Neill Morgan

Sermon Delivered September 30, 2007

Luke 16:19-31

¹⁹“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. ²⁰And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, ²¹who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. ²²The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. ²³In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. ²⁴He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ ²⁵But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. ²⁶Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ ²⁷He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house— ²⁸for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ ²⁹Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ ³⁰He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ ³¹He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Stan Wilson is a pastor of a church in Clinton, Mississippi.  He writes, “I spent most of the day after Hurricane Katrina checking on members, especially older ones, in and around Clinton, Mississippi, where I live. Clinton did not sustain serious damage, but we lost all power and lots of trees and roofs, and there was a palpable sense of fear and anxiety. Cars lined up immediately for gas, stores closed, evacuees packed the shelters, and the locals feared a serious shortage or crisis.

“At the end of a long, hot and unnerving day, I was heading home to a cold shower when I received a call from my friend David in Nashville. He had one question: "Have you checked on the poor?" The thought hadn’t occurred to me, so I turned my car around and drove back toward the hidden neighborhood where the poor mostly reside in our town.

“In our town it’s possible to go a long time without seeing the poor. A beautiful parkway lined with flags and flowers enables us to drive across town without driving through the neighborhoods leading to the poor. We do a pretty good job of keeping them hidden. My friend David must have been watching television coverage that we residents had not yet seen.”[1]

The story of Lazarus and the rich man is a tale of haunting distance and intimate nearness. The rich man is separated from Lazarus first by a gate and then, in Hades, by a great chasm, but across the chasm he sees Lazarus embraced in the bosom of Abraham.

Our reading today begins at the beginning of the parable, but Luke places it in a particular context.  Jesus is addressing the Pharisees whom Luke describes as “lovers of money.”  It was not simply that they had wealth – Jesus’ concern is that their theology of wealth ignored the teaching of the prophets and cherry-picked certain verses in Deuteronomy and the Psalms to support their gospel of wealth.  In their theology, which they can support biblically from Deuteronomy, is that the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer.  Jesus, who blessed the poor and urged a free sharing of one’s goods with those in need, regarded the Pharisees’ view as a gross misinterpretation of the Old Testament.  When he argued against their view, they accused Jesus of claiming that the law and the prophets had been canceled by the dawn of a new age.

Jesus, however, does not argue against the law and the prophets.  He argues in favor of their right interpretation.  In other words, Jesus says, you have to take the Scripture as a whole.  You can’t just go through and find the verses that support your position and ignore the rest.  While Deuteronomy and the Psalms draw the conclusion that righteousness begets wealth, and wickedness begets poverty, the prophets, especially Isaiah and Amos, rail against those who depend on their material goods for their security.

Reading through Luke, we may be struck by the opposite idea – that poverty is a sign of virtue and God’s favor, and wealth is a sign of eternal damnation.  That, however, misrepresents Jesus and Luke’s theological point; namely, that wealth is dangerous if we depend upon it for security; but, it is very useful when it is put in the service of God’s purposes.

In our reading from 1 Timothy, Paul warns his young student that the root of all evil is . . . not “money,” but “the love of money.”  Similarly, Luke presents us with some wealthy characters whose love of money does them in, and other wealthy characters who find freedom and joy in sharing their wealth with their neighbors.  In the case of the farmer who decided to build more barns to store up his treasure, he found that the security he felt was short-lived and illusory.  He soon found that the anxiety of protecting his goods was costing him his soul.

On the other hand, Jesus tells us of the rich man who threw a banquet, and when his wealthy friends declined, he broke down the barriers between rich and poor and invited the poor, the blind, and the lame and ended up throwing a party that gave everyone there a glimpse into the eternal Kingdom.

And, of course, back in chapter 15, the father of two sons threw a party to celebrate his recovery of his younger son, but the older son resented the use of the father’s wealth in this way, and would have preferred that the wealth be used to separate the younger son rather than join them back together.

The Pharisees justified their position by alms and acts of charity out of their abundance; however, Jesus argued that following the law in giving alms was not the same as generosity.  Following the law meant that they gave a certain percentage of their income to charity.  Generosity, in the eyes of Jesus, meant that we look at all that we are and all that we have as God’s; therefore, we look to use all our wealth for God’s purposes; that is, breaking down that chasm between rich and poor, between citizen and foreigner, between law-keeping sinner and law-breaking sinner.

Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus presents a picture of a rich man who missed a glorious opportunity to open his gate, share his wealth, and develop a relationship with Lazarus, a beloved child of Abraham. Jesus rejected the position of some Pharisees that  the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer; therefore, to relieve the suffering of the poor is to interfere with the plan of God.

Breaking down the chasm between rich and poor has never been easy.  It certainly is difficult in our own community.  We can idealize this idea of “the poor” all we want, but that misses the struggle of what it is really about.  Along with poverty in our society comes drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, lack of education, domestic violence, problem pregnancies, and chronic health problems.  It’s not that these problems are the exclusive territory of those who live in poverty, but they are part of that high wall, that locked gate, that vast chasm that makes escape from poverty so rare.

If the rich man in Jesus’ parable had decided to use his wealth to pull Lazarus out of his poverty, he might well have found himself banging his head against a wall.  Such a goal is not always achievable.  But, I’ve noticed that for all Jesus has to say about the inequities between rich and poor and the challenges of having wealth without endowing it with the power of a god, Jesus never presents a strategy for eliminating poverty.  Instead, he presents the joy of sharing wealth and building relationships across those cultural lines between wealth and poverty.  Sometimes, in the course of building relationships across that chasm, we will find a poor person who takes hold of an education, works hard, and accomplishes that transition from dependent poverty to working poor to skilled middle class worker or even wealthy business owner.

But, more often, in our society, the poor remain poor or sink more deeply into poverty, and the wealthy stay wealthy or get more wealthy.

Given that observation, it is tempting for realists to throw up our hands in frustration and just resign ourselves to the status quo.

The only problem with that is that we are believers.  And that dern Gospel of Jesus keeps calling to us, keeps beckoning with a love that will not let us go.  When we begin to think that Jesus was a hopeless idealist who had no idea the challenges we face in twenty-first century U.S., we keep coming back to the promises of the gospel, the joy Jesus says comes to those with generous and open hearts.  When we get grabbed by the cynicism of our culture, we continue to hear that voice of the gospel that says there is more to life than acquiring stuff, there is a joy beyond the blessings that money can buy.  There is such a thing as love and beauty, and we find it by living now as though we were already in the Kingdom of God.

A folk tale: There was a man who lived in a poor village more than a mile from the nearest river.  It was this man’s job to take two jugs on each end of a yoke across his shoulders and fetch water every day, and bring it back to the village.  The man understood the importance of his work, and took satisfaction in knowing that his daily journey to the river and back served his neighbors and family.

But, he was bothered by the fact that his water jars leaked.  He tried to repair them, and when they became so cracked that they were unusable, he made new jars, but the clay of that area was porous and he could not find a material that did not leak.  By the time he reached the village each day, half the water he had fetched from the river had leaked out, and sometimes his neighbors and family ran out of water in the evening.

Finally, he went to his wise grandmother and asked for advice.  “It is so frustrating,” he told her.  “I try and try to keep them from leaking, but nothing seems to work.  My jars are almost half empty by the time I get to the village cistern.”

His grandmother took him to the edge of the village and pointed to the path that led to the river and back.  “Look,” she said.  “Look along the edge of the path where you walk every day, and tell me what you see.”

The man saw that though the path was bare dirt, and the grass beyond the edges of the path was dry and brown, there were two strips on each side of the path where the grass was green and wild flowers of all colors grew.

“Beauty,” the grandmother said, “comes from the cracks in the jars.”[2]

When we live faithfully, we may yet feel that our efforts have less than satisfactory results.  And we are a results-oriented people.

Jesus, however, is a relationship-oriented Savior.  We may be imperfect vessels, which is a biblical euphemism for “crack-pots,” but that doesn’t keep God from creating love and beauty from our imperfect efforts at faithfulness.  It is love and beauty and joy that come from our faithfulness as disciples, not necessarily efficiency and perfection of our tasks and goals.

Stan Wilson, the pastor from Clinton, Mississippi realized on the day after Hurricane Katrina that his separation from the poor of his community was not just their loss.  It was his as well.  “I long for such intimacy,” he writes, “but I don’t know my neighbors very well, and they don’t know me. The result is that we are increasingly fragmented from one another, and this fragmentation means I do not know the poor (and I can be increasingly unaccountable for the use of my wealth.)

“It is ironic and tragic that I had to be reminded to remember the poor; I’m a pastor, after all. I have spent years studying the scriptures, and I like to think I know them pretty well. So, why did I forget the poor in a time of crisis?”

The rich man thought he knew scripture too. He thought they were his stories; he possessed the stories enough to think himself a child of "Father Abraham,” as he said. But he turns out tragically to have overlooked the heart and soul of scripture—the story of God’s deep desire to create a people of hospitality and welcome for the poor and the stranger.

“On my second effort to head home,” Wilson writes, “I came across what looked like a party. I slowed down. Neighbors who had been helping one another all day were emptying the contents of their freezers into a great, shared, neighborhood cookout.

“Across town most of the rich were frightened and sheltered, alone in their big houses, worrying about gas and groceries running out. But not here. Here was a neighborhood enduring the storm together and sharing its plenty.” [3]

With this parable, Jesus invites us into the joy of the children of Abraham, into the joy of a heavenly banquet that we share with all God’s children, rich or poor, healthy or failing.  With generosity, and the courage to cross those lines that divide us, we too, can join in the feast that Christ has prepared.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.