You Only Go Around Once
I Timothy 6:6 - 19
Luke 16:19 - 31
Text: "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.". . . Luke 16:31
There is an old story about a minister in a new parish who preached the same sermon three Sundays in a row. Finally one of the members of the Staff-Parish Committee called the young minister aside and reminded him of the fact that the same sermon was used for three Sundays. "I will preach a new sermon," the brash, young minister said, "when the people of my church start practicing the message of this one."
I don't think that this is unlike our experience with the Gospel texts these past few weeks from Luke. If you have found the lectionary readings from Luke hard to digest the past three weeks, do not adjust you set, the problem is not in your hearing. You are perfectly normal. The difficulty is in the message itself. If you think Luke has been pressing the issue about Jesus identifying with the outcasts, Jesus being unrespectable, and "spitting in the face" of the good church folk of his times, you are right. And guess what, you've got one more week of it as Luke continues to pound the point home. Luke is giving us essentially the same sermon until we get it right! As one of our members said after last week's experience with the dishonest steward, "Jesus really never held anything back - it's hard to be a Christian!
But the careful reader of Luke's Gospel will know that this theme of radical Christianity has run throughout Luke's entire Gospel, right from the very beginning. Jesus' mother Mary warned us to expect such radical reversals in her "Magnificat" beginning of Luke's Gospel - "He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent empty away."
Today's story of the rich man and Lazarus is a story of reversal. Someone low is being lifted up; someone high is being brought low. No doubt about it, this is a parable of good news and bad news, and whether this parable is good news or bad news to you depends a lot on where you are when you get the news.
Back in the 1970's there was a popular television commercial for a certain brand of beer. The commercial portrayed two couples out for a weekend sail. The couples sported golden tans on their well-shaped bodies. Their hair blew carefree in the breeze while the sun danced on the water. Together they laughed, they ate fancy food, and, of course, they guzzled beer. Ah, the good life! Here are the beautiful people, we thought, people the rest of us mere mortals could only dream of being. As we watched them drift into the sunset, the voice-over reminded us: "You only go around once in life. Grab for all the gusto you can get!"
It's a familiar message in our time. "You deserve a break today!" "We do it your way!" In other words there is a lot of gusto grabbing going on. People all around us, from politicians to office workers, to, yes, even preachers, are determined to grab all they can in life. But it's a very slippery slope from living life to its fullest to grab a bit more than we should. And there are also examples of greed all around.
But to continue along this line only preaches to our guilt. And preaching to our guilt is both an easy target, and, ultimately, unproductive. I think Jesus had something else in mind with this story, something more fundamental. Jesus is preaching at the very values that evoke our sense of what we should feel guilty about.
I say this, because I feel that the deeper meaning of the story of Lazarus and the rich man is a story about privilege and entitlement. It's not only about helping the poor, but it's about our underlying attitudes toward the poor and less fortunate. It's about our most basic core values that cause us to feel guilt and shame.
So let's dig into the story.
Lazarus was one beggar who really needed help. He was starving, hoping even for the rich man's garbage. Unfortunately, Jesus parable lacks the sort of information that people like to have when deciding whether and how to help. It doesn't say, for example, if Lazarus was deserving or lazy, drug-addicted, mentally ill, or a good Joe down on his luck. We don't know whether he cornered the rich man with pathetic spiels every time he left the house, or whether he just lay there, annoyingly mute, day after day. All we know is that Lazarus was at the gate, sick and hungry. And that, Jesus seems to say, is all we need to know to predict the reversal ahead. In other words, we don't know if, when he got the cash he's going to spend it on cheap wine to mask his misery, or whether he's going go to the doctor to get healed. Maybe we don't need to know.
Jesus' parable doesn't provide us with too many details about the rich man either. Did he invite friends over to laugh and point at Lazarus, have his goons lean on Lazarus to scare him off, or gag at the sight of the dogs licking at his sores? We don't know whether he was a cold man with habitually averted eyes who never saw the beggar at all or whether he did notice, maybe even said a prayer for a sorry case, but stuck to his policy of never giving anything directly to street people, referring them instead to the proper agencies. We know only that he was rich, dressed well, ate sumptuously. And that, Jesus seems to say, is all we need to know to predict the reversal ahead.
So the story continues, the scene shifts, they both die and Lazarus is enjoying the comfort of Abraham's bosom while the rich man is in Hades, in torment and being lapped by the flames of hell.
Anyone who reads the Gospel half-awake is not shocked by this reversal: Jesus is annoyingly repetitious about the mortal risks that the wealthy and the respectable run - we've heard this for three weeks, for crying out loud! And finally, two chapters ahead, in Luke 18, the disciples complain, "But [if what you say is true], how can the rich be saved?" But we're not there yet.
There's something else in the Lazarus story that seems odd: the rich man, up to his neck in flames, hasn't figured out that the reversal is for real and for good. There is no way out, even for him. And it's now not about whether or not he is willing to give something, or to warn others - it's about his attitude; which is fundamentally still the same.
Of course, it's not lost on him that he's suffering. Surely he's sorry now that he's failed to do right by that beggar. He now feels guilt and shame. But even that has not undone his self-centeredness that makes it easy to sin. His means are gone, but its stubborn resolve remains: unconsciously, he still has an attitude of entitlement - that he can send for people, and that he is still in a position to "warn" others. He is still feeling that he is entitled to certain privileges that allow him an advantage over others. Privilege clings to this rich man even in hell.
Maybe it's not so much, "you only go around once", but "you can only go around once and no more!"
"Send Lazarus to help me," he pleads. It is not an idle line. It betrays his attitude of entitlement. The rich man still believes, remarkably, that he can command something of another and expect a response. His entitled assumptions about what's best and who deserves what have made him insensitive to this situation. The rewards of heaven and hell are simply bookkeeping matters - do good, you'll be rewarded - and it is never too late to pay the final bill to get the books squared away. Lazarus, in other words, is the man the rich man knows he should have helped (but it still wouldn't have been wise to give him cash).
For the rich man, Lazarus is at best a servant.
How easy it is in our world to become, as the Harry Emerson Fosdick put it in his famous hymn, "God of Grace and God of Glory", to be "rich in things and poor in soul." The more we have, the more we turn our attention toward meaningless things while people around us wither away. No wonder Jesus pointed to the poor when he wanted to define purity. They don't have "things" to get in the way of what is important in life; they can't build walls to shut themselves off from the world.
In a Christmas Eve sermon, Martin Luther, the great reformer, chastised his congregation for their quickness to condemn those who refused hospitality to the infant Jesus on the night of his birth. "If only I had been there!" is the quick response. "How quick we would have been to help Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus! We would have washed his linen!"
"Well," Luther argued, "why don't you do it now? You have Christ in your neighbor. You ought to serve Him, for what you do to your neighbor you do to the Lord Himself."
Would tossing a nugget of gold out his window now and then have saved the rich man? What if he had made a little "to go" plate for this pitiful beggar? Would God have said, "Well done, good and faithful servant?" Hardly. For Jürgen Moltmann is right: "The opposite of poverty is not property. Rather, the opposite of both is community"
In 1942, Clarence Jordan, having studied agriculture and then theology, attempted a shocking experiment in living the gospel by founding Koinonia Farm outside Americus, Georgia. Blacks and whites lived together, embodying the kind of community described in Acts, where fellowship (koinonia in Greek) meant communal sharing of all goods. Not exactly caught up in gospel fervor, the Ku Klux Klan repeatedly terrorized, bombed, and vandalized Koinonia Farm.
Among the many impacted by Jordan was Millard Fuller. Fuller wound up at Koinonia Farm by accident, trying to save his marriage. When he met Jordan, he said he felt this tremendous heaviness in his chest. Wryly, Jordan suggested that "a million dollars can weigh awfully burdensome on a man." He suggested that Fuller was a "money-ac," that he was addicted to money. Jordan was fond of declaring, "What the poor need is not charity but capital, not caseworkers but coworkers. And what the rich need is a wise, honorable, and just way of divesting themselves of their overabundance."
Fuller divested himself honorably as he founded the ministry called Habitat for Humanity, which has engaged thousands of volunteers in building more than 100,000 homes for the working poor throughout America and in such far-flung locations as Zaire, Guatemala, Ireland, Hungary and Nicaragua. The opposite of poverty and opposite of wealth - community.
We learn by living, sharing, daring, tearing down fences. We discover we are all poor or rather that we are really all rich, when we study this story together. If a bunch of rich people read the story, they get squeamish, and dance around its clear intent. If a bunch of poor people read the story, they stick out their chests, and cast aspersions on whoever has money in the bank. But if we read the story together, we open a door. We are called to be in community.
I could stop here. But I think there is a message of hope offered in the words of Abraham to the rich man. "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." (Luke 16:31)
But thanks be to God! So long as we live and breathe, we have another chance to get things right - to listen to Moses and the prophets. God's grace is abundant and gives us courage to go where we once feared going.
How then shall we live? Are we to go and sell all we have and give money to the poor, as Jesus commanded the rich young ruler?
Perhaps. Only God Who claims our hearts can speak the message each one of us is to hear. Perhaps we are called to cast our lot with the poor as Mother Teresa did. Perhaps we are called to let go of our dependence on things in exchange for the leap of faith that Christian discipleship requires. Perhaps we are to claim the role we play in an unjust world - to acknowledge the walls of selfishness we build. But one thing is certain: none of us can remain unchanged in the face of the Gospel. We have been shown in Jesus Christ another way to live: giving ourselves for the sake of others.
How, then, can we, the privileged be saved? This story in Luke tells us that Jesus really 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.