Download Sermon TextSeptember 28: Your One Wild and Precious Life
Lisa Wiens Heinsohn
Your One Wild and Precious Life
Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn
given for the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church
September 28, 2025: Luke 16:19-31
Many of you are familiar with Mary Oliver, that wonderful poet who began to write poetry as a child. Her home life was very troubled, so she would escape it by going outside in nature with a notebook and a pencil and she would spend hours alone with the trees and the birds and the sky, and try to capture in words the magic she experienced all around her. Here is one of her most famous poems:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
I have been thinking a great deal about this poem and about its meaning lately. On Friday evening, one of our beloved members passed away—a woman in her fifties, Shanti Mittra. Last week, I did three other funerals for members of St. John’s. Life is short, as I say to you every week, and absolutely precious. As Mary Oliver says in her poem: everyone does die at last, and too soon. As your priest, the longer I am here with you, just about exactly seven years now, the more I know and love you, and the more keenly I feel the loss of any of you when you pass away. Life is precious.
Our gospel reading for today is a parable Jesus tells about a rich man and a poor man who live side by side until they both die and their fortunes in the afterlife are reversed: the rich man is in agony in Hades and the poor man resides in heaven in the bosom of Abraham, his great ancestor. It’s fascinating how the rich man’s perspective begins to shift even in his torment in this story. At first, he asks Father Abraham to send Lazarus to cool his tongue. He doesn’t even address Lazarus directly, still sort of imperiously seeing him as inferior, a servant, someone to do his bidding to make him feel better. You see the parallels between how Lazarus had longed to satisfy his hunger with a single crumb of food from the rich man’s table, and now the rich man wants a single drop of water to cool his tongue from Lazarus. When Father Abraham says this will not be possible, the rich man begins perhaps for the first time to think of anyone other than himself. Please send Lazarus then to my brothers to warn them, so that they will not also come here, the rich man begs. But again, Father Abraham says, they have Moses and the Prophets who have already warned them, and even someone returning from the dead will not convince them.
What would have made a difference to the rich man, to the rich man’s brothers? What would bridge the impassable chasm Father Abraham describes that exists between him and the rich man in Hades?
The answer, I believe, lies in the extent to which one can see and have compassion on those around us. Like Mary Oliver absolutely absorbed in observing the grasshopper eating sugar out of her hand with great delight, the rich man every day could have noticed Lazarus lying hungry and hurt at his gate. Even the dogs noticed Lazarus and had more compassion for him than the rich man did. The impassable chasm between Lazarus and the rich man in the afterlife is the same one that existed in this life: it was the one created by the rich man when he failed to see or notice or have compassion on Lazarus, and when he failed to listen to Moses and the prophets who were always there pointing toward that which matters.
Let me say immediately that I do not believe the main point of this story is about heaven or hell. I think Jesus is saying that what we do in this life matters, and that whether or not we see each other, whether or not we can have compassion, is of infinite consequence. What we do with our one wild and precious life creates realities in the seen and unseen worlds.
Father Greg Boyle is a Jesuit priest who has served in Los Angeles for many years. His parish was in an impoverished area of L.A. that saw a lot of gang violence by young teenagers, and Father Boyle was so distressed by the needless deaths of so many young people around him that he started an organization he called Homeboy Industries, specifically for formerly incarcerated young people. He gave them jobs and dignity and hope. He would go to prisons, hand out his business card and tell them to call him when they got out: he would give them jobs. He had compassion for them because he didn’t see them as different or less than himself. I suppose Father Boyle could have tried to shut himself off from the violence all around him, but he did not. He did not choose to blame or accuse or demonize the young people killing each other in gang warfare. He loved them instead. He wrote a book about his experience called Tattoos on the Heart: the Power of Boundless Compassion. More recently, he has written a book called Cherished Belonging: the Healing Power of Love in Divided Times. Father Boyle will be here in the Twin Cities, giving a keynote address in St. Paul on October 23, and information about that event will be in our e-news in the coming weeks. Father Boyle has allowed compassion to blossom in himself, and has used it to create new realities for people who are suffering. This is possible for any of us.
It is so hard for any of us to really grasp the fact that we are mortal, and not a single one of us knows how long we have on this earth. But what an absolute gift it is when we do begin to live each day as if it were our last. Ironically, recognizing that life is short allows us not to worry about things that don’t matter in the future or the past, but instead invites us not to put off things that matter. And for those of us who choose to follow Jesus’ way of love, to live fully means to have compassion. To step outside ourselves, to be so fully invested in the reality of another that we can delight in them as completely as Mary Oliver delighted in the grasshopper whose jaws moved side to side instead of up and down. In fact for Mary Oliver, the most significant thing she could do with her own one wild and precious life is to be what she called “idle and blessed” – to stroll through the fields, with an infinite capacity for noticing and delighting in everything around her. From this place, when you look without judgment or agenda at the world around you, sometimes you will see the beauty of a cloud or a flower or a dog or a child and you will feel delight. Other times you will truly see the suffering of another human being and you will be free to step forward to ask how you might be of service instead of judging, blaming or recoiling. It is so simple.
Mary Oliver said that she didn’t know exactly what a prayer was, but she did know how to pay attention. If the rich man had paid attention to Lazarus at his gate, perhaps he would have invited him in, offered him the shower, invited a doctor to come look at his sores, had a meal together. Perhaps they would have become friends. Perhaps the rich man’s life would have been infinitely blessed because he would have been freed from being curved in on himself. Perhaps he would have become like Father Boyle or Mary Oliver. Perhaps Lazarus would finally have been able to have enough to eat and would have healed enough that he could offer his own unique gifts to this world.
What matters, truly, to you? Where are you able to feel compassion? Where is compassion shut down in you? If you knew you had very little time remaining in your life, and that ironically your one job is simply learn to pay attention to everything around you and have compassion for all that you see, what might change in your life? What will you do with your one wild and precious life? Amen.
