Reverend John Pavlovitz has a blog titled, Stuff That Needs to Be Said. He often muses on the challenges of being the church in our world. This past week he titled his article- The Kind of Christian I Refuse to Be-
He wrote:
For far too many people, being a Christian no longer means you need to be humble or forgiving. It no longer means you need a heart to serve or bring healing. It no longer requires compassion or mercy or benevolence. It no longer requires you to turn the other cheek or to love your enemies or to take the lowest place or to love your neighbor as yourself.
It no longer requires Jesus.
After a long list of all the things he refuses to be, that none of us want to be, he finally says what he wants to be…
I refuse to be a Christian unless (unless) it means I live as a person of hospitality, of healing, of redemption, of justice, of expectation-defying Grace, of counterintuitive love. These are non-negotiables.
In this morning’s parable they are clearly non-neotiables for God as well. As we heard, if not followed, according to the parable, we are eternally damned. These values of…..hospitality, healing, redemption, justice, expectation-defying Grace, counterintuitive love are not new with Jesus, they are a rich and well known part of the Torah and other scriptures that Jesus and His followers wold have known. And they also would have known about the warnings of going to terrible place in the afterlife if not followed-
Deuteronomy 15:11-For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’
This is the prevalent through line and theme in Luke’s Gospel and Jesus gives parable after parable around this these…When you give a dinner, don’t invite your friends, invite the poor the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Sell your possessions and distribute the money to the poor; Both of those come with consequences in the afterlife when ignored.
And the people listening to this morning’s parable would not have seen themselves in it. The rich man is of a level of ostentatious wealth. Amy Jill Levine does an excellent job of laying this out by unpacking the Greek meaning of words…I won’t bore you with the details, but take my word for it, this is a rich man of fine purple who feasted daily the kind of feast that was reserved for wedding banquets and high celebrations. This was a man of enormous wealth who left his house and came home again, multiple times a day …and stepped over the man who was lying there, a man with sores, and dogs that cleaned his sores, a man who hoped for crumbs and was not begging, but too poor to do anything other than sit, wait and hope for a crumb. And the rich man didn’t see him, or chose not to see him, or refused to see him….We’re not told. And I think for good reason. We have a million reasons for ignoring those on the street, but I wonder if they were left out of the parable precisely to make the point that none of those reasons excuse our blindness to the problem.
The rich man isn’t given a name, The poor man, on the other hand, is given a name…..Lazarus in Hebrew is Eliezer why means….God helps….God helps this poor man when the rich man refused. God rewards this blessed poor, who does go on to inherit life after death, in the arms of the only other named person in this parable, Abraham, who holds Lazarus in his bosom, nurtured cared for and loved as a beloved child of God. God helps.
That was not the case for the rich man, who never says he’s sorry. Never really repents, but only asks that Lazarus be sent to him to cool his tongue, as though he’s owed this, in his privilege.
Then when the split between them is further defined by Jesus, the rich man asks that at least his brothers who are still alive be warned. The rich man continues to think himself, his own brothers, at least warn them.
And Jesus reminds him that they’ve already been told. Moses and the prophets taught, and continue to teach, and those listening will be rewarded and those who don’t will end up eternally damned and there’s no coming back from it.
I do wonder if Jesus got tired of preaching, and in his frustration would use a scare tactic to wake people up. This seems to me to be one of those.
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Monday night I had the our pleasure of teaching a polity class as a substitute for Conover who was riding for Pedal for Protein. First of all, if you know my knowledge of polity you know how funny it is that he asked me. I failed the first polity exam and had to take it again. But I had such a great time with them and I think they did too. I talked mostly about ministry, how the foundations of the Book of Order and general structure and definitions of what it means to be Presbyterian have influenced me as a Pastor and as a christian.
And I gave them a short list of things to always be asking themselves.… Similar to “What kind of christian do I want to be”….Only the question was a little broader…That question is, “Whats my role, whats my purpose?” You can ask that as a husband, as a parent, as an employee, a friend…. I can ask that questions of myself in session meetings, at the bedside of someone dying, in worship…when we ask it as a Christian it infiltrates and colors all those other roles, because Christ lives within us and colors everything else we do….And we should most definitely be asking ourselves that question as a church. “What’s our role, What’s our purpose….as a church. Any church.
Theologian Walter Brueggemann answers this in three parts…
The prophetic tasks of the church are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial, and express hope in a society that lives in despair.
If we apply that this morning's parable…
What illusions are there around the poor? That they somehow brought it on themselves, that because theres always been poverty there always will be so why bother. The illusion that we should look out for number one, or only our own country….The truth is that we are called to those non-negotiables mentioned earlier- of hospitality, healing, redemption, justice, expectation-defying Grace, and counterintuitive love. Not just for one but for all… by feeding one mouth at a time, one dollar at a time and to open our eyes and really see the people who are in need. Tell the truth through your actions in a society that lives in illusion.
2-to grieve in a society that practices denial
The denial is that we’re the wealthiest nation in the world, that we don’t have a problem. According to poverty USA.org, in 2018, 38.1 million people live in poverty. 17 million of those are living in extreme pottery and 96.3 million live close to poverty. We grieve that this may not change in our life time and that our collections won’t fix the problem… but it’s precisely that grief that compels us back to the question, whats our purpose whats our role….to give the problem a name and a face as God did, as Jesus did in this morning’s parable… because poverty has a name and a face, and it lives at our gate, and our lives are judged by what we do, if we are to call ourselves Christian.
John Stendahl, Lutheran Pastor and writer for the Christian Century magazine tells a story that begins-
Years later I still feel the shame. I was visiting a young man in a facility for people with severe brain injuries. He was agitated and eager to walk, so I joined him as he went from room to room and looked in each room as if he were searching for someone. Eventually we came to a big room that was not in use. At the far end a couple of janitors were at work buffing the floor. I saw that no one was sitting at any of the tables and said to the young man, “There’s nobody in here.”
Then, from the other side of the room, came the voice of one of the janitors. “What do you mean, nobody? We’re not nobody.”
I don’t recall what lame apology I offered, but I remember the heat rising in my cheeks. I really hadn’t seen those two men, although of course I’d registered that there were janitors at work. My mind was elsewhere.
Each of us have a similar story in our lives, when we become aware of how we separate ourselves form other human beings. Whether it’s the janitor, the gas station attendant, the person who takes our trash, the next door neighbor, there are people hiding in plain sight. We see them every day, especially as we drive from here to the freeway, at the gas station, one day it’s the man with the shopping cart and the well behaved pitbull. Another it's the old man with the white beard. Another day it’s one with a sign, recently laid off. Sometimes we smile in their direction, sometimes we get a smile back and that feels good, Sometimes we’re compelled to hand them a few bucks, other days, we feel embarrassed and avert our eyes, and other days we may feel helpless. Then other days we may even feel judgmental and frustrated projecting ideas about who they are, able bodied, young and seem to be accepting hand outs when they could be working. Many are mentally ill, can’t afford health care, or don’t like the affects of their meds, some are living paycheck to paycheck, and could be any one of us who have ever lived that way. We just don’t know. But like the rich man, we have a million reasons for not seeing, and none of them are good.
In Luke’s parable we don’t know much about Lazarus either. But we do know Jesus went out of his way to give him a name….A name that means……God helps…..We belong to God. In Baptism we belong to Christ. These are non negotiables, If God helps, we help. End of story. Beginning of our role and purpose, as a disciple, as a christian and as a church.