The
cemetery was an old, overgrown one, and the ancient-looking graves were covered
with moss and lichen. However, you could
still read the epitaphs on many of the tombstones. Some of the older ones included not only a
name with the years of birth and death, but also a poem, because that was the
fashionable thing to do at that time.
One of those poems read:
Remember, Friend, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, soon you shall be
Prepare for Death, and follow me.
However, on
one gravestone, below these four rhyming lines, a later poet had scratched out
the following couplet:
To follow you, I'm not content
Until I know which way you went!
Heaven
and hell. Paradise and punishment. Eternal delight and everlasting doom. The specter of those opposing concepts casts
a dark and forbidding shadow over this story we just read, this parable that is
a twist on an old Egyptian folk tale that Jesus once told to a group of
Pharisees who, at the time, were making fun of him.
The
rabbi we call the Messiah had told the religious elite that, just as a slave
cannot have two masters, so no one can love both God and money. The Gospel writer of Luke reports that the
Pharisees were laughing at Jesus and not taking him at all seriously. So Jesus told them a story.
And
because he used that story as a way to teach about the Kingdom of God, that is,
about God’s passion for the poor and God’s dream for a just world, we call the
tale a parable. It is the story of rich
man and a poor man. The rich man is
unnamed, and the poor man is named Lazarus.
The
simple fact of who is named and who is not should be a clue that Jesus is about
to turn values and mores upside down. I
mean, we all know who the rich man is – perhaps Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerburg,
any of us really who have a job and shelter, cable TV, and clean underwear to
put on tomorrow. But who knows the name
of the poor man? Who knows the name of
the panhandler in Portland or the ones who call the church in tears because
they cannot pay their electric bill, or they have no oil for heat?
But,
here in our story, Jesus tells us that the poor man was called Lazarus, and the
rich man was, well, he does not have a name.
Perhaps he is Everyman on this side of poverty.
And
Jesus goes on to say that the latter was indeed rich, very privileged. He dressed in expensive and rare purple
fabric, the color of nobility. He ate
filet mignon and drank only the best burgundy wines every single day, and he
finished off each meal off with a toast of Dom Perignon champagne. Here’s to….me! He lived in one of those gigantic McMansions,
you know, the ostentatious kind of home in a gated community, gated to keep the
riff raff out, designed to keep the less desirable elements of society in their
place – out of sight, out of mind.
The
gate in our story was doing its job because just on the other side of it was
one of those “less desirable elements.” It
was Lazarus, which means “God helps” – though it did not seem as if God was
helping all that much. I mean, Lazarus
barely had rags enough to cover his body.
He had sores too – infected sores - on his arms and legs. The dogs were licking them – the sores, I mean
- only because dogs like to do that sort of thing. And these were not the rich man’s housedogs
either. These were the street dogs – the dumpster
divers, the ones just come from nosing through the local dung heap.
That
is the setting for the parable. Rich
man, poor man. And from the setting, we
make a beeline to the conclusion because Jesus does not seem to care about any
intervening events. And so we discover
only that the two men died – unfortunate perhaps but to be expected. After all, it will happen to each one of us –
as will some variation of what next occurred.
When
the rich man came to in the afterlife, he was genuinely shocked to find that he
was in great pain. “What the _______ am
I doing here in Hades, in hell?” the rich man asked.
Actually,
he was not the rich man anymore. If you
read the text carefully, you will see that, not only does he have no name, now
he no longer has a descriptor either. I
guess you really can’t take it with you.
Trying to make sense of it all, the man
formerly known as rich looked upward, and that was when he experienced the
second shock of his eternal punishment.
There, sitting on Abraham’s lap, was some poor bugger, a beggar.
Though
he did not know it at that moment, it was perhaps the very first time that the
man formerly known as rich had actually looked at Lazarus. Not sure what or who he was seeing, something
– maybe the Spirit – nudged him and whispered that this was the guy who had sat
outside his gate for years, the one with the infected sores, the one with no
health insurance, whose food stamps had been cut, who had fallen through the
cracks when it came to Medicaid expansion, the one who survived on the largesse
of the rich man – bits of fat from the steaks and precious drops from the
bottles of burgundy.
“Really?”
the rich man asked. “What was his name
again?”
“Cool. Hey, Abraham, send Lazarus down here with a
drink of water for me. It’s heating up
real fast.” Does the man formerly known as rich still not get it?
I
guess not because that was when Abraham, father of all the Jewish people to
whom Jesus spoke, laid it out, plain and simple. Abraham was not angry, mind you. He just gave the facts.
“Child,
remember that in your lifetime you got the good things and Lazarus the bad
things. It’s not like that here. Here he’s consoled and you’re tormented.
Besides, in all these matters there is a
huge chasm set between us so that no one can go from us to you even if he
wanted to, nor can anyone cross over from you to us.”
An
unbridgeable chasm – scary thought!
Maybe this was when the man formerly known as rich finally understood –
about the love of money, about poverty, about indifference and apathy. Maybe it was then that he finally realized
that, just because he really was not a bad man in the classic sense of the
word, that ultimately made no difference.
It
did not matter that he was never out to make Lazarus’ life miserable. It did not matter that he never laughed at
him and his plight. It did not matter
that he never kicked him when he was down.
It did not matter that he was not an overt evildoer. What mattered was that he was apathetic. What mattered was that he was too accepting,
and he just did not care enough.
An
unbridgeable chasm. As the author of the
blog Magdalene’s Musing writes, “This seems harsh. Then, the rich man attempts
to perform what may be his first ever unselfish act: he tries to send Lazarus
as an emissary to his brothers, who he feels confident are going to follow him
to this hell of being unseen. But he can’t do it. “They have Moses and the prophets,” Abraham
sighs wearily, as if he has heard all this before. (“Is not this the fast I require? (from the prophet Isaiah) Is it not to share
your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your
house; when you see the naked, to cover him?”)
“Trust
me, even someone being raised from the dead will not get their attention.”
(Abraham continued). ( “When, Lord, did we ever see you hungry and feed you,
thirsty and give you drink? (from the Gospel of Matthew) Inasmuch as you did it
to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”)
That
is the end of the story. It begins with
purple fabric and ends in red and yellow flames. It begins with a gated community and ends
with an unbridgeable chasm. It begins
with the way life is and ends with the way life should be.
As
Lutheran pastor David Lose comments, “Nothing quite like a sermon about a rich
guy going to hell just before the fall Stewardship campaign kicks off, is
there?” Well, that’s the lectionary for
you!
An
uncomfortable coincidence or not, this parable of reversed fortunes, however,
speaks to something even more insidious than the love of money, financial
security, and the drastic inequities between rich and poor that we allow to
continue. This parable speaks to acceptance
and indifference.
First, there
is the theme of acceptance. "It's just the way things are," the rich
man may have figured. "That's just life." We get so weary of Lazarus,
don’t we?
As Baptist
pastor William Turner reminds us, “the numbers roll off our consciences. 730
million people wake up every morning with little hope of having enough to
eat…Put them in single file, and they'll circle the globe twenty-five times.
Four to five hundred of them will starve to death in the time it takes…to
preach a sermon….
Lazarus -- the
great need that is Lazarus -- wears us down, and so it's easier just to give
up…to let the nameless and faceless ones just fade back and blend in with the
background….” And maybe that is exactly what the man formerly known as rich
did.
And yet, as
Christians, Jesus warns us in this parable that such weary acceptance is not an
option. We are never to quit caring, he
says, and, above all, we are never to quit doing.
Oh, it does
not always have to be giving money, but certainly some of it does. It can also be voting responsibly, writing
letters, and, as Turner comments, it “wouldn't hurt any of us to miss a meal
(or maybe even fast for a day) and designate the money saved to (a) World
Relief Fund through the church….
Lazarus
lies at the gate and needs a hand. Will he take it if I offer it? Will she use
my help wisely? Many will, some won't. That's not my choice ... my choice as a
Christian with resources is to extend my hand.”
Why? Because part of my calling
as a follower of Jesus is to do
something.
Second,
there is the theme of indifference. The
man formerly known as rich did not even know that Lazarus was there. He looked right through him. Lazarus was invisible. He was on the other side of the gate. Out of sight, out of mind.
In
our nation, the wealthiest nation in the world, 14.5 percent -
some 49 million people – struggle to put food on the table. And 15.9
million of these hungry ones are children, according to statistics provided by Bread
for the World. For those of us who say we are Christian, those statistics should
take our breath away. They cannot be ignored. They must inform our personal budgets and
impact how we choose to spend our money.
This
parable is telling us that, one day, we will have to really look into the
mirror. Oh, the story uses lots of popular images of heaven and hell, symbols
of fire and water to make that point.
But the fact remains, one day we will have to face up to the truth about
ourselves. And that truth will have
everything, as Lois Malcolm reminds us, “everything to do with how we use
wealth in this life and whether we attend to those less fortunate in our
midst.”
Well,
that is certainly a downer! Is there any
way to fudge this? Maybe spiritualize the
story a bit? Are we beginning to sound
like the man who was formerly known as rich?
Send Lazarus down with some water, would you? Can we work out a deal here?
But,
according to seminary professor Mary Luti, “Abraham smashes this illusion; his
reply is terrible and true: Some outcomes cannot be influenced. Some chasms
cannot be crossed. Some things harden. There is a point of no return. Even
Abraham cuts no ice with a God determined to be just. How,
then, can we privileged be saved? Luke has nothing new to say. We have Moses
and the prophets and the Spirit to fix our hearts and minds on Jesus, who
lives. We could listen to them.”
“In
as much as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.”
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C.
