The Screwover Letters: An Occasional Series

My Dear Kickstaff,

The amateurish way in which you dismiss my suggestions regarding the connotations of "leader" and "pastor" cause me great concern. Did you learn nothing at the College of Mismanagement regarding the powerful tool of philology? Indeed, the work of our Language Department was one of the great triumphs of the last century, work which has only increased in both pace and quality since then. To take perhaps the most important example, consider what we have done with the word "leader."

At one time, this word defined a function. The person in charge of a given endeavor was the leader. Children played a game called "Follow the Leader" which required all participants to mimic the actions of a single player and this role as "leader" rotated among all participants. Thanks, however, to the invaluable work of the publishing industry and the psychologists, we have now made "leader," not a function, but a quality, and an exalted quality at that. A "leader" is no longer someone who happens to occupy a particular role at a particular time, but a superior and heroic sort of individual who, not by virtue of any specific knowledge or experience, but by mere personal charisma, takes charge of any situation, whether he possesses any actual competence or not. The potential for this kind of thing in destroying morale is virtually limitless!

I know your organization is not a specifically religious one, but I saw most of my field service among churches and the principles transfer nicely to other organizations. Indeed, we have so succeeded in getting churches to think of themselves in secular terms - even to strive for secular parity - that very little difference now remains, at least in the American sector. Very well then: Our first triumph was in getting the Christians to value mere size for its own sake. A big church was by definition a good church, a bigger church a better church. Thus a church needed to "grow." Of course, that word has various shades of meaning but we managed to reduce it to the mere idea of a headcount. Once the humans had made this move, it was child's play to convince them that the pastor of a "big" and "growing" church was an example to follow and thus a "leader." We further abstracted this quality into a noun, "leadership," and convinced the humans that it existed as a thing in itself, apart from a given situation. So the goal became, not to train pastors in any New Testament sense, but to create "leaders" in the exalted sense.

We have done so well with this that one very large church, which otherwise does a great deal of harm, hosts an annual "leadership conference" attended primarily by pastors. Its organizer said at one such event, "Leaders are just different from other people." Well, they will be if we have anything to say about it!

Next, we introduced the idea that, in order to grow, the churches needed to downplay their specific features and instead become as similar to the secular world as respectability permitted. Well, of course a churchy term like "pastor" just wouldn't do so the term "leader" became its synonym. Do you see the trick? A term that denoted care for individuals was now replaced by one that referred largely to getting a group of people to do what one person wanted. To a great extent, we have obliterated any distinction between the words "leader" and "pastor," not by conflating their meanings, but by colonizing the care-based word "pastor" with the connotations of the control-based word "leader." Indeed, we have done so well with this that the "leaders" of churches now read books by "leaders" with little or no understanding of the Christian faith, attend their conferences and even invite them to fill their pulpits!

This tied in nicely with the rise of the factory and the corporation in which individuals became ciphers, replaceable cogs in a machine. We have so far succeeded that I recently read an article in which one human claimed that offering pastoral care to church members was a bad idea for a pastor because such work "doesn't scale" and would prevent numerical growth!

Even where the humans retain the term "pastor" we teach them to add qualifiers to it, such as "senior pastor" and the delightful "executive pastor." These adjectives imply that the term "pastor" simply has insufficient panache and needs terms from the business world if it is to carry any weight. If there are "senior" officers in a corporation and "executives" are important people, then pastors gain respectability by aping these titles. It is an old method and dates at least as far back as that jolly fellow Constantine, but it remains as potent as ever.

Think, for instance, about literature. We have practically extinguished the reading of old authors like Gregory the Great and Richard Baxter. They addressed themselves specifically to "pastors" and encourage the reader to treat individuals in the congregation as distinct souls with unique strengths and weaknesses requiring personal care. But thanks to the excellent work of our philology and public relations departments, no one reads them but dusty specialists who would never think of their "subject" as anything to be applied to actual practice. Our modern writers however, encourage pastors to think of all churches as alike and all members (and non-members) as representatives of some designated demographic group. There is a troublesome fellow named Peterson crying out against all this but we have pretty much limited his market.

You will say that this is all very well for those working to sow discord in the church, but that you are dealing with a secular institution. But this makes your task all the simpler: Your man lacks even the vestige of religious tradition which might faintly haunt his mind regarding the new "leadership." Encourage your boss to think of himself, not as someone who happens to have a particular job that brings with it particular responsibilities, but as a "leader," an exalted type required not merely to give orders and see that they are carried out, but to galvanize his underlings to achieve greatness.

If you manage things properly, he will be unable to leave well enough alone when his organization is running smoothly and talented, hard-working employees are carrying out their assignments. He will feel the need to "lead," by which he will mean, not supplying whatever resources the employees require and seeing that they perform as well as possible, but coming up with new ways to "motivate" and "inspire" them. He will begin playing about with all sorts of new "programs," which basically consists of coining new names for old tasks. In a well-managed business, you can have employees regularly called away from productive work in order to attend seminars on how to be more productive!

Of course, once a boss becomes convinced that she must be a "leader," another helpful consequence follows: She adopts a role and ceases to be herself, to be a natural person. The humans have a term (I think that Jesus fellow popularized it): "hypocrite." Of course, they use it to mean anyone who upholds any sort of moral standard (the triumph of philology again!), but it originally referred to an actor who wore a mask that expressed a particular character or emotion. You can lure a "leader" into putting on such a mask without even knowing it. To the extent that she does so, her language, intonation, her very facial expression and bodily posture, become an affectation. The employees will sense this duplicity and resent it. The "leader" will sense the resentment and regard it as a rebellion against her "leadership," and the game is afoot.

You, of course, can see the delightful past results of exalting the idea of a "leader," but you don't want them to. Not to worry. Since we have virtually eliminated the study of languages and history from what they call an education, no one will notice that the German equivalent of "leader" is "führer."

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwover

Ozymandias for President: How Not to Have Peace in Uncertain Times, Luke 21.5-19 First Baptist Church of Corpus Christi, Sunday November 13, 2016

Collect

Sovereign God, on the brink of chaos Your Son urged His disciples to live in the present with eternal peace untouched by an uncertain future. In these unsettling times, grant us the grace to bear each day’s burden with unshakable faith in Your perfect plan, that in us a world in turmoil might see the peace that passes all understanding, the peace of Christ in Whose name we pray, Amen.

In 1817 the British Museum announced that it had acquired the wrecked fragments of a statue of Ramesses II, a thirteenth century Egyptian Pharaoh also known as Ozymandias.. The Romantic poet Percy Shelley pondered this strange twist of history: A colossal monument to the former king of the greatest empire of the ancient world now amounted to nothing more than a historical curiosity in the collection of yet another mighty monarchy. The thought inspired him to write his most famous poem, “Ozymandias,” a meditation on the fleeting nature of political power.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

In the text we have read this morning, Jesus confronts first century Israel with a similar prophecy about the architectural, geographic, political, and religious center of their people, Herod’s temple in Jerusalem. The great builder-king had spared no expense in this lavish monument to his power. Elaborate carved branches snaked through the massive stones of the passageways. The porticoes of the purest marble flashed in the sunlight. A golden vine entwined itself about the entrance to the sanctuary. The temple bestrode the peak of Mount Zion as an indomitable monument to the greatness of the God of Israel and the hopes of that proud people that one day they would again rule the region, as in the times of their hero-king, David.

Jesus primarily refers here to the destruction of the temple which took place during the Jewish revolt against Rome in AD 70, when the Roman general Titus did, in fact, pull the temple to fragments. When Our Lord dismisses the temple with a lurid prophecy of ruin, the crowd reacts with the same shock and disorientation depicted by Shelley in his poem. If Americans imagined the utter obliteration of the capital mall in Washington, D. C., we might have some understanding of the shock this prediction created. Not surprisingly, his audience responds with the predictable question of timing: Teacher, when will this be? Jesus, however, ignores their inquiry and instead tells them, not when this will happen, but how they should live in a world whose greatest stability rests on the shifting-sand foundations of human events.

What Jesus spoke as prophecy is, for us, history. The point of contact for us is that Jesus stresses the inevitable upheavals of life through which Christians always have and always will live. It is interesting that, in this context, Christ gives three negative commands, prohibitions, things NOT to do in times of crisis, and ends with a single positive imperative, one thing TO do. He issues three negative commands before concluding with a final active commandment.

Last Tuesday America elected a president. A campaign of scorched-earth rhetoric has given way to a post-mortem of apocalyptic prediction. For some, the incoming administration holds the promise of renewed national greatness and religious resurgance. For others, it heralds the rise of a social moonscape of wrack and ruin. This is a good time for us to turn to the words of our Teacher to learn how we are to live as we move forward into these uncertain days. I believe that Jesus gives us, as he gave his original disciples, three warnings of things NOT to do, and one word of what we MUST do.

First, Jesus says, in uncertain times, do not abandon your POSITION; v.8.

Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, "I am he!” and, "The time is near!” Do not go after them. Jesus refers, of course, to the many military messiahs, the religious warlords who did, indeed, arise to challenge Roman power in conventional revolution. You can find a catalogue of a few of them in Acts 5.35-36. “Don’t throw in your lot with the local militias,” would be a fair paraphrase. But something more is at work here.

The phrase I am he is, literally, “I AM.” This title harks back to the original name of God revealed to Moses before the burning bush on Mount Horeb (Exodus 3). Jesus uses this name for himself in the seven famous “I AM” statements of John’s gospel, culminating in the bold claim of John 8.58, Before Abraham was, I am. The claim, The time is near! is exactly the phrase Jesus uses to summarize his own ministry: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near (Mark 1.15). Taken together, they amount to a warning against any earthly leader who claims a mandate from God to bring about earthly perfection. The reason not to listen to such claims is the Christian’s prior faith that Jesus, God in the flesh, has already arrived, and that His kingdom, far from being some future utopia, is a present reality for all who dare to live the Christ-life in the present moment.

In troubled times, Our Master warns us not to abandon our eternal position in the present moment just because some political party or person claims to offer perfection in the future. The question for the Christian is never, “What will happen next?” but always, “How should I live now?” And the answer to that question always comes from the teachings of Christ, not the expediency of the moment. Our task is not to make America great again; our task is to proclaim the present greatness of Christ.

C. S. Lewis’ arch-tempter Screwtape counsels his bumbling protege Wormwood that “we want a man hagridden by the Future - haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth - ready to break (God’s) commands in the Present if by doing so we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other.” When tempted to despair over defeat or declare final victory, as Christians we must return to our unchanging position: The only thing that matters is what the teachings of Jesus command me to do right now.

Next Jesus says, in uncertain times, do not abandon your PEACE; v. 9-1l.

When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified. He does not mean we should assume the rumors are false; he means we should remain calm even though they are very likely true.

Jesus’ words leap across two millennia from that day to our own by pointing out that the one reliable constant of history is chaos. Isis will arise in the Middle East; fracking will fragment the very bedrock below our buildings; global warming will devastate the world’s food supply; random comets will threaten our entire planet in the stellar shooting-gallery that is our galaxy - but the end will not follow immediately. The various and unending upheavals of human existence are, in the phrase of Barbara W.Tuchman, only “the unfolding of miscalculations,” the inevitable results when nations take whatever actions they believe necessary in order to secure whatever peace and prosperity they think they deserve.

Do not be terrified. This word occurs in only one other place in the Bible, also in Luke. It describes the disciples’ emotions when the risen Lord suddenly appears in their midst on the first Easter Sunday: They were startled and terrified. (Lk 24.37) Jesus immediately calms their fears but the contrast makes a point: The unchanging truth of the resurrection of Jesus brings a peace that casts out all earthly worries.

You’ve all seen those little signs that show the British crown and say, “Keep calm and carry on.” The British Ministry of Information created this meme back in 1939 and planned to use it only if the Germans actually invaded. That never happened, of course, and the slogan lay dormant until sixty years later when a bookseller discovered it on a poster among some volumes he had purchased at auction. It caught the public imagination and is now, of course, seen everywhere, along with some humorous variations. In our home, we have two little refrigerator magnets based on this theme. One is the original design and slogan. The other is green and reads, “Now panic and freak out.” We keep them on the inside of our front door and place one or the other on top according to the scheduled events of the day.

Well, Jesus does not deny that there will be times of panic, times when we have good reason to panic and freak out. He does, however, insist that the original sign always remain on top of the front doors of our hearts: We live in the Kingdom of Heaven and, no matter what happens, we hold fast to our peace. We keep calm and carry the cross.

Then Jesus says, in uncertain times, do not abandon your PREPARATION; v.12-15.

So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.

Some of our more fundamentalist brethren have read this text as a prohibition against preparing sermons ahead of time. That is clearly a misreading of the text: Jesus does not speak here of a planned teaching session among assembled believers but of an impromptu deposition in some kangaroo court. Jesus warns his followers, under such circumstances, not to calculate their testimony in light of the prevailing preferences of the age, but to speak the same, unchanging, eternal message of the Gospel that Christians have always shared. This will give you an opportunity to testify. In other words, your goal is not to save your skin or win an argument, but to bear witness. We see this literally fulfilled when Peter and John, though “unlearned and ignorant,” argued the Supreme Court off it’s feet in a reply that reeked of Jesus. (Acts 4.13) We see it in Stephen, whose presentation of the Gospel left his opponents speechless. (Acts 6.10)

Jesus does not forbid sermon preparation. What he says is that our ability to speak with

power to our times lies in our relationship with the eternal Christ. It is by seeking to walk with Jesus daily that we find the ability to offer our world hope in any day and age, and learn to see times of trial as an opportunity to offer timeless testimony. Faithful witness does not lie in getting in the last word on Facebook or spouting the latest pronouncement of our favorite cable news talking head. It lies in living so daily and so deeply with Christ in God’s Word that instead of winning arguments, we bear witness.

My pastor, Scott Higginbotham at Lexington Baptist Church here in Corpus Christi, once told me a fascinating story about his seminary Greek class. He was a student when the planes hit the towers on September 11, 2001. All the students could talk about as they came into class that day was the events of the morning.  The professor, Dr. Schatzmann, entered and though the class’s minds are elsewhere, ploughed right on through the lesson for the day, including a vocabulary quiz, which the entire class bombed. Dr. Schatzmann returned the graded quizzes the next day and asked, “What affected your performance?”  Really?! Planes, buildings, death, an existential threat to the life of the nation: that kind of stuff! Dr. Schatzmann replied in effect: “This is the world we live in. Towers fall, lives end. Grieving people need well-equipped ministers to offer hope and solace. Take out your textbooks. We have work to do.”

What was he saying to the students? That they should turn calloused hearts to the tragedy of the nation? No. Instead he challenged them to see that the most compassionate thing they could do was to delve deeper into the task of learning the Word of God so that they could bring its unchanging truth to the ever-changing and never-endings sufferings of their world.

And now comes the single positive command. Do not abandon your position, your peace, or your preparation: Instead, conquer by your PATIENCE; v.16-19.

By your endurance you will gain your souls. The NRSV translates the verb as a future tense and makes it sound like a prediction. A one-letter change in the original text, however, would turn it into a commandment, as the King James translates it. I believe this to be the correct reading. And the command comes at the end of a harrowing series of predictions of betrayal, hatred, imprisonment and even death in which the single bright spot is that the very hairs of our head are numbered by a God who promises us an eternal reward.

The key to victory in these circumstances, Jesus says, is endurance. That word refers, not to a passive, stubborn, putting-up-with, but an active, hopeful anticipation of ultimate reward. The Christian does not stump, sullen and stoic, through the slings and arrows of outrageous events, but marches steadily and joyfully into the future, never flagging in the belief that God will grant victory.

And I think the reward is interesting: you will gain your souls. The word really means to possess or acquire what you do not yet own. Elsewhere in the Bible it refers to getting hold of cash or real estate. Does this mean that our endurance of life’s trials earns our salvation? No. The word soul is the idea of one’s true, inner self. When I anchor my life in the present reality of the indwelling Christ, I give up the buzzing anxiety which has me chasing a thousand contradictory schemes which promise me peace. Instead, of being pulled in pieces by the unknown future, I sit in peace in the present. I stand steady in the midst of the bombardment of persecution and calamity, realizing that whatever comes my way will serve to make me more like Jesus. When I quit pursuing my soul like a dog chasing its tail, I realize that I possess it at last.

And that’s the answer. When the seemingly unshakeable monuments of our security crumble into the vast and measureless sands, do not abandon your position; when two vast and trunkless legs of stone are all that are left of the symbols of political power, do not abandon your peace; when inscriptions of authority become mere hollow mockery, do not abandon your preparation. Instead, conquer by your patience. Perhaps the beautiful old hymn by Catharina von Schlegel says it best:

Be still, my soul; the Lord is on thy side;

Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;

Leave to thy God to order and provide;

In every change He faithful will remain.

Be still, my soul; thy best, thy heavenly, Friend

Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul; thy God doth undertake

To guide the future as He has the past.

Thy hope, thy confidence, let nothing shake;

All now mysterious shall be bright at last.

Be still, my soul; the waves and winds still know

His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below.

Amen.

A Control Freak Goes to Hell: A Sermon in Tryptich, Luke 16.19-31

Collect

Father, Your Son warns us that Heaven reverses every standard of earth like a garment turned outside-in, so that the least become the greatest and the outcasts occupy the seats of honor. Grant us wisdom to see and grace to respond to the true opportunities we daily receive to live and love like Christ Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Central Panel: Christ in the Text

This story starts off as a text about money and ends up as a text about Heaven and Hell. That ought to warn us that money is a very spiritual matter.

When I was a pastor, I always had someone who objected to the annual set of stewardship sermons that I preached each October. “I don’t come to church to hear about money,” they sniffed. “I come to hear about spiritual things.” But money is an extremely spiritual thing if we have any clear notion of what we mean by “spiritual.” I like what Baptist pastor and USC philosophy professor Dallas Willard says that spirit is “unbodied personal power.” Any power I can exercise without taking physical action is a spiritual power. My mother, who could not have used physical force on me after I was around the age of ten, could make me do her bidding with only a look, long after I was a hulking college athlete! It worked because authority is a spiritual power. A red light can make me stop my car even though there’s nothing about that color that casts a physical force-field across the intersection. It works because government is a spiritual power.

And money is very much a spiritual power. When I go into a restaurant, I can tell a total stranger exactly what I want to eat and drink and they bring it to me and are even extra-nice about the whole thing. They do this because of the implicit agreement that when I’ve eaten, I will give them money. Of course, for all they know I might dine-and-dash, but the mere promise of payment gets me what I want. I can move people around like pieces on my private chessboard: mowing my yard, repairing my plumbing, painting my house. Money is a spiritual means of expressing and obtaining my will.

And logically that means that the more money I have, the more of this particular spiritual power I possess. Money is my way of controlling what happens to me. I’m at a time in life where  you start thinking about retirement, and beyond retirement to the last years of life. I need a retirement fund so that, when my body can no longer do things to get people to give me food and clothes and a place to stay, my money can. I need a bigger retirement fund so that when I can no longer control my body, my bladder, or my brain, I can continue to control how I’m cared for. C. S. Lewis speculated that money was the root of all evil only because money gave us the ability to decide what happened to us, to have what we wanted anytime we wanted it. Money is, he argued, “a defence against chance.”

That’s really why we like it so much: we’re all basically control freaks and money offers us control. “I don’t like money,” said heavyweight champ Joe Louis, “but it does quiet my nerves.”

So I think that in one sense this famous parable is about control.

Sure, it’s about money: one man has a lot of it and one man has none at all. And we get the usual marks of money or its absence: clothing, food, and security on the one hand; vulnerability, hunger, and nakedness on the other. But money bred in one man a habit of control, and the lack of money bred in the other man a habit of trust. The rich man trusted no one, including God, so he had to control everyone. Lazarus could control no one, so he had to trust everyone, especially God.

Eight verbs describe the rich man: Seven of these are in the active voice: He dressed, feasted, died, lifted up, saw, cried out, said, and begged. The only passive one describes his funeral: he was buried. He speaks ten verbs. Three are commands (have mercy, send, and send) and three have an imperative component, describing what he wants someone else to do (dip, cool, warn). Of those seven commands, six of them relate to Lazarus!

By contrast, eight verbs also relate to Lazarus and all but two are passive: he was laid, was covered, was longing, to be fed. Dogs came and licked him. In the end, he was carried away. The only actions he takes for himself are longing and death. He speaks no words in the entire story and he certainly issues no commands.

This is a story about control. The rich man is a guy who gets things done. He had amassed enough money to control everything that went on around him: The story describes his clothing his food and his house, but they sketch out a larger portrait of someone who got what he wanted. Kings wore purple. The wealthy wore linen. Purple was a power color. Linen was a comfort fabric. He looked good on the outside and felt good on the inside. He feasted sumptuously. Jesus uses the same phrase four times in the parable of the prodigal son (Lk 15.23, 24, 29, 32). This guy’s daily fare rivaled the festive dining of a fairly wealthy father throwing a once-in-a-lifetime welcome-back party for his wayward son. The rich man’s house had a gate, and that word describes a massive structure, the kind of iron barricade that guarded a walled city (Acts 12.10). He’d built a beautiful wall and made sure he landed on the right side of it and that no one got in without his permission.

Lazarus, by contrast, controls nothing. He’s a low-energy loser. The NRSV says he “lay” at the rich man’s gate. In fact, the verb is a passive: he was laid there; and the word means “to throw.” Someone dumped him down at the rich man’s gate like a bundle of forgotten rags, like a trash bag on a street where the garbage trucks don’t go anymore. He was covered; he didn’t ask for these sores. He couldn’t even fend off the mangy mutts of the mean streets, curs that lapped up nourishment from the putrid flux of his bodily fluids. Someone threw him; the sores covered him; the dogs licked them; the only action he initiates is a weak-willed wish that he had no way of achieving. He appears as a completely passive personality, too feeble to take any part in determining what will happen to him. The only act he truly performs in the entire story is to die, and that wasn’t his choice either, not so much something he did as something he couldn’t help doing.

It interests me that both men take these behaviors with them either to Heaven or to Hell. The rich man spends his time in Hell giving orders: Send Lazarus to me! Send Lazarus to my brothers! I want my butler! I want my personal assistant! My will to be done! From the pit of Hell he argues theology with Abraham at the banquet table of Heaven, convinced that his interpretation of the Bible must be the one to prevail. But nobody does anything he says. Literally, his money is no good here. He lacks the kind of spiritual currency that holds sway in eternity.

Now look at Lazarus, by contrast. The text tells us that he went to be with Abraham, and that the rich man saw  Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side: Though I am a fan of the NRSV, I must admit that these are manifestly weak translations. First of all, the word means “breast” or “bosom.” More importantly, this is the image of one who occupies the favorite seat at a banquet, nearest the host (Jo 13.23). This gathers up a whole cluster of images. The Jews thought of the Kingdom of Heaven as an eternal banquet (Lk 14.15) where one was honored by the presence of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and from which exclusion was the worst possible fate. (Lk 13.28-29) And look at Lazarus once he arrives: He just keeps on doing what he has always done: He says nothing. He does nothing. He lets Abraham answer the enemy who would yank him from the joys of Heaven to run errands in the flames of Hell.

See, Heaven is a place where spiritual power arises from trust, and Lazarus is good at trusting. In fact, Jesus hints that Lazarus is immediately at home in Heaven, because Heaven was his home all along. Jesus says that Lazarus was carried away by angels. That could be translated, that he was carried back. Lazarus “returned,” to Heaven, as if bliss was his natural home from which he had been in temporary exile, and now, like a rubber band with the tension released, he snaps back to his original position. He’s never sat at anyone’s table before! He doesn’t know which fork to use and he drinks from the finger-bowl and blows his nose on the napkin, but no one doubts for a second that he’s right where he belongs!

The rich man opted for the spiritual power of wealth that works only on earth, and

ultimately entered eternity with a pocketful of Confederate money, the discredited currency of a defeated rebel world. Lazarus traded in the spiritual currency of trust, and found out when he got to Heaven that it was legal tender.

Now, if you want to make this a story about the reality of Hell, you can do that. It may only be a parable, as some people object, but even so Jesus never uses untruth to teach the truth. Besides, he gives one character a name, and Jesus doesn’t do that in any other parable. All this may really have happened, but whether it did or not, it certainly is the kind of thing that does happen. Jesus says there is a Hell, that it is hot, and that nobody can get out of it. But that reading makes for an interesting problem: The rich man doesn’t go to Hell for refusing to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and savior, and as far as we know Lazarus never prayed the sinner’s prayer. I’m not saying those things don’t matter; I’m just saying that they don’t seem to be the subject of this story.

I think the point of the story is to teach us trust over control in navigating the intimate encounters of our lives. Because Lazarus and the rich man did encounter one another in this life.

These two men meet only in two places in the story: the gate and the grave. They met at the gate. There seemed to be a great gap between Lazarus and the rich man. They inhabited separate worlds. Isn’t it interesting, then, that the rich man knows Lazarus’ name? Of course, he only uses it when he wants something from him, and even then doesn’t address him directly. Still, he knew the beggar’s name. How could that have happened? Oh, they’d met often enough. Every time the rich man roared up in his Mercedes and punched in the entry code to his gated community, he saw Lazarus lying there and congratulated himself on having enough money to live in a neighborhood that kept the riff-raff from dumpster-diving, scavenging for food scraps in the trash cans out back. “If I allowed him to do that,” he explained to his chauffeur, “he’d just become dependant on handouts. I’m doing Lazarus a favor.”

And they met at the grave. Oh, not literally. In fact, only the rich man rates a funeral. We know what became of the rich man’s body; we only know what became of Lazarus’ soul. Yet I say they met at the grave in the sense that death marked the level of their common ground at last. I said that almost the only active verb applied to Lazarus is the poor man died. Right after that, Jesus says, the rich man also died. Don’t miss that also. Our Lord emphasizes the great equalizer. Lazarus and the rich man were, in the words of Charles Dickens, “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

But those opportunities for intimacy end in the life to come. Where there once was a great gate fixed, there now is a great gulf fixed. Where the rich man once shut Lazarus out, he now yearns to welcome him in but cannot. Where he had dismissed Lazarus the beggar, he now begs for Lazarus to do him a favor. I think perhaps that Jesus warns us to open our eyes to the intimate encounters all around us.

Left Panel: Bearing Witness

Where are the Lazaruses of your life? What opportunities does your life offer you for daily training in the kind of trust that makes us feel at home in Heaven? I have a few suggestions.

First of all, look at how you handle yourself in intimate encounters at the gates of your life. That overworked waitress who gets your order wrong because she’s at the tail-end of a double shift of her second job that still can’t cover her rent: How she hungers for the crumb of a kind word to fall from your lips! That unpopular kid at your school whom the social system has dumped down outside the parties and privileges of the popular: How he would feast on the offer to sit with you at lunch, or study  with you for the test. And what about the telemarketer who always calls just as you sit down to supper? You think you don’t like him doing his job? How do you think he feels about it? You have to put up with him for one call. He has to get back on the phone and call a hundred more you’s in hopes of making enough to cover his college loan payments. You don’t have to buy that home security system he’s selling; in fact, I urge you not to. But you have enough kindness, broken and crumbled though it may be at the end of the day, to offer him a feast of gentle refusals.

Next, look at how you handle the intimate encounters at the guarded gates of your society. That person of color who fears an encounter with law enforcement because people who look like him tend to die with their hands up, shut out of the feast of civil rights where you as a white American assume the right to gorge yourself. We clamor for “law and order,” for gates and guns that reinforce our power and privilege. Can we at least spare the crumb of trying to see things from his side? Or are we too afraid to trust that God will do good to us if we show the love of God? That woman who came to this country hungry for the scraps of the job market, hoping - HOPING! - to clean your hotel room or wash your dishes in the kitchen of a run-down restaurant. Is there one kind crumb for her, or only a ticket back to the other side of the biggest wall we can get someone to build?

Finally, look at how you handle the intimate encounters that occur when you find yourself bereft of the currency of control and forced to trade in the currency of trust. What was it like to be the frightened child who had to take what the all-powerful adult dished out? How did it feel to take your car to the shop and trust that the mechanic wasn’t robbing you blind since you had no way to check the truth of what he told you? If you can live in that moment, just for a moment, and then live out of that moment for the rest of the day, you will be exchanging the currency of a bankrupt economy for the gold standard that retains its value forever.

Right Panel: Bearing Witness

A couple of years ago I read about a study which found that people in powerful positions change their manner of speaking in consistent ways that signal their superior status. Sei Jin Ko, the lead researcher, said it would be wise, before going into a big meeting or facing a job interview, to recall a situation in which you felt powerful. If you do, he argued, your speech patterns and body language will subconsciously change and everyone will think you are in charge. They will give you the control you feel you must have.

I want to suggest an alternative.

The next time you talk to someone - anyone, and especially someone like Lazarus, someone whom life has dumped down on the wrong side of the socio-economic or racial gates of society - try to remember Jesus’ voice on Calvary: the voice that cried out for a single mouthful of water: I thirst; the voice that admitted that even God seemed to have turned God’s almighty back: My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?; the voice that spoke prayers of forgiveness for his powerful enemies and words of forgiveness to his powerless fellow-sufferer: Father forgive them! This day shalt thou be with me in paradise. Remember that voice; put yourself in that place - then stretch your arms wide in complete vulnerability, powerless to fend off the spear that slices into your side, and speak one more word: Into thy hands, I commend my spirit.

You may lose the contest of that conversation. You may die a small death in a world that values only victory. You may be destined for a common grave with the rest of the misfits, or perhaps laid in the borrowed tomb of someone too afraid to speak up for you when it still counted. You may! But you will without a doubt have made a deposit in the eternal account you hold in a Kingdom that rejects control and values only trust.

And remember, the story of Lazarus teaches us that the grave is never the last chapter! Jesus wound up where Lazarus did - the discarded corpse of a criminal destined to rot or be devoured by the dogs. But that was on Friday, and Friday doesn’t last forever, because Sunday’s coming! The cross whispers of the price we pay, but the empty tomb shouts the reward we reap. Amen.

Benediction

Lift up the gates and the everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in!

The King clothed in rags, covered with running sores.

Lift up the gates and the everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in!

The King dog-licked and derelict, dumped down in a dismal heap.

Lift up the gates and the everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in!

The King hungry and homeless, hoping only for cast-off crumbs.

Who is this King of Glory? The Lord mighty in battle!

And what we do to the least of these his brethren,

We do it unto him.

In the Name of

The Father, and of

The Son, and of

The Holy Spirit,

One God now and forever,

Amen.