Sunday, September 30th, 2007
Eighteenth after Pentecost
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Luke 16:19-31
Theme: Do we truly live like we believe?
19“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. 20And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, 21who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. 22The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. 23In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. 24He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ 25But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. 26Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ 27He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house— 28for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ 29Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ 30He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ 31He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
Do you remember the morning after you made your profession of faith? Did it feel different? Did anything sound different, look different, taste different to you?
I remember the morning after I made my public profession of faith, but in all honesty, not for the reasons I WISH I could name here, but for other, very self-centered ones. That day was my tenth birthday, and it was the last day of First Baptist church of Paducah’s youth camp at Natchez Trace State Park in western Tennessee, and I distinctly remember being terribly disillusioned that the entire camp didn’t stop and at LEAST sing me happy birthday. Then again, I WAS only ten. Though probably old enough to know better, still and all, it was an indicator of what my biggest struggle would be with in the following years as I grew up and as I matured as a follower of Christ.
It seems that, all things being equal, our emotional and physical wellbeing, our creature comforts and social network – meaning family and friends – if we were to try to spell out how exactly we’ve lived our lives differently from the person down the street who has never set foot in a sanctuary, who doesn’t give much thought to the place God might or might not have in the universe, much less their lives, but who lives a socially acceptable, law-abiding life, would we be able to? Could we point to specific acts, or thoughts, relationships and how they are conducted, that would distinguish those who claim to follow Christ as Lord of their lives and those who don’t?
That can be taken a couple of ways. It could be understood to be an indicator of how influential the body of believers who meet here on a regular basis has been, or ALL the congregations in the area have been in forming a Christ-like ethos – a Christ-like spirit in our community over the time we have been here. While that MIGHT be the case, if we look at the general spirit and character of the community, while we can agree that it is … more pleasant than some others in our state, it falls considerably short of being one that could be considered to be TRULY Christ-like. Even a quick read of our weekly local paper would put that idea to rest.
So how DO we distinguish ourselves as followers of Christ? By coming here on Sundays and Wednesday, or by knowing how to navigate the intricacies of Church life? By knowing what the Alma Hunt, or the Lottie Moon, or the Annie Armstrong Offerings are? By understanding the term ‘profession of faith’?
In telling the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus himself didn’t really give any details about where the two men’s hearts were. He just described the conditions they each lived in. The rich man was VERY rich – fine linen was a product of Egypt, and was expensive and rare. Likewise, the dye to make the purple cloth that he wore was also hard to come by, since it was made from a shellfish’s shell, and the mention of the fact that he wore purple cloth was a way of telegraphing to the listeners the fact that the man would probably be the equivalent of at least a multimillionaire in our day. Lazarus, on the other hand, is described in a way that is as eloquent today as it was then. He begged on the street, lay at the gate of the rich man’s house, and longed to satisfy his hunger with the scraps that dropped from the rich man’s table.
We’re given two lives from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and that is all. There is no value judgment placed on their lives. There’s no storyteller’s note saying “the rich man was a cold-hearted, mean-spirited, thieving, greedy excuse for a human being, and Lazarus was a saint in beggar’s rags”, no. There’s nothing quite that clear in the parable.
What becomes patently clear is that SOMETHING WAS different between them, when we read of their afterlife. And this is where we begin to feel a little uncomfortable. Even the poorest of us can go to our closet and pull out clothes and shoes that would make even the rich man gasp in wonder at our wealth. We eat better than three quarters of the world’s population, and last time I checked I know of no one in our congregation who spends their days laying around at the entrance gate to one of our houses, waiting for the scraps to be thrown out in order to eat.
What was Jesus saying then, about the way people live their lives?
It’s important to keep in mind where this parable falls in the narrative that Luke is presenting. It is just after the parable of the dishonest manager, but between the two, Luke makes it a point to contextualize the telling of the parables. He offers this comment:
I remember the morning after I made my public profession of faith, but in all honesty, not for the reasons I WISH I could name here, but for other, very self-centered ones. That day was my tenth birthday, and it was the last day of First Baptist church of Paducah’s youth camp at Natchez Trace State Park in western Tennessee, and I distinctly remember being terribly disillusioned that the entire camp didn’t stop and at LEAST sing me happy birthday. Then again, I WAS only ten. Though probably old enough to know better, still and all, it was an indicator of what my biggest struggle would be with in the following years as I grew up and as I matured as a follower of Christ.
It seems that, all things being equal, our emotional and physical wellbeing, our creature comforts and social network – meaning family and friends – if we were to try to spell out how exactly we’ve lived our lives differently from the person down the street who has never set foot in a sanctuary, who doesn’t give much thought to the place God might or might not have in the universe, much less their lives, but who lives a socially acceptable, law-abiding life, would we be able to? Could we point to specific acts, or thoughts, relationships and how they are conducted, that would distinguish those who claim to follow Christ as Lord of their lives and those who don’t?
That can be taken a couple of ways. It could be understood to be an indicator of how influential the body of believers who meet here on a regular basis has been, or ALL the congregations in the area have been in forming a Christ-like ethos – a Christ-like spirit in our community over the time we have been here. While that MIGHT be the case, if we look at the general spirit and character of the community, while we can agree that it is … more pleasant than some others in our state, it falls considerably short of being one that could be considered to be TRULY Christ-like. Even a quick read of our weekly local paper would put that idea to rest.
So how DO we distinguish ourselves as followers of Christ? By coming here on Sundays and Wednesday, or by knowing how to navigate the intricacies of Church life? By knowing what the Alma Hunt, or the Lottie Moon, or the Annie Armstrong Offerings are? By understanding the term ‘profession of faith’?
In telling the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus himself didn’t really give any details about where the two men’s hearts were. He just described the conditions they each lived in. The rich man was VERY rich – fine linen was a product of Egypt, and was expensive and rare. Likewise, the dye to make the purple cloth that he wore was also hard to come by, since it was made from a shellfish’s shell, and the mention of the fact that he wore purple cloth was a way of telegraphing to the listeners the fact that the man would probably be the equivalent of at least a multimillionaire in our day. Lazarus, on the other hand, is described in a way that is as eloquent today as it was then. He begged on the street, lay at the gate of the rich man’s house, and longed to satisfy his hunger with the scraps that dropped from the rich man’s table.
We’re given two lives from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, and that is all. There is no value judgment placed on their lives. There’s no storyteller’s note saying “the rich man was a cold-hearted, mean-spirited, thieving, greedy excuse for a human being, and Lazarus was a saint in beggar’s rags”, no. There’s nothing quite that clear in the parable.
What becomes patently clear is that SOMETHING WAS different between them, when we read of their afterlife. And this is where we begin to feel a little uncomfortable. Even the poorest of us can go to our closet and pull out clothes and shoes that would make even the rich man gasp in wonder at our wealth. We eat better than three quarters of the world’s population, and last time I checked I know of no one in our congregation who spends their days laying around at the entrance gate to one of our houses, waiting for the scraps to be thrown out in order to eat.
What was Jesus saying then, about the way people live their lives?
It’s important to keep in mind where this parable falls in the narrative that Luke is presenting. It is just after the parable of the dishonest manager, but between the two, Luke makes it a point to contextualize the telling of the parables. He offers this comment:
"The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him [Jesus]. So he said to them, 'you are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God'" (Luke 16:14).
So we have an idea of WHO it was that Jesus was directing the parables to: the well-established and comfortable-in-their place leaders of the temple.
It is hard to try to deconstruct the parable simply in terms of its face value. We can take the original Greek and discuss what the different words mean EXACTLY, or what verb tense may have been used in one place and why a different tense might have been used elsewhere, and it would end up probably being a fascinating piece of information, full of nuances and highlights that would give us a clearer idea of how it might have affected the lives of those Pharisees… but that’s not the point of the parable for US.
The point of the parable is to connect with the audience – whether a first century or a TWENTY-first century one.
We’re tempted to dwell on the particulars of the story – the fact that the rich man wore purple and fine linen, or that Lazarus is the only named character in any of Jesus’ parables throughout the gospel of Luke, or in the details of the afterlife – the references to burning and pain and torture that the rich man is suffering and the fact the Lazarus is standing next to Abraham. None of those are the central focus of the parable.
The point is found at the end.
Jesus was telling those who were listening to him tell these stories that they were hard of heart. That means they had no sympathy, no compassion. They had lost the ability to put themselves in someone else’s place, someone else’s shoes, or begging spot, as the case may be, in order to through that experience, be able gain an understanding of how God feels towards ALL of humanity. They had SO hardened their hearts that even if someone had risen from the dead in front of them, they would find some way to explain it away, and would again miss the whole reason Jesus was standing there talking to them.
So we come to the weekly question: what does the parable of the rich man and Lazarus mean for us here today, at Jerusalem Baptist Church in Emmerton?
The question for us from Jesus is still basically the same one he had for the Pharisees: what will it take for you to let what you BELIEVE make a difference in your life? Essentially, UNLESS it changes the way you live, you DON’T, in fact, BELIEVE IT. That’s about as simply as it can be put. There IS one CRITICAL DIFFERENCE between that audience and this. Besides the obvious, time place and culture, we have an event that actually turns this parable from an object lesson into a reality.
The resurrection.
So now we read back over that last sentence:
“… ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
And we realize that we HAVE to take the place of the rich man’s family in the story. We ARE the ones who have ‘Moses and the prophets’ in the form of the Bible – easily available to us, easily studied. We have an abundance of materials and commentaries virtually at our fingertips to open the scriptures to us.
But even more significantly, we HAVE the fact that someone DID rise from the dead to make it even clearer to us what we have to do. The question is, has THAT convinced us?
Do we really live in the reality that death has been defeated? Do we really live in the reality that the dog-eat-dog mentality of the world is the WRONG way to live, and that we are called to a more excellent way – of sharing in each other’s burdens, celebrating each other’s joys, walking beside each other under the Lordship of Christ, finding ways to break in the Kingdom of God here, now, today.
Do we give to the Alma Hunt offering because it’s that time of year or because we understand that through our giving we are enabling the message of the gospel to be shared throughout Virginia and around the world?
Do we come to church to make an appearance, or to actually encounter the word of God – both the written and the living, EXPECTING to be changed by it?
In the words of Paul: “What then, shall we say” – not with our mouths, but with our lives?
We have an opportunity to live out the Kingdom every day. Occasionally, we come across other opportunities. November 3rd through the 10th there is a team going to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi to help rebuild homes that are still needing to BE repaired in the wake of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. If everything works out, a team will be going from Jerusalem to join them. Please pray over the next couple of weeks and ask God for guidance in how to respond to this invitation. The plan is to do light construction, drywall hanging, and painting. There will be other teams there at the same time, so we will not be alone. And there’s a lesson to be learned in that as well – in receiving grace, we are not alone, in extending grace, we are not alone.
In being the body of Christ, we are not alone.
Will we live our lives as if we ARE?
Let’s pray.
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