Luke 16:19-31
September 26, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
There’s an old painting by Holman Hunt titled, “The Light of the World.” Jesus, a lantern lifted in his left hand to dispel the darkness of the night, knocks gently with his right hand on a heavy wooden door. But by the looks of this door, it hasn’t been opened for many years. Ivy has grown up over and above the top of the door. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” is the Bible verse being portrayed but we wonder if anyone is going to open the door.
The front door in our house is made of solid materials with no glass windows and only this very small peephole that I can see who might be on the other side of the door. Many of us have iron gates in front of our doors and entrances that we need to “buzz” people in. Some of us live in what is called “gated” communities where you have a sentry who checks your ID and verifies your appointment before allowing you to drive in. Most of us live in places where our front doors separate us from people we don’t know.
The Rich Man and Lazarus
Last Sunday, we looked at the parable of the Dishonest Manager and I shared with you that it was more about our future life than our earthly one. There are times when we may need to forego short-term benefits and commissions for long-term security of heavenly rewards. Today’s parable that Jesus tells of the Rich Man and Lazarus is not about the afterlife as much as it is about this life. What do we do or don’t do with our wealth?
For some time now, Luke has been hammering in his Gospel on the theme of the dangers of riches. In Chapter 12:13-21, a rich fool builds bigger barns, only to die once they are erected. In Chapter 14, the rich get together and indulge in grand banquets, when they should be inviting the poor, maimed, lamed, and blind. The prodigal son squanders a fortune and cheapens his soul in riotous living in Chapter 15. And in Chapter 16:14, the Pharisees scoffed at Jesus’ teachings because Jesus saw them as “lovers of money.”
Of all of the parables that Jesus told, this is the only one that the character is given a name, Lazarus. It’s ironic that the name, Lazarus means, “God saves.” The story is about a rich man whose house contained countless indicators of God’s blessing: purple fabric from Tyre, fine Egyptian linen, sumptuous tables spilling over with exotic cuisine. This man was rich because we know that purple dye was produced at great expense from snails found in the Mediterranean Sea. Purple was associated with royalty and the wealthy.
Just outside this house were as many indicators of God’s curse. Poor man, Lazarus had oozing sores shouting out that he was ill, unfit, and deprived of the God of good health and happiness. Like the prodigal son who ate what the pigs ate in the pig sty, Lazarus was so hungry that he longed for what might fall from the rich man’s overflowing banquet table.
Almost like some kind of joke, both die. The rich man is buried, no doubt with great pomp while Lazarus is not even granted the dignity of a decent burial. But instead angels invisibly come and gather Lazarus up to Abraham’s bosom because like his name says, “God saves” at the end.
Across this unbridgeable gulf, the rich man is forever stuck in hell. His request for Lazarus to bring some cool relief to his tongue is denied. And when the rich man realized that his condition can’t be changed, he begs Abraham to send Lazarus back to warn his family of five brothers to change their lifestyles so that they won’t end up in this place of eternal torment. And even with this request, Abraham said that if they don’t listen to the teachings of Moses and the prophets now, why would they listen to someone who rises from the dead.
This parable is all about a door that never got opened. On one side, there are finely attired beautiful people who are dining on delicately prepared dishes sipping imported wine. But literally inches away, on the other side, lay a man barely in rags, his ugly skin ravaged by unspeakable infections; his only companions are a pack of mangy dogs that disgustingly lick his wounds. Two men, so close, just separated by a single door, yet so far apart.
Sin of Indifference
This parable is to teach us the importance of doing good deeds and helping people. Nowhere does it say that the rich man was mean to Lazarus. There was no abuse here. The problem was that the rich man was blind to Lazarus. Right there on his doorstep, day after day, starving, the rich man never saw him.
One of the poorest nations in the Caribbean is Haiti where we have American Baptist mission work. Just this past week, Hurricane Jeanne left thousands dead because of mudslides created by deforestation. Some years ago, in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, a luxury hotel was being built. But the owners of the hotel soon found that they had a problem on their hands. The view from the grand hotel was being spoiled, because of the nearby slum could be seen from the hotel windows. Rather than try to alleviate the poverty problem and clean up or improve on the slum area, they built a high wall around the hotel so that the guests at the hotel would no longer be able to see that the slum was there.
The sin of the rich man was not that he hated Lazarus or that he mistreated him. Instead, the rich man’s sin was that he was indifferent to Lazarus. He was blind to him. When we live in a narcissist culture that only sees the world from what our own eyes want to see, we don’t see people. We don’t see the blind, the lame, the ill, the suffering, the dirty, the imprisoned, the Lazarus’ in the world.
What is more shocking about this parable is that the rich man appears to be living a successful life not unlike any other reasonable wealthy person in our time, which would include the majority of Christians in our middle-class churches in the U.S. I wonder who the rich man in this parable is when it comes to our world today.
Although we are pleased to see that after all the suffering Lazarus endured that he is finally cradled in the bosom of Abraham, the fate of the rich man makes us squirm a little. If we are the rich man in this parable, we might be tempted to say that Jesus was strong on spiritual matters, but obviously never studied economics. We can’t feed all the poor. Making the poor dependent on charity only ruins whatever hope they have of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps we might say. Jesus is unrealistic.
Or we can blame the victim. Lazarus should have made his need known more clearly. He was just lying there when he should have been knocking on the door. The rich man might argue, “Had I known he was out there…” But the rich man is aware; he knows Lazarus’ name—but even if he didn’t, we must ask why his door was slammed shut so tightly. Why isn’t he going out, looking around for a brother who might be hurting? Why do we rest securely in gated communities, barred apartments and storefronts, and solid doors with little peepholes?
This parable tells an important message for us because if we ignore the poor, we will end up in hell. To follow Jesus we are forbidden to indulge ourselves behind closed doors. To follow Jesus we have to get all excited about redistributing wealth in the world. To follow Jesus, we have to see who may be on the other side of the door.
Disguised Poor
Mother Teresa framed her whole life around the notion that we see Christ “in the distressing disguise of the poor.” Her Sisters of Charity believe that they touch the body of Christ when they help the poor. They pray while working, believing that they are doing it for Jesus and doing it to Jesus.
In Matthew 25, we see at the time of judgment, the righteous will defend themselves by saying,
“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you? And the king will answer them. ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’”
If there was a character in this parable that is Jesus, it would be Lazarus. Jesus is often disguised as the poor and if we continue to party behind our closed doors, we are imperiling our souls. The challenge of life with God is not merely being charitable now and then, volunteering a few minutes now and then but to live out our lives knowing that God is constantly turning our world upside down to reveal that when the kingdom of God dawns, the rich will be bereft of all goods and the poor will live in palaces.
What Jesus says is true. But we are so bogged down, so entangled in our little worlds that we can’t see what’s just outside our doors. To his shame, this rich man is as stuck in the torments of hell as he was stuck inside his beautifully appointed home. He is still barking orders: “Tell that poor man to bring me some water; still thinking about himself first. And perhaps this is what hell might be like—being stuck in only thinking about our own needs. Just like people choose to separate themselves from other people, in hell, people choose separation from God. “I don’t want help. I want to be left alone.”
The rich man’s hope had been right outside the door. His own salvation was as close as the other side of the door, but when we measure how far he needed to go, we are into canyon-sized proportions. He could not go just a few inches, so now he cannot cross the massive chasm of his own choosing.
Opposite of Poverty is Community
I wonder if tossing a few nuggets of gold out his window now and then would have saved the rich man. What if he had made a “to go” plate of leftovers for Lazarus? Would God have said, “Well done, good and faithful servant?”
Hardly. For Jurgen Moltmann once said, “The opposite of poverty is not property. Rather the opposite of both poverty and property is community.” A take-out plate of leftovers or even a bundle of cash is not opening your door to establish community.
In 1942, Clarence Jordan, having studied agriculture and then theology, attempted a shocking experiment in living the gospel by founding Koinonia Farm outside Americus, Georgia. Blacks and whites lived together, embodying the kind of community described in Acts, where fellowship meant communal sharing of all goods. The Ku Klux Klan repeatedly terrorized, bombed, and vandalized Koinonia.
Among the many impacted by Jordan was Millard Fuller. Fuller went to Koinonia by accident, trying to save his marriage. When he met Jordan, he said he felt this tremendous heaviness in his chest. So absorbed was he in his business, making the unheard-of sum of 1 million dollars a year in those days, that he noticed his marriage was slipping away. Jordan told Fuller that a million dollars can weigh awfully burdensome on a man and that he was addicted to money.
Clarence Jordan told Fuller that “What the poor need is not charity but capital, not caseworkers but coworkers. And what the rich need is a wise, honorable and just way of divesting themselves of their over abundance.”
Fuller divested himself honorably, took down this huge door that separated himself from the poor, and began hammering on new door frames, as he founded the ministry called Habitat for Humanity. We know that Habitat has engaged thousands of volunteers in building more than 100,000 homes for the working poor throughout America and in such far-flung locations as Zaire, Guatemala, Ireland, and Hungary. The opposite of poverty and the opposite of wealth is community.
Yesterday the Sojourners spent a day under the leadership of Tommy Lim and Norman Fong to help clean up some of the worst housing conditions in Chinatown. Single-Resident-Occupancy (SROs) units are crowded with more people than there are beds. There are no private restrooms and cooking facilities but shared facilities by everyone on the floor. It may still just be for a few hours that you saw the needs of our residents, but you still opened the door that separated us from them.
Last week, the Xplorers sorted food and canned goods at the SF Food Bank so that surplus food can be redistributed around the city to people who need to eat. Lazarus would have benefited from the food bank. You opened the door for the poor to receive food to live on.
On this earth, we are called to live in community with each other, in this bold experiment in living together, those who once were rich, those who once were poor, the have and the have-nots, together in a Godly new world where the haves stop having, the have-nots start having. We want a human community where status is a distant memory, where we laugh at the slightest hint of somebody feeling superior over another.
Opening the Doors
Last Sunday a few of us met with ABC missionary Kim Brown who works in Chang Mai in Northern Thailand. We saw slides of the children, women and men who want a better life than forced prostitution and AIDS. The slides were merely windows to another world that we have been indifferent about. But some of us want to do more than view the world through slides and power point presentations. Some of us want to open our doors to go out and see for ourselves the many Lazarus’ all around us by going on a mission trip next year.
We learn by living, sharing, tearing down iron gates, opening up our doors. We discover we are all poor or rather that we are really all rich, when we study this story together. If a bunch of rich people read this parable, they get squeamish, and dance around its clear intent. If a bunch of poor people read the story, they get spiteful and cast aspersions on whoever has money in the bank. But if we read this story together, we open the door to each other’s world and salvation comes to all.
The problem is the door, not the wealth not the poverty, but the door. St Francis broke down a door in Assisi, gave his father’s clothing back, and lived joyfully in community with rich and poor in humble habits. Mother Teresa heeded Christ’s call to serve the poor, and she burst through an ugly door into the barrios of Calcutta to find many sisters. The Xplorers burst through the doors of the food bank. The Sojourners burst through the doors of the SROs. We want to open the doors that separate our church from the people in Northern Thailand. When we burst through the doors, we discover new neighbors and sometimes, we end up being saved—together.
Remember when the rich man couldn’t change his situation that he wanted to at least send a message back down to earth to warn his five brothers. By implication, we are those five brothers. We still have time to make a lifestyle change that will bring our lives in tune with God’s way now, while we are still living.
The somebody on the other side of the door is Christ, the poor, despised beggar, waiting for us to tender. He is lying at the door, waiting for you to come out, and he will come in, bringing with him a host of other people, not defined by poverty or property, but as a community.
The grace and mercy of God’s love can be seen in the fact that in this unthinkable wide gulf that separates us from God, we believe that Christ is the beggar who stretched out his wounded hands and feet, letting himself endure the horrific poverty of the beggar, exposing himself to the fiery torments of the rich man, clasping with his wounded hands the poor man and the rich man. Christ is the one who cannot be contained by the door outside his grave, who has risen from the dead, who pleads with the five brothers, with us, who cries out that it’s never too late to bridge across that the fixed chasm that separates us from the love of God.
Let us pray.
Gracious Lord God, forgive us for the times when we have refused to open the door of our world and to welcome those who are disadvantaged, oppressed, and powerless. Teach us to understand that your world is a loving and caring community of brothers and sisters who share life together in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. Help us not to be indifferent but to become aware of the needs around us so that in your mercy and grace, we are forgiven and saved. In Christ whom we pray and receive your love. Amen.