Bridging
the Gap
The
Pastor Roy B. Grubbs
World Communion Sunday
Luke
Each of us, I believe, has things we tell
ourselves to protect us from the pain of those around us.
If only he had not dropped out of high school; if only she had not had so
many babies; if he would just learn more English; if she would only stop
drinking. It is human nature to find
some reason why people are the way they are, so that we can get on with the
business of being the way we are, without too much drag on our consciences.
Most of us learned a long time ago that the
chief person we are responsible for is ourselves.
We have been put on Earth to love our neighbors, but changing their lot
in life is up to them, not us, especially in a culture like ours that puts so
much stock in individual initiative. The
great American myth is that anyone willing to work hard can win first prize.
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 so far back, that they can run until their lungs burst and
still never see the dust of the front runners.
Those are the hardest cases, I think, people
who have inherited poverty as surely as they have inherited brown eyes or curly
hair, who hear the starting gun go off and do not even know which way to run.
Not that it matters. They
don’t have the right shoes, can’t pay the registration fee, never get a copy
of the rules, and are in terrible shape anyway.
Other people look at them and think “losers.”
It has been going on for so long that even people who start much further
ahead in the race believe that the difference between themselves and others is
so great, that it is almost like God had something to do with it.
Maybe their misfortune is no mistake.
Maybe it is God’s punishment for their sins – known or unknown –
and by the same token, maybe those who do have more have it because God likes
them better. It is even written in
the Bible: “For to those who have,
more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have
will be taken away.” (Luke 8:18)
This was a popular view in Jesus’ day,
especially among the rich, who had no trouble finding passages of scripture to
back them up. Deuteronomy 28
promises fertility, prosperity, and victory in war to those who obey the Lord.
Psalm 1 makes it very clear that the Lord watches over the way of the
righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
Verses like these were used by some first-century religious people to
link wealth with God’s favor, so that mammon was not a bad thing at all.
It was a very good thing, as a matter of fact, a sure sign of God’s
pleasure.
Those who obeyed God were blessed with
material rewards and those who did not were condemned to poverty, which worked
out nicely on two counts. It not
only allowed the rich to enjoy their riches; it also allowed them to walk past
the beggars who slept by their garbage cans without even looking down.
Who were they, after all, to interfere with the punishment God had
arranged for those poor souls? The
best thing was to leave well enough alone. Let
the poor pick themselves up and dust themselves off.
Let them try harder to do what was right, and God might smile upon them
too. Meanwhile, the gap between rich
and poor was not anyone’s fault. It
was God’s doing and that was that.
It is called “health and wealth
theology” and you do not need me to tell you that it is still around. Jesus
could not stand it, and what he really hated was that way of reading scripture.
There was plenty in Moses and the prophets that went the other way, but
those were not the passages that rich people memorized, passages like “Open
your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land” (Deuteronomy
As usual, Jesus’ way of getting his
message across was to tell a story. It
is an awful story all the way around – the oozing sores, the slobbering dogs,
the place of torment, the great chasm. When
most of us hear it, we plummet right into our own chasm of guilt, even though
that is not the point. The point of
the story is to tell us a truth we need to know in hopes that it will change our
lives. Otherwise, God could care
less about our guilt. The only thing
guilt is good for is to move us to change. If
it does not do that, then it is just a sorry substitute for new life.
“I can’t do what you’re asking me, God, but I sure do feel bad
about it. Will you settle for
that?”
For better or worse, there is very little
guilt in this story. As far as I can
tell, the rich man does not feel badly about anything except the place where his
life of luxury has landed him. He
liked the distance between him and Lazarus fine when it was his own doing, but
now that the distance seems fixed for good he is in some distress, especially
since Lazarus has something he really wants.
Even on the far side of the grave, the rich
man does not recognize the poor man as a fellow human being.
He still sees him as something less.
He thinks Lazarus is Father Abraham’s gofer, someone to fetch water and
take messages, but Father Abraham sets him straight.
Cradling old bony Lazarus to his chest, he says no, no, no.
The rich man’s days of getting other people to do his bidding are over.
Furthermore, there will be no special messages brought back from the dead
for his brothers. They have Moses
and the prophets just as everyone else does, and if that is not enough to get
their attention, then no ghost is going to get it either.
The end.
I told you it was an awful story.
But remember: this story is for us, not against us.
Jesus may have enjoyed ruffling the feathers of his money-loving
listeners, but I would be surprised if that were all he wanted.
Even when he got angry, he got angry for a reason, usually because he
could not stand the way people loved the things they could get for themselves
better then they loved the things God wanted to give them.
They were satisfied with linen suits and sumptuous feasts, when God
wanted to give them the Kingdom. They
were content to live in the world with beggars and errand boys, when God wanted
to give them brothers and sisters. They
were happy to get by with the parts of the Bible that backed up their own ways
of life when God wanted to give them a new life altogether.
What they did not seem to know – what we
still do not seem to know – is that we are the victims of our own way of life.
When we succeed in cutting ourselves off from each other, when we learn
how to live with the misery of other people by convincing ourselves that they
deserve it, when we defend our own good fortune as God’s blessing and decline
to see how our lives are quilted together with all other lives, then we are
losers. Not because of what God will
do to us, but because of what we have done to ourselves.
Who do you think fixed that chasm in the story?
Was it God, or the rich man? Sometimes
I think the worst thing we ever have to fear is that God will give us exactly
what we want.
The best thing about this story is that it
is not over yet; for the rich man, yes, but not for us, because we
are the five brothers. Even though
Father Abraham would not let Lazarus come back from the grave to tell us this
story, Jesus has sneaked it out for us. Now
we have that as well as Moses and the prophets and someone who has risen from
the dead to convince us it is true. All
that remains to be seen is what we will do about it.
Amen.
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