“Lessons from Luke: Lazarus”

Luke 16: 14 – 31

Christopher H. Edmonston

Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church, February 27, 2005

I was in Charlotte this past week attending a meeting. Doug Marlette, who among other things illustrates the daily cartoon Kudzu (about a faithful but crossed-up preacher), wrote a novel about North Carolina called The Bridge. In the novel he describes Charlotte as an Emerald city, rising up suddenly out of the North Carolina Piedmont. Things in Charlotte, unlike Tarboro, fall down and then rise up quickly. Things come and go there with an alarming pace.

This of course, like most of the defining characteristics of a place is Charlotte’s strength and weakness. There is, after all, that old joke about the town, probably a lot like Tarboro, where everyone goes to bed praying, “O Lord we hope and pray that tomorrow looks exactly like yesterday.” In Charlotte the prayer is that yesterday might be forgotten all together.

This was true enough as I drove by the place where our first apartment used to be on Thursday morning. Just graduated from Seminary, we moved to Charlotte and rented a place very near to the school where Colleen taught English and coached soccer. It was a warm and comfortable place and our memories there were fond. I say were and not “are fond” because it is no longer there. There was nothing – no buildings, no pool, no trees – nothing but red clay and bulldozers. I believe it was singer Joni Mitchell that offered the famous line, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Well in Charlotte, or Raleigh, or other places the song might be tweaked to say, “They paved paradise and put up a mixed-use, multilevel, condominium, side-walk café, retail, and office park.” Looking at the red clay I became aware that history, combined with a preference of desiring tomorrow more than yesterday, had simply walked up, over, around, or through our first home in North Carolina.

II.

In a strange way, I saw something similar in the nearly five years that I worked in Charlotte. The homeless there, often nameless and faceless, often pushed into empty warehouses and little pockets of woods along train tracks where they make camps and set up what amount to thread-bare neighborhoods, the homeless were walked around, or over, or through by just about everyone. A group that it was just easier to ignore because of the myriad of problems they had and brought to any relationship, personal or financial.

These homeless folk, walked over or around by so many of us are the very folk that Jesus calls us to pay attention to – the ones that Jesus in Matthew 25 will call “the least of these” to whom we are to minister; the very folk that he has in mind as he tells us to love neighbor as self. That is why at my last church, which was downtown in a place where the homeless were part of our lives everyday, we called them neighbors, and we did our best to be hospitable, in prayer and in service with them, loving them as best we could; loving them as Christ had called us to love.

III.

At its heart, what we have shared this morning from Luke’s gospel is a story about a homeless man that is walked over every day by someone who should have known better. The man’s name that we know is Lazarus[1], the homeless man; the man literally dying on the doorstep of the rich man, the one who loved feasts and fine linens. Lazarus, the homeless man’s name, means, “God helps.”

Of note here, as we try to make sense of this most difficult to hear of parables is that Lazarus takes his place among the most favored of Luke’s and Jesus’ folk as he is the only person, the only character that is named in all of Jesus’ parables in Luke. We don’t know the name of the prodigal son or the unjust manager or the widow who looks for coins or even the good Samaritan. We do, however, know the name of this man – so poor and pitiful that he dies in the streets. Clearly, by naming him, Luke is trying to get our attention here; and I dare say that for those of us who live in the wealthiest nation on the earth, a nation that far too often for the sake of ease turns a deaf ear to the cries of the poor, if our attention cannot be seized by these words in the gospel then perhaps our attention will not be seized by Jesus at all.

IV.

Now, as many of you know, I am continuing today five weeks of Lenten sermons about wealth and poverty, about money and its ability to mislead us and control us. We are diving into five texts in Luke as they address the way that we “trust the benefit more than the Benefactor”[2] and substitute our financial power for the power of God in our lives. Two weeks ago we looked at Luke’s blessings and woes – the fact that where we, 21^st century Americans, see wealth automatically as a blessing, Jesus and the gospel see it as dangerous and potentially destructive.

Last week we looked at the parable of the unjust manager, the most complicated of all of Luke’s writings. As you might remember, we stopped at Luke 16:13 last week, the place where Jesus gives us the proverbial warning: “You cannot serve two masters – you cannot serve God and money.” Today, we picked up at verse 14, where Luke gives us this phrase –“The Pharisees, lovers of money, heard all of this and they scoffed and ridiculed him.”

One of the most important tasks in interpreting the parables of Luke is determining who the audience of the parable is; it is important to ask the question: who are the words, the story, the examples directed towards as Jesus is teaching?[3]

Luke tells us here that the Pharisees (Jesus’ staunchest opponents and most intractable critics; the resident scholars and learned men of their day) had heard all of this and they scoffed and ridiculed him. The word here used for scoff and ridicule is among the strongest words used in the New Testament – think of hissing and spitting and open mockery. Think of an attempt to disgrace the speaker into silence – to get him to tuck his tale and turn home back to Nazareth. Here in Luke 16, the Pharisees outright reject Jesus and what he has to say and what he had come to do.

So, what then of Lazarus and this unnamed rich man? What of this parable offered in the face of scoffers? What of the shocking and challenging critique that Jesus offers about the wealthy through this story?

Well to begin with let’s state what the crisis is: this rich man doesn’t understand all that is at stake here. He doesn’t care enough about the law of Moses and its requirements of care for the poor to change any of his behavior; to allow any of the scraps from his table to go to the man dying at the door. He just doesn’t allow the ethics of his faith to have any bearing on his actions, all the while knowing what the faith has historically required (why else would he want Lazarus to warn his brothers of his fate?).

One scholar writes these words, words that point us to a fitful understanding of the plight of the rich man in the parable and help us to see it as the tragedy that it is:

In this story we have the makings of a tragedy, and tragedy is closer to the truth of the gospel than any morality play. What is deeply troubling about tragedy is that it involves more than our individual will to action, or our intellects; it involves character flaws so grave that permeate the actions of … whole communities.

The rich man doesn’t get it: it is not that he screwed up by not helping Lazarus while they were both alive; rather, it is that he could not hear, or did not listen to, Moses and the prophets, who had a lot to say about justice, the poor and those in need. He had what Jesus in other contexts calls ‘hardness of the heart’…. [For the rich man] nothing changes, even after death [as] Jesus makes it clear that the rich man does not understand, even in Hades. There he asks for mercy, but not forgiveness. He asks for water, but not for life….

As with any good tragedy the effect transfers to us, the audience. We see the tragic flaw in the rich man and recognize our own inability or unwillingness to hear and listen to God’s word as it finds its way to us. [In it we] see our own hardness of heart…[4]

VI.

The most troubling reality in the world today is the sharp disparity between the “haves’” and the “have nots’” – between the richest and the poorest. In a book called, Neither Poverty nor Riches, author Craig Blomberg cites statistics from 1996: at least 1 billion of the world’s 5 billion lived in squalid poverty; huge sprawling slums and ghettoes spurn health, education, and unemployment problems; there are nearly 20 million refugees in the world; millions of children die from hunger each year; and, in 1994 the wealth of the world 387 billionaires equaled the wealth of the world’s bottom 45% or about 2.5 billion people (387:2.5 billion!).[5]

Closer to home, as the News and Observer and The Daily Southerner frequently point out, 8 of the 50 poorest counties in the United States, or 16% of the poorest counties in this nation are east of I-95, here in North Carolina.

In the face of this data, is this sobering fact: in the 1980’ and 1990’s Americans spent twice as much on cut flowers as we did on overseas missions; about one and a half times more on video games, pinball machines, and lawn-care equipment; we spent five times more on pets than we did in Protestant missions, twenty six times as much on soft drinks and sodas, and 140 times as much on legalized gambling. In 1995 alone, worldwide expenditures for advertising, the tool of the media designed to appeal to you and me that we need all of the stuff of our lives spent 385 billion dollars; compare that to the five-year period of 1984 to 1989, where American Christians spent 15.7 billion on church construction – a difference of roughly 370 billion dollars.[6] Needless to say, our priorities are grossly misguided.

VII.

Most of the time when I hear numbers like these, I feel helpless and hopeless. Who am I, so small, in the face of a problem and a disparity so large?

Well, to begin with, I, like you, am a disciple of Jesus Christ. And Jesus is doing all that he can to get my attention here – to teach me that though the problems are great and the laborers are often too few, the one response I cannot make is to be either ignorant or unconcerned. The grace of Jesus Christ that claims us in the love of God is the same grace that calls us in the name of God to love neighbor as self – to be informed and active in the plight of all our brothers and sisters. One cannot read the gospel of Luke and come away without an understanding that God cares a great deal for the poor and impoverished – one cannot read this parable and come away without an understanding that God expects us to care as well. We are expected to help when and where we can – just as “God Helps” Lazarus, so too are we, those who are led by God to lend our aid. Indifference is not an option here.

For that matter, neither is self-righteousness, which is really the sin of the rich man. Self-righteousness in the thought that his richness, his feasting every day, were the product of his own doing (and not of God’s blessings) and his alone to enjoy regardless of who came to beg for the scraps. His sin is really unrepentant, self-righteous, indifferent wealth.

Last week, the parable of the unjust manager was really a sharp reminder that none of what we have is really ours; and, if we believe it is, we are serving our wealth and moving away from God: you cannot serve God and wealth. This parable today is a story and a warning – a tragedy – about what happens if we dare to live like we do believe that it is all ours; that we do control our wealth or that somehow we are owed something by it. The two parables are intrinsically related.

As Blomberg says it in the conclusion of his exhaustive work on possessions in scripture, “No ungodly poor people are ever exalted as models for emulation, and no godly rich people who are generous and compassionate in the application of their wealth are ever condemned.”[7]

VIII.

My best reading of this text suggests to me that if we give of ourselves to things like two cents a meal, and tsunami relief; if we take our commitment to Habitat for Humanity seriously; if we are generous in our support, both financially and prayerfully, for community organizations that aid and advocate for the poor – if we do these things then we are meeting the basic requirements of the gospel and we are not letting the dogs like the sores of the “least of these” in our midst.

But this text, if I am going to be a serious interpreter of the gospel, also demands that I ask of myself, and of us all, whether or not the basic requirement is the best I have to offer to God in thanksgiving for all that God has given to me?

To be sure, there is chasm between rich and poor[8] (Abraham tells the rich man as much in the parable itself) here in Luke 16; but the greater chasm just might be between how we are called to live as servants of God and neighbors to all people, and how we do in fact live.

Do we come with joy to meet the Lord?

Are we living like we are forgiven, loved, and freed?

Are we partners in Christ’s service?

Is our firm foundation the life and resurrection, the ministry of Jesus Christ, or is it something else?

IX.

I want to conclude today by asking you a question: what are you afraid of? What scares you? My guess is that we each have an individual fear – like flying, or public speaking, or darkness. Personally I am afraid of tornadoes – the things scare me to death. I have a strong suspicion, though even each of us is cowed by a personal fear, we each share a common fear of being like Lazarus – we are afraid of poverty; we are afraid of homelessness; we are afraid of not being able to pay bills; afraid of begging for scraps; afraid of losing the lifestyles we have worked so long to secure.

This fear, I think more than any other, leads us on a quest for security that causes us to keep Lazarus at a distance – we don’t want to get to close lest we become like him. And we follow the illusion that we can keep him at a distance when he is really close at hand. We fear poverty, we push it away. All the while the gospel suggests in this parable that we should be more afraid of wealth (and we strangely embrace it).

Let us, in our being sought by God and seeking the way of his son, realize that we cannot just plow under and remake the needs of the poor as a means of walking by them. We cannot simply forget about them by focusing on something else. We can neither level their stories and rebuild on the sites that are unseemly nor be bested by despair – believing that nothing will ever change; that tomorrow will always be like yesterday. Neither of these are options for believers in and followers of Jesus.

Let us take John Wesley, the great Methodist, to heart when he says, “Gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can”[9] as a faithful substitute for the fine linen of consumerism that tells us to ‘spend all you can.’

Let us remember Lazarus as he was remembered by God; and let us help him when we meet him on our doorsteps.

Amen.

[1] See, Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty nor Riches, page 123 (see note 5 below). Note also – Lazarus is the Greek form, Eliezar, which also means “God helps.” The most famous Lazarus/Eliezar of the Old Testament?: the servant of Abraham was named Eliezar, thus increasing the “joke” on the Pharisees hearing the parable. This Lazarus also is sometimes confused with John’s Lazarus, the man raised from death by Jesus. They are most definitely not the same.

[2] Cf. “Moveable Feast” paper by Bob Dunham, from Tiede, David “Luke 6: 17 –26” Interpretation XL January 1986, page 67.

[3] Johnson, Luke, Luke (Sacra Pagina) page 246 – 248 – although Johnson emphasizes audience and speech throughout his commentary, he first raised my awareness to the audience in this text.

[4] Mark Harris, “No Way Out,” Christian Century, Sept. 12-19, 2001, page 18. Cited from Bob Dunham’s sermon, “The Chasm Between Us,” a work which I follow closely in this sermon, preached at University Presbyterian, September 2004.

[5] Craig Blomberg. Neither Poverty Nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Possessions. Intervarsity Press, 1999. Pages 17 – 18. It is of note also that the statistics have only gotten worse – the gap has increased – since then.

[8] Cf. sermon by Bob Dunham. See note 4 above.