The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
September 30, 2007

Proper 21-C
Amos 6:1-7
1 Timothy 6:11-19
Luke 16:19-31

“If they will not listen to Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead,” Well, of course, someone did rise from the dead. Or so we say we believe. But here in the midst of our celebration of the Resurrection these disturbing guests intrude:

– First in line is Amos, that grumpy old prophet: “Woe to you who are at ease in Zion.... Woe to you who lie on your beds inlaid with ivory and lounge on your couches, and who dine on choice lambs and fattened calves. You shall be the first to go into exile, and your relaxations and pleasant feasts shall pass away.”

– Amos is followed by Paul, who reminds us that those who are rich in the world’s goods are foolish if we put our faith in them.

– And then Jesus chimes in – Jesus the peach, who is soft and fuzzy on the outside, but who, we find when we bite into him, is not quite as sweet as we were led to believe, and then in the middle we find he’s a hard nut to crack! Here comes Jesus with his troubling story of the rich man dressed in purple and fine linen, a man who feasted magnificently every day while the poor man Lazarus lay at his gate, hungry and covered with sores.

It’s a story Jesus tells to those who “were lovers of money,” Luke says, a story Jesus tells to those who scoffed at him when he rebuked them for counting themselves righteous while they ignored the poor, a story like all those other stories we’ve heard from Jesus this summer. Like the story of the rich fool who built bigger barns to hold all his wealth, only to lose it when he died that night. And like the story of the Great Banquet where only the poor and the lame, not the rich and powerful, get a seat at the table. All stories that point to the truth of last week’s story about the dishonest steward, the truth that one cannot serve both God and money.

Today’s is a story of resurrection. But it’s not a resurrection story with an ending that’s fuzzy and sweet. It’s a story with a center as hard as a peach pit, a story of resurrection not as promise, but as a warning. It’s a story of the resurrection of a rich man who dies and then, after he is resurrected, finds himself not in heaven but in torment, in hell. Even in hell, however, he has not accepted the fact that the wealth and power he enjoyed on earth cannot buy what he needs. Even in hell, he tries to use power and influence to tell Father Abraham what to do: “Abraham,” he says, “send that boy Lazarus to fetch a glass of water for me.” He even tries to tell Abraham what will work and what won’t work on the earth he used to live on: “Father Abraham, if you send someone from the dead to my rich brothers, they will listen to him, and then they won’t be resurrected to the kind of hell I’ve been raised to.”

But Jesus ends the story with Abraham’s ominous punch line, a line heavy with irony for the rich man’s rich living brothers: “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

It’s a story, in other words, which presents resurrection not as a fun party, but as a warning, a warning meant to convince us, just as the warning of Amos is meant to convince us, and as are the warning of Paul, and, indeed, the warnings of Moses and hundreds of prophets and saints before and since.

But who wants to listen to Moses and the prophets? Who wants to think of resurrection as a warning?

A friend’s young daughter came home from Sunday School one day and reported what she had learned about the Resurrection that morning: “Jesus died,” she said, “but it was all okay, because he popped up again.”

Now there’s a resurrection we can celebrate. There’s a resurrection we can live with: not resurrection as a warning, but a pop-up, make-it-all-okay resurrection.

And it’s this pop-up resurrection, not the Resurrection of Jesus, which has been convincing middle-class Americans like ourselves. It has been convincing us that the Christian life is a pop-up, everything-okay miracle for the middle class, where the fun is clean and the feelings are good and the future holds no threats, a pop-up miracle that tempts us to think that we can just sit in our suburban homes and churches, clothed more or less in purple and fine linen and feasting sumptuously every day by world standards, while the poor eat cake.

Jesus does not say that the rich man was an evil man, or even that he tried to run Lazarus off the property. The only sin the rich man committed in Jesus’ story was that he was dressed in purple and fine linen and ate sumptuously and ignored Lazarus.

Well, in the rich man’s defense, perhaps he just never saw Lazarus sitting there outside his gate. The eye, you know, is an organ that does not discriminate. Like a window, the eye receives the images of everything in front of it. It is up to the brain to enable us to see selectively, to focus on the things we really want to attend to. So we human beings are peculiarly able to see, and yet not see. We can see, in other words, and yet attend only to those things our brains and hearts call to our attention.

Reinhold Niebuhr says that “grace is seeing ourselves as God sees us.” Grace is also seeing others as God sees them. And grace is seeing God as God is, and seeing God where God is. Grace is being able to put heart and mind into gear in order to really see.

The sin of the rich man in Jesus’ story seems to have been nothing more than that he did not see. He was simply blind to the sad relationship between himself and Lazarus, and therefore between himself and God. There was a wide chasm between them, and he did not see it. And therefore he did nothing to change it. So his resurrection was to live with that relationship forever.

To begin with, the rich man didn’t see poor Lazarus who was begging for the scraps from his table as he rode through his gate in his limo every day. He did not see Lazarus as a man, as a child of God, as his brother in need. To the rich man, Lazarus was what Ralph Ellison said the black man in America is to the white, “the invisible man.”

It is the first sin, the original sin, says Archbishop William Temple. Our original sin is to see but not to see, to see the world and ourselves not as God sees us, but to see the world as if I am the center of all things, with everything else and everyone else there to serve me.

“When I was born,” Temple says, “I opened my eyes and saw the world, and I measured the world and everyone in it from where I lay in my crib. The world’s horizon depended upon where I was, and other people were important only insofar as they happened to come into my field of vision.” Every one of us does this when he is born, says Temple. “Each of us takes his place at the center of the world on the day he is born.”

“But I am not the center of the world,” Temple reminds us. “I am not, and God is. In other words, from even before I could speak I have been putting myself in God’s place. This is my original sin. I am not ‘guilty’ on that account,” says Temple, “because, as an infant, I could not help it. But I am in a state, from birth, in which I shall bring disaster on myself and on everyone affected by my conduct, unless I can escape from it.”

Education helps a little, Temple allows. Education raises us higher so that our horizons are enlarged and widened. With education, our horizons can stretch out beyond us all the way to Latin America and Haiti, and to Iraq, and beyond that to central Africa and to Asia. But even then I am still seeing the world not as God sees it, but as if I am the center. “But I am not the center. I am not, and God is.” What is needed is grace. “My escape from my disastrous state can, finally, be accomplished only by my surrender to the One who is at the center,” so that I can see the world and myself and others as God sees me and the world and others. (Christianity and Social Order)

The rich man did not see himself as God sees him, and he did not see Lazarus as God sees Lazarus. Nor did the rich man see God himself sitting at the gate with Lazarus. “God is my Helper” – that’s the meaning of the name “Lazarus.” Lazarus and God, his Helper, sitting together outside the fence of the rich at the end of our driveways, Lazarus sitting as he has always sat outside the gates of the rich, with God his Helper. But our driveways are long and winding, so it’s easy not to see God there, just as it’s easy not to see Lazarus there, even though everywhere in the Scriptures Moses and the prophets tell us that that is where we should look for God.

Isn’t that what they tells us? Moses, who assures us that God is with those in slavery. And Amos, who warns us to give special attention to those who live at the mercy of the rich and powerful. And Mary, who reminds us that God throws the mighty down from their thrones, and sends the rich away empty, and raises up the lowly. And Jesus, who sits outside the fence with Lazarus, just as he sits with those in prison, waiting with them for the cup of water we can offer, waiting for our visit.

But that’s not all the rich man did not see. He did not see the great divide itself. He did not see the chasm that separated him from the poor, the chasm that separated him from Lazarus and from God, until it was too late.

Belief in resurrection, at the time Jesus told his story, was a belief that everyone is raised – that after death the righteous are raised to be with Abraham and the unrighteous are raised to a place of torment. And from there, across the chasm, the tormented can see the righteous in Paradise with God, but they cannot join them. That the unrighteous can see those in Paradise after they have died, but not join them, is part of their torment.

But before death, they could have joined them then. They could have crossed the chasm then, if only they had seen and had decided to cross.

Resurrection life, Jesus warns us in this story, results from a choice we make. The great chasm between the rich and the poor is dug in this life, not in the next. The gap between rich and poor is built in this life, not in the next. The lines between rich and poor are drawn in this life, not in the next. The great chasm is dug by us, not by God. But only after death is it permanent.

Lazarus “longed to eat what fell from the rich man's table,” but Lazarus knew that a line was drawn at the gate. He knew there was a divide which prevented him from walking up to the rich man’s door, a divide created and defended by the rich. But the gate did not prevent the rich man from inviting Lazarus to dinner, or from stopping to help Lazarus any time he wanted to.

Is it possible that, like the rich man in Jesus’ story, we middle-class types have not really come to grips with the Resurrection of Christ, who calls us to die to self in the confidence that there – in our deaths to self, just as in Jesus’ death to self – we will find the true life God has promised? Is it possible that, instead, we have embraced pop-up resurrection, with its comforting assurance that God will make it all okay for us just the way we are now? So that it doesn’t matter, we think, that our driveways are long and winding, and that our beds are inlaid with ivory, and that the center of our world is our sumptuous table. So that it doesn’t matter that Lazarus, lying there at our gates today at the end of our long and winding driveways, as he has always lain at the gates of the rich, awaits our notice. So that it doesn't matter – do we think this? – that Lazarus is lying there on the other side of the world or at our very gates, too far away for us to see.

Is it possible that when one has given his life to a pop-up-miracle-Jesus, then it’s hard to notice that the real Christ, whose Resurrection was a warning as well as a promise, is down there at the gate with Lazarus? Is it possible, in fact, that Lazarus himself may even be the real Christ?

The Resurrection we celebrate here at this Eucharist is no pop-up resurrection. It is a resurrection of promise, but also of warning. It is a resurrection that requires the distribution of ourselves and our food and our lives to the world, as Christ distributed himself to the world, a resurrection that extends forgiveness, but that requires confession of sin, confession of the sin of our indifference to Lazarus, confession of the sin of our indifference to the world beyond our gates, and therefore confession of our indifference to the real Christ.

What will it take for us to see? That the barns of our wealth and the temples of our power are turned to dust? That someone should rise from the dead? But someone has risen from the dead – Lazarus, Jesus, “God is my helper.”

Do we see, in Jesus’ story, that the only one who is living the resurrected life in the bosom of Abraham is the poor man Lazarus? Have we noticed that the only sin the rich man committed in his life on earth was that he did not see Lazarus? Or, if he saw him, that he ignored him?

The story of the rich man and Lazarus is a hard nut to crack – chilling, really – because nowhere in it does Jesus offer us a moral. He does not offer the rich any guidelines at all about what to do. He offers only Moses and the prophets. It is simply a story about the way life is, a story about the rich man who did not see until God, in his grace, finally said to him, “OK, Dives, your will be done.”

The Bible, you know, is carefully silent about exactly what happened back there on Easter morning. We are given no miracle of popping up. We are given only the empty tomb. There is no assurance that we’re okay just the way we are now. That, it seems to me, is the hard nut to crack in Jesus’ story about the rich man and Lazarus.

Nothing in the Bible suggests that the Resurrection made death unreal or took away our moral obligation to live lives that count in this world. What the Resurrection did do was invite us to live and die in faith. The Resurrection the Bible offers is an invitation for us to die to those securities of the world we tend to put our faith in and to join Lazarus – Jesus – at the Cross, and, in faith, to live the life of Christ by joining Lazarus outside our gates, confident that it is there that we will find the life that is truly life.

For in all the stories Jesus tells, it is always and only Lazarus, and those who are with him, who are raised to life with Abraham and all the saints.

What the Resurrection did do, by its warning sign of the ways of God, was convince a tiny group of frightened and defeated men and women that God was with them, calling them forth beyond their gates and security systems to a world that is sick and hungry and dying, calling them to live there with Lazarus the life which is life indeed, the resurrection life of Christ in the world.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.