September 26, 2010 (26th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson
1. Some of Jesus’ parables are so familiar: the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan. Some not so much. Here we’ve got one of the less popular, but it’s a goody! There is so much detail and humor in these verses from the gospel reading, and the characters—though a bit caricatured—are true enough to life. Of course, there’s the rich man. He’s not a bad guy, he’s just privileged. He was born that way, with a silver spoon in his mouth. Then there’s Lazarus, the only person in a parable to have a particular name. He’s the opposite of the rich guy. Instead of fine clothing, he wears nothing but his own worn out skin, which itself is full of sores. Instead of eating sumptuous feasts, he eats nothing but what he can beg. Instead of being greeted by the beautiful people, stray dogs disgustingly lick him while he’s down. Then in the story, we have the patriarch Abraham, who seems to be in charge of something like heaven. He’s more or less to this paradise as is St. Peter at the pearly gates in our jokes about heaven. Across an impassable chasm from heaven, there is a place called Hades, which is full of fire and torment. And, strangely, both the suffering ones in Hades and the comfortable ones in the bosom of Abraham can see each other.
2. Remarkably, and of key importance for the parable, the rich man never sees Lazarus when Lazarus is a fetid beggar outside the gates of his compound. He never sees him when he is coming and going from his dates with the rich and famous or from his jaunts to the finest shops. The rich man doesn’t see Lazarus until his backside is being warmed by the fires of Hades. Then he sees Lazarus living the comfortable life up in paradise, and he somehow conjures up his name. But he still doesn’t speak to him directly. Instead, the rich man, who is used to giving orders, tells Abraham to send the poor Lazarus to come and refresh him in Hades. And when that is refused, he asks that poor Lazarus be removed from the paradise that he so richly deserves after his miserable life, and be sent back to earth to haunt the rich man’s brothers and scare them straight. This request is also refused.
3. The natural sense of the parable is that both Lazarus and the rich man get what’s coming to them, and so perhaps it is also natural that we are likely to feel sympathetic with Lazarus and even laugh a little bit about the rich man’s hubris and comeuppance. But, I think that if we are honest, we need to swallow our laughter and remember that it is far more reasonable in this day and age in this rich country to remember that we are more like the rich man. There’s a website on the internet called Global Rich List. On this site, you can enter what your income is, and it tells you where you stand financially in the whole world. I entered mine and my wife’s income into the site and found out that together, we are the 49,322,169th richest people in the world! So, pretty far down the list?! Not so. It turns out, even at 49 millionth place, we are in the top 0.82% richest people in the world! In other words, in a group of 100 random people around the world, I would be the richest. I imagine those 100 people in a line behind me, and I know that I can see the 98th and 97th richest people right behind me. If I really try, I can even see down to probably the 90th richest person. But I can’t even see the really poor people at the end of the line. They are like Lazarus to me. They are completely outside of my vision and my experience.
4. That’s the problem right there. Too many people live in this world completely outside of our sight. Because of poverty and other sinful barriers, we cannot see them. The terrible truth of this situation is what inspired Ralph Ellison’s famous novel The Invisible Man. The protagonist of the book is a nameless African American man who has been made metaphorically invisible by the society he lives in. The narrator says, “I am an invisible man.
No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe:
Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids
- and I might even be said to possess a mind.
I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.” It’s the gospel story all over again. The rich man in Jesus’ parable could have seen the poor, sore-covered Lazarus outside his gate, but he had no reason to do so, and so he simply was blind to the suffering, downtrodden man before his gate.
5. What is perhaps worse is when the rich like us go out of our way to not see the poor and the suffering. I live in west Belleville not far at all as the crow flies from the slums of East Saint Louis. The quickest way for people in our part of town to get to downtown St. Louis is to take Illinois 15 west and then navigate through the blighted and burnt out neighborhoods of East St. Louis to the Poplar Street Bridge. But if you take this route, there is almost no traffic. All of us, myself included, find it better, safer, easier, less terrible, to take the longer way around on the 255 up to I64 thus completely skirting the devastation of our neighboring city. I would say we Bellevillians must be a pretty rotten bunch to act this way, but all over the country, cities like Belleville, and like Alton, have found ways to route better off people away from poor people. In this awful circumstance, we are willfully blind. We don’t see because we do not want to see.
6. The upshot of Jesus’ parable, sadly, for the rich man is that there’s not really anything new to say. The rich man desperately wants Lazarus to be sent back to his family, with the notion that a specter from beyond the grave would at last open their eyes. That an apparition would do the trick to remind them of their religious obligations to care for the poor. But Abraham says no. He says there is no new word to give on this. It’s all been said before. The law, the prophets. It’s all in there: take care of the poor, comfort the afflicted, tend to the suffering. And if you didn’t hear the old, old, story, not even the ghost of Lazarus will turn you around. I guess I don’t really have a new word either. We all know that we Christians cannot bumble through life with blinders on. We all know that the poor, the imprisoned, the oppressed, the foreigner are all our specific responsibility. What more is there to say? If we haven’t listened to all that, and we persist in our willful blindness, not even seeing a resurrected man will turn us around once it’s too late.
But, it’s not too late. That’s why Jesus tells the parable in the first place. He wants those who hear him to do something now. We are still able to open our eyes and clean out our ears. We are still able to repent and start seeing.
7. And this need to see the poor, and to serve the poor, and to be one in Christ is urgent. An old saying attributed to the British stateman William Gladstone is “justice delayed is justice denied.” There is no time to wait. The urgency of poverty in this world is extreme. Jesus’ parable about the rich man and Lazarus suggests that it is not our certitude about God and the afterlife that will ultimate motivate a change in our behavior. Instead, we will be motivated by the certitude that suffering people exist in this world, and we need to see them and care for them and help them find justice now, before it is too late for us and too late for them.
8. It’s like the campaign that you see around Illinois with the big signs that say “Start Seeing Motorcyles!” We need to start seeing the poor. Let me give you some suggestions on how to do this.
- Pray. Pray that God open your eyes to the suffering of your fellow human beings. Pray that God give you a compassionate spirit and the energy to serve.
- Talk. Talk to your friends and neighbors. What are they doing to help others? Can you help them? Find out from them why they got interested in the work they do to help others.
- Reflect. Think about what God has given you. What are you good at? What are your interests? Is there some way that you can both help the Lazaruses in this world AND use your God-given gifts and interests. Do you like to read? Read to the blind. Do you like to garden? Find a way to beautify blighted areas. Do you like children? Become a mentor.
- Finally, make a commitment. When it comes to helping the poor, to providing justice now rather than later when it is too late, the important word is this: something is better than nothing. You don’t need to be the next Martin Luther King. You need to do something. Do it here at the church, or do it with another group. It is not possible to be a rich Christian, and we are all rich in some way, without serving the poor. Let me conclude with words from the passage in 1 Timothy that we heard this morning: “As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.”
Brothers and sisters, Amen.
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