Here's the full text of the sermon I preached to students and faculty at the Divinity School today.  One thing that might help as you read: the Div School is in the process of adding on a huge building addition, which has been quite a big deal and is much anticipated around the school.

Luke 16:19-31

The Rich Man and Lazarus
¹⁹"There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. ²⁰At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores ²¹and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. ²²"The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. ²³In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. ²⁴So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.' ²⁵"But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. ²⁶And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.' ²⁷"He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, ²⁸for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.' ²⁹"Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.' ³⁰" 'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.' ³¹"He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"

Preparation for the Fire?

This isn’t going to be pleasant.  This text from Luke’s gospel is not the warm fuzzy sort that sends you on your way from worship with a gentle pat on the back as you head down the road of discipleship.  It is instead one of those passages of Scripture that makes you shift in your seat even in hearing it and arouses some apprehension as to what the preacher will say about it.  It makes us uncomfortable because it talks about wealth, more specifically a situation where one is exorbitantly wealthy while another languishes in extreme need, and well, we Christians who live in America live in a country of exorbitant wealth that routinely leaves Lazarus at the gate to fend for him or her self.  The scene between the rich man and Lazarus is all too familiar, but it isn’t that circumstance that gives us trouble so much as it is the result, what happens to the rich man.  Like good liberal Protestants, we get a little nervous when the language of the story turns to the rich man’s destiny, the lake of fire and torment, unquenchable thirst, a great chasm and alienation from God, topics we like to avoid in the interest of not sounding like fire and brimstone Christians.  And while we may be patient enough to read this text and wrestle with it for awhile, we don’t linger long, because eventually we put ourselves in the story, we try to find our place in this parable to see how it relates to us, and we find ourselves on the wrong side of the chasm.  That’s too much for us. It’s just too depressing to take too seriously.

            What do you do with texts like this one, when you’re as rich as we are?  The rich man has ignored the plight of Lazarus, he has never really seen his need or how he could help him, even though he had been right in front of his house, in plain view.  We might explore questions like, “Well, was it that he was so selfish and conceited that he just wouldn’t help Lazarus?  I mean, if that’s the case, then it wasn’t really his wealth that was the problem, but his obsession with it, his unwillingness to use his wealth for good.  There’s a difference between being rich and being greedy.” Problem is, the text doesn’t allow for those questions.  It simply doesn’t make any distinctions as to whether it was his wealth or his greed that got him to the fire, if the two can even be separated.  So there’s no exegetical loophole to be found here, there’s no nugget that can make us feel better about the fact that Jesus has condemned the accumulation of wealth and we are found wallowing in our plenty. 

                The truth is that we’ve spent too long looking for ways around dealing with this text and ones like it.  For too long we have read what Jesus teaches about wealth and shrugged our shoulders and moved on. It is a curious phenomenon; Jesus has other demanding teachings about things like non-violence and forgiveness that we are quick to take seriously, to build our lives around.  Why is it that when it comes to wealth, we find what Jesus teaches to be unintelligible and impractical?  Maybe we’re in too deep, we’re too dependent on our possessions to bring us comfort, we’ve become too accustomed to our privilege.  And so we look for ways around it, so we can try and keep our discipleship and our money too.  What about what Jesus says to us with this story do we not understand?  Have we so grossly underestimated the cost of discipleship?

            It seems so.  This is the trend now in the Church, it has been for awhile.  Maybe it is the product of making the leap directly from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate” for so long that we lost our understanding of what happened in between those lines in the creed.  Whatever the reason, it seems we are becoming increasingly hazy on what exactly it means to follow Jesus, to live a life like His even to a death like His, so that we may hope to be resurrected like Him.  At the end of this text, the words of Abraham leave us with a haunting foreshadowing that now rings eerily true.  The rich man has begged him to send a resurrected Lazarus to warn his brothers about the dangers of wealth, with the idea that the appearance of a dead man might convince them that there is a different way to live.  Abraham’s reply?  If they haven’t heard Moses and the prophets, they won’t hear a man who is raised from the dead either.  Turns out he was right about us, even the resurrection hasn’t forced us to take Jesus seriously here . . .

            We haven’t heard this teaching with regard to wealth and we haven’t heard many of the other things Jesus teaches us about how to be faithful followers--at the least we haven’t taken them seriously, and so now we find the concept of discipleship suffering.  For some reason, we seem to be embarrassed by these demands Jesus makes on the lives of those who seek to follow Him.  We’re timid about being honest with people who come looking to understand what it means to be a Christian, we seem to stand on the front step of our churches waving people in . . . “Bring it all, bring your flag, your nationalism, your inclinations to violence, and most certainly your money, please bring that, because real ministry costs money.  You can bring it all with you, we have a sort of discipleship that lets you keep all of it, just so long as you have some warm tender feelings about Jesus and you felt guilty when you watched ‘The Passion’, you can keep it all!”  Somewhere along the line, we traded in the concept of costly discipleship for a bargain basement variety.  But to lower the cost of discipleship to the price we are willing to pay, or worse, to what we think others will be willing to pay, is to propagate a self indulgent heresy that puts our very salvation at risk.  We simply can’t do it anymore, we can’t stand in our pulpits and tell people anything other than the absolute truth about what Jesus taught, in this case that He condemned the accumulation of wealth, especially while others suffer right in front of us.  We are called to live differently, and we’re embarrassed by that.  How presumptuous, to make ourselves into apologists for Jesus. .  . .

            And so we have to wrestle, we have to be honest, we have to confess.  We must read and hear this text and let it move among us.  How do we read this text in the shadow of a $22 million dollar, 45, 000 square foot building addition that God’s people are constructing, while Lazarus still stands in the median on 15-501, holding his sign—“Hungry. . . .Living in the Woods. . . .Please Help. . . God Bless”?  What happens to us as God’s people when we read this text even as we go about our daily routine, pounding away at laptops, reading Scripture from our palm pilots, complaining about construction noise and the inconvenience of having class in this chapel, while young Lazarus sits in a classroom a few miles from here, without the materials she needs to learn, without a facility that creates a positive learning environment, perhaps without a teacher qualified to instruct her, and certainly without so much as a chance of ever seeing the inside of a classroom at a university like this one? How can we read this text without it killing us, when on Sunday God’s people will file through the doors of churches to give praise and worship to God and proclaim Jesus to be their Lord and Savior, and on Monday Lazarus will find those same doors locked, as she walks from church to church, eviction notice in hand, looking for just another month’s grace until she can get on her feet?  What do we do?

            Our hope rests in what Hauerwas tells us about the formation that comes from hearing the Word, that our hearing of this most difficult story will form us and shape us into something different than what we currently are, into something more than the sum total of our greed.  We are being prepared for something, God is still working our redemption.  My hope is that we are being formed to be the kind of pastors who can leave this place and preach this text honestly and unapologetically to the same people who sign our paychecks, the kind of pastors who can resist the temptation to make our callings upwardly mobile, to search for the “better” appointment or calling, a nicer parsonage or better pay.  Perhaps we are being shaped into the kind of leaders who can lead people away from their dependence and obsession with their possessions and out to the gate, where we find Lazarus.  It would be wonderful if God forged us into a new generation, a part of a reclamation process that restores some sense of a first century discipleship to a Church that has fallen victim to the riches of today’s Roman Empire.  Maybe the conviction this text brings will make us bold enough to tell people that following Jesus will mean giving up some of the things they now treasure, maybe we’ll be able to show them that by discovering what life in Jesus Christ is, we come to the realization that the things we gave up to follow Him weren’t worth much in the first place.  When it comes to fellowship with God, the purpose for which we were intended, cars and houses and money and stock portfolios turn to dust, they perish.  Yes, we’re being prepared for something. . . . I just hope it’s not the fire.