Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

Sunday, September 25, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

Lazarus Who?

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 146
Luke 16:19–31

In your imagination, do you have a picture of what that gate looked like — the gate that stood between the rich man and Lazarus when both were alive? Was it a tall wooden, privacy fence, the kind of fence you put up around your backyard so your neighbors can’t peek in? Or, in your imagination, was that gate more of a security wall, something built to keep the rich man and his family safe and separate from everyone else? A barrier that provided physical security certainly, but emotional security also. A wall that helps you forget what and who literally lie on the other side. Out of sight, out of mind.

For if you don’t see something, then you don’t have to feel responsible to do anything about it. And if that is indeed the case, then if anyone inside the rich man’s household ever asked him if he had seen Lazarus that day, the rich man easily could have replied, “Did I see Lazarus? Lazarus who?”

Imagining that gate as a high wall reminds me of a place in the South Bronx I once read about in an autobiography. Back in the 1980s, a young Lutheran pastor moved into a South Bronx parsonage to serve a church in the exceedingly underinvested neighborhood. Pollution, drugs, the trauma of AIDS, violence — all of it were everyday occurrences for her parishioners. And as she looked around her new neighborhood, she noticed that though many of the neighborhood buildings were abandoned, they sported these metal decals over the upper-story window spaces.

Furthermore, those metal decals were painted in a way to resemble windows with curtains, shutters, or Venetian blinds. Some depicted plants with flowers that never faded. One showed a black cat that sat motionless for years. Up high, the neighborhood looked lovely. It looked safe and pleasant.

Now, down at the street level, graffiti covered the buildings. Cinder blocks and gaping holes stood where windows belonged. And yet, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development spent $100,000 (remember — early 1980s) of taxpayer money on the art up high. For a long time, the new pastor could not figure out why the city would go to all that trouble to invest in something that had zero positive effects on the people who actually lived in the neighborhood.

She came to discover, however, that the art was not painted for the sake of the people that lived there, some of whom were literally covered in sores, many of whom spent their days in line as they waited for the scraps that served as their sustenance. On the contrary, it was painted to for the sake of the people who drove by there on the Cross Bronx Expressway, an elevated highway.

All those who drove by her neighborhood on that elevated highway could simply look over and see the pleasant, populated blocks replete with lace curtains and plants that never wilted. The art served the purpose of protecting the illusions of those that drove by while on their way to other places. And unless they took a wrong turn and descended from the elevated highway, they never had to confront the reality of the need and suffering below (Heidi Neumark, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx, pp. 73–74). Did I see Lazarus? Lazarus who?

Back to our story: We know, though, that even if the rich man always did respond with “Lazarus who?” when asked, at some point he saw him. He must have. Jesus tells us that Lazarus — the only person in any parable to whom Jesus gave a name, by the way — Lazarus was right there in front of his gate. Lazarus was not covered up in blankets, hunkered down in the corner of an alley; he was not sitting by a tent in a city park in Uptown; he was not standing in line at Catholic Charities. He was right there at the rich man’s gate, day and night, immediately outside his house.

Every single time the rich man passed through that gate, there was Lazarus—skeletal and gaunt with hunger, vacant with need, covered with sores, waiting for something, anything that the rich man might throw his way. And from the way Jesus tells this parable, we have to assume that every time the rich man went through that gate on his way to somewhere else, he had made a conscious decision not only to ignore Lazarus’s plight but to not even allow Lazarus’s existence to creep into his frame of vision. And so we might wonder — how did he do that? What aided him in shoring up the wall — not the literal wall around his home, but the wall he built in his spirit?

Perhaps it was the rich man’s theology — his God talk, his way of interpreting God’s work in his life and in the world. Similar to our own time, health-and-wealth theology was also popular in Jesus’ day. Those with excess wealth were fond of quoting scriptures that promised fertility, prosperity, and victory in war for those who obeyed the Lord. That theological perspective, what we now call the prosperity gospel, holds that wealth is linked with God’s favor. Those who obey God are blessed with material reward. Those who do not obey God are condemned to poverty.

If that was what the rich man believed, then it was partly his theology, his religious practice, that helped him keep his distance. He shored up the wall in his spirit by concluding the gap between rich and poor was God’s doing. Therefore, he owed Lazarus nothing, not even an acknowledgement of Lazarus’s humanity or his suffering.

And yet, if that was indeed his primary lens through which he looked at both God and scripture, then he must have skipped over a whole lot of other passages in the process. He conveniently left out of his theological vision the myriad of passages throughout scripture that command us to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan—scriptural shorthand for those who are vulnerable and exist in the borderlands of power — people like migrants seeking asylum and those experiencing homelessness.

Just like he walked by Lazarus every day without seeing him, he chose to practice his religion without dealing with the tough questions, the hard issues of justice and responsible stewardship. His paltry, carefully curated Instagram kind of faith assisted him in building a high security wall to protect himself from confronting messy things like human need and suffering. Out of sight, out of mind. Did I see Lazarus? Lazarus who? And we might imagine that over time the rich man became quite adept at living behind his wall, so much so that he decided it was a necessity. The security wall around his house and his spirit kept him safe — safe from all kinds of things, all kinds of people, all kinds of ideas, all kinds of demands. That security wall, that gate, kept him comfortable with the way things were.

And yet, perhaps he should have been more mindful as to what he wished, for as we keep our eyes on that gate, we notice that over time something happened to it. It changed. The rich man had built it with the original intent to serve as a boundary, but it was one that he could always choose to walk through. He always had the option to assist Lazarus, should he ever be moved to do so.

But according to Jesus’ parable, what started out as transient became permanent. What started out as just a gate, just a wall, just a boundary to keep his life and his faith neat and contained, safe and secure, became a fixed chasm. A chasm so deep and so permanent that not even Father Abraham himself could transgress it.

It is a rather tragic shift, isn’t it? The rich man had just wanted something to protect him — something to protect his unfaithful illusions about whom he had to love and whom he didn’t; for whom he was responsible and for whom he was not; with whom he was to be a neighbor and with whom he was not. Yet regardless of his original intention, over time the impact was that the wall in his spirit became more fortified. It became his new self-justified normal, for if he were to walk through that gate and care for Lazarus, who would protect him from all the others? Who would protect him from the chaos that act of caring might unleash in his life?

If he ever allowed himself to really see Lazarus — a name that means God helps — then the once innocent gate, built for safety, protection, and for boundaries, would crumble. He could not allow that. And yet I’d venture to guess he did not expect for that gate to change, to become a fixed chasm that kept him in permanent agony and torment. A fixed chasm that he could not bridge, even if the moment ever did arrive in which he finally decided he was ready to cross over and to be Lazarus’s neighbor, Lazarus’s sibling in God’s large family.

One thing I find interesting is that in his story Jesus never tells us who it was that actually changed the permeable gate into the fixed chasm. Was it God? Perhaps. Or we might wonder if the rich man fixed the chasm himself. Perhaps he became a victim of his own chosen way of life, for in the end he finally succeeded in cutting himself off from the rest of the world. With that fixed chasm, he never had to choose again whether or not to walk through that gate. Whether or not God called him to care. Whether or not he had a responsibility to the rest of his human family. He, himself, was now out of sight and out of mind. Did I see Lazarus? Lazarus who? In a way, perhaps his prayers were answered; perhaps he finally got exactly what he wanted — complete and total separation forever (Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels, pp. 112–113).

That unintended consequence of the rich man’s purposeful decision to not just ignore Lazarus but to wall himself off from Lazarus’s God-given humanity is one reason I am so glad we are formally installing the Reverend Nancy Benson-Nicol as the Associate Pastor for Caring Ministries and Spiritual Formation, for part of Reverend Benson-Nicol’s ministry is to empower Fourth Church Deacons to prod and to prompt us, as both individual disciples and as a congregation, to resist the temptation to act like that rich man in Jesus’ parable.

In our Presbyterian Book of Order, the ministry of Deacons is explicitly stated to be one of “compassion, witness, and service, sharing in the redeeming love of Jesus Christ for the poor, the hungry, the sick, the lost, the friendless, the oppressed, those burdened by unjust policies or structures, or anyone in distress.” With her leadership, our Deacons will continue to challenge us as disciples and as a faith community to not give into the temptation to just surround ourselves with pretty pictures of lace curtains and plants that never wilt.

With her leadership, they will not let us get too comfortable with a paltry, carefully curated Instagram kind of faith that is all about the “put together” and has nothing to do with the “cast out.” Reverend Benson-Nicol and the Deacons will remind us that following Jesus compels us to do what that rich man did not do — to see God’s image in all of humanity; to be willing to let any walls we have built up in our own spirits crumble; and to intentionally welcome into our lives the faithful chaos that comes with caring for our neighbors, for this city, for our world. And I have already witnessed first-hand how adept she is at bringing into the conversation voices long silenced and issues of justice too easily ignored.

For as people who try to follow Jesus, the questions “Did I see Lazarus? Lazarus who?” are dangerous ones. Questions that have unanticipated corrosive effects on our discipleship and our spiritual formation. Questions that too often turn into fixed, permanent chasms. So may we learn together what that rich man never did. Amen.