"The Crumbs"

Luke 16:19-31 What’s the biggest bird? Isn’t it the ostrich? I’m told that an ostrich has an unusual habit. When startled or afraid, instead of flying off or running away, the ostrich sticks its head into a hole in the ground. For the ostrich, this is advanced logic – “If I can't see it, it doesn't exist - If I can't see you, you don't exist – if I can’t see what makes me afraid, it can’t hurt me.” The ostrich may appear to be foolish in its reasoning, but to be honest about it, it’s not too far from the way that people like you and I think! Children reason this way, "If I throw my clothes into the closet and close the door I don't have to think about putting them away. If I shove all the toys under the bed, then I won’t have to clean my room." Adults reason this way, too. For example, I suspect that some of the apples in the refrigerator drawer have gone bad, but if I don't open the drawer then I don't have to deal with it! If I don't open that drawer I won't have to deal with the mess. Maybe someone else will open that drawer first and take care of it for me. "Out of sight, out of mind" is an old saying, and it offers a certain comfort: if I can manage to keep violence, prejudice, poverty and disease out of my sight, then I won't have to do anything about them. But the logic of this thinking increases the distance between me and God. When we build fences between ourselves and the world, we run the grave risk of building a fence between ourselves and God. Now, the Rich man and Lazarus: As the story begins, it seems like everything is fixed in place, the rich are rich and the poor are poor. The Rich Man lived in a house with heavy iron gates, he wore the best clothes, and feasted on the best food every day. He had everything a person could want, and more. Most every day for Lazarus was a bad day. He was a miserable beggar, diseased and covered with oozing sores. Every so often he would find a few crumbs in the rich man’s trash that had not yet become completely moldy or rotten. And that was a good day in an endless series of really bad days. All he got in life was the worst of the leftovers. Eventually he became so weak that he could not even fight off the scavenging dogs. Lazarus was dying of starvation and disease at the rich man's gate. They actually lived very close to one another, but there was a vast distance between them. Finally, Lazarus dies, right under the rich man’s window. And then the Rich Man dies, too! Lazarus is carried by angels to sit on the lap of Abraham in the light and joy of heaven. The Rich Man, on the other hand, goes to the place of the dead, a terrifying place of heat and flames. So, even in death, there remains a great distance between the two. It is curious that Lazarus does not exhibit the usual marks of religious life, like faith or prayer or testimony or sharing. Faith. Lazarus enjoys the feast of heaven not because of his faith, but because of God’s compassion and justice. Tears come to our eyes when we imagine Lazarus, treated worse than a mangy dog, now sharing the abundance of God’s love. But then there is a problem in the story … what about that rich man ... what to do with him? He ignored the starving, diseased, dying Lazarus who was at his front door. He was blind, insensitive, greedy, and worse. What will God do with him and people like him? Later in the story, Jesus says that there is a deep chasm, something like the Grand Canyon, that lies between Lazarus and the rich man. We can see some of those same impassible canyons and chasms all around us, between nations, races, religions, gender, and classes. And they are way too wide and too deep to cross. The chasm between the Rich Man and Lazarus is too wide and deep for us to cross, but if we say that then we are also saying that the gap between ourselves and God is also too wide and deep. The message from the text is that the great distance between us and God is the exact reason why God has sent Jesus to bridge the distance, to overcome the prejudice, the violence, the poverty, the fear that lies between peoples. It’s true that we have habits like the ostrich when it comes to avoiding the problems around us, but all is not lost! It’s because we are Christians, learning and growing in faith to overcome that distance ... it's what the work of God is all about. Here’s what I love about our church: when we see deep chasms like that which separate people we get this crazy idea that a bridge can be built to cross it. You see this sentiment in our songs, our prayers, our hopes and dreams. It’s something wonderful that we’ve learned from God, who upon seeing the hopeless condition of humanity, decided to build a bridge in Jesus Christ. So by participating in this congregation you are a bridgebuilder! The world needs more people like this, lots more. But it may involve bridgebuilding of a sort that you never imagined. It’s not as simply as people of means increasing the amount of crumbs offered to the poor. I am a part of a post-World War II generation that sincerely believed everything would get better and better. It was assumed that I would receive better education, find a better job, earn more money, and afford more things than my parents. And I equally assumed that my children would do even better than me as they grew up. On top of this, for a long time, our church has lived according to a “Gospel of Prosperity”, in which our generous and loving involvement with the surrounding community and world was based upon our having been blessed with an abundance of wealth and resources that we could easily share. The current economic crisis has turned these world views on their head. The gap between rich and poor is widening, average household income is down, more and more wealth is concentrated in the richest 1% or the population. The middle class is in decline, as more and more slip back into poverty. Jobs are being sent abroad. There are more Lazaruses and fewer people like most of us here able to help him. Many of us are actually getting closer to Lazarus. When we calculate the drop in real wages since the 1960’s, the loss of jobs due to outsourcing, the rising costs of fuel and energy, the deep loss in the value of investments, less health coverage and higher medical expenses, and so on and so on. That “Gospel of Prosperity” may no longer work so well for us, but this does not mean we are losing our spiritual direction! We need to experiment with a new form of the Gospel, one that does not begin with assumptions about our prosperity, but with a different assumption concerning God’s incredible commitment to justice, healing and peace. This is not a new theology. In fact, most of the world’s Christians practice it—because they have never experienced the kind of prosperity that we have long enjoyed. Maybe the economy will recover more quickly than expected. I hope so, but let’s not lose this opportunity to re-examine who we are, and what God is calling us to be.