one bold woman of colour sitting at the front of a bus, the women’s liberation and the #metoo movement, the legalisation of gay marriage, or the movement towards reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples. When I start to think about how far we have come as a society, even in the past 50 years, I am astounded at the change and the progress towards equality. Personally, as a young, mixed woman, I have often taken for granted the ability to call out inequality, unethical practice or bullying culture countless times in the workplace, at church and throughout my upbringing. Something that wouldn’t be the case if I had been born a few decades earlier.

But with equality comes push-back as its very nature challenges the patriarchal, consumption-based society that lines the 1%’s pockets with 50% of the world’s wealth. For they are the ones who stand to lose the most from equality. But when we think about climate change, inequality doesn’t overtly stand out as the underlying cause. However, once you scrape past the surface it isn’t hard to see that those who benefit most from our current societal structures are those who make the most from our world’s destruction. And because our earth has been the most voiceless in society, it has been the most abused, the most oppressed and the most used up simply because we have not been able to hear it. It saddens me to know we had the opportunity to integrate the culture, the wisdom and the spirituality of our Aboriginal sisters and brothers when the colonisers first landed in this country. Had we listened to them and learned how to hear the land and integrate this way of listening into every aspect of our life, our world might be in a better position than it is today. I often think how Christianity could stand to have changed because of it too: how we could have actually been transformed by living into a trinity that truly symbolises inclusion, equality and unitedness of all beings and all things.

But it’s not too late. It never is. No matter how excruciatingly long or how ever slow it takes we must continue to live and breathe towards equality. This means listening to the 90 year old’s stories, sitting and holding hands with someone with down syndrome, laughing and playing with children, singing deeply, dancing boldly and standing up for earth on the rich soil our ancestors reside in because they are counting on us, so are our children and our children’s children. So are the 1000 year old trees and the dolphins in the sea. The time is now to fight bureaucracy, politics and patriarchy that for far too long has been the status quo, the paralysing system that is eating away at our earth. The way of the feminine, that is, the way of equality is coming whether we are a part of it or not. Our earth is Lazarus and it is time to hear her cries and heal her sores.

So go, love mercy, walk humbly and act justly with our earth. For she is the only one we have.