Clarence Jordan, farmer, theologian and one of the founders of Habitat for Humanity once said, “[The bible] doesn’t say you shouldn’t serve God and Mammon; it says you can’t.”
And yet, we sure do remember wealth and their names…
Jeff Bezos Bill Gates Warren Buffett Mark Zuckerberg Charles Koch
To name just a few…
But wealth and power don’t seem to interest God as much. And in fact, God doesn’t want us to be caught up with it either, because if we do, we will lose sight of what is around us, we will lose sight of the needs of this world and what God has called us to do. We cannot serve God & mammon.
I remember going shopping early in our married life. As we stepped out of the car, I started to walk across the street. Ellen saw the homeless woman lying at the light pole. I completely missed her. She engaged in a conversation and we bought a meal for her. Ellen saw what I missed, a person in need lying at the gate.
I am reminded of Walt Whitman’s words “despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks…”
We each have a part to play in bringing about good in our world, "Do a little bit of good wherever you are; its those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world." ~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it.
But we live in a society that struggles with our individuality and the common good. We have a hard time seeing the need next door, in our town or in the nearby city or in the devastated places in our world (Bahamas, Syria), even as we are more and more connected in this media driven age.
In the parable, the rich man who goes unnamed ignores Lazarus, the poor man with a name (notice how Jesus reverses the dynamic!!) who is at his gate, and only after their fortunes are reversed at their deaths, does the rich man see Lazarus. It is Abraham, the patriarch of the faith that says to the rich man in hades that his brothers should listen to Moses and the prophets, for if they won’t listen to them, they will never listen to someone risen from the dead. (Hint: he’s talking about Jesus!)
Which is a reminder to us that we have Moses & the prophets and Jesus who was raised from the dead, telling us of our calling to care & serve one another, especially those in need like Lazarus.
The rich man was blinded because of all his wealth, he did not or would not see the poor man Lazarus who was at his gate. Was the rich man serving God or his wealth? What do we do?
A rabbi remembers the moment he felt that God had called him to be a rabbi:
The summer before he was to begin rabbinical studies, he volunteered to work on a building project in Ghana. For two months he lived in a tiny village with no electricity or running water; he spent his days mixing concrete to make bricks for a new elementary school and his evenings reading by gaslight and chatting with his new Ghanaian friends. It was the most constructive and fulfilling summer of his young life.
The day before heading home, his friends planned a going-away dinner in a small restaurant in Ghana’s capital city, Accra. When he got out of the taxi, it was raining and the air was thick with fog and smoke from burning trash.
Then he saw her: a young girl, lying by a sewer, red muddy water streaming by her, with her distended stomach and jaundiced eyes, her painful look of despair. Lying quietly in the rain, barely moving, she looked up at him, and they locked eyes.
He froze. After a summer of building and teaching and learning, a summer in which he felt as strong and as powerful as he had ever been in his young life, he felt powerless. He remembers:
“I felt like she saw right through me . . . Seeing this nameless girl dying before me was like seeing the demarcation between God’s dreams and our actions. I felt the call not so much as a clear prophecy from God but as a clarion cry of suffering innocence . . .
“My friends grabbed me and pulled me inside. Needless to say, I had no appetite. I was mixed up and confused about what had just happened . . . When I returned outside, I looked for her. She was gone. Maybe someone saved her. Maybe she was swept away. I just don’t know. It haunts me still...
“When I came home, I knew what I wanted to do with my rabbinate. To bridge the gap. To take pain away. To cross the chasm between oblivion and redemption.” [Rabbi Noah Farkas, writing in The Christian Century, July 3, 2019.]
To take pain away. To cross the chasm between oblivion and redemption. That is what Jesus parable for us is all about.
In his encounter with a starving girl, a rabbinical student encountered a Lazarus, who opened his heart and spirit to a new awareness of the gap that exists between the rich and the poor, between hope and despair, between emptiness and meaning.
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke challenges us to look around beyond ourselves and see God in the Lazaruses at our gates: the poor, the forgotten, the isolated, the marginalized; to realize the dignity of every human being as created in the image of God; to possess the humility that enables us to embrace one another as brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of God our creator.
We are called to serve God, to help relieve the pain of others, to cross the chasms of our own making, and to be that redemptive power in this terribly divided world today as disciples of Jesus. Amen.
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