The Rich Man and Lazarus
19 “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20 At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21 and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
22 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
25 “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’
27 “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, 28 for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’
29 “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’
30 “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
31 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’” (TNIV)
“From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations” Sermon Series, Week Four
I had a wonderful conversation with a fellow from the local historical preservation commission who wanted to see if we as a church would be interested in holding a Saturday morning tour next spring for people interested in the rich history of our congregation. It was a great opportunity to showcase our campus and our story, and for several reasons, unfortunately, the tour will have to be postponed until the following spring, in 2013. But even with that delay, our church building, along with many others across America and Europe and the world, will be visited by religious pilgrims and tourists, hoping to catch a fleeting, amazing glimpse of history. And these church buildings that are visited, they will fall into two categories—a church where something amazing was built—the building—or a church where something amazing was done.
In central France, towards the southeast, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small, rural town with an equally unremarkable church building. But this building receives visits by the droves from religious pilgrims. The citizens of this humble French town, led by one of their local Protestant pastors, spent the years of the Second World War successfully harboring anywhere from three to five thousand Jewish French citizens, saving them from the Nazi Holocaust. And unlike the great cathedrals of Europe, pilgrims come to visit Le Chambon not for what was built there, but what was achieved there. People already come to visit us for what we’ve constructed here on this corner of Longview. Will people visit us for what we have done in our ministry, and will do in our ministries yet to come. I pray and I pray that there will be a time when people will say, “I traveled to Longview to see that church which has done so many great things.”
And so begins the fourth week of our sermon series together, “From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations.” This series is based on a book written by a United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Eric Elnes, who has pastored a very successful church in Arizona, where they have made amazing use of a diverse array of tools and talents available to them in doing ministry. Eric then wrote this short book called The Phoenix Affirmations, after the town in which it was composed, but also because the image of the phoenix, being reborn out of the ashes. We began this series by talking about the role of Scripture in listening for God’s word and the importance of having a vibrant and artistic worship to attend. Last week, we talked about the need to include everyone into God’s family in a way that practices real hospitality instead of mere tolerance. And this week, we’ll be getting into the stuff that preachers run like the dickens from—this week’s theme is, “As Jesus did, seeking peace and justice with or without the support of others.”
Now, there is an epilogue to the role of the church in Europe during the Second World War. After the war, a German Christian came to visit the United States, and saw that our church pews often have cushions—quite unlike the churches of Europe with their heritages in fairly strict Lutheranism or Calvinism. But after hearing one too many feel-good sermons that feared to tread on a pastor’s expectations for their flock to embrace peace, to embrace social justice, this German Christian then said to his American host, “American preaching, it has cushions too.”
One of my friends in faith calls this kind of preaching, this kind of a church the “Church of Be Nice and Chew with Your Mouth Closed.” Which isn’t a slap in the face at etiquette, it’s a realization that there are more important things, and those important things is what delineates the difference between what the writer Steve Dublanica calls being nice and being decent. A person can be nice—they can have terrific manners, always says please and thank you, always holds the door open, but that person could be greedy with money or support destructive causes. Ideally, people would be both nice and decent, but if you were to force me to choose, give me the decent person every time, and I’ll take it upon myself to tell that person when to hold the door open.
I say this because Jesus, in Luke’s story, gives a spot-on example of a man who is fundamentally nice, but not one bit decent. The rich man has excellent manners—he dresses appropriately for attending a fancy meal—wearing purple linen then would be the equivalent of putting on a tuxedo today. So we know that he has good manners. But he is not decent man, and here’s the kicker—a decent man in either life or death. His indecency in life is obvious—he ignores poor Lazarus at his gate and is utterly uncaring of Lazarus’s needs. But even in death, the rich man remains entirely in character in dismissing other people—he tries to order even Father Abraham to send Lazarus to him, so that Lazarus might do the rich man’s beckoning and ease his suffering. Jesus’s Jewish audience back then would have cringed at that because Abraham was the father of the Jewish tradition, the father of Israel herself. It would be like, as Americans, if one of us, in the afterlife, tried to order George Washington around—it is patently absurd! But this rich man, caring only about himself, has the hubris to do exactly that, to ask Lazarus to intercede, to be his guardian angel, to go through the fire in order to protect him.
And I have to admit, I worry that the extremely rich possess the same sort of hubris today. At a time when the average CEO makes something along the lines of 475 times more salary per hour than the average hourly worker, and then demands that his pay always be above average that of his peers—notice how mathematically, something has to be below average, so if everyone tries to make their salary above average, your pay will skyrocket. This has been Pastor Eric’s pastoral tips for how to ask for a raise, thanks for listening. But really, I look around this sanctuary and I don’t see the rich man. I see Lazarus. It’s tough, because in Jesus’s time, there was no such thing as the middle class—there was a small group of wealthy people, maybe 5% of the population, and then everyone else lived in abject poverty—there was very little in-between. And with that position in the middle comes the burden of carrying both roles—sometimes we are seen as Lazarus, sometimes as the rich man because of our own knowledge that we may not have the financial means to change the entire world, but we can change our own little piece of it. Being a part of the middle, something intrinsic to our name as “mainline” Christians, as “mainstream” Christians, means that we are among that privileged 80% of society comfortably within the margins. And one of the biggest questions Jesus is asking the church to answer here, who in that 80% will stand up for the other 20%? The parishioners at Le Chambon in France did, but what we remember about heroics like that is not simply that so many lives were saved, but that those lives were saved in the face of the prevailing anti-Semitic sentiment of the time. In trying to encapsulate the prevailing sentiment of our time, I look to Stephen Colbert, the best fake-news anchor this side of Jon Stewart, or Chevy Chase on Weekend Update, who said in part about Christianity that “Either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition.” Loving the poor and serving the needy is not easy, but the church has never been at its best when it has limited itself to what is easy. We are at our best when we do what is right. It is why this church does things like aid the battered women’s emergency support shelter and Community House, and offer space to Narcotics Anonymous. The church should live and breathe for that work. The rich man asked Lazarus to come through the fire for him. May we instead go through the fire for Lazarus. Doing so may singe our skins, but it will also strengthen our souls. Our own Messiah asks nothing less of us, and how wonderful it must be, to have that sort of faith put into us by a Savior who believes we, His church, can change the world. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
10.23.11
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