The Moral of the Story: A Sermon for the 16th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 21C

 I always find it helpful when I encounter a passage in Scripture for which I know I have already done exegetical research. And it was a joy to re-read that exegesis paper that I labored over in my junior year in seminary. I found some pretty good bits of information! 

And here I am... four years later... preaching on Lazarus and the "certain rich man." 

+++

Texts: 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16: 19-31

Prayer: May the One who makes peace in the High Heavens make peace for us on Earth. Amen. (Mishkan T’Filah, 219)

Last week… I couldn’t wrap my mind around the Gospel with the parable about the dishonest manager.

This week… we have a Gospel lesson that has a very direct and powerful message.

Our Epistle that hammers home the main point of the Gospel.

Did you hear Paul say, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains”? (1 Timothy 6:10)

We even have a song that Avery and our musicians will be playing a little later in the service just in case you missed the memo from Jesus.

And in case you DID miss the message… it was previewed in that difficult Gospel message of last week when Jesus said, “You cannot serve God AND wealth” (16:13c).

And if we choose wealth over God… a great chasm will be fixed between us and God and there is no crossing back.

That’s a harsh message for those with privilege and power to hear.

It is a balm…like that balm in Gilead… to those who are the “have-nots.”

There are… in fact… several chasms fixed in this Gospel reading that have resonance with us today.

The obvious one is between this “certain rich man” and Lazarus.

The distance between them begins with the rich man lacking a name.

Now in some quarters he is called “Dives” (DIE-vess). Scholars picked that up from the Latin Vulgate of the Bible… but it is doubtful that was his name.

Jesus does give the poor man a name: Lazarus, which translates to “God helps.”

Neither of these two men are real; they’re characters in the morality play that Jesus is presenting in Luke’s Gospel.

Morality plays… especially ones like this were very common in the First Century. The original hearers of this gospel would’ve been used to these stories.

Ancient Rome was a highly stratified society. Biblical scholar Luke Johnson notes that these weren’t closed ranks, and there was always the possibility of upward and downward mobility. But there was classism, nonetheless.

And much like our late-night comics of today… the Greco-Roman satirists would go to town writing plays that made fun of the people with newly acquired wealth who would have lavish banquets for themselves and flaunt their riches for all the world to see.

So that’s what we have happening in this drama with the certain rich man and Lazarus.

There’s the great chasm of wealth… as illustrated through the rich man’s sumptuous eating… and his purple clothing… which likely comes with matching silk stockings.

Meanwhile…Lazarus has oozing sores all over his body…and probably little clothing to cover them. He eats whatever scraps he can get from the rich man’s table… not much better than the dogs who lick his broken skin.

There’s the physical barrier between them: the rich man lived in a gated community. People kept bringing poor Lazarus to the edge of this man’s property… but there was a gate fixed between them….probably for safety concerns… doncha know.

Gates and fences help to keep the riff raff out.

Even when they die…there was an ever-widening gulf between them. The rich man received a proper Jewish burial.

Lazarus wasted away by that closed gate.

And now the chasm expands as the roles reverse.

The angels whisk Lazarus off to be in the bosom of Abraham… while the rich man lands on the hot seat in Hades… enduring a perpetual South Georgia in late July existence.

I’m pretty sure they have gnats in Hell. And no shade.

We can almost hear Mother Mary lifting her voice in the words of the Magnificat:

“He has cast down the mighty from their thrones

And has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things

And the rich he has sent away empty.”

 

There’s no mistaking the moral of the story… at least to this point: those with plenty have a special obligation to look out for the people at the gate who have nothing. Abraham has noted the great distance between where Lazarus sits and where the rich man will spend eternity. And if the play stopped there… it would be a sufficient ending to this drama.

But sadly… it doesn’t end there.

Even in death… the rich man dares to call upon Abraham.

“I’m so thirsty… make Lazarus give me a drink. Tell him to go talk to my brothers!”

This is the tragic turn in this drama.

The other day, Isabelle and I were talking about the state of affairs in the country.

The level of cynicism infecting our political leaders is astounding.

And that led us to talk about the story of the Exodus and how each time Moses went to Pharaoh to ask for better treatment of the Israelites… Pharaoh hardened his heart… until finally at the end it was God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart.

When Pharaoh was doing the hardening, there was still a possibility for the Egyptian leader to change his mind… see the disasters happening to his people… have a little compassion for the Israelites.

Once God did the hardening… the chasm had been fixed between Egypt and Israel.

And the Israelites… despite all their fears… and kvetching and complaining to Moses… had to get out of Egypt.

They couldn’t trust Pharaoh would help them.

They had to place their trust that God was leading them out of there.

Israel gets deliverance from oppression… and Pharoah’s army drowns.

All because Pharaoh’s heart is hardened so many times to the point of being impenetrable.

It’s clear from our drama of the rich man and Lazarus that the heart of a certain rich man has also become so hard that not even death and an eternal life sentence in Hades has turned him around.

What a sad story that is.

I think that beyond a simple morality play about the how rich should behave toward the poor… this unrepentant and extremely hard heartedness is an even more pressing lesson for us as individuals and as a nation.

If we allow our hearts to harden… and our eyes to see only our own image…if we isolate and gate ourselves off from others… we’re creating a chasm not only between ourselves and other people… but ourselves and God.

If anyone has caught the latest Ken Burns documentary series on PBS about the Holocaust… we can see the ways in which when our nation hardens its heart… the results are disastrous and can leave scars that last for generations.

I’ve only seen one of the three episodes. But episode one showed how our country once welcomed immigrants.

But then we followed the pseudo-science of eugenics.

We created categories of people based upon their skin color… national origin… their languages.

Our hearts hardened through punitive immigration policies that not only hurt the Jewish people attempting to escape the terror being unleashed on them in Europe in the 1930s… it fed the Nazi narrative that nobody wanted the Jews…emboldening Hitler in his extermination plan.

We still struggle today with who we are going to be as a country.

We say we welcome people.

So many around the world see us and know us as the land of the free…the ones who give shelter to those fleeing repressive governments.

But then what happens when they arrive?

The last lines of the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty… written by another Lazarus… Emma Lazarus…

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

 

Those words could very easily have been written by Jesus.

Or an expansion on the words of Father Abraham looking down at the rich man with his stone-cold heart sitting in Hades.

We have the choice now to act and live now into the mission of Jesus:

Bring good news to the poor.

Proclaim release to the captives.

Recover the sight of the blind.

Let the oppressed go free. (4:18)

This is the task Jesus has laid before us: keep working for and pursuing those ways to close the gaps between us so everyone is able to breathe free.

In the name of God… F/S/HS.