Now or Never?

Series: Pentecost

Speaker: The Rev'd Emily Griffin

It's just a story. We don't need to take it seriously, this Gospel parable of "turn or burn," do we? I mean, we shouldn't need the flames of hellfire to scare us into giving beyond ourselves. If parables are stories told to make a point, then we can get the point and lose the story, right?

We can try anyway. The problem is that it’s so specific. We can picture the rich man in his finery feasting away. And the poor man at the gate isn’t "abstractly" poor; he’s covered in sores. He’s not abstractly hungry either; there’s plenty of food on the other side of the gate. He’s just not welcome to it. It’s as if Jesus insists on us seeing this poor man in his torment, just as clearly as we later see the rich man in his; he even gives the poor man a name – Lazarus. It’s the only time Jesus ever names a character in one of his parables. For whatever reason, we’re not meant to look away this time.

Both men die, and while Lazarus is carried away by the angels, the rich man ends up not so far away, it turns out. Hades in Jesus’ time was thought of as a place where those above and those below could see each other. His audience could track the image; they had a sense of the landscape already. As Lazarus could testify, they had a taste of it here on earth.

What would have been surprising to them was who went where. It was thought then that wealth must be a sign of God’s blessing. Poverty, on the other hand, must be some kind of punishment. Otherwise, it wasn’t really fair for fellow children of Abraham to live so close together and yet live so differently. Yet in Jesus’ parable, Lazarus’ earthly suffering bears no relation to what God truly thinks of him. His sickness and struggle had nothing to do with divine justice. We’re not told why he’s poor. I’m not sure it matters. The difference here is one of power, not necessarily morality. The rich man had the time and resources to do things differently, until he didn’t anymore.

The thing is, he can’t plead ignorance. He knows what Lazarus looks like. He even knows his name. Yet the distance he couldn’t cross in his lifetime – he now expects Lazarus to cross in eternity. The mercy he never showed – he now expects to be shown to him. When he learns that’s not possible, he does reach outside himself and think of his brothers. Yet once again, he wants Lazarus to do his bidding and give them some kind of sign – so they’ll respond appropriately. But Abraham says No; the signs they’ve been given are all the signs they need.

So, what is the point of this parable? Is it just to give to the poor and needy? If so, couldn’t we just be served by our reading from 1st Timothy? That passage is easier to handle. It tells us what to do, but leaves the interpretation of particular circumstances up to us. “Do good, be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share.” We can handle such toothless generalities. We can tell ourselves that whatever we’re doing is enough, partly because no one is holding us accountable.

That’s what’s disturbing about the parable. We’d prefer a story that doesn’t connect the way we feed or clothe ourselves, or the ways we spend our money, to anyone else’s particular need. The notion that we can’t get away with benign neglect forever, that our time to give will one day run out, that we’re called at times to respond to the specific human beings right in front of us instead of always letting middlemen do it for us – that’s what makes us want to look away from this story with all its specificity for something more general. Can’t we just stick with the broad strokes and let someone else handle the uncomfortable details?

Speaking of specificity, you can’t get more specific than today’s reading from Jeremiah. It’s the most detailed business transaction recorded anywhere in Scripture. Without getting into all the details (the passage does that more than sufficiently), here’s the gist: Jeremiah has been predicting the fall of Judah for decades now, and finally the sky is truly falling. The land is under siege. The economy is tanking, and it’s only a matter of time before Babylon seizes everything.

In the midst of this, Jeremiah’s cousin comes to him with a land deal. (You gotta love family.) Either poverty or debt have forced him to sell, and if Jeremiah buys, the land will at least stay in the family. Jeremiah knows how foolish this purchase is; within a year, it won’t be worth the papyrus it’s printed on. Babylon won’t recognize his rights of ownership. This isn’t a matter of “buy low, sell high;” he will die before he’s able to sell, and he knows it.

And yet he buys the land anyway – not as an act of charity or a kneejerk response made out of guilt or fear, but as an act of hope that others could see and hold onto later. You see, God has promised him that there will come a time when the crisis will be over. His country will die, yes, but there’s new life waiting on the other side. And for Jeremiah at least, God’s promise of new life is enough.

So why do we have this reading, with all its boring detail? Perhaps because, unlike today’s parable, this is not a story. The transaction is legal and public; real money is involved between real people at a very real place and time. And sometimes our faith requires that of us – to put our real money where our real mouths are. Acting on God’s promise of hope for a better future for all of us will, in fact, cost us something. Sometimes it’s giving to individuals, and sometimes it is giving to organizations that can help us give more wisely. As the church, we are called to invest in a future we can’t see yet – in the form of people we can see, where the return on investment may or may not be seen in our lifetimes.

Why? Well, among other reasons, because we’ll all die someday, and we can’t take it with us. As 1st Timothy so aptly reminds us, “we brought nothing into this world,” and we can take nothing out. We can set our hopes on the uncertainty of riches, sure; we can let our fears of scarcity drown out our hopes and enter our own kind of hell, the hell in which we’re responsible to no one and no one is responsible to us. Or we can be generous to real people in real time and “take hold of the life that really is life.”

Perhaps that’s the good news in today’s readings. We don’t need to wait for some sign to live differently. We have Moses and prophets like Jeremiah; we have the One who actually did rise from the dead to show us that not even death can stand in the way of new life. And we don’t need to look far to find people in need. Maybe we just need to stop looking away. In the silence that follows, I invite you to think about the future you’re hoping for and how your giving can reflect that, how you can invest your real time and real money in what really matters. In the Name of the One who has given us all the signs we need, Amen.