AtomLord, Help Us to See
Luke 16:19-31
Dr. James Kennedy died a couple of weeks ago. You may or may not have known that during the 1970’s and 1980’s he was the founder and moving force behind a significant outreach ministry of the Christian church called Evangelism Explosion. I was trained in this method while on my internship. It centered on engaging folks in intentional conversation and then gradually working the conversation toward the asking of two questions: ”When you die, where will you go?” (The second question depended on how you answered the first, but if you said, “heaven,” the second question was, “When you get there, and Jesus asks you, ‘Why should I let you into my heaven?’ what will you say?” And I learned that sharing the faith was about helping people to know that they knew they had a place in the coming kingdom. Forgiven at the cross, they were given eternity through their faith in the risen Christ. We know that. We believe that as Christians. But then readings like this come along and mess with us. They seem to tell us heaven isn’t about forgiveness. It’s about how you live and how you share.
By the way, didn’t I just preach on a story like this at the beginning of September? If you worshipped then and you haven’t been back until today you might think I (and the church) only talk about this topic. We don’t. But Jesus does…quite often. In fact one of my colleagues did a word study in the Bible and found that Jesus spends as much time talking about our relationship with the material world as that of the spiritual. 17 of 38 parables are about possessions. There are 272 mentions of belief or believing, 372 mentions of prayer, 714 mentions of love and 2,172 references to giving or possessions. It’s hard to get away from this connection between the spiritual and the material. Trust me, I tried. I decided to look at the reading from 1st Timothy as the text for my sermon. That was Tuesday.
On Wednesday a young man came to the office. He is living homeless in our community. I tried to help, but not very successfully. I went back to my sermon. On Thursday, I had a message. Another member of our community struggling to make ends meet needed gas to go to a funeral out of town. I wrote a voucher for gas, thankful that the community gives to offer some relief in this way. Back to the sermon. Friday morning…a giant of a man came through the office door, looking for some food to get him through the next couple of days. He had a voucher for the food pantry, but it was Friday and the pantry is only open on Tuesday and Thursday. He was passing through, living out of his car, looking for work, but limited by a physical disability and lack of housing in the community. Again, I tried to help. But I also thought, “God are you trying to tell me something?
God wouldn’t let me move away from this story. So indulge me if you will one more time. The story is about a great gulf that exists between the haves and the have nots. Jesus saw it in his own society. I believe he would see it in ours. How you see it kind of depends on how you define rich and poor. Most of us would not define ourselves as rich, but many peoples of the world would. Many would even see the poorest in our community as affluent in comparison to the poor in their own countries. I can imagine that the poorest of the poor in Haiti would see our poor as having it pretty good.
Nonetheless, Jesus goes into some detail here to show how sumptuously and elegantly the rich man lived. Purple dye was the most expensive of dyes. Only the wealthy could afford it. And only the wealthiest could afford linen material for their clothing. Then, in sharp contrast, Jesus paints a picture of this poor man living in complete, disgusting, utter misery.
Jesus says the poor man lay at the gate of the rich man and would gladly have feasted upon the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. But because of the gate, securely locked, there was no way for the poor man to intrude upon the rich man’s plenty.
When the rich man’s life ends, he finds himself in hell. The poor man is in heaven with Father Abraham. It is only then that the rich man seems to notice the poor man. How ironic! After all, the poor man lay at the rich man’s gate. He had to see him as he went in and out of his house. He must have seen him.
The rich man sees that the tables have been turned and God’s intentions for his wealth were not the same as his own. And so he pleads with Father Abraham to send someone back from the dead to warn his rich brothers of their peril. He wants them to see, before it is too late, what he sees now.
But Father Abraham isn’t buying. He says to the rich man that surely his brothers have read the Bible and must have heard what Moses and the prophets say about the great peril of riches and God’s great love for the poor and the oppressed. If they couldn’t see what was so plainly displayed in the Scriptures, how will they see even if someone comes back from the dead?
I for one sympathize with the rich man’s argument. It is so easy not to see. The great evangelical social activist Jim Wallis noted that there are about 908 verses in the Bible on the evils riches may pose for the faithful. He said that one time he went thought his Bible and decided to cut out all those verses that had to do with the problem of riches and poverty. He ended up with a Bible completely in shreds! You take out these references and you take out much of the Bible. And yet that is what most of us do. We selectively read scripture, hearing what we want to hear, seeing what we want to see. We put a microscope over those verses that we like, and we snip out those verses that we don’t like. And we just don’t see the world the way God sees it.
In his short story, “Gooseberries,” Anton Chekhov writes:
We neither hear nor see those who suffer and the terrible things in life are played out behind the scenes. All is calm and quiet, only statistics, which are [silent], protest. They would tell us: many have gone mad, many barrels of drink have been consumed, so many children die of malnutrition… [but they are silent]
And apparently this is as it should be. Apparently those who are happy can only enjoy themselves in such silence. In a real world this silent happiness would be impossible. It is a kind of universal hypnosis.
There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its cause, catastrophe will overtake him – sickness, poverty, loss – and nobody wills see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But the happy man goes on living [neither seeing nor hearing.]
What an accurate, tragic description this is of the way most of us live. As Chekhov says, “We neither hear nor see those who suffer.” We want to structure a society in which the sad things of life are “played out behind the scenes.” Some of you here may live in those places behind the scenes. Some of you may work there in your job in law enforcement or your work at the crisis center, or even in our schools, where you teach young people whose only balanced meal of the day might be the school lunch. You see. The rest of us might need some hammer to hammer upon our brains, some way to see that which we are determined not to see. It is as if it would take somebody coming back from the dead to come and get us to put things in focus.
I’m beginning to sound a bit negative, aren’t I? Someone suggested to me lately that the church too often lands on the negative, dwelling there rather than on the good things happening around us. It may be true. You come here on a nice Sunday in the fall like this one, feeling rather good; and then the preacher stands up and starts hammering away at all the problems of the world.
But be fair to us preachers. We have to hammer away at such things. Being a Christian means being someone who is so in love with Jesus, that you are in love with the truth. Being a Christian means being someone who is willing to let Jesus tell us a story like this one, a story in which our world is so honestly depicted, a world where some have everything and some have nothing, a world in which there is a great deal of inequality, a great gap between the rich and the poor. And then to have Jesus paint us a picture of the world as it should be, the world as it is being made, remade by the work of God.
It takes great courage to see such a world. A few years ago, there was a popular movie title, The Truman Show. The people in the story lived in a perfect world, a too-perfect world, in which everything was clean and bright and happy and perfect, But then they realize that it was a fake world, nothing but an elaborate, very expensive TV set, which covered a multitude of sadness just beyond the stage. And they had to decide, did they want to stay on the “set” or join the real world.
As Chekhov says, most of us try to live in the fake world. Statistics sweep past us, telling of the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the virtual slavery of poor nations to international debt, the great suffering that goes on beyond our borders, outside our doors, beyond our safe security compound. But we want to move on to happier thoughts. As Chekhov says, “There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people.” And if not a hammer, perhaps someone to come back form the dead to shake us and get our attention.
What would it take for me to admit to the sin upon which so much of my “good life” is based? How might I see that I have been the beneficiary of a whole web of injustice? What might motivate me to work for a more just and equitable world in which there were a distribution of the world’s goods in a more just way? How could I sense my God-given, Christian calling to reach out to those whom Jesus sees but which I tend to overlook? Might there be some way for me, through my lifestyle and my actions, to sign, signal, and witness to the in-breaking of a kingdom that stands in marked contrast to our kingdoms? What would it take for me to see it?
A hammer, striking on my brain, to break through the crust of my self pre-occupation and intentional blindness? Or someone coming from the dead to tell me that which I am determined not to hear, to show me what I don’t want to see?
Friends, you’ve just listened to a story you might rather not have heard and maybe you sense your eyes being opened to truths of this world you would just have soon have missed. Which means that Father Abraham was wrong. It is possible to hear and see those unpleasant facts of life that we would like to deny. It is possible to look down and see suffering Lazarus as we go through the gate into our well-kept, well-ordered world. Father Abraham was wrong. Someone has come back from the dead, and despite all of our defenses and rationalizations, has caused us to see. And seeing is the beginning of responding. With all deference to Dr. Kennedy and the way I learned to do evangelism, following Jesus, sharing the good news is not just about bringing others into the kingdom of heaven. It’s also about bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. Someone has come back from the dead and told us this story; someone has risen in order to help us see. Let’s pray…
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