Missed Opportunities
Luke 16:19-31
Grace Hills Baptist Church
October 2, 2016
I have 939 Facebook friends. Some of them are friends from high school, college, or seminary. Some are friends I’ve made through Baptist life. Some are members of churches I’ve served. Some are just random people I’ve met at some point. Many of them are people I don’t keep up with, haven’t spoken to in quite some time, while others are people whose kids I watch grow up and whose opinions matter very much to me. But there are few of my Facebook friends whose posts I read every day.
One is an exception. He’s a man named Steve, and I got to know him while I was serving on staff in Blacksburg. We aren’t especially close; while I worked a summer with his son in a school warehouse, I’d say we are more acquaintances than anything else. So why do I make sure to look at his Facebook wall every day? Because every single day, he posts two things: the weather report and a funny story. The weather report is for Blacksburg, so I don’t usually look at that unless I happen to be going to a Virginia Tech football game that day, but I always read the stories. Often, they are pretty cheesy, but every now and then they make me chuckle. Take the one from last Sunday: a father was worried that his son was spending too much on dates, so he asked the young man how much his last date had cost. The son thought a minute and answered, “Oh, about $15 or so, I think.” The father was relieved and said, “I’m proud of you for finally coming up with an inexpensive evening out.” His son replied, “To be honest, Dad, we’d have done more…but that was all the money she had!”
I love the stories Steve posts. Most of us like to hear or read good stories – that’s in large part why we read books, watch TV, chat with friends, and gather down at McDonald’s or Granny Bees in the morning. This is nothing new; human beings are storytelling creatures. Go back to the earliest recorded accounts of humanity, and you’ll find stories that are told. Sometimes, those stories are simply like those my friend Steve posts on Facebook: they are there to entertain. Yet other times, the stories we tell and hear are something a bit more: they are told for a reason, to inform us, to challenge us, to persuade us, to move us.
Jesus told stories like this. In fact, a great deal of his teaching took place in stories, especially stories of a particular type, called parables. “Parable” is a word that can be difficult to translate; it can mean a fictional story told for an instructional purpose; it can be described as “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning”; it can even be defined as “riddle” or “puzzle.” Ultimately, what a parable does is convey a point in a manner that engages the imagination and challenges the listener to reevaluate something in life. Jesus’ parables, in particular, often took the assumptions of his listeners and turned them on their head, reversing the conventional wisdom of his day about who was good and who was bad, who was right and who was wrong, who was blessed and who was cursed.
The Scripture we read just a few moments ago is a classic example of a Jesus-type of parable. The story opens with a rich man. We don’t know his name; all we know about him is that he is among the superrich, the Donald Trump-level of wealthy. He has only the most fashionable and exclusive clothes – which means obscenely expensive. Not only that, he doesn’t save his costly and high-quality clothes for formal occasions or special events; he wears them to the daily meal, to his likely exquisite dining room table. When he gets there, he feasts on whatever he desires, eating only the best and most sumptuous foods every single day. This man is living in the lap of luxury, the 1% of the 1%. That’s what we know.
Now, before we move on, let’s notice what we don’t know about this man. We don’t know his name; his entire identity in the story is tied up with his wealth. We don’t know how he got his money. We don’t know what else he does with his money, whether he is a great philanthropist, a greedy miser, or somewhere in between. We don’t even know if he is piously religious or a committed atheist. He is flat, one-dimensional in this story: he is the very caricature of a rich man.
Luke doesn’t have much use for the rich in his Gospel. From Luke’s perspective, God was not neutral – God is on the side of the poor. Near the very beginning, in a passage heard in churches around the world during the Christmas season, Mary sings her Magnificat, brashly proclaiming, “My soul magnifies the Lord…He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”[1] In his inaugural sermon, Jesus chose a Scripture passage from Isaiah that said “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”[2] In the passage from Luke we read before communion, Jesus warned against inviting your rich neighbors to dinner; instead, the faithful person would “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” what some would call ‘losers’ from the world’s perspective.[3] And just a few verses before our parable this morning, Jesus scorns the beliefs of his opponents, warning them, “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”[4] This wasn’t an idea Luke, or even Jesus, got on their own; it is a strong thread throughout the length and breadth of Scripture; indeed, much of the Law is concerned with the care of the needy and oppressed, and next to the sin of idolatry, responsibility for the poor is one of the chief concerns of the biblical prophets.[5] So we shouldn’t be surprised that, right from the start, the rich man is not exactly celebrated in Jesus’ parable.
There is, however, another man in the story, a poor man named Lazarus. Lazarus is in a bad way; he is destitute, utterly without the financial means to purchase a basic meal. There are no minimum wage jobs he can apply for, no soup kitchens he can visit. He is starving. Not only that, he is suffering from some sort of sores, some physical malady that he cannot afford to have treated. He has no health insurance. He doesn’t even have Medicaid or an emergency room to go to for treatment.
About all the hope he has, from an earthly perspective, is that someone will have mercy on him. And, though we may miss it in the story, someone does. We are told that Lazarus was laid at the rich man’s gate. In those days with no social safety net, the only source of support was from the rich. There was an expectation in Roman society that the rich would be patrons of the destitute, and this expectation was expanded in Jewish society. Indeed, in the Torah, the Jewish Law, the rich were told, “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’”[6] There was a social expectation that the rich man would do something for poor Lazarus. As scholar Amy-Jill Levine puts it, “To ignore suffering – especially when it is at one’s doorstep – is never ‘socially acceptable.’ To the contrary, perhaps the reason Lazarus is at the gate in the first place is because the people who placed him there expected the rich man to act.”[7]
Yet the rich man does more than not act. According to Jesus’ story, the rich man doesn’t even take notice of the poor man at his gates. The rich man doesn’t even SEE Lazarus. Apparently, he knew Lazarus – he knew him on sight later in the story – but he didn’t really notice Lazarus. He didn’t pay attention to Lazarus’ need. He didn’t consider Lazarus to be of any concern to him. And then something happens: both men die. Lazarus is carried to the bosom of Abraham, an image of intimacy and care, while the rich man discovers that he has been relegated to Hades, the Greek world of the dead. It is only there, in the midst of his anguish, that his predicament fully sinks in. He, the rich man, the important one, is in pain, suffering from thirst, and yet he can see that Lazarus, the man he looked past day after day, being cared for in the bosom of Abraham. This was an image that spoke of intimacy, protection, and love. It even alludes to the heavenly feast, a feast that the rich man, lover of banquets where the dinner table groans under the weight of all sorts of delicacies, cannot taste. In his agony, physical and mental, he cries out, asking Abraham to send Lazarus to tend to him.
There is a bitter irony here. The rich man had many chances to tend to Lazarus, yet passed them all by. Now, he is desperate for Lazarus to tend to him. It is obvious here that he knows Lazarus, but now instead of ignoring him, he begs for Lazarus’ help. It is tempting in this moment to smirk a little, to relish the rich man’s just rewards, if it wasn’t for the discomfort that we have much more in common with the rich man than we do with Lazarus. Fully 50% of the world today lives on less than $2 per day – yet all of us, every single one here today, has a closet with clothes in it. All of us, every single one, has options on what to eat when we leave here. We may not all have the ability to go from this place to a steakhouse or order lobster for lunch, but I seriously doubt any of us are going to go hungry today. We are rich by any mathematical standard – and like the rich man, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve often overlooked the poor, needy person at our gate. We’ve looked past the victims of racism in our midst. We’ve ignored the people working three minimum wage jobs who can’t afford medical insurance. We’ve tuned out the images of children and families devastated in Syria, and turned our noses up at the very thought that we share any responsibility for the tragic circumstances that far too many low-income families have to live with every single day. We are, whether we like to admit it or not, awfully like the rich man – and so we read Jesus’ parable today with a little bit of a chill, because we have to wonder: just what is Jesus trying to tell us?
When I tried to answer that question this week, I ended up listening to a sermon on this very passage by one of the best preachers of our time, Dr. Tom Long.[8] In his sermon, Dr. Long wrestled with the troubling idea in this parable that rich is evil, poor is good, and that our socioeconomic status determines our final destination. That is, indeed, the most difficult question in this passage. But Dr. Long reminded his listeners in that sermon that a parable isn’t a factual story; it is a riddle, a puzzle, and it is told to teach a point. What is the point of this parable? That while the ultimate, best understanding of the Gospel is that it’s never too late, the banquet of God is open to all, and the children can always come home, that there is a penultimate meaning to the Gospel, an underlying theme that makes the grace of the Cross even more amazing. It is this: every now and then, God opens a window, a window of blessing, a kingdom window, and gives us an opportunity to be part of what God is doing in the world. Sometimes we take that opportunity, sometimes we don’t…and then the window closes, and it is too late.
To illustrate this, Dr. Long told a story from a time when he wasn’t much older than I am: when his daughter Melanie was young and part of the Campfire Girls. One time, the Campfire Girls were going to have a father/daughter banquet, and Melanie desperately wanted her father to go with her. Dr. Long, though, was already an admired speaker, and he had a speaking engagement that night. As he put it, “I cannot believe that when I was a young father, I actually got on that airplane and flew somewhere to give a speech to people who no longer remember me or what I said instead of going to the father-daughter Campfire Girl banquet that my daughter Melanie was begging me to go to with her. Now that I’m older and a little wiser, I know that I made the wrong choice, and I am now ready to go to the father-daughter Campfire Girl banquet.” But he can’t. His daughter is now grown up, and he missed it.
The rich man has missed his opportunity, as well. Father Abraham responds to his request, and it isn’t a response full of vengeful gloating or cold impartiality. Abraham says, “My child” – a word filled with both love and anguish. It is the same word Mary and Joseph used in Luke 2 when they were desperate to find the lost 12-year-old Jesus in their worry and anguish. It is also the word used to express the father’s love to his eldest son in what is probably the most famous parable of all, the Prodigal Son. It is a term of devotion and care – but in this case, it is also a word spoken by heartbroken parent. Why? Because there is nothing Abraham can do. He can’t send Lazarus to the rich man, no matter how much he wants to. The opportunity is gone.
It is likely Jesus heard plenty of sermons like this when he was growing up. In the rabbinic literature, we find many sermons about how God would open up windows or blessing or provide opportunities to serve the Lord, but that after a time they would close. And often, when they would preach these sermons, they would tell stories about someone in particular: Eliezar of Damascus. Eliezar is a very minor person in the story of Scripture, appearing only in one or two places in Genesis. He was Abraham’s servant, his right-hand man. The rabbis would make up stories about him, how when God wanted to bless the earth in some way, he would ask Abraham to send his servant Eliezar to earth as a blessing. In these stories, Eliezar would come in disguise: a shepherd, a traveler. He was the passerby on the sidewalk, the person in the seat beside you on the plane. You have to keep your eyes open if you are going to see Eliezar of Damascus, if you are going to recognize God’s blessing, if you are going to seize the opportunity to make a difference for the kingdom of God.
These stories were preached and proclaimed in Hebrew; Jesus and every observant Jew of his generation would have been familiar with Eliezar of Damascus stories. They would be stories of reminder, cautionary tales against overlooking the poor and needy, the unusual and the uncomfortable, because those people and situations just might be an opportunity from God. Yet the interesting thing for me is that, while Jesus preached in a form of Hebrew, the Gospel of Luke wasn’t written in Hebrew; it was written in Greek. And what is the Greek translation of Eliezar? Lazarus.
Like the rich man, we have opportunities that come our way. In fact, they are right there at our front gate – on our TVs, in our Facebook feed, in the newspaper, on our e-mail. We see people in desperate need. We hear of situations where suffering is taking place, know people who could use our help. And like the rich man, we have a choice. Are we going to see those needs, the poverty around us, the injustice that abounds, and sit idly by? That’s what he did – not, I believe, because he was evil, but because he was too rich, too self-absorbed, toocontent in his own life to really see the pain and suffering of others…and so he missed it. Will we? Or will we open our eyes to the world around us, throw off our own blinders of comfort and security and fear and self-absorption, and step forward when God’s window of blessing and service opens? God is in the business of healing the world and making a difference, and he gives us the opportunity to be part of it. Don’t miss it! Let us pray.
1
[1] Luke 1:46, 52-53
[2] Luke 4:18
[3] Luke 14:12-14
[4] Luke 16:12-13
[5] Lischer, Reading the Parables, 107
[6] Deuteronomy 15:11
[7] Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, 255
[8] Long, “The Open Window,” preached at The Riverside Church of New York, 4/17/16