The hands of God

The word “Gospel” means “good news.” And the overarching message of the Bible is in fact good news. The good news of God’s love. The good news of Jesus’s life and resurrection.

But I’ll admit that I had to search for the good news in this week’s Gospel reading. Oh, it’s good news that God cares for the poor and suffering, of course. But the rest of it? A life of misery for Lazarus, filled with pain that ends only with death. An afterlife of misery for the rich man, separated from heaven by a great chasm—an unbridgeable gulf. No rescue. No second chance. Is that good news? For anyone?

Maybe this story is here to remind us that our choices matter, that ignoring suffering has consequences. But still I found myself looking everywhere for a bridge across the Gospel’s unbridgeable chasm. I found myself searching for the God who is always more ready to hear than we are to pray, for the God who gives more than we desire or deserve, for the God who forgives again and again.

I found that God this week more in the psalm than in the Gospel. Where the Gospel warns of a chasm, the psalm shows us a bridge. Where the Gospel closes a door, the psalm opens it wide, revealing who God is and what God does.

Psalm 146 tells us that God “keeps his promise for ever,” “gives justice to those who are oppressed, and food to those who hunger,” “sets the prisoners free,” “opens the eyes of the blind,” “lifts up those who are bowed low,” “loves the righteous,” “cares for the stranger,” “sustains the orphan and the widow,” and “frustrates the way of the wicked.”

That doesn’t sound like a God of unbridgeable chasms. That sounds like a God of hope.

But yet is that how the world works? Can a Lazarus of our world find hope and healing in this life? Can a thoughtless rich man find forgiveness and redemption?

Because we look around us and see that suffering is real. The hungry are still hungry. The poor are still overlooked. And all too often the wicked prosper without apparent consequence.

And yet the psalmist insists that God is at work. Feeding, healing, lifting, sustaining—even now. The psalm invites us to trust that God’s promises are true even when we can’t see their full reality.

And I wonder if the psalm might also suggest a role for us to play. Because if God is a God who feeds, heals, lifts up, and sustains, shouldn’t God’s people try to do the same?

I recently re-read a book by a woman named Sara Miles. Take This Bread is its name. Sara was a journalist and a lifelong atheist. But one day, almost by accident, she wandered into an Episcopal church in San Francisco. She sat down. A service began. The people sang, stood, sat, stood again. And then everyone moved towards the Table. Sara followed. Someone put a piece of bread in her hand, saying, “the Body of Christ.” A sip of wine followed, “the Blood of Christ.”

And then, as Sara puts it, “something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.”

In the weeks and months that followed, Sara returned to the church again and again, stepping ever deeper into the water of faith. Her first Communion could have ended where it began, as a private, mystical moment. But it didn’t. Because even though she couldn’t explain it, she had been fed, and she knew she was called to feed others.

And so she did. She started a food pantry right there on the church’s altar—distributing soup and granola bars and fresh produce from the very Table where she had first met Jesus in bread and wine. The pantry grew, feeding hundreds of people every week.

It was messy, because people are messy. Members of the parish were hesitant, a few neighbors hostile. But Sara and those who worked with her went on. What they built wasn’t just an outreach program. It was a community. Maybe even a church in its own right. A place where people in need could find both food and hope. A place where they could find Communion.

Because that’s the secret. God feeds the hungry. But sometimes God does it through us. God lifts up the lowly. But sometimes it’s our hands doing the lifting. God cares for the stranger. But sometimes it’s our voice that speaks words of welcome.

It’s simpler than we often think: bread, shared. And it’s harder than we want it to be: showing up, week after week, to do the work of love.

When life is hard, we want someone to save us. We pray for God’s intervention. Or we hope for a more earthly savior. But the psalm says, “put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth.”

Today’s psalm does promise that God is and always will be faithful. But the reality is that, more often than not, the work is ours to do.

You may have heard a line often attributed to St. Augustine: “Pray as though everything depends on God. Work as though everything depends on you.” At first glance, that might sound like a contradiction. Either God is in control or we are, right? But Augustine understood something deeper: that God chooses to work through human hands and hearts. Our prayers open us to see where God is already at work, and our work becomes the very means by which God’s love reaches the world. We’re not competing with God’s power. We’re participating in it.

We help build God’s kingdom every time we do the messy work of discipleship, every time we bring food for the Flint Hills Breadbasket, every time we serve biscuits at Happy Table, every time we take a stand on the side of justice, every time we choose mercy over indifference.

Sara Miles’ story shows us how God works—through ordinary people sharing ordinary bread. But let’s go back to that difficult Gospel reading for a moment.

The truth is that we are all Lazarus, suffering and in need. And we are all the rich man, selfish and thoughtless. And if a chasm does divide the two, it’s a chasm that maybe only God can bridge. The God who “gives justice to those who are oppressed, and food to those who hunger.” The God who is always faithful.

May we be the hands of God in our world.