The Call to Conversion of Life

It’s good to be with you all here this morning. Especially as it was touch and go earlier in the week… with all the anticipation around the Rapture. You heard about that, right? Apparently, someone shared with the world that Jesus came to them in a dream back in 2018 to let them know the Rapture would happen on September 23, 2025.[1] I realize this isn’t the first time the world’s anticipated an event like this, but this year, given where we are as a country and as a world, when I heard the Rapture was imminent, a part of me didn’t think it would be so bad. Even though this is absolutely not my theology, I like to think I keep a somewhat open mind … and, I must admit, I didn’t think it would be too bad to be proven wrong on this, and have the Rapture actually take place sometime on Tuesday, as promised.

… I’m not proud of it, but I was a little bit disappointed when I woke up on Wednesday and absolutely nothing had happened.

Having Jesus take care of it all would actually be so good, and so welcomed right about now. Nothing we’re doing seems to be making much of a difference, and so for a fleeting moment there I, too, longed for God to do something massive, to take care of it for it for us, in one dramatic and decisive divine act.

We live in a strange and peculiar world. We have millennia of accumulated wisdoms, tested spiritual knowings that connect us today with the ancients who came and lived before us. Our bodies, our physical selves, have evolved to be wonderfully and intimately interconnected with the world we live in, with the complexity of life we share this world with; and we have our Christian faith, born of a wildly long lineage that reaches back through the ages, a lineage of spiritual teachings that offer us firm guidance for how to live, how to be. We’ve repeatedly been told, through the ages, how to do life well together, how it all could be so much better than it is.

We’ve been taught a ton through the history of humanity; humanity has witnessed and responded to a lot; as human beings we sense a lot and have an instinct for even more, and yet … we, humans, tend to ignore all we “know”-  trading it, instead, for the junky ideas floating on the surface of the current moment. We get caught up here, on the surface, and we get frustrated and uncomfortable that things are the way they are. And so we yearn for the world to change, for something to happen, for someone to do something. For an event like the Rapture!

And the junk floating around on the surface, it’s only really concerned with the individual self. It places super-high value on comfort, on wealth, on having power over people and place; it values these things, actually, more than the life of the whole. And for those of us shaped by a society like this, all the world, the people, the plants, the animals, all of it can be thought of as existing solely to be ‘of service,’ all of it as resources to be taken and used, misused, and abused to indulge our comforts and wants. With this worldview, if we want things to be better, it’s the world that needs to offer it up – because the world ‘out there’ exists for us and for our needs.

Even when he’s dead, the rich man in our Gospel reading today, expects someone else to do something for him! “Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue” he calls out to Abraham. The rich man looks out, spots Lazarus, and immediately has a plan to put him to work for his own benefit, for his comfort.

In this context, it’s a staggering self-centered move! And yet, we’re the inheritors of a cultural way of being that shaped the rich man and still shapes us today. I think it’s highly likely that at some point or another, each one of us has thought: if only that person/those people would do what I want them to do, live or think or act the way I want them to – then, the world I’m forced to live in would be far more bearable. But people aren’t so quick to do our bidding, they have their own ideas, we are not of one mind - and so perhaps this is one reason why there’s so much violence of speech and action in this world we live in.

The rich man also begs Abraham to send Lazarus to his father’s house, to his five brothers, who – we must assume – are living as large he was. He wants to “use” Lazarus, a man from the dead, as a way to teach his brothers how they should be living, as a warning, so they can amend their lives and avoid ending up where he is. Abraham counters, he says if they’ve not paid attention to Moses and the prophets (if they’ve not learned from millennia of tested teachings and wisdoms handed down to this generation by the ancients) they absolutely will not listen, even to someone who’s back from the dead.

And this is true today, right?

We have it all, all the ancient wisdoms and teachings, God has given us Holy Scripture, a Savior, the Church, the Saints - but our society is noisy and demanding, and we are easily distracted. The culture we live in insists on being our primary teacher, so we learn to look out at the world around us, see it as separate from us, and we learn to claim and wield power over it to make it what we think we want, what we think we need, we learn to want to change it, and to change the people in it to suit us.

Yet, as Christians, we’re also inheritors of the Way, of Jesus’ Way – a way of living that draws our attention, crucially, to our interior world. Jesus’ Way teaches us to spend time ‘there’ get to know that world, work to transform that world, our own interior world. Jesus’ way is the most ancient of ways, and it emphasizes we are entirely interconnected, actually, and entirely dependent on God, and on this planet, and on one another for all of life, for all we have, for all we are; we are all in this together.

This is a ‘knowing’ that’s found deep in the being, in the heart; our relationship with God is a truth of our embodiment, of our whole selves. Jesus’ Way calls our attention to that, teaches and encourages our embracing of that, so that this inner knowing, our call to our own ongoing transformation, that is what we’re called to pay attention to, to listen to, and that’s what we can change.

Our best life, our true comfort, a healed world, an end, finally, to humanity’s abuse and exploitation of this planet and of one another doesn’t start and end out there, with everyone and everything ‘out there’ changing. There is no voice, no information, no new thought or well-articulated idea, there is no scientific development that can ever speak out a truth that will finally bring about the kind of change we’re all waiting for. … the change that’s needed must happen in here. It starts with each one of us taking seriously the immense impact our own conversion of life will have on the great unbroken story of life in God that’s still unfolding on this planet.

But it’s not easy, and it will take effort, and it’s going to take courage and creativity and commitment and faith,
it’s going to take all that for change to be lasting and to be real and good, and it has to come from within.
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So, in these times, whenever we find ourselves longing for the world to change, longing for God to do something decisive that will heal this broken world, let’s remember that God already did. In Christ Jesus we have all we need, have been taught all we need to learn, have been told all we need to hear; it’s up to us whether we choose to listen. Amen.

the Rev. Linzi  Stahlecker
September 28, 2025
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[1] https://www.today.com/popculture/rapture-tiktok-september-23-24-rcna233251