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26.09.2010 Luke 16
| 05.10.2010, 19:00 | |
| Rev. Tatiana Cantarella Psalm 90:1-6, 14-16; Deuteronomy 15:1-11; I Timothy 6:6-19 Luke 16:19-31 Challenge to the Comfortable We all know how to convince ourselves about how to keep other people from hurting us. If only my daughter would finish school... If only my husband stopped drinking... If only my son would start studying harder... Our human nature always seeks an explanation for why people are the way they are. And that in its own way gives us the opportunity to continue being just the way we are without any twinge of conscience. We all have heard the truth at some point that the only person we are responsible for is ourselves. God gave us life and commanded us to live and love our neighbor. But we are convinced that being called to love our neighbor, we aren’t responsible for changing their life; that’s their obligation, not ours. This is particularly noticeable in contemporary society, which is waging a war for independence and individuality. Every one is responsible for themselves and if only they apply sufficient effort and if they are hard-working, then they will have success. Pastor Taylor writes, "It might be true if everyone were standing at the same starting line when the gun went off, but that is never the case. Some start from so far back that they can run until their lungs burst and never even see the dust of the front runners”. A lot of people inherit unfortunate circumstances and poverty in the same way they get their brown eyes and fair hair, and when they hear the shot of the starting pistol they are so far behind the rest that they can’t even figure out the direction in which they are supposed to start running. And even if they knew it wouldn’t change much because they don’t have the necessary running shoes, the money for their starting fees, and besides all of that they’re just plain out of shape. When others look at them they think: "hopeless misfits.” This attitude has characterized humanity for so long that many who start out behind believe that the distance separating them from everybody else is so great because God ordained it to be so. And perhaps the misfortune of these people is not just a coincidence. Perhaps it is a punishment for their sins, public or private. Or, in the same manner, perhaps those who have success have had it because God has blessed them with more. It’s in the Bible after all: "Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken from him” (Luke 8:18). This is was a popular belief when Jesus was around, especially among the rich, who could find in Scripture what they needed to justify their position. Deuteronomy 28 promises prosperity and victory in war to those who are obedient to God. The first Psalm clearly says that the Lord preserves the righteous, but the way of the ungodly will perish. Several religious personalities during the first centuries AD began to connect wealth with God’s blessing and therefore mammon couldn’t be that big of an evil. On the contrary, it must be good, even a sign that God is blessing you. They believed that those who are obedient to God were blessed materially and the ungodly were fated for poverty. This concept is profitable in two ways: first, it allows the wealthy to enjoy their wealth without feeling guilty about it; secondly, likewise avoiding any nagging doubts of conscience, they could walk past the poor who were sleeping at their doorsteps. What is the sense of getting involved? The Lord has set it up this way and it must be that these people have deserved their fate in life as punishment from God. They should get up on their own, try to something right, and then God could possibly have mercy on them. The wealth gap between the rich and the poor was huge and people reasoned about it in such a way that they saw no personal guilt in the situation at all. That’s how God wants it, so leave good enough alone. We see a variation of the same way of thinking in what we call today the "prosperity Gospel,” which is preached in a lot of churches. The essence of this theology is that if you are strong in faith and righteous, then God is obliged (!) to bless you with material wealth. If you are materially poor, it means that there is sin in your life and that your poverty is your own fault. But the Lord Jesus had absolutely no patience for this way of thinking; such an interpretation of God’s Word disgusted Him. In Scripture, in the Torah and in the prophets, there are tons of words that turn prosperity gospel and similar theologies upside down, but the wealthy closed their eyes to those verses. They ignored words like Deuteronomy 15:11. "There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.” And Proverbs 14:31: "He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.” Scripture is unambiguous on this point. God not only does NOT condemn the poor, but identifies with them. To walk past a person in need and turn away your eyes means to walk past God Himself, who has come unnoticed. Woe to the one who acts in such a way. In Matthew 25 Jesus speaks about his father’s judgment, which is based on the way believers have treated those in need. When they served their neighbor (even if they didn’t know it), the were serving God. And, as always, Jesus tells a parable in order to make this truth more accessible to people. Some parables are comforting and console us with good news, like the parable of the prodigal son, for example, which reveals God’s mercy to repentant sinners. Other parables, however, provoke the conscience, calling us to a radical change in life, calling us to repentance, warning us that we are missing the whole point of life, warning us that in God’s eyes our opportunities to mend our ways and set out on the path of righteousness are only decreasing with time. Today we have one of those parables that relate a rather unpleasant story, no matter how you look at it. It has a beggar, scabs, dogs who lick wounds, suffering, hell, a great abyss. Stories like this tend to make us feel really guilty, although that isn’t really what they’re supposed to be about. The meaning of today’s parable is that it opens our eyes to the truth we don’t see, in the hope that because of this truth we will change our life. If changes don’t follow, then our feelings of guilt are worthless to God. If guilt doesn’t lead to change it is just a sad substitution for new life. "I can’t do what you’re asking, Lord, but if I really regret it and feel guilty about it, will that be enough?” In this story there isn’t anything about a feeling of guilt. The rich man Jesus speaks of doesn’t experience any kind of regret except that his wealth lead him to such a terrible place! In life, he liked the distance between himself and Lazarus, it was more comfortable than being up close. But now the gulf between them is irreversible and that frightens him, particularly because Lazarus has something that he desires: water. What happens here between the rich man and Lazarus painfully recalls a Spanish folk tale in which a Queen has died, leaving her only daughter behind, and her husband the King has remarried. Everything would be just fine, if the new Queen hadn’t given birth to her own daughter and if the Step-Mother Queen hadn’t hated her Step-Daughter, looking down on her and considering her good for nothing more than a serving girl. The Step-Mother kept her running around, doing the laundry, fetching water from the stream, and whatever else she might think up. "Do this, serve this, bring this!; do this, serve this, bring this!” In the same way the rich man, on this side of the grave, does not see Lazarus as a fellow human being, he only sees someone who is beneath him. He thinks that Lazarus is serving Abraham in that life, that Lazarus is running around, fetching water, passing along messages for Abraham. But Abraham puts the rich man in his place. Scripture says that Lazarus was in the "Bosom of Abraham.” Bosom literally means embrace (literally breast or cavity). The rich man thought that Lazarus, a misfit in life, was now good for nothing more than being a "gofer” for Abraham and himself. But Lazarus was in the paternal embrace of Abraham, accepted as God’s child into his Father’s House. No longer could the rich man order people around, no longer could he lord his authority over others, telling them to bring him water and to send a message to his brothers. Those days had come to an end. The rich man, like his brothers, had everything they needed -- the words of Scripture, of Moses, of the prophets. No messages from the other world would help attract people’s attention to the truth. Even the miracle of resurrection could not melt the ice of an unrepentant heart, could not open the eyes of a rich man to see not only himself, but others as people. It’s a pretty sad story with an unhappy ending for the rich man. But I want to remind you that this story was told for us, not against us. It was given to us so that we could have a chance! Yes, Jesus was abrupt and unceremonious, challenging his money-loving listeners, but he didn’t do it for pleasure. Even when he was angry there was a reason. He couldn’t stand it when "people loved things and used people,” when the loved what they could acquire for themselves more than what God wanted to give them. They were satisfied with clothes made of byssus (fine linen) and expensively died textiles (purple, think Lydia), feasts that lasted for days, while God wanted to give them His Kingdom! They were satisfied with life in a world of beggars and "gofers” while God wanted to give them brothers and sisters! They were satisfied with those parts of the Bible that justified their way of life, but God wanted to give them a completely new life. This difficult story should help us understand that often we are victims of our own way of life. When we isolate ourselves from others, when we grow accustomed to living without looking at other people, convincing ourselves that they have earned their lot in life, when we preserve our own good fortune as a gift from God and refuse to see that our life is interwoven with everyone else’s, that is when we become "hopeless misfits.” And it’s not because God is punishing us, but because of what we are doing to ourselves in this life. How do you think the abyss between the rich man and Lazarus in eternity got there? Did God create it, or the rich man? Someone once wisely noted, "sometimes it seems to me that the worst thing that could ever happen to us is if God would give us exactly what we want.” You see, we become like the god we serve. If our God is love, then we become loving and merciful. If our god is money, then we become calloused and cold, like an iron coin... And in order to get into the rich man’s position we don’t have to be rich, although material plenty does have the tendency to hasten such a fall. At times we live just the same way he does, scorning God’s Word by only choosing those verses that justify our way of life and throwing away all the others. Or we scorn other people, or treat them like a thing that can be used to achieve our own aims, others we keep at arm’s length or talk down to them because of their faults, creating for ourselves the illusion of our own superiority. We might depend on our own good fortune sooner than we would depend on God. We might hold on to our opinions, comfortable attitudes, to everything that is dear to us, our convictions, everything that in our opinion defines the good life, and before we know it we’ve dug an abyss between ourselves, God and other people. The sin of the rich man isn’t in his wealth, but in his attitude to it and to the people around him. His sin is that he missed the point, he never understood that "there is no wealth but life. Life including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration” (Ruskin). It isn’t enough to just count ourselves "saved” on the basis of a prayer of belief and repentance said long ago or on our church membership. The rich man called Abraham father. He believed that he belonged to God’s people. It’s like the pastor who saw at an airport a huge, expensive car with a clever bumper sticker, "My treasure is in heaven”.... Funny, but sad at the same time. We can stick the "Christian” label on ourselves wherever we want, but it won’t change our essence... The Rich man still hadn’t really understood anything, even in the other life. But now I’ll cheer you up a bit. There is good news in the parable. The good news is that the story isn’t over yet. Sure, for the rich man it is over and it’s all very sad. But for us it isn’t yet. We are the "five brothers,” the ones that are still alive and have the chance to repent and change their lives. And although Abraham didn’t send Lazarus to be resurrected and warn the brothers about the consequences of the choice we make in this life, Jesus preserved and delivered to us that very message in this parable. We have not only the words of Moses and the prophets, but also the words of the Christ, who was resurrected from the dead that we might know the truth. All that remains to be seen is what we will do with what we’ve heard. Scripture confronts those who are satisfied with themselves and confident in their participation in the Kingdom of God but at the same time by their way of life and their attitude towards others dig an abyss between themselves, God and their fellow man. We need to understand one thing: people don’t "wind up” in hell, they spend their whole lives digging themselves a trench, closer and closer to hell, one shovel full of dirt at a time. Every day God gives us a chance to adjust our "compass,” the thing that determines where we go, where our values direct us, our attitude towards others. And today God is giving us the chance to wake up, to see the abyss between ourselves and our brothers and sisters, to see our life in the light of Scripture, to see our sin and, in repentance, to begin to fill in that abyss, to cover it up with love and mercy instead of making it bigger with our self-absorption, our needs, our interests. | |
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