Luke 16:19-31
September 30, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco
Preachers like to tell, “pearly gates jokes.” There was a very rich man. He knew he couldn’t take his wealth with him, but because he had been good and generous with his wealth, he negotiated a special deal. God told him he could take one suitcase full of his wealth with him.
The man sold a bunch of stuff and converted it into gold bars, which he put into a suitcase.
When the time came to enter the Pearly Gate, the rich man encountered St. Peter. “I’m sorry,” said St. Peter, “You can’t take anything into heaven with you.”
“But I have special permission.” He showed St. Peter his note from God.
“OK,” said Peter. “But I need to see what you have in there.” There’s extra security in heaven these days. The man opened his suitcase.
St. Peter looked puzzled, “Paving stones!” He did not know that the streets of heaven are paved with gold.
The Rich Man
The sin of the rich man in this parable is not his love for his money or gold. The problem of this man is the way he tends to his gates. Just imagine this magnificent iron gate standing at the entrance of his estate. Day in and day out, the rich man looks out his window of his master suite while his valet irons his pants. Day in and day out, he sits in his black limousine looking away from Lazarus as the chauffeur drives him back and forth to the office. Day in and day out, the first thing he does when he arrives home is to check the day’s activities on the stock market. Day in and day out, the rich man sits at the dinner table, dining on roast beef and Caesar salad, sipping vintage wine, and watches as the scraps of bread which he used to wipe his fingers are carried by the butler to the wide open patio door and thrown to the watch dogs who sit waiting.
Day after day, the rich man can see Lazarus outside his gates, starving and weak, covered with sores and comforted only by the compassionate licking of otherwise ferocious dogs. The rich man sees Lazarus all right. The problem in this story is not with his eyes, any more than it is with his gold. The problem is about the way the rich man keeps his gate.
He keeps his gates locked up and secured because he sees that his wealth is a blessing from God and that those who are poor are the subjects of God’s punishment. Just prior to Jesus telling this parable, Luke recorded that the “Pharisees who were lovers of money, heard all of this, and they ridiculed him, Jesus.” Drawing from selected passages in the Torah, the Pharisees followed the Deuteronomic idea that the rich and powerful in this life have attained their stature and success as a direct result of their favor with God, while the poor and those who suffer are the subjects of God’s punishment. Following this school of thought, there were those who would not help those in need for fear of interfering with God’s wrath on that person.
Jesus had a different reading of the Law and prophets. His teaching flows directly from the conviction that at the heart of the Scriptures is a covenantal obligation to care for the poor and underprivileged. Jesus teaches about wealth and the special place in God’s kingdom for the poor and the disposed.
Gated Communities
I notice the irony of living in Sausalito and needing to cross the Golden Gate Bridge to come to San Francisco and to Chinatown. Political decisions have created a major chasm between people who live in Marin County and those who live in San Francisco. Without easy accessible public transportation like BART, property values in Marin are always higher than other places in the Bay Area. There’s no room for poor people in Marin. The Golden Gate Bridge poses a big gate between those who have some gold and those who have a lot of gold. Although we may live in Sausalito, we still just have only some gold.
Although we might want to identify with Lazarus in this parable, as members of the United States, we are more like the rich man. We all have some gold. Most of us are not rich by the standards of this world. Our names are not published on the list for the wealthiest Americans living, probably not even on the lists of the wealthiest ones in our neighborhood. But we still live in our form of a gated community. It may be that you live in an actual gated community that only you with a secret pass code will get you in. It may be that your house has one of these iron gates that only a peek through your peek hole would let you buzz in someone you know. It may like me who drives across the Golden Gate Bridge everyday and know that not everyone can afford to live in Marin County or for that matter, in most of the Bay Area.
It’s true that most of us were not born with a silver spoon in our mouths. But we were born to a life lived out on this side of the gate where the rich man stands. Simply because we were born in the United States of America, rather than across our southern borders or across the sea—we happen to have enough of the earth’s resources to live well and then some. There’s a gate between us and the world’s poor, and that gate is there due to the circumstances of our birth. Our lives are gated—we can see what’s going on outside but as long as we have this gate up, we can tell ourselves that it’s not our business.
There is no sin in being rich. There is no sin in being poor. But there is a great sin in having more than you need and not sharing it with those who have less than they need.
Jesus’ story is a wake-up call to us, a call to tend to the gate.
Opening the Gate
We put up this gate of indifference and hide behind it. We are indifferent when it comes to the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. We are indifferent to the spread of AIDS in Africa. We are indifferent to the collateral lost of lives in Iraq. We are indifferent to the Asian sweatshops that manufacture much of our affordable clothing and toys. We are indifferent to global warming as long as we have cheap gas and rich food. We may say, “It’s not my problem.”
But God will not be indifferent to our indifference, for God is not only a God of compassion but also a God of judgment, and we must live up to Jesus Christ’s teachings of the law of love. When that time comes when the tables are turned, justice will happen. The weak don’t always get crushed. The poor don’t always get the shaft. With Jesus the gates actually do fling open. Finally Lazarus receives justice.
There’s a Christian social activist in England who engaged in the struggle against apartheid. Before he became an activist, he was working in South Africa. He passed by a street beggar whenever he entered and left the building in which his office was located. He scarcely noticed the man though at times he mechanically gave the man a coin. One day something seemed different when he came to work. Later in the day it dawned on him that the beggar was not at his usual post near the door. Enquiring, the man learned that the beggar had died—of starvation. This news stunned this man—a human being whom he had passed by day after day had died for lack of food. This sent him back to this parable that Jesus taught. The specter of the beggar continued to haunt him, driving him into the struggle against the conditions that caused people to starve to death—and that others accepted with little question. He vowed that never again would he be blind to a beggar at the gate.
Jesus’ parable tells us that those who separate themselves in this way from the poor separate themselves from God as well. There is a great reversal coming. “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled…But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry” (Luke 6:20-25).
To fail in compassion for other human beings as the rich man does with Lazarus is to cut oneself off from God, who is love. Whatever gates we have put up, we are called to open them up and to share with those who are in need with the resources and blessings that we have to give. Next week and for the month of October, we’ll be receiving the World Mission Offering. We hope that you will think about the beggars at your gate.
There’s a story about a man named Bob. Bob heard of a man in his neighborhood who lost his job suddenly and unfairly. Bob and his wife began to pray for the man.
One night Bob woke up, unable to sleep. A thought kept going through his head: “Give this man 10% of your wages.” When Bob told his wife, they prayed about it, and in the end decided that’s what God was calling them to do.
So Bob went to the unemployed man’s house, saying, “You don’t know me, but God knows us both. This will seem weird to you, but here is 10% of my wages. And I’ll send you a check each payday with 10% until you find work again.”
Bob opened his front door, probably opened his front gate and went over to his neighbor’s house to share what he has with one who has needs.
I know I have included the man named Gregory from Zimbabwe in my sermons before.
But this man keeps coming to our church seeking me out for some money to get by. He’s not like us. He is very different from you and me. If there’s someone who might very well be on the other side of our church gates, he would be that someone. But it seems to me that God keeps sending him to me and the only way I know that we can help him with his daily needs is to give him some more money. I know that we might be victims of a scam but I don’t think so. This man might very well be our Lazarus at our gate.
Isn’t it interesting that the name Lazarus means, “God has helped” when the rich man refused to do so. The meaning of the name Gregory is “watchful.” I wonder if God might be watching what we might do with the beggars who sit at our church gates.
Sharing with Others
This afternoon at our Membership Meeting, we will be hearing about stewardship in the life of our church. A special focus and a reminder that we are called to give generously out of the abundance of what we have, living here in this side of life’s gate.
With the rich man, the parable allows us to see poor Lazarus being rocked in the bosom of Abraham. The story is designed to shock us. It is the voice of one who is risen from the dead, and it comes to us in our sleep, jolting us awake from our sweet dreams of success and abundance. Asking again and again, “How much is enough?” “How are you sharing what you have?”
The story is meant to teach us that the gates of heaven are created to swing wide and free. To include those who stand on both sides of the gate. It is not too late to check the condition of those gates in your lives that stand between us and the poor, the suffering, the spiritual destitute. All it takes is a little oil, carefully placed on the hinges, to keep the gate moving smoothly: the oil of compassion, the oil of mercy, the oil of generosity, the oil of hospitality, and the oil of justice: all the central teachings of the Gospel message.
When it is our time to enter the Pearly Gates, Jesus Christ will ask us, “Do you love me?” And we will be able to say, “Yes, we have opened our gated lives and welcomed in the beggars into our hearts.”
Let us pray.
Lord, why did you have to pick the poorest and weakest people to be drawn to? They are so unpleasant, so different, so depressing, so forgettable. What we would like to do is forget about them, but you bring them up so often in your Scriptures. You make it hard to enjoy all the stuff we have when we are constantly reminded of the hungry, the sick, the lame, the powerless. Couldn’t you just make our faith be about more “spiritual” things?
Yet we pray, Lord, that every time we succeed in our attempts to forget about the Lazaruses of the world, you would cure our amnesia with your Word, Jesus Christ. Grant us courage to exercise mercy, to work to turn the tables on injustice that your Kingdom may come on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.