June 2, 2013 First Sunday After Trinity
The Riches of Humility
Isa 5:8-12, 18-24, Ps 73, 1 John 4:7-21, Luke 16:19-31
The rich man has no name. The crippled beggar Lazarus we know . . . but the rich man has no name.
In our own place and time, many are rich, and many of the rich are anonymous. In Bible times, wealth
didn’t grow on fig trees, and everyone knew who the wealthy were. But the identity of this wealthy one remains cloaked today while Lazarus basks in fame.
You might have heard the rich man called “Dives.” But that name is not in the Scriptures. It’s a Latin term that came into use later and has passed into English with the meaning “rich glutton.”
The Bible leaves him nameless. This is a parable and not a historic event, true, but there’s no explanation in that. In the story, the pauper has a name; why not the rich man? Here’s a theory: God had said by his prophet of those who do not fear Him: “I will not remember their names with my lips.” Would you want to be one of those whose name God dismisses from His memory, a spill of milk blotted up, never to be thought of again? I wouldn’t, either.
There’s more we can mine from this fascinating parable if we view it through a first-century grid. How would the hearers, standing in the presence of Jesus as He relates it, have understood it?
First, let me mention something you might find useful in the weeks to come. I’ve decided that in this Trinity season I will preach through the gospel lessons the prayer book gives us. I recall Bishop Sutton telling a story in a seminary class about an elderly lady in a church who grumbled about the preachers coming out of seminary who virtually ignored the gospels and delved right into the New Testament epistles. Bishop Sutton thought she had a point.
So do I. Preachers – and especially freshly minted ones – like to show off their theological erudition. The gospels tell us who went where and did what and said what. The epistles elaborate theology; they make great fodder for those who would parade their understanding of fine points of doctrine. I’ve been guilty. Now I’m repenting. All that high-falutin’
stuff St. Paul spins out about justification and reconciliation is vital to our faith, but it means nothing to us out of context.
And the context is: where our Lord Jesus went, and what He did, and what He said. In other words, what the gospels
tell us.
So we’ll work our way through the gospel lessons. I invite you to look them up early each week, read them, study them,
meditate on them. Your worship here each Lord’s Day will be richer for it.
Now, back to the rich man and Lazarus. Two groups make up the Lord’s audience, the Pharisees and the disciples of Jesus. A child could identify which character in the story represents each group. The Pharisees are the high
and mighty among the Jews and the Lord’s disciples are mostly poor working folk and outcasts.
The Pharisees are shocked – shocked! I tell you -- that Jesus consorts with sinners and tax-collectors. The latter were reviled for doing the bidding of Israel’s Roman overlords and pocketing whatever they could. Jesus even engages with them at the table, the most intimate form of fellowship.
The rich man wears purple and fine linen, an ostentatious display. He fares “sumptuously.” The same language is used of the prodigal son.
Lazarus’ name tells his story. It means “God is help.” He gets help from no other source. He is laid at the gate: He cannot so much as drag himself. Many pass by each day, either ignoring or despising him. He is covered with sores from a malignant skin disease, a mass of open wounds. The dogs lick his sores. He has no strength to drive them away and no one will help him. In the ancient East, dogs were filthy, hated animals. Lazarus would have eaten the scraps from
the rich man’s table. He had barely enough food to sustain life.
The second scene: Angels bear Lazarus to Abraham’s bosom. In Jewish thought, angels escorted one
into the next life, where there was no pain in the body or anguish in the soul but eternal health, rest and happiness.
Abraham was the father of all the Israelites. All would be gathered to him after death.
The rich man also dies and is buried. The typical funeral for a man of wealth proceeded with much pomp, with a large retinue of mourners and a choir of women loudly lamenting the deceased and praising his virtues. We find a modern expression of the same spirit in New Orleans, where many a rich man is sent off to his just reward with a trumpet-and-trombone procession that ends at the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. “Oh I want to be in that number/when the saints go marching in.”
A man I know happened to be on the square one day when a notoriously corrupt politician – even by Louisiana standards – was getting his send-off. This fellow stopped one of the musicians as the crowd was breaking up and expressed surprise that he would help to celebrate a scoundrel who stole from the common people. The trumpeter trumpeted, “Naw, man, cat’s got the cash, we’ll blow him on out.”
Our rich man in the parable, from all we know of him, enjoyed such a send-off.
The final scene: Lazarus resides in the comfort of Abraham’s bosom but the rich man writhes in Hades. This is not hell
as we conceive it but the place of departed souls of the good and the wicked alike. They are separated according to their conduct in life. A great gulf separates the damned in their hell of torment from the righteous in their abode of eternal joy with their father Abraham.
What follows is figurative language. First, the rich man looks across and sees Abraham. Next comes their conversation and finally the rich man’s appeal for his brothers. The Jews would not have taken this scene to represent an actual event but as a vivid illustration. The rich man is “in torments”: without succor, without hope. The figurative speech serves to heighten the hearers’ terror at the rich man’s plight. Because he is an Israelite he can call Abraham “father.” As head of all the just in the realm of the blessed, Abraham can command his sons and grant help.
The rich man asks Father Abraham for only a drop of water to cool his tongue. He is suffering beyond our imagining but he dares ask for only the smallest relief. His request for Lazarus to bring this tiny comfort shows the complete reversal of their situations. The rich man would be content with a “scrap” of cool, clear water from the bottomless pool from which
Lazarus drinks.
Abraham acknowledges him as “son.” If this seems to us a favorable sign, it is because we ignore a salient fact: Abraham is a loving father indeed, but a just one as well. Here is the rich man’s dilemma: For Abraham to grant him relief now would be to pervert justice. The rich man enjoyed the bounty of God’s provision while on earth and denied the slightest comfort to Lazarus.
By the justice of God, their roles have been reversed. To love one’s brother is to love God. The rich man had reviled his brother, and so he had hated God. He has no standing before the court: no case to plead, no argument to advance that Lazarus should provide a drop of water for the man who denied the pauper even a morsel of food.
Granting the rich man his wish would be not only unjust but impossible. The great gulf between them can never be bridged. It is an eternal barrier between the good and the evil. With no case to present for himself, the rich man pleads for his five brothers, who are still in the first life and, we surmise, as self-absorbed and lacking in compassion as he.
Again, Father Abraham is unmoved. The brothers have “Moses and the prophets.” Moses represents the law of
Israel. He is the author of the Torah, or first five books of the Old Testament, which lays out God’s law given
to Moses at Mount Sinai. Each Sabbath in the synagogue, the Jews heard the writings of Moses and the prophets
read. They know their Scriptures.
And the rich man knows his brothers. Even more he knows his own experience. God works by means, and the ordinary means of revealing Himself to His people – through Moses and the prophets -- had not deterred the rich man from a life
of dissipation, had not provoked righteousness in him. The rich man is more than a fool: If a departed soul delivered a warning to his brothers, an eyewitness account of the horrors of the place of the damned, he thinks, they would pay
him heed. Oh no, says Father Abraham. Those who reject the revelation God provides in the first life would not listen if one should return from the next life to warn them.
The rich man is the typical aristocratic Jew of the gospels who does not fear God, who demands a miracle before he will believe. Such are those who say of Christ as they mock him from the foot of His cross: “If He is the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him.” (Matt 27:42)
But in the end, God will not be mocked.
This picture presents us not with a condemnation of wealth but with the misuse of it. All we have is from God and is to be used according to His will. Jesus has just told them, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” They are worshipers of worldly things.
Shortly, standing on the very porch of Jerusalem in Bethany, Jesus will call another Lazarus out of the grave, and these scoffers will refuse to believe. Soon, our Lord Himself will arise from His tomb, and they will continue in their hardness of
heart. They claimed to want to see a miracle, but when Jesus walks out of His grave, they fabricate stories to explain away His resurrection.
Just as wealth for its own sake is not condemned in the parable, neither is a righteousness of works taught or poverty exalted. It would be an error to conclude that Lazarus proceeds into eternal bliss solely because he is poor. There is danger in universalizing the parables, each of which serves to teach one central lesson.
I once wondered if the truly destitute in poor countries were more virtuous than we. Jesus’ concern, after all, seems always to be for those on the margins of society. Is poverty in itself a ticket to eternal bliss?
And so, shortly after Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America, I traveled to Honduras. It was my first exposure to the mission field. Our group spent 10 days distributing food and repairing houses. And I learned of men who made the
rounds, living on an alternating basis with three women and living off all of them. They put their children out to beg on the streets and beat them if they came back without the price of a beer. The kids sniffed glue to dull the pain; many of them were dead by age 12. Poverty alone, I suspect, is not a ticket to everlasting joy. I have noticed since that many immigrants raised in poverty, even those from Christian homes, arrive in our land of plenty so intent on Mammon that they lose God.
The point of this parable is the point of the Bible: True wealth is eternity in the Kingdom of God, which Adam forfeited and Christ reclaimed. It is not the indulging of our appetites on earth, oblivious of the needs of our fellow man.
God means for us to enjoy His creation and the abundant fruits of it. The rich man and his brothers instead gorge on the sumptuous fare of this life and fritter away the unimaginable blessing of the next. Having consumed all the glory, they turn and find that only desolation remains.
The story reminds us of a truth often forgotten in our time: We enter the Kingdom of God in the here and now, becoming stewards of our Master’s money. A flawed theology afoot in the land has it otherwise: After the conversion he secures for himself by his decision for Christ, the Christian has little to do but sop up all the gravy he can consume.
Marjorie and I have a friend who fell into the trap – and almost never wriggled free. But one day she awoke. “Forty years in church,” she said, “and I’d never heard of sanctification.” For those who remain in the trap, church is a social club, something like Rotary, with some service projects thrown in for leaven. Worship dissolves into skits and how-to instruction: six steps to a better marriage, 12 steps to taming your teen-ager. If God is present, He appears as a divine butler, on call as needed to attend to the cares of His people.
Not for us. Not for us. We worship the King of glory!
There is one more matter to attend regarding our parable: its Author. It is God the Son who speaks not only of the blessing of the righteous but the cursing of the wicked. Here appears the error of painting the Father as the God of wrath and the Son as the sweet Vessel of mercy.
Going back to the ancient church, many have wanted to divorce the two, to consign one to the Old Testament and the other to the New. A correct reading of the Bible tolerates no such distinction.
The Father demonstrated His superhuman patience with that stiff-necked people Israel for centuries – and chastised them with deportation and bondage to impress on them their need for repentance. At the last He dealt them death when they would not turn from their rebellion. But in His mercy He always preserved the faithful as His remnant.
The Son, likewise, both condemns and saves. It is He who, in the last day, will separate the sheep from the goats.
With the Holy Spirit, They are One. And in the end, as we read in our epistle lesson this morning, He is love. By this St. John means not that God has no other attributes but that He gives of Himself unceasingly and seeks the best for His
creatures. This is the God who desireth not the death of a sinner but that he should
turn from his wickedness and live.
His love is not some gauzy thing, a feeling without form, but a hard-edged reality demonstrated in searing pain upon His cross. And as God loved us, He instructs us to love one another. His love for us provokes and stimulates our love for our fellow man.
If we grasp that His love is perfected in us, as St. John teaches us, we know that we abide in Him and He in us. The rich man and his brothers and their fellow travelers would not imbibe this central truth. Denying God’s mercy on them, regarding their wealth as something they generated rather than the gift God gave, they could spare none of it for the wretched and pitiable among them.
And so I think riches and poverty in the parable represent not an accumulation of worldly things or lack of them but our charity or lack of it toward our fellow man, which reveals our attitude toward God. The rich man was a pauper in virtue, the pauper was rich in his knowledge of himself as a sinner in desperate need of God’s grace.
He who has not love for his brother knows not the love of God. And God – both Father and Son are in view – cannot abandon justice. To do so would be to make a mockery of His love.
Amen.
.
.
The Riches of Humility
Isa 5:8-12, 18-24, Ps 73, 1 John 4:7-21, Luke 16:19-31
The rich man has no name. The crippled beggar Lazarus we know . . . but the rich man has no name.
In our own place and time, many are rich, and many of the rich are anonymous. In Bible times, wealth
didn’t grow on fig trees, and everyone knew who the wealthy were. But the identity of this wealthy one remains cloaked today while Lazarus basks in fame.
You might have heard the rich man called “Dives.” But that name is not in the Scriptures. It’s a Latin term that came into use later and has passed into English with the meaning “rich glutton.”
The Bible leaves him nameless. This is a parable and not a historic event, true, but there’s no explanation in that. In the story, the pauper has a name; why not the rich man? Here’s a theory: God had said by his prophet of those who do not fear Him: “I will not remember their names with my lips.” Would you want to be one of those whose name God dismisses from His memory, a spill of milk blotted up, never to be thought of again? I wouldn’t, either.
There’s more we can mine from this fascinating parable if we view it through a first-century grid. How would the hearers, standing in the presence of Jesus as He relates it, have understood it?
First, let me mention something you might find useful in the weeks to come. I’ve decided that in this Trinity season I will preach through the gospel lessons the prayer book gives us. I recall Bishop Sutton telling a story in a seminary class about an elderly lady in a church who grumbled about the preachers coming out of seminary who virtually ignored the gospels and delved right into the New Testament epistles. Bishop Sutton thought she had a point.
So do I. Preachers – and especially freshly minted ones – like to show off their theological erudition. The gospels tell us who went where and did what and said what. The epistles elaborate theology; they make great fodder for those who would parade their understanding of fine points of doctrine. I’ve been guilty. Now I’m repenting. All that high-falutin’
stuff St. Paul spins out about justification and reconciliation is vital to our faith, but it means nothing to us out of context.
And the context is: where our Lord Jesus went, and what He did, and what He said. In other words, what the gospels
tell us.
So we’ll work our way through the gospel lessons. I invite you to look them up early each week, read them, study them,
meditate on them. Your worship here each Lord’s Day will be richer for it.
Now, back to the rich man and Lazarus. Two groups make up the Lord’s audience, the Pharisees and the disciples of Jesus. A child could identify which character in the story represents each group. The Pharisees are the high
and mighty among the Jews and the Lord’s disciples are mostly poor working folk and outcasts.
The Pharisees are shocked – shocked! I tell you -- that Jesus consorts with sinners and tax-collectors. The latter were reviled for doing the bidding of Israel’s Roman overlords and pocketing whatever they could. Jesus even engages with them at the table, the most intimate form of fellowship.
The rich man wears purple and fine linen, an ostentatious display. He fares “sumptuously.” The same language is used of the prodigal son.
Lazarus’ name tells his story. It means “God is help.” He gets help from no other source. He is laid at the gate: He cannot so much as drag himself. Many pass by each day, either ignoring or despising him. He is covered with sores from a malignant skin disease, a mass of open wounds. The dogs lick his sores. He has no strength to drive them away and no one will help him. In the ancient East, dogs were filthy, hated animals. Lazarus would have eaten the scraps from
the rich man’s table. He had barely enough food to sustain life.
The second scene: Angels bear Lazarus to Abraham’s bosom. In Jewish thought, angels escorted one
into the next life, where there was no pain in the body or anguish in the soul but eternal health, rest and happiness.
Abraham was the father of all the Israelites. All would be gathered to him after death.
The rich man also dies and is buried. The typical funeral for a man of wealth proceeded with much pomp, with a large retinue of mourners and a choir of women loudly lamenting the deceased and praising his virtues. We find a modern expression of the same spirit in New Orleans, where many a rich man is sent off to his just reward with a trumpet-and-trombone procession that ends at the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. “Oh I want to be in that number/when the saints go marching in.”
A man I know happened to be on the square one day when a notoriously corrupt politician – even by Louisiana standards – was getting his send-off. This fellow stopped one of the musicians as the crowd was breaking up and expressed surprise that he would help to celebrate a scoundrel who stole from the common people. The trumpeter trumpeted, “Naw, man, cat’s got the cash, we’ll blow him on out.”
Our rich man in the parable, from all we know of him, enjoyed such a send-off.
The final scene: Lazarus resides in the comfort of Abraham’s bosom but the rich man writhes in Hades. This is not hell
as we conceive it but the place of departed souls of the good and the wicked alike. They are separated according to their conduct in life. A great gulf separates the damned in their hell of torment from the righteous in their abode of eternal joy with their father Abraham.
What follows is figurative language. First, the rich man looks across and sees Abraham. Next comes their conversation and finally the rich man’s appeal for his brothers. The Jews would not have taken this scene to represent an actual event but as a vivid illustration. The rich man is “in torments”: without succor, without hope. The figurative speech serves to heighten the hearers’ terror at the rich man’s plight. Because he is an Israelite he can call Abraham “father.” As head of all the just in the realm of the blessed, Abraham can command his sons and grant help.
The rich man asks Father Abraham for only a drop of water to cool his tongue. He is suffering beyond our imagining but he dares ask for only the smallest relief. His request for Lazarus to bring this tiny comfort shows the complete reversal of their situations. The rich man would be content with a “scrap” of cool, clear water from the bottomless pool from which
Lazarus drinks.
Abraham acknowledges him as “son.” If this seems to us a favorable sign, it is because we ignore a salient fact: Abraham is a loving father indeed, but a just one as well. Here is the rich man’s dilemma: For Abraham to grant him relief now would be to pervert justice. The rich man enjoyed the bounty of God’s provision while on earth and denied the slightest comfort to Lazarus.
By the justice of God, their roles have been reversed. To love one’s brother is to love God. The rich man had reviled his brother, and so he had hated God. He has no standing before the court: no case to plead, no argument to advance that Lazarus should provide a drop of water for the man who denied the pauper even a morsel of food.
Granting the rich man his wish would be not only unjust but impossible. The great gulf between them can never be bridged. It is an eternal barrier between the good and the evil. With no case to present for himself, the rich man pleads for his five brothers, who are still in the first life and, we surmise, as self-absorbed and lacking in compassion as he.
Again, Father Abraham is unmoved. The brothers have “Moses and the prophets.” Moses represents the law of
Israel. He is the author of the Torah, or first five books of the Old Testament, which lays out God’s law given
to Moses at Mount Sinai. Each Sabbath in the synagogue, the Jews heard the writings of Moses and the prophets
read. They know their Scriptures.
And the rich man knows his brothers. Even more he knows his own experience. God works by means, and the ordinary means of revealing Himself to His people – through Moses and the prophets -- had not deterred the rich man from a life
of dissipation, had not provoked righteousness in him. The rich man is more than a fool: If a departed soul delivered a warning to his brothers, an eyewitness account of the horrors of the place of the damned, he thinks, they would pay
him heed. Oh no, says Father Abraham. Those who reject the revelation God provides in the first life would not listen if one should return from the next life to warn them.
The rich man is the typical aristocratic Jew of the gospels who does not fear God, who demands a miracle before he will believe. Such are those who say of Christ as they mock him from the foot of His cross: “If He is the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him.” (Matt 27:42)
But in the end, God will not be mocked.
This picture presents us not with a condemnation of wealth but with the misuse of it. All we have is from God and is to be used according to His will. Jesus has just told them, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” They are worshipers of worldly things.
Shortly, standing on the very porch of Jerusalem in Bethany, Jesus will call another Lazarus out of the grave, and these scoffers will refuse to believe. Soon, our Lord Himself will arise from His tomb, and they will continue in their hardness of
heart. They claimed to want to see a miracle, but when Jesus walks out of His grave, they fabricate stories to explain away His resurrection.
Just as wealth for its own sake is not condemned in the parable, neither is a righteousness of works taught or poverty exalted. It would be an error to conclude that Lazarus proceeds into eternal bliss solely because he is poor. There is danger in universalizing the parables, each of which serves to teach one central lesson.
I once wondered if the truly destitute in poor countries were more virtuous than we. Jesus’ concern, after all, seems always to be for those on the margins of society. Is poverty in itself a ticket to eternal bliss?
And so, shortly after Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America, I traveled to Honduras. It was my first exposure to the mission field. Our group spent 10 days distributing food and repairing houses. And I learned of men who made the
rounds, living on an alternating basis with three women and living off all of them. They put their children out to beg on the streets and beat them if they came back without the price of a beer. The kids sniffed glue to dull the pain; many of them were dead by age 12. Poverty alone, I suspect, is not a ticket to everlasting joy. I have noticed since that many immigrants raised in poverty, even those from Christian homes, arrive in our land of plenty so intent on Mammon that they lose God.
The point of this parable is the point of the Bible: True wealth is eternity in the Kingdom of God, which Adam forfeited and Christ reclaimed. It is not the indulging of our appetites on earth, oblivious of the needs of our fellow man.
God means for us to enjoy His creation and the abundant fruits of it. The rich man and his brothers instead gorge on the sumptuous fare of this life and fritter away the unimaginable blessing of the next. Having consumed all the glory, they turn and find that only desolation remains.
The story reminds us of a truth often forgotten in our time: We enter the Kingdom of God in the here and now, becoming stewards of our Master’s money. A flawed theology afoot in the land has it otherwise: After the conversion he secures for himself by his decision for Christ, the Christian has little to do but sop up all the gravy he can consume.
Marjorie and I have a friend who fell into the trap – and almost never wriggled free. But one day she awoke. “Forty years in church,” she said, “and I’d never heard of sanctification.” For those who remain in the trap, church is a social club, something like Rotary, with some service projects thrown in for leaven. Worship dissolves into skits and how-to instruction: six steps to a better marriage, 12 steps to taming your teen-ager. If God is present, He appears as a divine butler, on call as needed to attend to the cares of His people.
Not for us. Not for us. We worship the King of glory!
There is one more matter to attend regarding our parable: its Author. It is God the Son who speaks not only of the blessing of the righteous but the cursing of the wicked. Here appears the error of painting the Father as the God of wrath and the Son as the sweet Vessel of mercy.
Going back to the ancient church, many have wanted to divorce the two, to consign one to the Old Testament and the other to the New. A correct reading of the Bible tolerates no such distinction.
The Father demonstrated His superhuman patience with that stiff-necked people Israel for centuries – and chastised them with deportation and bondage to impress on them their need for repentance. At the last He dealt them death when they would not turn from their rebellion. But in His mercy He always preserved the faithful as His remnant.
The Son, likewise, both condemns and saves. It is He who, in the last day, will separate the sheep from the goats.
With the Holy Spirit, They are One. And in the end, as we read in our epistle lesson this morning, He is love. By this St. John means not that God has no other attributes but that He gives of Himself unceasingly and seeks the best for His
creatures. This is the God who desireth not the death of a sinner but that he should
turn from his wickedness and live.
His love is not some gauzy thing, a feeling without form, but a hard-edged reality demonstrated in searing pain upon His cross. And as God loved us, He instructs us to love one another. His love for us provokes and stimulates our love for our fellow man.
If we grasp that His love is perfected in us, as St. John teaches us, we know that we abide in Him and He in us. The rich man and his brothers and their fellow travelers would not imbibe this central truth. Denying God’s mercy on them, regarding their wealth as something they generated rather than the gift God gave, they could spare none of it for the wretched and pitiable among them.
And so I think riches and poverty in the parable represent not an accumulation of worldly things or lack of them but our charity or lack of it toward our fellow man, which reveals our attitude toward God. The rich man was a pauper in virtue, the pauper was rich in his knowledge of himself as a sinner in desperate need of God’s grace.
He who has not love for his brother knows not the love of God. And God – both Father and Son are in view – cannot abandon justice. To do so would be to make a mockery of His love.
Amen.
.
.