September 29, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

What We’ve Heard All Along

Fourth in a Series of Sermons on Luke

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 16:19–31

I’ve been preaching on stories from the Gospel of Luke for the past several weeks. This is the last one in a series of four. Today’s passage may at first seem to be about the afterlife, about heaven and hell. I’m going to argue that it is about something much more important than that: it’s a story about kindness.

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This was the introduction to the lead story in the New York Times on Friday morning:

“The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have agreed on a resolution that will require Syria to give up its chemical weapons, but there will be no automatic penalties if the Syrians fail to comply” (Michael R. Gordon, “U.N. Deal on Syrian Arms Is Milestone After Years of Inertia,” New York Times, 27 September 2013).

The story in the Times leads with an idea that Jesus was talking about two millennia ago: that in this world, there are often no automatic penalties for failing to do the right thing.

Let me be clear that I’m not talking about penalties for doing the wrong thing; there are plenty of those. Cheat on your spouse, rob a liquor store, drive twice the speed limit—you can easily get in trouble for actively doing the wrong thing. But failing to do the right thing is different. Choosing not to pick up trash on the street, not sticking up for someone who is being bullied, saying you don’t have time to go to the breast cancer walk when the reality is you’d rather just watch football—these are things for which we rarely pay a penalty.

One of the most common examples of failing to do the right thing is directly addressed in today’s scripture lesson. This is a story about a man who has plenty of money and chooses not to help someone in need.

The story itself is a lot more descriptive than that. There’s a rich man. He dresses in purple—the color of royalty—and in fine linens, and every day he sits down to a feast, his table spread with expensive wine and rare delicacies. Each time the rich man comes and goes from his estate, he passes by a poor man named Lazarus who sits outside his front gate. His skin is covered with disease, and he’s starving, and stray animals come along and lick his open wounds. Lazarus doesn’t want to be invited to the rich man’s feast; he just wants the leftovers. But every day the rich man rides through the gate and ignores Lazarus; he gives him nothing.

The two men eventually die, and Lazarus finds himself carried to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. One of the most vivid lines of the story pictures the two men: Lazarus is being cared for in heaven by the patriarch Abraham while the rich man looks up from the flames of hell and calls out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” Abraham replies, “We can do nothing for you, for in life you feasted while Lazarus suffered, and now there is a great chasm that separates us from you and it cannot be crossed.” And the rich man, accepting the justice of his fate but afraid for his five brothers still alive on earth, asks if Lazarus might go and warn his brothers not to live as he had lived, to which Abraham replies, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.”

A few comments about this story, first about the description of heaven and hell: I don’t think the physical description of heaven and hell or the fear-based motivation that goes along with it are the important part of this story. Visual images of the afterlife have been a part of many religious traditions throughout history, and that’s true because the images are powerful. I will admit that because of these images, I remember this Bible story going all the way back to my childhood Sunday school days—and there aren’t a lot of stories I would say that about. But for the most part, these images, as powerful as they are, don’t cause us to change our lives for the better.

I’m reading the novel Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett right now. One of the central characters is an evil young nobleman who rides around burning villages and killing and raping his subjects, because he thinks that fear is the best motivator. He keeps getting caught in the act by a priest who tells him he’s going to burn in hell and the narrator tells you there is nothing the nobleman fears more than this. But every time he hears that he’s going to hell, the young nobleman visits another priest, a corrupt one, confesses his sins and receives forgiveness, and then he goes out and does more of the same thing. The fear of hell is clearly not much of a motivator for him. Likewise, you may find this surprising, but the preponderance of research in contemporary America suggests that most folks in our culture, even in more conservative churches, don’t go to church because they’re anxious about heaven and hell (see Robert Putnam, American Grace).

The Bible also is not as concerned about heaven and hell as most of us might assume. In today’s story, Abraham makes the comment that the rich man’s brothers already have Moses and the prophets and should do what they say. Moses and the prophets had precious little to say about the afterlife; they cared about life in the world. Abraham is referencing Old Testament quotations like “Honor your father and mother,” “Care for the alien, the orphan, and the widow,” “Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly.” These are the ways the rich man and his brothers should have known how to do the right thing. Not heaven and hell but neglecting to do the right thing—failures of kindness—are really the subject of this story.

Here’s the most significant reason why I don’t think the point of this story is to describe what happens to us after we die—and you know this one as well as I do. It has to do with a literary technique. We’ve all heard jokes that are told using the same method Jesus is using in this story: “Two men die and go up to see St. Peter at the pearly gates . . .” You know as well as I do: a joke that begins that way is not meant to describe the afterlife. On the contrary, it always leads to a punch line that reflects on life in the world.

The point of this story about the rich man and Lazarus is to say, “How are you doing, here and now, when it comes to actively doing the right thing? How are you doing even when there are no immediate penalties for slacking off?” And this is the point of the passage because, as it turns out, making the active choice to do the right thing, or failing to do it, is the kind of decision that really does shape a life. One of my favorite authors these days is George Saunders. He’s a professor at Syracuse University, and he gave the commencement address there last spring, an address that went viral on the web.

Saunders talked about memories from his own life. He started out by talking about some of the most foolish mistakes he’d made along the way: swimming naked in a polluted river that made him sick for months; playing in a hockey game and being so preoccupied by a cute girl who was watching that he scored on his own team’s goal.

Saunders told the graduates he didn’t regret any of the most foolish or embarrassing things he had done in his life. Then he talked about what he did regret. I’m going to read his words because he writes it so well:

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?”—that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. . . . And then—they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing. One day she was there, next day she wasn’t. End of story.

Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.

But still. It bothers me. So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly." (George Saunders, “Advice to Graduates,” Syracuse University, Commencement 2013)

That’s what today’s story is about—not whether you’re going to heaven or hell or what it might be like when you get there. Not whether it’s purely evil to be rich or always good to be poor, because let me be perfectly clear in what I think about that: there is nothing enviable about poverty or the hunger and disease that so often comes along with it, and we as Christians are called to fight poverty, not settle for it. But I see no point in trying to convince you of that through fear or shame. What I think is much more powerful and important is for all of us to remember the story of the rich man and Lazarus. Why? Because it is a story is about one of the only truly regrettable things about life, no matter who you are: it’s a story about a failure to do the right thing; a failure of kindness.

And so the lesson Saunders gave to those graduates is the same advice that comes to us in the Gospel of Luke: do not neglect any opportunity you have to choose to do the right thing. As Saunders said to those graduates, "Do all the other things, the ambitious things—travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers . . .—but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness." In so doing, we will one day look back from wherever we end up and realize that ours has been a life well lived. Amen.