Sermons
Lazarus and the Rich Man
The Rev. Gia Hayes-Martin
St. Matthew's Episcopal Church
September 26, 2010
Jer 32:1-3a, 6-15; Ps 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Tim 6:6-19; Lk 16:19-314
Although you can’t tell from my accent, I am a Southerner born and bred. My ancestors first arrived in Maryland and Virginia in the seventeenth century. They stayed south of the Mason-Dixon line for three hundred years, moving through North Carolina and Tennessee to Kentucky, until my father was transferred to Ohio when I was a baby. And like most white people living in the South before the Civil War, my ancestors owned slaves––a lot of slaves. Hundreds, in some cases. As ashamed as I am of this family legacy, I have to remind myself that in my ancestors lived in a different world. Their churches, their government, their neighbors, their economic system all told them that owning human beings was normal. As I’ve reflected on this family history, I’ve come to believe that the practice of slavery required my ancestors to be blind. They could not see—they could not allow themselves to see—that the people they owned were people, fellow children of God who were precious in God’s sight.
The same blindness is there in the rich man Luke describes for us in today’s gospel. Everything in the culture of first-century Palestine told the rich man that a beggar like Lazarus was disposable. Indeed, the economy needed a large number of disposable people at the bottom of society to support the extravagant wealth of the few at the top. The rich man in our story is clearly one of those at the top. He owns a house so luxurious that it has a gate to keep out the undesirables. Every day he dresses and dines in an orgy of conspicuous consumption. He has so much money that he can use whole loaves of bread as napkins, wiping his fingers on it and throwing it to the floor. What Lazarus the beggar hopes to receive from the rich man isn’t a few crumbs, it’s a substantial meal that would satisfy his hunger and sustain his life. Lazarus, in contrast to the rich man, is at the very bottom of their society. He might have been a younger son who didn’t inherit land from his father, or perhaps his farm was foreclosed. He migrated to the city in search of work, but he found nothing, until malnutrition and hunger left him unable to work at all. Now Lazarus is so weak that he can’t even push away the dogs who come to sniff at his sores. It would be something out of a Monty Python movie if it weren’t so tragic.
Throughout the story, the rich man never really sees Lazarus. I mean, the rich man sees Lazarus with his eyes. He knows Lazarus’ name and recognizes his face. Yet the rich man never sees Lazarus with the eyes of his heart. While they are both alive, Lazarus is something to be ignored, a piece of trash in the street that the rich man had to walk around. And after they are both dead, when the rich man has his change of heart, he still views Lazarus as someone who is only there to serve. Lazarus is a messenger, a flunky, a slave even. The rich man is blind to who Lazarus truly is: a fellow child of God, beloved and precious in God’s sight.
Jesus encountered this kind of blindness over and over again in his ministry. In his culture, people with power did not see women, children, the poor, the sick, foreigners, sinners, and those who collaborated with the occupying Roman empire as having any worth at all. And again and again, these worthless people are the very ones Jesus chose to spend time with. He ate dinner with sinners and tax collectors like our own patron saint, Matthew. He called women like Mary Magdalene to be his apostles. He lifted up children as bearers of the kingdom of God. He healed foreigners and those who were ritually unclean. Jesus’ response was always to draw in those who were on the margins of his culture and place them at the center. When he was criticized for it, he treated his opponents with compassion while opening their eyes to the full humanity of people on the margins. Jesus was clear: ALL people are beloved children of God. Our Baptismal Covenant, which we renewed just last week, calls us to live out this part of Jesus’ message. We promise with God’s help to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to respect the dignity of every human being. All persons and every human being, not just people like us, or people we agree with. It’s one of the central proclamations of the Christian gospel: everyone is a beloved child of God. If we say that over and over in the church, it’s because we all find ourselves on the margins in some way at some point in our lives. We might be grieving a loss. We might be struggling with addiction or physical or mental illness. We might be unemployed or lonely or hurting. We might be weighed down with the burdens of our sins. And whenever we are on the margins, God’s powerful, insistent love for each of us draws us back into the center.
We have a long history in this country of not seeing certain people as beloved children of God. In the days of my slave-owning ancestors, it was African-Americans. At other times, it has been women, or the Irish, or Italians, or Jews, or the Japanese, or people who have immigrated illegally. We have discriminated against these groups of people in employment and housing, denied them constitutional rights, even locked them up in internment camps. Now, it seems, it is Muslims whom we do not see as children of God. I have watched the news over the last couple of months with dismay and despair at the increasing level of prejudice being directed at Muslims, at the stabbing of a Muslim taxi driver in New York, at the plans of a pastor in Florida to burn copies of the Quran. The New York Times reported a couple of days ago that religious-discrimination claims filed by Muslims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission set a new record last year and are on track for another record this year. The word “Muslim” itself seems to have become a slur, a code word that questions someone’s citizenship, implies they support terrorism, and marks them out as Not One of Us—as someone whose rights and dignity we can feel free to ignore.
This is exactly the kind of blindness that Jesus calls us to resist. Muslims are our classmates, our co-workers and neighbors, our doctors and police officers, our teachers and soldiers. They pray to the same God we do; they honor Jesus as a great prophet. I can understand the fear and anxiety that lies beneath much of the anti-Muslim rhetoric these days, yet judging all Muslims by September 11 is like judging all Christians by that Quran-burning pastor in Florida. Whatever your views might be on building an Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan, Muslims are beloved children of God who are precious in God’s sight. And as fellow children of God, they are our sisters and brothers.
What the rich man in today’s gospel never understood is that the chasm between him and Lazarus became uncrossable only after death. In this life, all the rich man had to do was to open the eyes of his heart, see Lazarus as his brother, and reach out his hand. And that is what Jesus calls us to do as well. We could call people out when we hear them use anti-Muslim slurs. We might suspend our judgment and listen to the experiences of Muslims in America. We could read the Quran to try to understand our sisters and brothers better. We might even go to Friday prayers at the mosque just up the street here on Ellsworth Avenue. All it takes, all Jesus asks us to do, is to open our eyes and reach out our hands.
Lazarus was a fellow child of God to the rich man, as Muslims are fellow children of God to us.