Sept 25, 2022
Text: Luke 16:19-31
A couple of weeks ago, the business world went wild over the news that the founder of Patagonia is handing over his $3 billion company to a trust that will fight climate change. Yvon Chouinard essentially gave away all his wealth at once, as did his children, who will not inherit the company. He was reported to have said, “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”
There are two things about this story that fascinate me. One is that he focused on the climate crisis. Even before a single dollar of his company goes to funding climate solutions, he has made a difference by finding a novel way to bring attention to the urgency of this crisis. That’s a very good thing.
The other is that Chouinard decided that there were no acceptable options for him under the normal rules of capitalism. The pressure to grow and to produce short-term profits at all costs are just too great; he had to look for a new way of doing things, even if it meant giving up his own claim on three billion dollars. That feels like a pretty glaring reality check to those of us who are trying to understand how systemic inequality works in our world today. Everything is interconnected and there are no easy answers; we’re all going to have to get creative and not be afraid to take some big leaps.
Now, to be sure, the founder of Patagonia is not going to end up like Lazarus, the beggar in today’s Gospel story. Most certainly he is not in any danger of going hungry, or having to depend on the kindness of strangers. Which is just fine!
Meanwhile, the rich man in today’s Gospel may or may not have had the equivalent of $3 billion at his disposal, but whatever the size of his bank account he definitely wasn’t trying to find ways to give it away for the sake of the greater good. At face value, so to speak, this story seems to be about the afterlife, which is pretty scary to think about.
Most of us in this church—not all, but most—live more like the rich man in the parable than like Lazarus. We might struggle a bit to pay the mortgage some months, or worry about skyrocketing inflation and the effect it’s having on our 401Ks, but we’re not in imminent danger of starvation. We’re not in a position of such desperation that we’d be grateful if someone tossed us even a few scraps of their leftovers. And yet we know that people all around us are exactly that desperate. People in other countries, yes, and in other cities, yes, but also people right here in Davis. So, if this parable is meant to be an accurate description of eternity, of heaven and hell, and each of us is either on one side or the other of the great divide described in it, then I know that I for one am in a heap of trouble.
And yet, I’m not at all sure that what Jesus is providing in this story is actually supposed to be a description of the afterlife. For one thing, it doesn’t feel much like a place where “sorrow and pain are no more” and where God will wipe away every tear, which is what our tradition promises awaits us in the great beyond. For another thing, this story is one of a series of parables in the Gospel of Luke—hard parables, parables that should make us think, maybe even make us squirm, but parables nonetheless. And parables, as a rule, are not about what happens after we die but are about how we are living now, and how God is at work in our lives. So why does this parable take place in a version of the afterlife that feels so rigid and uncompromising, so downright scary?
The New Testament scholar Barbara Rossing wrote something about this passage that made all of this click into place for me. She argues that this parable takes the form of an apocalypse, a genre that “serves as a wake-up call, pulling back a curtain to open our eyes to something we urgently need to see before it is too late.” She concludes,
If this parable is an apocalypse, then Luke is situating the audience not so much in the role of either Lazarus or the rich man, but in the role of the five siblings who are still alive. (The Greek word adelphoi can also be translated “siblings” — it includes sisters as well as brothers.) The five siblings who are still alive have time to open their eyes. They have time to see the poor people at their gates, before the chasm becomes permanent. “Send Lazarus to them, that he might warn them,” cries the rich man on behalf of his brothers and sisters, “so that they do not come to this place of torment.” The terrifyingly vivid apocalyptic journey to Hades awakens a sense of urgency on the part of Luke’s audience.1
I hope it doesn’t sound like a copout to say that this story is not meant to scare us into doing better with our lives in order to avoid eternal damnation. Rather, I would say, it still puts the ball firmly in our court. The responsibility is still ours to decide what it means to live a good life, what it means to listen to the words of Moses and the prophets, what it means to follow the example of the One who rose from the dead to show us the way to new and abundant life.
So, what is the wake-up call, what is the urgent crisis we’re being asked to see and confront before it is too late? I could think of many: climate change and its effects being first among them. Sticking with the text brings us closer to some foundational truths about our world, though; the key seems to be the “great chasm” that exists between Lazarus and the rich man. There is, in the here and now, a great chasm that we experience as a deep-seated, entrenched inequality that separates people into haves and have-nots.
Much of this inequality can be traced to a worldview of white supremacy and its many offspring, including racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other pernicious, unchristian ways of seeing and being in the world. Beneath even that, there is the illusion of self-reliance and self-sufficiency that leads far too many of us into self-congratulatory rugged individualism and others into a sense of loneliness, failure, and despair. The isolation, segregation, and conflict that are so evident in the way the world is now are all drawing us farther away from the dream of God’s Beloved Community.
When I consider the rich man and Lazarus, what strikes me hardest is that at the beginning of the story they are both equally isolated. Lazarus is unseen by others, exiled in a prison of invisibility created by his poverty and ill health. People don’t see you, really see you, when you’re a beggar at the gate. That is its own kind of hell. But what this parable also suggests is that wealth creates a similar trap—a cocoon of privilege, if you will—so that people may see you, but they can’t touch you. That too is a kind of prison, a prison built on the illusion of security and self-sufficiency that wealth perpetuates. Notice that the reward that awaits Lazarus in paradise is not wealth and material luxury—it is relationship and connection. He is being comforted in the bosom of Abraham, held in an eternal embrace, seen and known and named, much as we come to church to be seen and known and called by name.
Siblings in Christ, we still have time. We have time to see the poor people at our gates, to see them and respond to their need. We have time to see and hear the planet’s distress and to respond with urgency and compassion. But the time is now. The time is now to work together to dismantle the systems of economic inequality that are destroying God’s precious creation, while denying full dignity and humanity to all of God’ precious creatures. This is a tall order, and there are no easy answers. Most of us don’t have $3 billion to give away! But this community does have resources, including resources of knowledge and relationship and political awareness. There are people in this congregation who are leading change, who are tending to the lost and least day after day, who are even taking action against the forces that are extracting wealth by destroying our local ecosystems.
Each of us needs to find our own ways of doing this week, but we can all start by pulling back the curtain on the isolation and self-centrism that so distort our common life. We have heard Moses and the prophets. We have seen and heard and tasted the risen Christ, the One who comes to us in bread and wine and in the poorest of our neighbors. Let us not turn away, not pull back, but join together, facing the truth in prayer and service and love. Amen.
1https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-26-3/commentary-on-luke-1619-31-4
