Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (26C) – Luke 16:19-31
I know a man, back in Pennsylvania where I grew up, who is dying of cancer. He’s gone through a series of treatments, and is now on to some experimental chemotherapy, mostly because the previous treatments haven’t worked, not quite enough. Somehow, he still has hope. Yet he’s deeply hurt by family members who have liquidated his possessions, assuming he’s not going to survive. They have stopped seeing him as a person, and begun seeing him as a victim, perhaps even as already dead. It’s a messy family system, which helps to explain some of the strange behavior of these relatives—and he even understands why things are the way they are. But it still hurts to not be seen as the person he is—now desperately poor, medical expenses having destroyed all his assets—but still a human being, having dignity, worthy of respect.
These days, he sits in a nursing home and watches TV endlessly. It’s all he really can manage to do as he’s recovering from the ravages of the chemicals that seem to kill a lot more than the cancer cells. You know how sweet certain kinds of old men can be, and the chemo tears down his defenses even further. He tells me that he can’t stand to watch those commercials that come on for Save the Children International—or worse, for a local children’s hospital. His eyes would fill up with tears, just thinking about a commercial. “I can deal with the cancer treatments,” he says, desperately ill as he recovers from the last one, “But children shouldn’t have to have this. I know how sick chemo makes me. A four year old shouldn’t have to be this sick.” He is able to see these children—complete strangers on television—for the human beings they are, and probably in a way that most of us cannot, thanks to having to live with his own disease.
The parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel reading is all about what we see, and what we don’t. As the story begins, we have a rich man, and a poor man. The rich man has the most expensive clothing, and stuffs himself with good food every day. The poor man at his gate has nothing to eat. He’s hungry, begging for scraps. And as for how he’s clothed, it’s not purple and fine linen, but open, running sores, so bad that dogs come and lick at them. Ycch. Sounds like an infection waiting to happen.
What exactly do these two men think of each other? The poor man knows of the rich man; he longs to satisfy his hunger with what falls from the rich man’s table. That might even by why he sits at the rich man’s gate. He knows there is a surplus there, and perhaps one day, he’ll have a chance at some of it. Does the rich man know of the poor? You can imagine him being carried in and out of his home by servants, in a handcar with curtains. He may literally never have even seen him. But even if he sees him with his eyes, he doesn’t see him with his heart. I mean, he’s never done anything mean, to hurt him; he hasn’t kicked him, or stolen what little he has, or even tried to get him to go find someone else’s gate to lurk around. But to the rich man, he’s just a poor beggar, a disgusting bit of filth, necessary, I suppose, in this culture, in a city, there’s always a lower class. One would hope some wealth trickles down to them, but we can’t really be bothered to make sure.
In adult Sunday school today we’ll be talking about prayers of confession. As a pastor, I need to confess as much, if not more, than anyone else. So here’s a confession. I was at Starbucks the other day, which is my second home. I don’t think of myself as rich by any means; I’ve switched from the pricey, sugary drinks to just plain coffee. But let’s face it: If you regularly get your coffee from even Dunkin’ Donuts rather than the kitchen counter, you’ve got some disposable income. Anyway, its time to leave, and as I go, there’s this woman standing near the door, and she’s wearing a pink sweatshirt and sweatpants, that look dirty in a way that suggest that sanitary napkins are out of her price range, and she is not just pregnant but gives meaning to the phrase “heavy with child.” When she calls out to me as I walk past, I do something I normally don’t do in these situations: I pretend I didn’t hear her. Because I guess I’d had a lousy day and was tired and didn’t really want to be bothered, or whatever, but she follows me to my car, and I get in and close the door before I really see her, and then I roll down my window, but I already know what she’s going to say. Right? She asks me for money, even just spare change. And I tell her that I don’t have any, which is not true, because next to me in the car is a tray full of change. But you see, I have decided, with the increased number of people on the streets begging for change, that I can only give to one person a day, and I already gave away a dollar that morning. Shall we be honest? Anyone walking out of a coffee shop has no business claiming poverty as a motive for stinginess. I’m bothered by it still, and it’s been over a week. I keep hoping I’ll run into her again, to correct my error. Because my sin, frankly, has absolutely nothing to do with whether I gave her money or not. I could have given her a hundred dollar bill, and still messed this up, because that day, I looked at her like she was a beggar first, and a beloved child of God last.
It’s amazing, that two thousand years after Jesus told this story, even the best of us still sometimes get caught treating other human beings as if they’re something less than human. Sometimes we justify it because of economic status, or skin color, or age—do we treat children as if their decisions and desires matter, or do we as adults just decide what’s best for them no matter what they have to say? Do we really care for the elders in our community, or do we just tuck most of them away in nursing homes where they lose their volition and dignity, and where the rest of us don’t have to see them. Sometimes I think that the great chasm between the rich man and the poor man in this story was larger during their lives than the one that stood between them in the afterlife, because at least looking up to heaven from hell, the rich man saw Lazarus. I mean, granted, he still wanted to order him about, get him to come down here with a droplet of water, or send him off to tell his brothers. But at least he knew he was there.
Lazarus. That was his name. The rich man didn’t even see him, but when Jesus tells the story, Jesus knows his name. The rich man is never named in Jesus’ parable, but Lazarus is given the dignity of a name. This is, I think, the most important thing to notice in this parable. You see, this Gospel reading comes after a host of other parables told by Jesus, which begin, back at the beginning of chapter fifteen, like this: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus, and the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling” about it. It’s about these Pharisees and their intolerance that Jesus tells his stories. There’s the shepherd who abandons his flock to search out a lost sheep, and the woman who goes on a cleaning spree to find a lost coin. Mark Vetter, in our Monday night Bible study, was the one who pointed out to me that here we have a story about relationships, and another one about money. Then we have the prodigal son, whose father doesn’t care about the property he’s squandered, but welcomes him back with open arms. And the weird story last week about the manager who dishonestly uses his employer’s money to build relationships with some of his debtors. Jesus condemns the Pharisees here, who love money more than they love God’s people. The Pharisees think that Lazarus doesn’t matter in this story, because he has no money. But Jesus knows even his name.
And we should too. That’s what Jesus wants us to learn from this, I think. We should care enough about people that we would know their names, no matter what their economic status is. The poor shouldn’t just be “the poor” to us who are followers of the Christ. They should be people. They should have names. We should know that they are children of God. We should treat others with dignity and respect, no matter where they come from, what they look like, how they live, or what they have. After all, they, too, were imbued with the image of God at the beginning of time. Shouldn’t we honor that image reflected in them? Shouldn’t we see Christ in even the “least” of these?
We should know better. We are, after all, Christians. God has spoken to us through our spiritual father Abraham. God has given us Moses and the prophets; we should listen to them. What more do we need? But it isn’t enough for us. We don’t do it. There are still pregnant women begging by the side of the road. There are still suffering children on television. There are still old men who are neglected by their families. And Jesus says it himself: “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”
Which begs the question, “Why, then, would God raise someone from the dead?”
Maybe, it’s because God knows your name, after all. And where we fail to treat others with humanity, Jesus reaches out to you with his humanity and his divinity, and gathers you to his side, and calls you by name. We cannot seem to breach the chasm between ourselves and the poor, but Jesus breaches even the chasm between heaven and hell, between good and evil, and draws us in to himself. Jesus knows you. Jesus sees you. Jesus rises again for you. Not even death could stand in his way.
May you see with new eyes, and find life and humanity, both in yourself, and in your neighbor.