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When I was growing up, my family had this ritual. On the last Friday of each month, my mother would take my sister and me to Little Professor Bookstore. It was this cozy, independent bookshop and whenever we walked through that front door, the booksellers always remembered us, and they always seemed glad to see us.
I would sit on the floor of the bookstore aisles, still in my school uniform, surrounded by shiny new books that my mom would buy for me.
I always saw my life through those stories. And that bookstore was my heaven.
Throughout my life I have always had my head in a book — even now, as an adult. My work is story. I am a book editor, and I work with writers as their words create worlds on the page. As a book editor, I am trained to get carried away with story.
That was my experience with today’s Gospel story. There is so much richness here, and my hope is that we can get lost in it together.
Here’s what I want us to do.
I’d love for us to look at today’s story the way we would approach a book. Better yet, for this sermon, let’s just think of this as our own book club! The Epiphany Book Club, with our book club pick, The Rich man and Lazarus. We’ll look at the characters, the settings, the motivation, the tension, the emotion, the plot twists, the cliffhangers, the ambiguity, the foreshadowing, and of course the big reveal.
This is what’s happening in today’s text; we have our main characters — the rich man, Abraham and Jesus.
First, there is a rich man. He wears fancy, lush, elegant clothes; the purple he wears indicates he’s possibly a king or a member of the priesthood. He’s a prominent man, and has a table filled with decadent meals. The house he lives in is not described but what is described is his gate. At his gate is a poor man named Lazarus, who is hungry and covered with sores and has probably been there for some time, day in and day out. The rich man dies and ends up in hell, where he is tormented and in agony. He sees Lazarus, who has also died. Only Lazarus is far away, up in heaven, sitting right next to Abraham. The rich man in hell can see heaven. He can see it, he can hear it, but he cannot get there. Abraham tells him he will never be able to get there.
Now, let’s not turn the page just yet. As readers, we might say there’s too much happening off the page that we don’t know; we want to know more about the rich man’s backstory. For example, why is he in hell? Was it because of what he did or did not do? Was it the number of times he did it or the number of times he missed doing something? Scripture doesn’t tell us.
As a book editor, when I imagine this text, I think maybe the rich man’s perspective is that he didn’t even see Lazarus at the gate. Maybe he seemed invisible, or like he blended into the setting…maybe the rich man stepped over him. Maybe his chasm was one of indifference or insularity or something else.That makes me think of my family’s bookstore ritual that I shared, but in reverse – My sister and I were welcomed at the gate of the bookstore, we were smiled at. In today’s text maybe Lazarus was never noticed or recognized or welcomed by the rich man and maybe not by anyone.
The intended message of Jesus with this parable invites us to consider that how we see each person matters.
God sees each of us in the fullness of ourselves. That is how we are called to try to envision one another.
We have more going on in the text. We’re in Luke 16, which has a recurring theme of Jesus talking about worldly wealth.
I want to look at another angle of the rich man: his motivation.
He knows he is in hell and he asks, no, he begs Abraham to spare his brothers, who are still living, from going through the same agony in the future. To me that sounds like compassion. So he’s not a bad guy. He’s just got shadowy bits, like we all do.
Still, there’s a tension here: He extends compassion to his brothers, but not to Lazarus. Something — some chasm — keeps the rich man from loving his neighbor as himself. Plus, he doesn’t seem glad about Lazarus’ reversal, that his hunger and his sores are gone.
With this parable, Jesus invites us to consider this ethical point: that God calls us to be equitable with our compassion, and to share our abundance. Beloved readers, you know when you come to a moment in the book and you feel your heart start to break a little? For me, that happened in this is that moment: the rich man in hell can see heaven, he can hear what happens there, he can reach for it, but he cannot get there. It is beyond his reach.
And in the twistiest of plot twists, it’s Abraham who tells the rich man he is barred from the radiance of heaven. Father Abraham! The common ancestor of the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
If we take Abraham at his word, is he saying that there’s no hope for us? That we are excluded from the radiance of heaven. That seems at odds with what Jesus teaches us.
Because we do not worship an exclusionary God. The God we worship “stretched out his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross so that everyone might come within his saving embrace.” That divine hug is real and Lazarus is in it.I want to share a publishing nugget with you: When literary agents – they’re the ones who represent the author – would ask me what I was looking for in a manuscript to acquire for a publishing house, I would always say this: I want the story to break my heart and put it back together again.
That happened for me in today’s text. At first glance, we readers might think the rich man and Lazarus are main characters have nothing in common. Rich/poor, heaven/hell, starving/fed. All those binary dichotomies.
But they have something in common.
They both want relief.
The rich man wants relief from the hell of his own making, and Lazarus wanted relief from his hunger and pain. These days, I think we all could appreciate a little relief. Maybe even relief from our own chasms. Relief from the hells of our own making.
Jesus fills the chasm, and he does that through us.
If there is one thing I’d love for you to walk away with from this sermon, it’s to give someone some relief.
When you feel like the world’s story is overwhelming your story, sometimes the only thing we can do is to provide a little relief. I hear that here at Epiphany. I hear at Women’s Retreat Group and in one-on-one conversations, what can we do in this moment in our world? Does any anything I do, does any action I take actually matter? Or I hear, that there is so much hellishness, that sometimes we don’t know what to do.
It’s easy to feel like the world’s story is hellish, and like the world’s story seems to drown out God’s story. It can seem like our actions don’t matter.
When it gets like that, and I know it’s gets like that, I want you to consider one thing: give someone some relief. Like a finger tip of cool water from today’s story, or when Veronica wiped Jesus’ sweaty, pain-wracked face as he buckled under the weight of the cross and the friction rubbed his shoulders raw. Veronica gave him relief.
And those dogs licking Lazarus’ sores from today’s story. You know how when you’re in need, animals can sense it? They tend to you. I know that might be cringe on the page, but it can be relief, tender relief, in real life.
This world needs some relief. We do that in everyday ways. It starts with each of us being attentive. Maybe you see someone struggling with groceries, so you help them carry a bags. Or someone needs a hug from you or for you to just listen to them. Or making someone laugh can be a relief and stewarding your resources toward our community’s greatest needs. Or you can relieve someone’s hunger by feeding them, or relieve their loneliness by visiting them or putting your arm around someone’s shoulder in comfort.
Before we close the book, we wonder if we’re going to get a satisfying ending. Jesus gives us this Easter egg with that last line – that even with Lazarus raised from the dead or later Christ Jesus resurrected, some still won’t believe. But Jesus does what Jesus does. He gives us the ultimate relief. The lesson in First Timothy is like a step by step guide to doing that when it states:
“They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.”
What Jesus is saying with this Rich man/Lazarus parable is that there is hope even in hell. Even when the world seems hellish, there is hope. So don’t bar yourself from a better place. You don’t have to wait until the afterlife to cross the chasm. We can choose to do it now.
What you do matters. It matters to others and it matters to God, with whom each of us can have a relationship that lasts for eternity! So don’t let your best self be out of reach.
I’d like to end with a quote: “[It is] the compassionate way Jesus invites us to live into our best selves, our best being, our best interpretation of all God has been saying since the very beginning. And Jesus walks with us on that hard and arduous path towards the kingdom of God.”
“Our journey into heaven has already begun. We are on that journey now, because heaven begins here, in the Church, in our relationship with Christ, on earth. And with each other.”