William Yagel

Grace Radford

September 25, 2022

Proper 21, Year C

God of all mercy, 

we confess that we have sinned against you, 

opposing your will in our lives. 

We have denied your goodness in each other, 

in ourselves, and in the world you have created. 

We repent of the evil that enslaves us, 

the evil we have done, 

and the evil done on our behalf. 

Forgive, restore, and strengthen us 

through our Savior Jesus Christ, 

that we may abide in your love 

and serve only your will.

Amen.

 

It wasn’t that the rich man hated Lazarus.  We read of no indictment in the passage today that tells us that the rich man was angry or mean.  There is nothing here that tells us that he wanted to see Lazarus suffer.  We are not even led to believe that the rich man had some thoughtful reflection about Lazarus needing to pick himself up and dust himself off and get back into the game!

None of that.

We know that the rich man was well dressed, lived in a house with a gate, and presumably walls, and that he ate well enough to leave crumbs on the floor.  We know basically the same amount about Lazarus-he was hungry, envious of the rich man’s food, and a sick man who seems to have kept company with dogs.  As the story unfolds, we learn some more, so hold that thought.  

Right now, I want to ask you to see that in the first part of our story there is nothing inherently evil about the rich man, or inherently noble about Lazarus.  We don’t hear a grand story of Lazarus freeing people with his last Denarii!  He didn’t give up all he had like St. Francis of Assisi to live in solidarity with the poor!  The most notable trait we have is that he simply didn’t have any money.

As for the rich man, we don’t hear of how badly he treated his parents, his wife, his kids, or even his pets!  We don’t get the list of unethical decisions that he made to get to the top of his profession.  IN FACT, he was wearing purple, so he was likely part of some royal family, and probably there wasn’t even a real “profession”, as we might think of it, for him to excel at!  We might assume that he was born into his wealth, and never knew anything different.  This was simply how his life went.  What we know of the rich man is just that, he was rich.

Wealth is the profound difference between these two men, at least as far as we are told in this parable.  Each of the other binaries that we are provided can be understood as a derivative of binary divide between rich and poor.  The rich man robed in purple and fine linen vs Lazarus who is dressed in sores.  The rich man feasted sumptuously every day, vs Lazarus who didn’t even have the crumbs.  In the comparison Lazarus is bothered by dogs where he himself is the “dog” of the rich man, living outside the gate.  In the final binary Lazarus finds himself in in heaven and, of course, the rich man is in hell, their fortunes reversed, but continuing to live on polar ends of the spectrum.  

Their lives seem to be magnets of the same polarity, forever pushing away from one another.  It is not only in their deaths that there was a great chasm between them.  That chasm was always there, and it is in the second half of the passage that we see that a pattern in life has repeated in death.  The rich man calls to Abraham and tells Abraham to “send Lazarus over to help”.  It seems that even from the fires of hell, this rich man saw fit to ask the man in power to send old Lazarus over to do his bidding.  Never mind what Lazarus was willing to do.  Even then, he wouldn’t stoop to ask Lazarus himself for help.  He still operated as though Lazarus’s opinion and desires were of no consequence, almost as in his life, the person of Lazarus was so distant from the rich man that it was as though he was not even there.  

Lazarus was effectively invisible to the rich man.  

The rich man had lived at a great distance from Lazarus, and from the rest of the world.  And it is likely that this was always what was expected of the rich man, yet here he is.    

Decades ago I was fortunate enough to travel to France.  I lived there six months with my brother who was working at that time for a French-American firm and part of his work took him there to live.  I was fresh out of College so I tagged along.  During that stay I made a visit to the town of Oświęcim, Poland.  And, as I was leaving that place on a train the man opposite me and I began a conversation.  He had been born in that town in the late 40s but as the iron curtain fell on Poland he fled to neighboring countries and ultimately to South Africa, where he lived as a doctor.  He had been back visiting family.  It was a unique piece of history for me to sit with this man and hear his reflections on his life and that of his parents.  His  parents, obviously I suppose, had survived the second world war in this small town that more is infamously known by its English pronunciation, Auschwitz.  

What has always stuck with me from that conversation about his life and the reality of being from that town was when this man looked away and he said of his parents.  “They knew.”  Surely, they didn’t know everything, but they knew enough.  Letters, or more like pleas for help, would make their way out.  They could see the train cars going in.  

They were to keep up appearances.  The people of this town were to act like there was nothing going on.  That evil right outside their gates had nothing to do with them.  But, of course, the keeping quiet had a tremendous impact on them, and has scarred them for generations.  They had never reconciled how they were complicit in that great evil.  Their willful ignorance had a price.  It may have been necessary for their own lives, being under occupation as they were, but it exacted a toll just the same. 

I know I have felt a similar pressure in my own life.  I love my cell phone, I like to pay the cheapest price for my jeans, I scoff at the price of corn in the market, but don’t relish a conversation about the conditions that the workers who make or provide those goods live in.  I know there are chasms between me and many who support my life.  Not unlike the rich man, or the people of Oświęcim, I can easily choose a life where I don’t see them. 

In reflecting on this I was reminded of the words an alternate version of our Confession of Sin that I offered at the start of my sermon.  These words are from a resource called “Enriching Our Worship” which offers alternate language for our liturgies that can be used in whole, or in part, to help assist worshiping communities wishing to expand their worship.  I am not sure if you remember it, but “repenting of the evil done on our behalf” always gets me.  

We come here this morning primarily to give thanks, to wonder in the glory of God’s creation.  And as we move to the confession of sins we recognize not our particular sin as an individual.  Surely, that is part of our call, but here as we worship we are called to confess on the part of the whole world those things done, and left undone.  We confess those evils done on our behalf.  The Gospel this morning, and the corporate confession which we will offer in a moment ask us to see the fullness of the system from which we benefit, and to strive to find justice and to seek God’s love within it.  To admit to and push back against those evils from which we benefit but which maybe we would rather not admit.  

As we move toward the table this morning, where we will remember Christ’s love for us.  We will resume our work of closing that chasm, and of reversing those magnets, to draw us ever closer to God who created us, redeemed us, and sustains us.

Amen