Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost – September 29th, 2019

Text: Luke 16:19-31Revised Standard Version (RSV)

The Rich Man and Lazarus

19 “There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. 20 And at his gate lay a poor man named Laz′arus, full of sores, 21 who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. 22 The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; 23 and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Laz′arus in his bosom. 24 And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Laz′arus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.’ 25 But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Laz′arus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. 26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ 27 And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house, 28 for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ 29 But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.’ 30 And he said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if some one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ 31 He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead.’”

In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen

This is, without a doubt, a difficult passage. Yet, at the outset, we need to be clear about one thing: This is a parable. All the elements are there to make the story work, to make the intended point, and above all to make the lesson stick in the minds of those who hear it. Parables are intended to surprise, even to shock. They’re meant to jar us, to knock us out of our mental ruts. Hence, the details of a parable are deliberately exaggerated. The events have been made up, and don’t necessarily reflect reality.

The overarching point of this passage, along with the lessons from Jeremiah and I Timothy, is to illustrate the benefits of a life connected to God. Jeremiah portrays God’s desire that we turn away from our disconnectedness. Jeremiah is instructed to purchase the land as a symbol of God’s “right of redemption” and as a promise of hope for those who have chosen paths that have led them from God. In other words, conducting a business transaction like buying a field is an act of hope and faith that what is happening to God’s people now is temporary and will one day be set right. I Timothy tells us that our top priorities should include righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness. These are goals we can adopt and strive for.

By contrast, the passage from Luke speaks to the consequences of living a life disconnected from God. One of our human disconnects centers on money. In both the New Testament and the Old, money is always sort of the bogeyman – it’s the symbol for everything that is bad. The phrase “money is the root of all evil,” from I Timothy 6:10, which we read this morning, is the one we almost always hear quoted when this topic comes up.  Yet, again, the point here is living a life that is disconnected from God, at odds with how God wants us to live. The rich man in Luke is condemned, not because he had that pile of cash, but because he allowed it to separate him from Lazarus, his neighbor, and probably from all of his other neighbors. Note that nowhere in this lesson, nor anywhere else in the Gospels, does Jesus condemn someone simply for having wealth. It’s equally true that Jesus does not say that poverty is somehow a nobler walk of life than being well-to-do. Jesus does talk about the “poor in spirit” in the Sermon on the Mount, but there “poor” is to be understood as “humble.” When Jesus talks about those who are poor in the sense that we understand the word, he does so in the context of what his followers need to do to alleviate their condition – clothing them, feeding them, treating them as his hearers would themselves like to be treated: “Whatsoever you do to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you also do to me.” It’s worth noting here that the Apostle Paul’s unceasing efforts during his missionary journeys to collect money for the widows and orphans in Jerusalem is very much in that spirit.

In other words, when Jesus condemns people like that unnamed rich man – it’s significant to note that in this parable only Lazarus is known by name – he does so by pointing out what they have allowed their wealth to do to them. This is an extremely important distinction to make. A bag of coins has no power in and of itself. It derives its power from the attitudes of the person who carries it. Once we grasp this, we can clear away any preconceived notions we might have as to who is really “on God’s side.” There are people of means who do indeed strive to live the life Timothy speaks of – Andrew Carnegie, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffet come to mind – just as there are people without such means who live in ways that can only be described as vile, selfish, and mean. At the end of the day, it really has nothing to do with what’s in your bank account, but everything to do with what’s in your heart.

And there’s no question that what was in the rich man’s heart was very clearly not the milk of human kindness; and owing to that, he found himself at the end in The Bad Place – but the description of Hades in the passage is also meant to be understood metaphorically. The chasm, for example, that is fixed between the rich man and Lazarus isn’t new. In fact, that chasm had been created long before by the rich man himself and reinforced every time that man came and went into his wonderful house to feast at his rich table, walking right by Lazarus and totally ignoring him as he did so. It’s been said that the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. He obviously knew Lazarus was there, he certainly understood his suffering, because later on he mentions Lazarus by name. Yet he did nothing. And even in the afterlife, the rich man continues to treat Lazarus as a nobody, at best as a servant who should fetch him some water or, failing that, be sent as a messenger to his brothers. In both his earthly life and even in the life to come, the rich man refuses to even see Lazarus as a person, much less as a fellow child of God. His torment is not God’s punishment, but the end result of his own actions and his own arrogant, callous disregard of the needs of others, even of the beggar who spent his life right outside his own gate. His punishment is self-inflicted.

Above all, that rich man was faithless. He had no doubt grown up hearing God’s commands as stated by the prophets like Jeremiah and found in the ancient books; yet he had failed to take those commands to heart. And apparently, his brothers had, too. There is no blindness so dark as the blindness of deliberate inaction in face of the needs of others, needs which one can easily fill, but refuses to.

That, in a nutshell, was the sin of the rich man. He saw Lazarus every day, but he failed to notice Lazarus; failed to ask even the most basic question as to just why Lazarus was in such a state and what he as a fellow human being might do to alleviate it; failed to realize that what he accepted as just part of his daily landscape was not natural, or normal, or acceptable.

Our old friend William Barclay puts it this way: “The sin of [the rich man] was that he could look on the world’s suffering and need and feel no answering sword of grief and pity pierce his heart; he looked at a fellow human being, hungry and in pain, and did nothing about it. His was the punishment of the man who never noticed.

“It seems hard that his request that his brothers should be warned was refused. But it is the plain fact that if people possess the truth of God’s word, and if, wherever they look, there is sorrow to be comforted, need to be supplied, pain to be relieved, and it moves them to no feeling and to no action, nothing will change them.

“It is a terrible warning that the sin of [the rich man] was not that he did wrong things, but that he did nothing.”[1]

The rich man rejected the life of connectedness to God. He did nothing; and in the end, because of it, he had nothing, and became nothing.

God calls us to care. God calls us to see. God calls us to notice. God calls us to help.

For Lazarus is still among us.

In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.

[1] Barclay, William, The Gospel of Luke, The New Daily Study Bible, © The William Barclay Estate, 1975, 2001, Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press, p. 254