Luke 16:19-31

Once upon a time in a land far far away (Luke 16:19-31) there was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich’s man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus at his side. 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.” But Abraham replied, “Son remember that in your lifetime you received your good things which Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all of this, between us and you is a great chasm that has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, not can anyone cross over from there to us.” He answered, “Then, I beg you Father, send Lazarus to my father’s house for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will also not come to this place of torment.” Abraham replied, they have Moses and the Prophets, let them listen to them.” “No, father Abraham,” he said “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.” 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.”

While we’d love to look at this story from a story tale perspective, where everything works out well in the end and Lazarus reaches the end of his life victorious, but it is hard to find joy in Lazarus’ situation when his story is being lived out day after day around us. We find it in the faces of the homeless, the hurting, the self-abusers, the addicts, and the prostitutes, whom are avoided and feared even by the church. Or whom we reach out to only as a forced act of kindness. Do we feel sympathy and love for Lazarus in this story, or do we look at him through the eyes of the rich man?

Let’s pause and look at what this story is really trying to tell us. Often we lose a lot of the meaning of Christ’s parables because we are no longer living in 1 CE AD. The rich man is standing in front of Lazarus wearing purple. If you think about a few books further in the New Testament, in Acts, Lydia is said to be a seller of purple cloth. Purple is a color which is hard to achieve, and is reserved solely for the rich. Purple is an outward sign of power and money. A status symbol. So we have this rich man who is concerned with others knowing what he has. And outside of his lavish home, which is gated, another sign of power, is a man named Lazarus. Lazarus would be shunned by the Jewish community at the time because he is covered with infectious sores. We aren’t told what the sores exactly are but skin diseases were considered to dangerous, and thus those who were unfortunate enough to contract diseases found it hard to keep a job or even to be part of the community. Here the contrast emerges between the rich man, filled with the world’s wealth and having much more then he could ever think about needing, and Lazarus, a man who had nothing left to call his own, no money, no power, no family to take care of him, no community to love him, and no dignity. Lazarus is in such a destitute situation that he desires to eat only what falls from the table, a place generally reserved for the animals, who were not seen as friendly pets as they are today, but as unclean. Now Lazarus is not only seen as an animal, but as less then the animals, as the dogs come up and lick his sores, as the rich man sits, reclining at his overabundant table with family and friends, ignoring Lazarus’ needs.

Then we reach the climax of the story, as Lazarus is carried into Heaven and the rich man descends to Hell. One may think that both men have finally gotten what they individually deserved, but that isn’t the point of Jesus’ parable. Remember that to Christ the Kingdom of God, isn’t just in Heaven after we die or on Heaven on Earth after Jesus returns. Often we get so caught up in the aspect of Christ coming again, that we forget that we are the Church. The collective body of Christ who are supposed to be living in the present Kingdom of God. We should be living everyday actively for Christ by reaching out to those whom Christ loves, instead of just waiting and praying that we are taken home. I often find myself wondering if Christ accepts our egger anticipation of his return as a form of worship, or if he has more joyful when we reach out to the needs that we see around us everyday. I think he loves it when we love others, for no reason other then he told us to.

So before we go on and address the part of the parable where Christ speaks of each man “getting what they deserve” let’s look at how the rich man and Lazarus contrasted lacked appropriate, Christ like contact with each other when they were alive.

I recently had the opportunity to get to see the movie, the Jammed, about underground prostitution in Melbourne. I wouldn’t recommend this movie to everyone, but is has a powerful message, and especially touched me as a Christian. The movie tells the story of three women who were pulled into prostitution under false contexts and one woman who got pulled into helping the girls by no choice of her own. I was quit convicted by the end of the movie by a phrase that kept playing in my head from my favorite book, the Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claiborne. Shane is having a conversation with a friend who just claimed that Jesus never talked to a prostitute and Shane is trying to defend the fact that of course Jesus talked to prostitutes, all the time. But then Shane’s friend replied, “Listen, Jesus never talked to a prostitute because he didn’t see a prostitute. He saw a child of God he was madly in love with.” How are we seeing the people around us? Are we even seeing the people around us at all? Or like the rich man are we ignoring the Lazarus’ that are right in front of us? Are we seeing a child of God or are we grumbling under our breath and in our minds that “those type of people” made their own decisions. Really? How have you made decisions that are any better? And why should that prevent you from reaching out and being the hands and feet of Christ?

I would also like to suggest that being the hands and feet of Christ isn’t something that is always safe. What if Jesus is calling us to be radical as we stand up for our neighbors who are hurting? At a recent bible study on the Book of Acts the point was brought up that almost everyone in the book of Acts dies, most being charged with some form of treason against the government or crime against the Jewish religion. Do we have that type of faith today, a faith that goes against the grain of culture that has seeped into the church? To stand up for our brothers and sisters and speak against the injustices being committed against them even if it means going to jail or lying down our own lives? Am I willing to let God use me in this countercultural way? Are we going to allow ourselves to be political criminals, not carrying about how others see our passions, but caring only about how are loving others? “Give to Caesar’s what is Creaser’s”, realizing that everything is God’s. Or are we going to live in fear of what others will think?

Fear has become such a stumbling block for the Church, creating an us vs. them mentality. We are over here trying to achieve holiness and we’ll interact with a small fraction of the poor and broken hearted once in a while just to meet our quota of “Jesus like” acts. I feel as if that doesn’t matter at all, if we don’t have a Christ like heart when we are reaching out. Why are we so fearful? I generally carry change around in my coat pockets. If I get a coin it goes into my pocket so I can hand it to the next beggar that I see on the street. I have a friend who handed his money to a man who told us he was in need of a train ticket, who we later found out was an addict. But does it really matter if the man ended up misusing his money if my friend has a pure heart when he gave the money? If he took time out of his day to interact with someone whom everyone else ignores. We are all going to make mistakes when it comes to giving money and time, but God is big enough to redeem every pure hearted action we take. What is to say that the love that my friend showed to the man on the street even for a few minutes won’t have positive repercussions on his life later on? When are we going to start trusting God to use our resources for God instead of worrying if we made a good decision or not? What if we just give our change to the Lazarus’ who are right in front of us? What if we just gave a bit of our time to those crying out for the message of Love? As the Church we are called to meet people where their need exists, which may not mean preaching the gospel of Christ to the homeless on the streets, before giving him a piece of bread when is crying out for table scraps, because he is so hungry.

Fast forward to the part of the story where the rich man and Lazarus have reached their eternal destinations. Did you notice that even when the rich man is in Hell, the lowest place you can get, he still sees Lazarus as inferior to him? He wants Lazarus to come and give him water and go to warn his family about what happened to him, so they can go and avoid the same fate, as if Lazarus is under his command. I wonder if our earthly opinions of people and our motives for serving them or avoiding them will carry over into Heaven. When I reach out to someone in need is it because I want to communicate to that person that they are LOVED and WORTHY just because they are a child of God? Or do I have motives of chalking up points with Jesus? I think back to another quote from Claiborne’s book about who is our family, “The same desperate love a mother has for her baby or that a child has for his or her daddy is extended to all of our human family…yet somehow we have family members who are starving and homeless, or dying or Aids, or in the midst of war.” When I look at Lazarus in Heaven or at the homeless man who I passed on the street and I going to see them as my brother or am I going to try to hold up myself higher then them? Isn’t the rich man’s sin not only that he ignored Lazarus but that he didn’t work for others while on the earth with a pure heart? His selfish desire to achieve power, money, and greatness blocked his ability to work for the Kingdom of Heaven. Christ commands us to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. It’s time that we actually start living out those commandments. Because I’m not loving God when I treat the people around me as subhuman. Would you be prepared to give an account to Jesus for your reasons for reaching out to the people around you? Is it a pure love? Is it something Christ could smile at?

Jude has been concentrating the last couple of weeks on the Pauline concept of relationships, which is so important. How we live in our marriage has ripple effects into those we interact with. But so does our relationship to those people who are part of our family whom we don’t really know, which can be mind boggling and overwhelming. We are not meant to stop homelessness or prostitution on our own, but we are to do our part in being the pure-intentioned church, Loving because Christ Loved. Seeing people as Christ saw them. If we collective act as the Church we can actually achieve something. I think back to the civil rights movement in the 1960s in the United States and the vital part that the Church played in those non-violent protests. It has been said that civil rights would never had been achieved if not for Christians being passionate against injustice. What are we passionate about today as the Church? Are we just passively waiting for Jesus to return or are we living out the present Kingdom today? Are we ignoring Lazarus and treating him as undignified or are we actually acting like Christ? I leave you with one final question that Shane Claiborne presented in his book, “Can we honestly worship a homeless man in church on Sunday, that is Christ, and ignore the homeless man on the streets on Monday?”