16th Sunday after Pentecost (Year C) - September 29, 2019

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Year C
September 29, 2019
Luke 16:19-31

This week Jesus hits us again with another hard parable. Unlike last week, this one isn’t a puzzle tofigure out. It is almost “too clear.” To give the broader context, Jesus tells this parable in the same sermon in which Jesus tells the story of the Lost Sheep and the Lost coin. In this gathering are “tax collectors, sinners, Pharisees, and scribes.” Jesus, in addressing this group, goes from talking about searching for the one lost sheep to this imagined scene, that is quite frankly disturbing. This is not a comfortable text. It is one thing to hear about the reversals of the Kingdom of God and the justice found in God’s kingdom – in general. I love hearing the Magnificat; “he has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:51-53). As many of you all know, my favorite hymn, the Canticle of the Turning, is based on these verses. The Magnificat and (thus the Canticle of the Turning) are about Justice – not human justice, but God’s justice. And it is a beautiful vision of the justice that is coming into the world.

This justice in the Gospel of Luke is not “getting one’s ‘fair share’ or getting what one ‘deserves’” No, justice for the Gospel of Luke is the balancing of scales. The powerful are brought down and the lowly are lifted up. Both the Magnificat and the Canticle of the turning are… well… general enough that it doesn’t push me too far. There’s distance in the general. But here, today, we get a parable from Jesus in which this role reversal and in which God’s justice, which was present from the very beginning of this gospel comes close, in the particularities of two people – the rich man and Lazarus. When we get into the particularities and the specifics, when we imagine how God’s justice plays out for two characters, things get much more… uncomfortable. The distance allowed by keeping things general is erased, and suddenly we have these two people, these two characters in front of us. It is intentionally uncomfortable – from the detail in which Jesus’ describes Lazarus’ pain and affliction to the detail of the rich man’s torment after death. We’re not supposed to get to the end of the story, thinking that it was such a “nice” story. A powerful story. A provoking story. A clear story. But not a nice and comforting story, as it is directed at the Rich Men (those scribes, Pharisees, and tax collectors) not the Lazaruses.

As we continue to wrestle with some of Jesus’ toughest parables, I keep in the back of my head the purpose of Jesus’ parables. These stories are supposed to help shape us for living kingdom building lives – not in the next world – but in this one. In other words, the question of today’s text isn’t “what does this text say about what will happen to me?” Instead, the questions are “what does this story reveal about our current reality?” and “what does this story reveal to us about living out our faith and living out the Kingdom of God?”

On internship, we had a Tuesday afternoon pericope study, in which either Pastor Neal, my supervisor, or I would lead a bible study on whatever passage we were (at least at that point in the week) likely using as our focus for preaching. This week’s gospel happened to fall on my supervisor’s turn to preach. I don’t remember the angle that he eventually took in his sermon. But I hand wrote some notes in the margins of my bible from that pericope study. Intern Pastor Alex had enough sense to write some things down where I could find them once Pastor Alex had to preach this text. (I’m super thankful for my past wisdom this week). I have these notes above the passage: “To serve the vulnerable is to serve God.”

The story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation
[Public domain]

In life, Lazarus was invisible to the rich man. The chasm between them wasn’t created in this imagined afterlife. It was created in life. Maybe the rich man saw him every day to the point where he became numb to Lazarus’ pain. Maybe the rich man blamed Lazarus for his situation – he didn’t work hard enough, he made his lot in life with the choices he made, he never pulled himself out, never changing his ways to make a better life for himself. Maybe the rich man just didn’t see him; his wealth and purple clothing may have blinded him to the real suffering just outside his own gate.  Whatever kept the Rich Man from seeing Lazarus, the rich man did not do something to help the person in front of him who needed compassion, who was hungry and needed food. At the end of the day, the “why” Lazarus ended up there isn’t the focus; he was just a person in front of him who was in need. The only ones in the parable to show Lazarus compassion in life were the dogs that would lick his sores. In life, Lazarus was a nobody. And the Rich Man never looked down from his place of wealth and privilege to see him, really see him and his suffering – and so he didn’t act.

The Rich Man, presumably speaking, was someone of the Jewish faith. He heard texts his whole life that called him to look down, to see the other, to serve the neighbor, to welcome the stranger. The last few weeks we’ve heard some of those texts in our worship from the Prophet Amos. This week, too, we hear it in our appointed Psalm text. “Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.” (Psalm 146:5-9). There are few things that the Hebrew Bible – especially the prophets – talk about more than care for the needy, food for the hungry, welcome for the foreigner/ migrant. The heart of God, or as our text says today, the bosom of Abraham belongs to these. He had the words of the prophets, the words of the Psalmists, the Word of God, yet he wasn’t convinced enough by them to act for God’s justice in this world.

The Good News is: We have a God who sees. The first person in the Bible to name God was Hagar – the mother of Ishmael and slave of Sarah and Abraham. She named God “El-roi” – the God who sees. The God who sees her suffering, her affliction. This is a God who sees the suffering of the Hebrew people and who acts to bring them out of slavery. This is a God who sees the people that God so loves mess up again and again, yet continues to reach out to God’s beloved humanity to offer grace, love, and forgiveness. This is a God who sees that acts to bring God’s people out of Exile and back to their home. He knows these stories. His brothers know these stories. His faith in the God who sees should affect how he interacts with the world around him. His faith in the God who sees should push him to work for God’s justice in the world. Yet he is so ensnared by the trappings of this world – his own wealth and purple clothes, that he misses that he can use what he has to seek justice for Lazarus in this life. To serve the vulnerable is to serve God. Martin Luther puts it this way, “You can’t feed every beggar in the world, but you can feed the beggar at your gate.”

This is a God who sees the pain of humanity and acts. And even more, in Jesus, we have a God who feels. We have a God that comes down, was born to an unwed mother. Our God was a child migrant, fleeing for his life. Our God makes Godself known in suffering and in dying on a cross. Suffering is real to our God, made known in Christ. Jesus – the one who was beaten, left with sores, the one who died the death of a dangerous political dissident – the one who rises from the dead – knows intimately the sufferings of Lazarus and those like him. We have a God made known in suffering. We have a God that shows us God’s own wounds. In Jesus, God sees our pain and the pain of those around us. We have a God that looks down, that notices, that sees, that experiences suffering, poverty, and has experienced the worst of what the world as it is can offer. 

By the Grace of God, we know that we have been saved. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, we know that nothing can separate us from the love of our God who sees and who knows us more than we can know ourselves. Not our mistakes, not our choices in life, not our pain, not our sin. Nothing can separate us from the love of God made known in Christ Jesus. In other words, we have a God that looks down into the best and worst of what it means to be human – and brings us to Godself. God doesn’t give us what we deserve. Despite our own failings, God gives us grace, love, and mercy. 

Here’s where we get to my last note. “Christ will look like Lazarus. If Lazarus is invisible, so will Christ.” How can we see and experience God’s presence – the presence of the God who sees and feels - if we cannot see the suffering of others? To see Christ is to see the vulnerable. We too have a call to look down, to see the Lazaruses in our midst. We find all sorts of excuses to look away, to not see. “He’s an alcoholic.” “She has made the same mistakes over and over.” “They should just find a job and pull themselves up. Why is it my responsibility?” “He made his choices and now he has to live with them.” We find ways to blame and shame people for their suffering – to allow ourselves not to see the brokenness all around us. But at the end of the day, we have the vulnerable in front of us, Lazarus at our gate. In the Gospel of Luke, however, we get this repeated call to live out our faith – our faith in the one who has already seen us and saved us – by seeing and serving those who God sees, those who are close to Abraham’s heart. How will our faith in the God who sees, who feels, who looks down, who comes down, shape how we interact with the world around us? How will this God push us to see those most vulnerable? Will we be convinced to act for justice for the vulnerable around us by the one who was raised from the dead?

Amen