Be with us, O Lord, for if you are with us nothing else matters; and if you are not with us, nothing else matters. Amen.
So there was a guy who found himself at the pearly gates of heaven and St. Peter asked him, “Tell me about one good deed that you did during your lifetime?” The man said, “Sure, this one time, I saw a group of mountain lions circling some deer and I charged at them to try to scare them away.” St. Peter replied, “What a kind and generous act. When did that happen?” The man said, “About two minutes ago.” It’s a setup for a joke that we all know – someone finds themselves at the pearly gates and some sort of twist delivers the punchline.
Well, it was no different in Jesus’ world, they had their own version of “St. Peter and the pearly gate” and those Jewish wisdom tales were about Eleazar, the Hebrew version of the name Lazarus, and Abraham. These stories feature, Eleazar, Abraham’s most trusted servant, being sent by Abraham to test the generosity and hospitality of people to the poor. So this isn’t a story about the afterlife and it doesn’t tell us anything about the landscape of heaven or hell. Instead, this story that Jesus tells is about the here and now more than it is the hereafter.
Earlier in Luke, we were given the major themes of the Gospel. First in Mary’s song: “God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly” and then later in Jesus’ first sermon when he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” When Jesus tells the story about the rich man and Lazarus, it’s to further that message about providing liberation to the oppressed, not to give us a nickel tour of heaven and hell. And you’ll recall that the readings over the past few Sundays from chapters 15 and 16 of Luke have been parables about lostness, lastness, leastness, and littleness. After these lessons about lost sheep, coins, sons, and managers, Luke tells us that “The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this and made fun of Jesus.”
Jesus responds, in part, by telling this story about the rich man and Lazarus. Let’s start with the rich man, and we’ll call him Dives, as that is what the tradition has called him. In Latin, “Dives” simply means “rich,” so that’s how he got that name. He’s an incredibly wealthy person, as Jesus says that he feasted sumptuously every day. But wealth corrupted his soul. As we heard Jesus say in last Sunday’s reading, “You cannot serve God and wealth.”
It’s the same truth that we hear in First Timothy. There, we read that there is great godliness that comes through being content with what we have. But our economic system only functions by us not knowing the word “enough.” Somehow, expenses always rise to meet income and there’s always something new that catches our eye, and then, soon, our hearts. Thomas Cranmer, the composer of the first Book of Common Prayer, astutely observed that “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” We convince ourselves that we need more than is required and that we deserve more than we have.
But, as we know and Dives soon learns, “we brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of it.” For all of his status and wealth, Dives ended up just as dead as Lazarus, and had nothing to show for it other than the void that greed and entitlement had created in his soul. This is exactly the warning we heard, “But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” There’s a reason why Jesus talks about money more than almost anything else – it is the most captivating and corrosive of all desires.
About a decade ago, an anthropologist wrote a book called “Debt: A History of 5,000 Years.” The central thesis of the book is the reason why we have money is because of debts we owe to one another. Money becomes an accepted stand in to fix the broken promises between people. The author says that money, inherently, exists within the realm of promises. I give you a piece of paper, or a series of credit card numbers, as a promise that I’m giving you something of value, and you promise that you’re giving me the product or service that I’m expecting. The money though is a stand-in for our propensity to break promises, for the fact that we can’t just trust one another. That brokenness is what First Timothy warns against and what ends up dooming Dives. He thought his wealth would protect him, but it ended up damning him as he treated Lazarus more cruelly than even the dogs that licked Lazarus’ sores.
Conversations about money do not, primarily, belong in the field of economics or ethics, they are spiritual. Because money has its genesis in promises, it means that God is always involved because God is a God of promise. And the uncomfortable and inconvenient spiritual truth about money is that we do not use money, it uses us. We fool ourselves, as Dives did, if we think that wealth is a symbol of our ingenuity, hard work, intelligence, or deserving. I’m sure he had his reasons for not helping Lazarus out and justifying his own wealth – “He made his choices, now he’s living with the consequences. There are agencies that are supposed to help people like that, he’s not my responsibility. He’ll probably just the money for one of his vices. He should go and get a job. No one ever gave me a handout and look where I am.” Money became the way that he broke the promise to love our neighbor.
This story would have us to consider what our relationship to money is. Can we acknowledge that we are under the spell of capitalism and, with God’s help, resist the allure of wealth? Or do we foolishly think that we have more willpower and control than money does? If this story tells us anything, it’s that there are consequences to neglecting our relationship with money. And there’s a very simple test that you can take to find out what your relationship to money is: give it away.
And I’m not talking about a little bit off top. No, not the scraps from the table that Lazarus was pining for, but enough to make it clear that money is not the God of your life. Our practice has always been to give 5% of our income to our parish and another 5% to other charities whose mission we want to support. There’s nothing necessarily special about 10%, though there are Biblical grounds for that number. But 10% takes intentionality – it means thinking about it, it means making some sacrifices, it means being mindful about money. And when we aren’t mindful, that’s how money ensnares us.
So, the test is to give away a sacrificial and intentional amount of money. If you think that Grace and St. Stephen’s is doing good and important work, then, by all means, please give here in the assurance that we strive our best to be faithful stewards of the gifts we receive. But if you don’t think this is the right place to give – that’s fine, but for heaven’s sake, give your money away. If you cannot give your money away, that is a clear sign that your money has more power over you than you might be ready to admit. The way to exercise our power over money is by giving it away. And that’s something that Dives could not do.
Then there’s Lazarus, whose name means “God is my helper.” He is among the class of people that Howard Thurman called the “disinherited.” Martin Luther King reportedly always carried a copy of Thurman’s book called “Jesus and the Disinherited” with him. In it, Thurman writes “hatred begins with contact without fellowship.” That’s how Lazarus was treated – people knew him, Dives even knew his name and recognized him from across the chasm of Hades – but no one was in fellowship with Lazarus. As the civil rights attorney and activist Bryan Stevenson has noted, “we have to get proximate to one another.” But our neighborhoods and society are carefully constructed for us to avoid the Lazaruses in our midst.
In Salisbury, I was a founding member of Racial Equity Rowan – an organized committed to education about the history and persistence of racism in America. In the many workshops that I attended, I was always convicted by the data that makes it clear that our systems are not broken, as we so often claim. No, not at all. Our political and economic systems are not broken because functioning exactly as they were designed to. What we need is the courage to do as one of the prayers from the Prayer Book puts it: “Grant us grace fearlessly to contend against evil and to make no peace with oppression.” We need more followers of Jesus who are willing to make good trouble and break the systems of oppression by seeking first the Kingdom of God as opposed to the kingdoms of power and money.
I once heard a bishop say, “Thank God for the poor, because without them, we wouldn’t have a place to give our money and save us from it.” The ironic twist in this story is that though it seems like Lazarus needed the generosity of Dives to save him from poverty, it was actually Dives who needed Lazarus to save him from wealth. In Jesus opening sermon, as I quoted, he did say that he has come to bring good news the poor, but then Jesus adds that he has come to “proclaim release to the captives.”
Beloved, we are the captives. We are shackled by the broken promises of our economic system, riddled with debt, conditioned to be obedient consumers who are always chasing “enoughness” but always coming up short. The liberating Good News of the Gospel is that you are already enough. And it was never up to you earn, only to enjoy and share with others. If we truly trusted that our value is not tied to our income or net worth, that would throw a wrench into the economic machine that chews us up and spits us out, turning us into covetous competitors with each other instead of neighbors.
If investing our money in the right way could save the world, it would have done so by now. But, arguably, we’re further from Eden than when we started. This story helps us to imagine a different world, a different way of being, a way that is more closely aligned with the prayer that Jesus taught us: “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” And that’s why this isn’t a story about the afterlife, but rather the here and now.
When Dives asks for a messenger from the dead to go and warn his family, Abraham essentially says “Poor Dives, you still don’t get it. We’re not talking about a reality in which corpses are revived. No, this is about a whole new Creation.” And that’s what we mean when we speak about Resurrection – it’s not tweaking broken systems or being zombie-like living-dead people. No, what Jesus beckons us towards is a New Creation; the abundance of life here and now, where love and mercy are the only currency worth anything. What will it take for us to hear the voice of Jesus calling us out from prison cells that he has opened? What will for us to accept our acceptance instead of trying to purchase it?
This is another reason why, as I mentioned in my first sermon here two weeks ago, I like to translate the word “Grace” as “relief.” A relief, especially in art, is something that stands in contrast to what surrounds it, something that rises above its background. What Jesus is showing us through this story is the holy alternative to living beholden to the pursuit money and missing out on the gift of life. Our annual giving campaign will officially begin next week and our hope is that in giving, we will receive the relief and joy of giving. Having a transformed relationship with money isn’t easy, as the lures of wealth have a much larger marketing budget than we do. But as Jesus has been teaching us recently through these parables about the lost being found, he comes to us all to show us his most excellent way of Grace, which liberatingly and ironically, we gain more of by giving it away.
