Messengers of Memory and Hope
Sermon by James W. Crawford
September 27, 1998
How as disciples are we stewards in the service of Jesus Christ? How do we offer our lives as trustees of Divine gifts? The New Testament offers a clue in the peculiar and powerful parable we read this morning. Luke recalls and perhaps recasts the parable for the sake of his own congregation some sixty to seventy years after the death of Jesus. Luke is concerned about the immediacy of his congregation's discipleship, the essence of their stewardship. He tells this parable of "the Rich man and the beggar" -- the parable of Dives, which simply mean "rich man" -- and Lazarus, meaning, "the one God helps." And as we wander through this parable this morning I beg you remember in particular, as we focus for a few moments on the rich man and Lazarus -- I beg you remember the five brothers the rich man pleads for and his urgent request for messengers to save those brothers from his own fiery fate. This parable is a humdinger and as usual, Jesus, as he does elsewhere -- Jesus socks his point to us.
I
Scene one: "There was a rich man," Luke tells us. "There was a rich man dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate there lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come to lick his sores."
What jumps out at us? How do you perceive this picture? Let me tell you why this story packs a punch. The people who hear it believe the rich man is blessed by God; they believe the poor man is damned. Luke's hearers believe in a powerful religio-economic ideology: that riches assume righteousness; that wealth is a function of Divine favor; that if you are rich you are good; if you are wealthy you have a claim on heaven's reward. And yes, so goes the ideology, if riches demonstrate divine favor, poverty reflects Divine rejection, a pointedly deserved Godly censure on presumed sin and ethical inadequacy.
So, for those hearing this parable, the rich man is a good man, a civic leader, a business genius, a man whom God blesses because of his integrity, his patriotism, his piety.
And that poor man hunkering outside the gate? A religious outcast, an alien, a human reject, the wild dogs nourishing themselves from the puss in his wounds because he, for some sin-driven reason, lives beyond the pale of Divine blessing and acceptance. The people who hear this story build their images from this base.
Now the rich man lives by the rules of his time. He knows Lazarus squats at his gate. He supplies leftovers from his table. Dives does not call the police, his servants do not kick Lazarus around or out. He obeys his religious laws to provide alms for the poor; part of his wealth, as perceived by onlookers and hearers of this story, assume his riches come from his adherence to a piety protecting and exercising what we might call a charitable approach to poor people.
But -- and you knew I was going to say this -- but the point of scene lies behind and beyond the story itself. What Luke and Jesus before him seek to illustrate is a moral debacle, a rich man blind to seeing Lazarus as a human being. The rich man misses the poor man's humanity. He sees him as a beggar, a cultural misfit, a religious pariah, a social exile. Surely not as a brother, a child of God, his humanity denied by Divine indifference, if not rejection.
A moment please for a contemporary footnote. I read, last week, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal an article by Robert Rector from the socially and politically conservative Heritage Foundation. He interpreted this week's poverty figures from the Census Bureau with facts and figures essentially telling us most of the poor people in this country are really relatively well off and secondly, that those who are not deserve their poverty, being poor with all of its horrendous and wearying burdens, their own fault. The modern welfare state, as he puts it, rewards their dysfunctional and self-destructive behavior. He describes their condition as "behavioral poverty," implying laziness, dependent complacency. Your fault. That is the contemporary secular perspective, held with almost religious conviction by certain Dives types of the nineteen-nineties, their political collaborators, their privately funded foundations – exactly! Two thousand years later, cut from the same cloth as Luke's auditors.
But Marion Wright Edelman, of the Children's Defense Fund, reminds us, while pointing to these supposedly deservedly deprived, as defined by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, that as far as poor children are concerned: they are 1.5 to 3 times more likely to die in childhood, 2 to 3 times more likely to suffer fatal accidental injuries, about 2 times more likely to suffer serious mental or physical disabilities, 1.5 to 2 times more likely to suffer deafness, 1.2 to 1.8 times more likely to end up with partial or complete blindness, and so on it goes with all the sad and miserable implications for further human development amid the poor population. There is something wrong here, morally wrong! And for the comfortably prosperous to smugly blame the poor for their poverty enables the prosperous frequently to deceive themselves, dismissing the luck, the privilege, the connections, the breaks -- whatever advantages they may start with, attributing everything to their merit, entitlement and just desserts -- permitting them -- (us?) -- with all good reason to disengage from action in behalf of the poor because, by gosh, they got themselves into this mess, and they can darn well get themselves out. Does Luke have a bead on our times, too? Dives may be a citizen of the 20th century as well as the first.
But back to the story. What we see in this first scene, then, is a rich man with what he perceives only as a beggar at his gate. He does what the law requires, he exercises his piety; we may speculate he does better by Lazarus than his neighbor. Dives may contribute generously to his temple, but we know the dregs from his table do not cost him a thing, the charity demands none of this time, his comfort, his provisions, his privilege. He surely takes good care of his family and promises his five brothers, part of his extended family living near him, that their wealth and his confirm Divine approbation. They have a good deal from God.
But Luke sees a problem with Dives and his well-heeled family. It is not so much his riches causing the problem. It is his moral myopia, his limited compassion, his failure of imagination, his misperception of the depths of the humanity of the man squatting and wounded at his gate.
II
Scene 2: the world upside down. The economic ideology inside out. The apparently blessed rich man in hell, the poor man Lazarus now in Abraham's bosom. And lest you think this is Luke's rationale for the poor man's believing through his ghastly and devastating poverty on earth that heaven will bring his vindication; or that religious pie-in-the-sky and the Divine promise to reward the poor on earth with ecstatic and pleasurable experiences in heaven justify his poverty. If you think this is Luke's purpose, forget it. First of all Luke does not believe it. And secondly he has another purpose in mind. But more of that in a moment.
Nonetheless, what do we see? Reversal. A 180 degree, topsy-turvy image. Dives now roasting, parched and isolated in hell -- a far cry from his complacent and opulent condition on earth. Dives looks up and sees that bleeding, impoverished, mendicant Lazarus resting in the bosom of Abraham. "Hey," Dives shouts, "Hey, a drink, cool water, anything to wet my lips, cool my throat, relieve my torture. Send Lazarus, just with a wet finger to touch my burning lips to alleviate my torment." Notice Dives does not rail against Abraham, lamenting the injustice of his current setting. He does not mournfully ask, "Why, God; why send me to this heaven forsaken place when everything on earth indicated I would end up in your arms and Lazarus be deservedly directed straightway to this desolation?" No! The rich man accepts his current status. And to his clamorous request from Abraham he receives a disconcerting and merciless reply: "Oh Dives, you had it good once and you blew it. You knew comfort and security, you lived in abundance and luxury and if you thought it came as a blessing from me, think again. Your wealth and opulence bears no claim to Divine favor. You may have been a nice guy, but do not delude yourself that your affluence indicated you as some sort of special case. No way!"
That is Luke shooting down any pious complacency among the rich people of his church. And one more thing we need remember: when the Gospels send anyone to hell, they do so to tell us that person blew a life and death decision. The Gospels use the imagery of someone on the hot seat, like our friend Dives, to describe the ethical urgency of a particular attitude or behavior and the cosmic catastrophe attached to sloughing it off, to missing its urgency. Gospel choices can be no less than those of life and death.
Just so with Dives. And then Luke shows us Lazarus, who, against all the economic ideology of the moment, now finds himself in a comfortable position. And Luke tells us as well, that just as there exists a vast and insurmountable gulf on earth between these two characters, so there exists now a terrible gulf that cannot be crossed, and Dives now knows the torment bedeviling the suffering Lazarus at his gate. Luke's point again: The Divine heart is not necessarily in the corner of those whose wealth blinds them to the humanity of their brothers and sisters.
Well, Dives, realizing the desperate nature of his condition and his responsibility for it, then begs Abraham to send some messengers to his five brothers. "Tell them," he cries, "tell them to shape up. Tell them their complacency, their numbness, their small bore public morality, their blindness to the need around them is a moral monstrosity, an egregious ethical cataclysm, separating them from the human community and from you!"
Remember how Abraham responds? "Your brothers?" he replies. "They have Moses and the prophets. They should listen to them." But our rich man, even more agitated and anxious pleads yet again, "No father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will change their ways. Alert them, I beg you, to their Gospel opportunities and privileges. Send out the alarm. Warn them of the crucial and decisive nature of the choices they make regarding the treatment of other people. Shock them out of their casual attitude toward their religious traditions." And the response from Abraham: No consolation. "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."
III
Now friends, this parable, at many levels, can be aimed at us. But here I think, as we enter our focused stewardship season, it comes to us most vividly. First of all, some of us may identify with Lazarus, some of us with the Rich man. But today, I think we need to understand ourselves as the rich man's siblings, as those living on earth with the witness of Moses and the prophets ever before us. We live with the vision and mandates of the Old Testament directing us to care for the earth, to see the Lazarus at our gate, not simply as an individual, but perhaps as the prototype of an economic system failing at a crucial point for a vast number of our brothers and sisters in God.
You remember those admonitions of Amos: heaping contempt on our worship unless it leads to justice flowing down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing steam. Or the prophet Isaiah's asking rhetorically and with stunning power:
Is this not the worship that I choose;
to lose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke
to let the oppressed go free
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with
the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house:
when you see the naked, to
cover them
and not to hide yourself from
your own kin?
That is Moses and the prophets! As Luke insists: we have that. If we, as those figurative five siblings, do not get the point after pondering Moses, Amos and Isaiah, no one screaming threats, no one belting out a shattering alarm will cut through the dark veil covering our spiritual eyes, dissipate our ethical numbness, clear our moral myopia. Out task is already brilliantly laid out. See it? Get with the program! It is clear. It is urgent!
And yes, not only do we have Moses and the prophets, we have someone whom Luke testifies rose from the dead! If we do not respond that that dominant world transforming fact of faith, no further miracles, no special magic, no volcanic natural event will alter our attitudes. If Jesus Christ and the empty Cross do not spell out to us the urgency and possibilities of a new world for all of us and our part in bringing it about, then really, all further messengers are empty and superfluous, hollow and redundant.
Well, maybe so, but I am going to take a chance today. I am not going to give up yet. I am not going to give up on you or me, or this church. I do not care what Luke says. I want to be a messenger today -- a messenger of memory and hope and by golly I want you to be messengers, too. I know we can be complacent. I know we can sing the hymns, read the scriptures, say our prayers, look at this cross, listen to the clown in the pulpit and say, so what else is new, same old stuff, I've heard it and seen it a million times. And if we are not literally dozing off, then we may at least spiritually shut down.
Well, maybe so even today. But I am not ready to give up on us, yet. So as a messenger calling you to be messengers for Moses and the prophets, messengers for the One raised from the dead, let me remind you as you consider your pledge to the church this year, that first of all, as Jeff Makholm mentioned earlier, we stand in a great tradition, a live one, a dynamic tradition here at Old South, with a story in this city since 1669 bespeaking a continuing, civilizing, humanizing, redemptive presence.
But more importantly, we stand in a long line of churches from the very beginning, two thousand years ago, with men and women, saints and sinners, reminding the world and its inhabitants that a gracious heart grounds our common life and that we see it clearly, vividly, beautifully, exhaustively in the face of Jesus Christ and in the stark and loving depths of this Cross.
And yes, say it once, say it a thousand times: our worship and our mission are not independent of one another, and even as we gather here to reorient our loyalties and reconfigure our priorities, so those loyalties and priorities will be exercised as our church purpose insists, in righteousness, justice and peace, transforming the human race into the human family in the Back Bay, the South End, Beacon Hill, this city, this Commonwealth, God's world.
Is that Message redundant? Yes! Is the messenger tongue-tied, cliché-ridden, a dim echo, a broken record? Yes! And Yes again! But friends, Luke's discouragement about our spiritual and moral deafness – Remember? "Forget the special messengers, if church people don't take the message seriously already they never will" -- Luke's discouragement is something I will not give into and please -- please! -- for Christ's sake, don't you give into it either. With your time, your pledge, your commitment, your life in the world, your integrity and confidence in Jesus Christ, I beg you identify yourselves with Moses and the prophets, the indomitable hope of Jesus Christ and Christ's new future as vigorous, challenging, courageous, stalwart, radiant Messengers of Memory and Hope.
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