A Fourth Church Sermon by Nanette Sawyer

Sunday, September 25, 2022 | 4:00 p.m.

Listen to the Prophets

Nanette Sawyer
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 91
Luke 16:19–31

Luke is a master of reversals. Beginning in the first chapter of the Gospel he recounts the song of Mary, the mother of Jesus. She sings her Magnificat:

“With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.
God has looked with favor on the low status of this servant.
Look! From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored. . . .

God shows mercy to everyone,
from one generation to the next, who give honor to God.
God has shown strength of arm
and has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
God has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly.
God has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty-handed.
God has come to the aid of God’s servant Israel,
remembering God’s mercy,
just as was promised to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to Abraham’s descendants forever.”
(Luke 1:46–56, gender expansive rendering)

Luke begins telling of God’s reversals in chapter 1 of his Gospel. Those who are powerful and arrogant are pulled down, and those who are lowly are lifted up. God filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed. It sounds a bit familiar, a bit similar to the story we have today.

Then in chapter 4 of Luke, Jesus describes his calling, his vocation, and he quotes the prophet Isaiah, saying that he is sent “to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19), which was the year in which debts would be forgiven.

God, through Jesus, is reversing the circumstances of injustice. These are reversals for a reason — reversals for release, recovery, and liberation. These are some of Jesus’ purpose in the world. The purpose of a savior is to save. And the Gospel is describing salvation in a very physical, practical, and tangible way in this realm, in this life. Lord, save us, is often our cry.

So here we are again, in today’s parable, considering the reversals of fortune for a rich man and an impoverished, ill Lazarus. In addition to their situations being reversed, there is a reversal in the simple fact that the poor man is given a name, while the rich man is not. Lazarus is given the dignity and the recognition that being addressed by name gives to a person.

The rich man, on the other hand, does not give that dignity to Lazarus. He does not even seem to see Lazarus when they are both alive. Lazarus is lying on the ground, starving and suffering of oozing sores on his skin, and the rich man continues to dress like royalty and feast every day.

He doesn’t just eat every day; he feasts “sumptuously” every day. It seems that even in life a great chasm had been firmly established between the two men, so that the wealthy man did not see the humanity of Lazarus or feel any compassion for his suffering.

Wealth is not named as the problem here. Wealth might have even addressed some of the problems that Lazarus was having. Wealth shared with generosity and compassion can bring comfort and healing and relationship.

Wealth could have assured that Lazarus was fed. Wealth might have gotten him some health care. Wealth shared might have closed the great chasm between the two men before it became “fixed,” established firmly, between them in the afterlife.

But the chasm remained. Even after death the wealthy man could only see Lazarus as a potential servant of his, someone who could bring him water on the tip of his finger to comfort the parched man. And he still didn’t even address Lazarus directly. He asked Abraham to tell Lazarus to help him. He asked of Lazarus what he had never done for Lazarus before they died.

One biblical scholar, Professor Barbara Rossing, who has written a lot about the book of Revelation, has said that this parable is an apocalyptic story. (Barbara Rossing, “Commentary on Luke 16:19–31,” 25 September 2016, workingpreacher.org)

The word apocalypse means to unveil or unfold. It reveals something. This is a style of literature that uses symbolism and exaggerated contrasts to show something in stark ways. It’s meant to convey a sense of urgency and to get the listener to act or to change their actions. Think of Scrooge’s dreams in A Christmas Carol. Think of the book of Revelation in our Bibles.

In our parable today we have stark symbolism and contrasts. The royal purple garments of the wealthy man and the exposed skin of the sickly and impoverished man. The sumptuous feasts of the one man and the longing for something as minimal as crumbs by the other man.

And this is all reversed in harsh imagery of stark contrasts between the rich man’s suffering after death and the poor man being carried by angels and comforted by Abraham. According to Rossing, this “vivid journey to the afterlife” is one of the things that makes this parable fit the category of an apocalypse.

So who are we in this parable? With whom do we identify? Who do we think is being addressed in this parable? We all fit on a continuum of wealth and poverty in some way. We all have health and illness in some measure.

But Professor Rossing proposes that we consider something else. She wrote, “If this parable is an apocalypse, then Luke is situating the audience not so much in the role of either Lazarus or the rich man, but in the role of the five siblings who are still alive. . . . The terrifyingly vivid apocalyptic journey to Hades awakens a sense of urgency. . . . We are those five siblings of the rich man. We who are still alive have been warned about our urgent situation, the parable makes clear” (B. Rossing, workingpreacher.org).

The choices we make today are urgently important. Jesus doesn’t tell us in the parable what happens to the five siblings. Abraham doesn’t say so either.

The rich man is clearly concerned about the future of his siblings, concerned that they won’t change, that they won’t do the right thing. After all, he grew up with them; they all learned in the same family how to act and interact — with each other and with the world.

The rich man wants to warn them, but Abraham says that they have everything they need. “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them,” says Abraham.

The books of Moses, which are the first five books of our Bible, repeatedly chastise people for being unjust, self-centered, and cold-hearted. Exodus speaks of mistreatment and oppression, warning the people against acting in these ways (Exodus 22:21).

And in Leviticus it says when a harvest is gathered, one should leave some of the harvest on the ground for the poor and the immigrant to gather up and be fed (Leviticus 19:9–10).

Moving on to the book of Deuteronomy, we read that every third year people should bring a tenth of their produce and leave it at the city gates to be eaten by Levites, immigrants, orphans, and widows. They should be allowed to “feast until they are full” (Deuteronomy 14:28–29).

Sharing our harvests, sharing our food and resources, might look different in our day and age and in our urban location. We don’t have crops to leave on the edges of our field, and people aren’t gathering crops in that way. But the concept of compassion and generosity is the thread from then to now.

The prophets consistently call people to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God, as Micah proclaimed (Micah 6:8). The prophet Isaiah urged the people to “learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). The prophets Jeremiah, Amos, and Ezekiel all made similar exhortations.

Do we listen to Moses and the prophets? Do we allow their testimony to change our lives?

A New Testament professor in Minnesota tells the story of a time that she lived in a place where the disparity between the well-off and the poor was very visible.

She encountered many people begging and says that she “wanted to help but doing so seemed overwhelming as [she] considered that no matter what [she] did, it would do little to ultimately alleviate so many people’s daily suffering.”

But, she wrote, “then I started to notice one young girl in particular who I regularly saw digging in a dumpster for food. I had passed by her many times without ever interacting with her — perhaps a sign of my numbness to the suffering that had become the backdrop to daily life.

“But eventually, I started to see the girl in such a way that I could no longer ignore her immediate needs and began bringing food to share with her. Even if I could not change her larger life circumstances, I could do something” (Jennifer Vija Pietz, “Seeing Our Neighbors,” 18 September 2022, workingpreacher.org).

Perhaps some of you can relate to that feeling of numbness or of overwhelm or the idea that your actions might not make much of a difference. We can get paralyzed by a feeling that we should be able to fix the world, to change everything and save everyone.

But what about the idea of simply and truly seeing the people that we actually encounter face-to-face and doing something to help them?

In today’s parable, the rich man was not expected to eradicate all poverty, but he was accountable for not helping the man directly in front of him. The parable is very personal in the way Jesus tells it about two men encountering each other. It’s not simply about groups of people, It’s about that one rich man and the man Lazarus. The story is personal, specific, and tangible.

We might do something in many different ways. First, just seeing and acknowledging the people we encounter is one good step. Seeing someone, looking in their eyes, nodding, smiling — these signs of acknowledgment create a spark of connection and begin to break down the chasm between us.

You could sign up to volunteer with our Chicago Lights Social Service Center, which provides a food pantry and a clothing share shop as well as wraparound services to help people move out of their difficult situations. You could donate men’s pants, of which we are always having a shortage and a need.

You could volunteer with the Fourth Church Meals Ministry programs, where we serve lunches three days a week and a hot supper on Sunday and Monday nights. Volunteering is a way you can do something through well-managed programs that have long track records of serving and helping people.

We also have social justice advocacy that happens through and in conjunction with our World Mission and Social Justice Committee. So we’re not just feeding people; we’re trying to address some of the reasons that so many people are hungry.

These are just a couple of ideas of where you can offer your time and talent toward diminishing the chasms that grow between people. And you can also give of your treasure by making a pledge to the 2023 stewardship campaign that begins today.

In our parable today, Christ is urging us to listen to Moses and the prophets, to take these guiding scriptures seriously. In the well-known verses from Matthew 25, Jesus also teaches that when we care for others, it’s as though we are caring for him. He says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.”

If the rich man in today’s parable had been generous with Lazarus, it would have been as if he was being generous to Christ himself. That provides a powerful meditation for us — to think that every person we encounter is Christ in disguise. How would it change our lives if we did that? Christ in disguise is all around us.

Jesus is urging us to share what we have. Abraham is waiting for us to do the right thing. God is loving us, now and already, but whispering to our hearts to do better. As one contemporary writer has written, God loves us too much to let us stay the way we are. We can do better; we can be better.

Everything we need has already been given to us. We have the teachings of Moses and of the prophets. We even have a savior and a teacher who has been resurrected from the dead.

So if we are the five siblings of the rich man, we are in a position to write the end of this parable. What will we siblings do? May we feel the urgency that Jesus conveys through this parable. But let our motivation be love, not fear. May our generosity flow from a sense of gratitude for all that we do have.

May we feel the embrace of Abraham and the love of God urging us on into generosity, compassion, and grace. Amen.