Looking for Love – and Grace – in All the Wrong Places
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
September 26, 2004
Luke 16: 19-31
“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus covered with sores...” Did you know that this familiar story told by Jesus was the spark that set fire to Albert Schweitzer? He read it and was suddenly flooded with an awareness of how fortunate he had been as a person, how richly endowed was his nation and, indeed, all of western Europe. And he concluded that Africa was the poor, sick beggar lying at Europe’s doorstep. So, he gave it all up, the wealth and position and worldly comforts, and founded his hospital at Lambarene in the Congo. For him there could be no turning away. This parable has that kind of power.
And I also want to remind you that it is a parable, a story, told to make a point. It is not a theology, or a geography or a road map of the afterlife. Don't get this parable mixed up with anything like a literal interpretation of heaven and hell. It remains a story, a story that expresses some large – and challenging – truths.
As you heard, it is a drama in three acts. The first act shows the rich man, covered with every comfort: food, clothing, comfortable home and all that goes with it. But near at hand is Lazarus, covered with sores, a poor man who scrounges for crumbs from the rich man’s table and is too weak to drive off the scavenger dogs who lick his festering sores. Jesus paints a grim picture of his situation. They must have seen each other every day but did the rich man ever actually see Lazarus? Did he ever pay attention? Did he care about the poor man’s desperate situation?
Well, apparently not, because in scene two, both men are dead and we find that their roles are exactly reversed. I don’t know if you know this, but Lazarus is the only person in all of Jesus’ parables who is actually named. His is the only proper name we will find and it means God helps – so you kind of get a clue where Jesus is going in this parable. Lasarus, now after death, is comforted in the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man suffers the torments of Hades. Again, this is a parable, not a literal description of heaven and hell. The rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to him with a little water – he still sees Lazarus as a servant, but Abraham says it just isn’t possible. Just as there was a great gap between them in life, a gap the rich man refused to cross, so now after death, the gap remains, only this time the rich man is on the wrong side.
Jesus’ listeners would have found this reversal of fortune quite shocking, indeed disturbing. It would be assumed that the rich man’s wealth was a sign of God’s blessing, while Lazarus’ oozing sores shouted that for whatever reason he was outside God’s love and care. Don’t be so sure, says Jesus, because in the kingdom, in God’s promised future, things just might look a little different, radically different. Present arrangements may not be what God ultimately intends. What we see in this story is a vivid clashing of priorities. The age to come, the Kingdom of God, versus the present age.
The third act comes unexpectedly. The rich man tells Abraham that he has five brothers still alive on earth for whom he could not wish such misery. He wants them to be warned. I guess this means that he doesn’t think he was sufficiently warned in his own lifetime. So he makes a strange request. “Raise up Lazarus from the dead and send him to warn my brothers. That ought to make them pay attention!” And then comes the real punch line of this parable. Abraham says, “Look, they already have Moses and the prophets to tell them what to do. If your brothers have not listened to them, they will not be convinced even if someone comes to them from the dead. They know what they need to do. ”
What conclusions might we draw from this fascinating story? Well, for one thing, Andy was worried that I might ask him to sing the song, “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.” But clearly, from Jesus’ perspective, the rich man has done just that – has looked for love, for meaning, for true life in the wrong places. And along the way he developed a vision problem. He just doesn’t see. And when he does finally see, it is too late. Now why would a man with 20/20 vision be so blind? Does it have anything to do with wealth do you suppose?
A minister tells this story. “I remember as a youngster in the church, the first time a missionary came from the Congo in Africa, it was an agricultural missionary. Actually, it was a missionary couple. We’d had evangelists and teachers, but never agricultural missionaries. What did they do? They taught the people to feed themselves. This couple explained to our congregation that when they went to the village where they were, the scrawny little chickens that picked in the street laid about an egg and a half in a year. And the chickens were not fit to eat, just sinewy little things. So they brought in a new way raise chickens and a whole new strain of chickens. In a few years they had big, plump chickens for the table, and they had dozens and dozens of eggs. They could sell eggs and they could sell chickens and they were actually doing just fine.
“When the talk was over, somebody in our church said, ‘I’m not sending any money to missions anymore – over there raising chickens. We gave our money for them to go over there and save souls! Raising chickens. I’m not giving another dime to do that!’” “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen…” Sometimes we just don’t see.
I’m just guessing, but I don’t think we really like to talk much about money in the church – we just don’t like to talk about money. It is interesting, in the Rotary club, when someone gives $1000 to the Rotary Foundation, we make a big deal of it. They become what we call “Paul Harris Fellows”, they get a special citation and pin and everyone stands up and gives them a standing ovation. Everyone knows how much money they’ve given! We don’t do that in the church. “Today during worship we want to honor Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They have just made a pledge of $5000 to the church operating fund. I’d like them to come up here, I want to give them a little plaque.” We don’t do that in church. Now calm down… don’t panic… I don’t want any rumors to start. I’m not suggesting that’s what we are going to do. But it is interesting and I think it does indicate how uncomfortable we are talking money in the church. And it could be that one reason for our reluctance is that Jesus so often had harsh things to say about wealth and the wealthy. In fact, in verse 13 of this chapter in Luke he says, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” You can’t serve them both.
We may not like to talk about money but for Jesus, actually it was one of his favorite subjects. He talked about it all the time. He saw the temptations of wealth, temptations that are hard to resist: closing our eyes to the needs of the hungry and the sick; using one’s wealth selfishly; allowing it to create kind of amnesia, forgetting that so much of what we have is by the grace of God alone. He hammered away at the gap between the rich and the poor and the injustices inevitably produced by this gap. He challenged one wealthy man to give it all away.
He knew wealth could lead to a certain blindness and then he told this parable. Says William Willimon, “The rich man lived in a fantasy world. He thought the world was structured in such a way that the rich deserved what they have with no responsibility to the poor because they have earned their possessions. The poor likewise deserve what they have. The world is structured in such a way that there are some who lie outside the gate in complete misery. Inside the gate, up at the big house, inside the locked security perimeter, there are the rich, safe in their possessions. But the story indicates that they only think they are safe. In the end, when God gets the world that God wants, the tables are turned and we see that God has very different intentions for the world than we have lived…Jesus renders for us a picture of the world as it should be, the world as it is being made, remade, by the work of God. And we see.”
We see. We see that we really haven’t been seeing at all. We see that we have been looking for meaning, for love, for community, for life itself in all the wrong places. A Fred Craddock story. “I was in graduate school at Vanderbilt. I had left my wife and family in the little parish I served and moved into a little room on campus to prepare for those terrible comprehensive exams. It’s make-or-break-time; they can kill you. I would go every night about 11:30 or 12:00 to a little all-night diner – no tables, just little stools – and have a grilled cheese and a cup of coffee to take a break from my studies. It was the same every night. The fellow behind the counter at the grill knew when I walked in to prepare a grilled cheese and cup of coffee. He’d give me a refill, sometimes come again and give me another refill. I joined the men of the night sitting there hovering over coffee, still thinking about my impending New Testament exams.
“One night I noticed a man who was there when I went in but had not yet been waited on. I had been waited on, had a refill, and so had all the others. Finally the man behind the counter went to the man at the end of the counter and said, ‘What do you want?’ He was an old, gray-haired black man. Whatever the man said, the fellow went to the grill, scooped a little dark dry patty off the back of the grill, and put it on a piece of bread with no condiments, no napkin. The cook handed it to the man, who gave him some money, then went out the side door by the garbage can and out onto the street. He sat on the curb by the sidewalk and ate his sandwich, and the dirt and grime kicked up by the eighteen-wheelers of the night were the salt and pepper that seasoned his sandwich.”
Says Craddock, “I didn’t do anything. I did not reprimand, protest, or witness to the cook. I did not go out and sit beside the man on the curb. I didn’t do anything. You see, I was thinking about the questions coming up on my New Testament exam. But as I left that little diner, and started up the hill back to my room to resume my important studies, off in the distance, I heard a cock crow.” It’s so easy not to see; to choose not to see; to rationalize not seeing, “I was so busy.” And then we run into this little story told by Jesus.
Perhaps the second conclusion we can draw is that the rich man’s salvation was right there lying by his door all the time. This story tells us less about the afterlife than it does about this life. Surprisingly it would seem that both rich and poor in this life need the same thing, and they need it from each other and together and what we need is community. And we look everywhere for it except where we need to look the most and that is into the eyes of each other and into the eyes of those we would call different.
Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “What we still do not seem to know is that we are the victims of our own way of life. When we succeed in cutting ourselves off from each other, when we learn how to live with the misery of other people by convincing ourselves that they deserve it, when we defend our own good fortune as God’s blessing and decline to see how our lives are quilted together with all other lives, then we are the losers. Not because of what God will do to us, but because of what we have done to ourselves. Who do you think established the chasm in this story? Was it God or the rich man? Sometimes I think the worst thing we ever have to fear is that God will give us exactly what we want.”
Jerry mentioned Michelle Averbuck, a wonderful speaker. Last week she told a central story from the life of St Francis. He had decided to give up all worldly goods, was walking around naked actually, and his father couldn’t stand it and gave him all these beautiful, expensive clothes. Well, Francis went back, broke down a door in his father’s house in Assisi, and gave him all the clothing back. He put on a simple, probably burlap habit, and went from there to live a joyful life in community with rich and poor, male and female, all kinds of folks, all wearing that same humble habit. I think you could say that when Francis broke down that door, a new world was born – an inclusive, open, welcoming world that really no one had ever seen before. Maybe the problem is the door – not the wealth, not the poverty, but the door. We are so secure behind our doors. But sometimes on the other side of the door are new neighbors, sometimes on the other side of the door is Christ himself. It may very well be that true life is found by daring to tear down the old doors and open new ones, and in the process, find other people, not defined by poverty or wealth, but as a community. As Martin Luther said, “Finally, we are all beggars at the door.” All of us held by that slender thread of God’s grace.