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.
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