“The Attack upon the Chew House” by Howard Pile Credit: Wikimedia

A Homily for the Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Reading: Amos 6:1a, 4-7    1 Timothy 6:11-16    Luke 16:19-31

The tides of war often turn on the unexpected, such as attacking the enemy on an unanticipated front. General George Washington attempted to do just that when he assailed Philadelphia by way of Germantown on Oct. 4, 1777. What was then the American capital city was occupied by British forces under the command of General William Howe. 

The year before, the same strategy had brought victory against the Hessians at Trenton, but this battle proved to be a resounding defeat for the revolutionaries. In The Fate of the Day (2025), the second volume of his magnificent Revolution trilogy, Rick Atkinson records the aftermath of the fight, retrieving two details that speak to a battlefield compassion that has surely been echoed in armed conflicts down the centuries. 

Hundreds of curious sightseers made their way from Philadelphia to poke about. Even ardent loyalists could pity the seventeen rebels buried under a cherry tree near the front gate. Another thirty went into a single pit by the northwest corner of the house. A redcoat who found a speechless dying man urged him, “Pray now for your soul.” As a British burial detail collected the enemy dead from orchards and woodlots and bullet-perforated houses, an officer advised them not to “cast dirt in their faces, for they are also mothers’ sons.” 

How can those of us who have never known battle understand what it takes to kill others, whatever the righteously declared cause might be? And lacking that tested resolve, who can say how hard it is for compassion to return when the fighting is over? A British soldier comforted, rather than taunted, a fallen American while his fellows saw their own humanity in the corpses they were burying.

There is a goodness native to the human heart. So why should we be surprised to find it on the battlefield? 

So often we are like the rich man who, in the best of times, failed to see his own humanity in Lazarus. In the doctrine of original sin, our creed insists that something is essentially askew within us, that something has gone awry since God’s act of creation. We have fundamentally changed ourselves, altering our moral DNA. We did this when we chose to turn away from the origin and destiny we call God. 

How else do we explain our inability to recognize our own humanity in others? How do we manage to turn away from those who are in need? How do we reinforce our resolve to remain unreconciled with others? How do we concentrate our attention upon the legal status of others and so easily forget their standing as fellow human beings? In short, how do we look at each other and not see ourselves? 

These failures are facile, constantly repeated in our daily lives, yet our faith tells us that this is not how it should be, not how it was meant to be. We were not created to be more prone to callousness than compassion. 

Even if one stands outside the Christian worldview, these two fundamental features of human life still demand explanation. How do we explain both our basic goodness and our ever-repeated failure to be kind, to be compassionate? For who would be so foolish as to deny that both are constants of who we are? For all its utility in understanding ourselves as animals, evolution does not explain this fundamental dichotomy in our humanity. 

If the division does not belong to biology, then it must be sought in our history. Our human consciousness came with a freedom not given to other living things. At some aboriginal moment, we collectively inverted ourselves. We chose against something so fundamental that it can only be called our creator. 

So while we were created good, we chose its absence when we turned away from the origin and destiny we call God. Hence, our history, whether personal or collective, is one of goodness in conflict with evil, of a kindness that is not constant, of a compassion that somehow needs assistance to assert itself.

Yet our faith insists that God did not abandon us to forever taste the fruit of our disdain. No, in Jesus of Nazareth, God has entered our history. As one who is both fully human and fully divine, Christ chooses obedience to his Father even unto death. His decision for God and his solidarity with us is more than an example that we model. Christ’s strength within us—what we call grace—gives the ability to turn back, to undo, to unleash again the fonts of kindness and compassion.  

A British soldier helped a fallen American collect his soul in the face of death. His fellows recognized a common humanity in their fallen adversaries. Wars forever remind us that we have lost our way, but small acts of human kindness tell us that God still seeks us in the person of his son, “Christ Jesus, who gave testimony under Pontius Pilate” (1 Tim 6:13) that all will yet be well. We changed once for the worst, but in Christ we can turn back to the better.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.