[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the Collective Table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast.
So we're glad you're here, and thanks for listening.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Good morning. My name is Mark, and normally when I'm asked to speak, I feel like I can say what I want. But now that Jason and Janelle are not here, I really feel it.
So I'd like to start this morning with an interpretive dance followed by some dirty jokes.
Janelle right now is in front of a laptop going, please don't do that.
And so I won't.
We are in the middle of a series on the parables, and I don't know how you tap into that part of your brain that is childlike and imaginative and that daydreams to yourself that tell stories in your head, but I hope you can tap into that part of your mind this morning, the imaginative part.
And we're going to read this text slowly, and I hope you will imagine it with me.
It might be on the PowerPoint, but I can There we go.
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen, who feasted sumptuously every day, and at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table.
Even the dogs would come and lick his sores.
The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.
The rich man also died and was buried in Hades, where he was tormented. He lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, father, Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames. But Abraham said, child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner, evil things.
But now he is comforted here and you are in agony.
Besides all this, between you and us, a great chasm has been fixed so that who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.
He said, then I beg you, Father, to send him to my Father's house, for I have five brothers that he may warn them so that they will not also come into this place of torment.
Abraham replied, they have Moses and the prophets, they should listen to them.
He said, no, Father Abraham. But if someone from the dead goes to them, surely they will repent.
And he said to him, if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
Before we get into the parable this morning, which is a bit dark, I want us to do something imaginative together that might feel a little bit strange, but it will also be impossible.
We won't be able to fully achieve what we are aiming for. But I think there's still a reward in trying to get our mind somewhere.
I want us to try and imagine as a kind of a thought experiment with what it must have been like to see and taste and feel the world as Jesus felt the world.
Let's lay down some of the basics of that world.
You are born into a political situation in which your people, pretty much all of the people you know, are taxed to the edge of collapse.
We know this much about the history of the Roman Empire.
Most people were intensely strained by the Empire's taxation and debt system and it kept all but the richest people in a pretty herniated place of stress.
You see in the Gospels that wherever you go, you're imagining you're Jesus here, wherever you go, food, security, and all of the diseases and all of the ailments that go along with malnourishment, there are rushing at you from every direction. And imagine also that you are the firstborn child of a widow and you are surrounded by your people in Galilee who are scarily burdened to feed their kids and their parents and themselves.
How would you see people who are quite comfortable.
But imagine further that you are committed to the faith of your ancestors and that your people all have a different take on how to understand this place in history, your place in history under the boot of. Of Rome.
These are the political debates you grow up hearing.
There's this one group that says that you have to adapt with the times and play ball with the rules on the field and to make the most of what advantages you have, you've got to play the cards that you've got with the greater Greco Roman culture. This is where the Sadducees end up.
And you begin to recognize early on in your life that this is a very compromised position and it values social power too much.
And it has nothing to say, nothing meaningful to say about the needs and the suffering of the common person that you grew up with.
But there's this other group that has gone totally in a different direction.
And they say that you can't be faithful to God. And remain within society at all.
The game is too tainted, the culture is too corrupt.
You've got to leave it entirely if you're going to resist it.
This is the kind of Amish option of the time, to totally live separate from mainstream culture.
And this is what a group called the Essenes are doing in the desert. And John the Baptist, one of your relatives, was likely somewhere under the umbrella of this group or a group very much like it. And you find it tempting at times.
Recall the imaginative exercise here, because this is unacceptable to you as well.
Because loving and serving people, as you see it, demands that you be among the people.
You've got to be in the streets to heal the people of the streets, as you tell yourself.
Removing yourself from society might be tempting at times, but it's too defensive.
It's too easy to just leave, to leave the lost sheep of Israel, your people.
There's also these sporadic, violent groups who call for an armed revolution, an insurgent response to the Roman world.
You read the headlines and hear the gossip.
And we have a record of some of these groups before the lifetime of Jesus and later in the second half of the first century. And they all, however, since sincere, get snuffed out and crushed by the prevailing powers.
So if you were Jesus, you were met by some people who believe that you have to fight power with a fighting fire, and that this reflects confidence in the God who rescued the Egyptians. It reflects confidence in the God who empowered Samson, and he will stand beside the Jews who take up the sword again.
And you think about this a bit.
You have a long and thoughtful reflection on what it means to exercise God's power in the world.
These questions animate much of your early adult life as you ponder the place of your people who suffer because they've just been overpowered.
What does it look like to exercise God power in the world, you ask yourself, against army power, against money muscle, against cultural strength.
What is the technique of that?
And then there is the group that you find yourself closest to.
This is the group that you have the most affinity with.
You agree with this group that there must be a type of a renewal movement, a renaissance, if you will, of taking Moses and the prophets seriously. You're pretty much all on board with this, a call to Israel's people to be holy in the way that God is holy.
But the way that this renewal movement has turned out makes you a bit anxious at times because it focuses a whole lot on the food code and who you have table fellowship with and how you observe the Sabbath and you Understand that these matters of respecting the law.
But it doesn't seem to meet the needs of the people. You went to elementary school with the guy that your father worked with.
Let's get some history straight.
The Pharisees do not disagree that God is compassionate.
And Jesus does not disagree that God is holy and calls his people to holiness.
But imagining that you're Jesus here, you begin to recognize all of the ways in which the law, at least the way it's being exercised, it starts to stratify people.
It starts to categorize the people that you know into clean and unclean, in groups and out groups.
It begins to shape a view of your neighbor that starts to irritate you a bit because you're looking around the world in which you see the blind and the deaf and the paralyzed and the hungry and they're not being taken care of.
There's this intense suffering that's shaping your view of the world while you're still a young person and the people teaching you the faith seem to be less concerned with those people than protecting a code of faithfulness to God's law, which has little to say to their suffering.
Over time, you start to feel confused about why these people whom you agree with on much, why they are not unnerved by the widow who faints from hunger.
You're confused by why they are not disturbed by how servants are treated by cruel masters.
You begin to feel discouraged that they are not angered by how people collect on debts with interest, which causes people to sell the clothes off their back.
Your teachers and exemplars who you admired, they are not properly disturbed.
That some people in the community live quite comfortably and others struggle under the insecurity of poverty from birth to the grave begins to get to you.
You become a distressed character.
And you try to reach out sometime in your 20s and increasingly into your late 20s to experience the consolation of God's presence within you in a world that is often ugly to you.
And it is ugly to you because you are a whole deep feeling, healthy psyche who has not become numb to the cruelty of the world.
I think it's important to imagine this a bit if we are to call ourselves Jesus people.
I think this is something that we need to do regularly.
When you think of Jesus moving through the crowds of people begging that he help them, when you picture the mind of Jesus who has hands reaching for him because they have heard that his touch is a cure, there is a burden that comes with that.
There is interrupted sleep packed into that kind of experience, Jesus has tasted and now carries the power of a spirit that moves and directs him. Yet he still must wrestle with a world that often angers and disappoints and haunts him because of its wretched unfairness.
Imagine it.
Imagine what that would do to your personality and how you feel the world.
Do you not find yourself feeling a bit maladjusted, a bit haunted, frequently unnerved by what you see?
Do you not walk the streets and feel a shared pain in your bones when a child, eerily thin, in filthy clothes, opens up their hand to you, asking for a coin?
It has to shape you.
For me, the real key of interpreting the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is spoon fed to us by Luke just a few verses earlier. Earlier, the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him.
So he said to them, you are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts, for what is prized by humans is detestable in the sight of God.
They have heard several parables. If you're filming this as like, you know, the Jesus Netflix movie, this is the setup for the scene.
They have heard several parables up to this point, which raise some questions about whether or not the wealthy can inherit the kingdom of God.
And they recoil a bit, they vocalize their disfavor, and Jesus decides to double down on that very thing that has begun to pit him against them.
And this sets the scene of the parable's telling.
It's a little tense in the room.
All Jesus needs his listeners to know about the rich man is that he has a very cushy, luxuriated life.
His entire Persona is summed up in a single sentence. He wore fine purple linens and hosted sumptuous feasts every day.
And Jesus digs deep into the misery of Lazarus. He is the only person given a name in any of Jesus parables. Not even the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan received that kind of dignity.
And this man is still covered in source.
And he lays each day at a gate where the rich man passes him, and dogs from the street lick at his scabs.
Jesus is aiming for maximum discomfort here.
The sentence, and the dogs from the street look at his scabs isn't even easy to say.
But the real drama happens after these two die, when the rich man finds himself in torment. And there's this kind of Shakespearean exaggerated map of the afterlife that Jesus is drawing. We should understand that he's using a technique here of the absurd and the exaggerated for emotional effect because the rich man is so close to paradise that he can talk to people on the other side and sees Father Abram, the great patriarch of the Jewish faith. And he's embracing Lazarus, who does not speak in the entire story.
And the rich man refers to Abraham as father and Abraham refers to the rich man as child, highlighting that the rich man is Jewish and that Abraham recognizes this, but his bloodline has provided him no post life insurance policy at all.
The rich man won't even speak to Lazarus. Did you notice that in the story he won't talk to him directly, but he asks Abraham to tell him to just bring him a drop of water.
This is a colorful display of how Jesus views the wealthy.
They are so supremely out of touch with their own situation that they're making demands of other people in hell.
Yeah.
Barbara Rossing, professor of New Testament over at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. I think she's got this point right when she tells her students that the real hinge point of this story is about the failed negotiation between the rich man and Abraham about how to send a warning back to his siblings.
This is the crux of the parable.
Abraham tells the rich man that they have already received a sufficient warning because they've got the writings of Moses and the prophets, which if you think about how Jesus is telling this story, this detail is kind of a stinging rebuke of who's listening to it.
Because Jesus is in a veiled, shall we say, a kind of a passive aggressive way, he's telling his real life opponents that if they were true students of Moses and the prophets, that they would already understand the risks of being wealthy in a world of hungry people. They would not be surprised at all to see Lazarus in the embrace of Abraham. And they would not be surprised at to see the rich man in the place of torment. He's telling them that they've already received the memo and yet they haven't really received the memo.
And the rich man responds to Abraham with a kind of a dark, tragic honesty.
Yeah, that won't be enough for my siblings.
You're going to have to send them a phantom or Lazarus or a resurrected prophet or an angel or someone from the dead to shake them to attention and then they'll repent.
You have to appreciate the honesty.
Abraham rejects that offer.
Not even a visitor from the dead can compel them if the Scriptures haven't already.
And I consider that a kind of a sobering realization for myself because we too have Moses and the prophets.
We have those writings in every existing translation and interpretation in hard and digital copy.
We have all of those texts in our pockets if we decide to call upon them. I can press a button and hear a person with a British accent reading to me the scripture of my choice in nose noise canceling earbuds as I leisurely stroll along the beach.
And Jesus speaks of such a people with access to those writings.
He does it through the character of Abraham as being unmoved by a ghost or a resurrected messenger, even if they were to come to them directly at their doorstep.
Because if the Scriptures haven't already compelled them, then nothing can compel them.
If that doesn't put a rock in your shoe, I'm not sure what does.
It says something remarkable about how Jesus experiences the authority of these Scriptures when they instruct us to care for the poor and the widow and the orphan and the imprisoned.
How he weighs that force upon us, to give away what we have and to forgive debts, to visit the sick and to lend without expectation of being repaid. It's ultimate. There are no excuses, there are no justifications for sidestepping.
In the cases, the rare cases in which Jesus is the biblical fundamentalist, we should pay attention.
And here is one of those rare cases.
No one will be sent from the realm of the dead to motivate us further. We have already received what is necessary for us to lift up the Lazarus of our neighborhood and just do something for them.
There's no challenge here to alleviate global poverty.
There's no mission here to permanently fix problems.
It is simply to alleviate some suffering in the best way that we know how.
This is what it means for a Jewish person to understand the teachings of Moses as law.
Moses says, give and you give.
It's an astounding glimpse into how Jesus views the moral necessity to bear up the wounded, imprisoned, unclothed and sick of the world. The Scriptures have spoken and there can be no wavering in our response.
And I have to say that this disturbs me.
It unnerves me just to think about this in light of a life in which I have been given so much and I have kept so much, because I quietly believe that I need money to protect me against the possible dangers of of the future.
I cannot deny that much of my thinking and behavior is in service to the imagined safety of wealth or the imagined safety that wealth provides.
I don't like fine purple linens and I'm not into sumptuous meals, but I was raised to save neurotically out of a fear of being Poor, because in the world in which I grew up in, in rural Texas, there was no greater embarrassment that you can bring upon yourself than being recognized as poor.
Does anyone here relate to that?
And so I bring this message to you that can feel a bit heavy handed.
As someone that has not been sufficiently motivated by Moses and the prophets, I have not been transformed by them in the way that I would hope.
It's not that I want luxurious things in this life.
I am a cheapskate.
I am a religious cheapskate.
I find it hard to go on vacation or to own a car because the expense just sucks all the happiness out of it for me.
But I remain deeply anxious about the possibilities of the future in an economy, particularly of such uncertainty as this one, in which I might not be able to pay for a hospital bill or repair a roof or even retire by the age of 70.
And I am certain, as certain as I am as the sun will rise tomorrow, that this poses a grave moral and spiritual danger to me and the necessity placed upon me to shower wealth upon other people, if for no other reason than I am a privileged American who lives in a time of troubling, haunting unfairness.
And I don't know what to do about that.
I think that when I am an old man, many of us will look back on the days you remember, the days when masked men in tactical gear were jumping out of vans and throwing our neighbors without any legal recourse into foreign prisons from which many will not return.
And we will find ourselves burdened by what we were not compelled to do by Moses and the prophets.
And I must confess that I don't know what to do about that.
But the deep seduction, the powerful seduction of protecting the wealth that we imagine can protect us from the dangers of this world is a piece of us getting stuck and numb and paralyzed and doing nothing. So we feel like while things are scarce, the best we can do is stay in the rat race and provide for the people that we love.
These two things are bound up in one another.
The power of wealth to possess us as our possessions possess us.
I sense, and it's a humble guess, that taking on the mind of Christ in times like this, one might commit us to seeing the world as he saw it.
That imaginative exercise that we did at the beginning of the sermon, I think that it's a discipline that we should take on rather routinely to feel the world as he felt it, or to try to feel the world as he felt it, of experiencing the compassion of God in a society that is often disturbing to us of looking into the eyes of Lazarus and not turning away.
And then we can read and be shaped by the scripture.
And they might uproot the scriptures, they might overturn our comfort.
They might also liberate us from the bondage of those comforts.
And this is why I continued to go to church in my 20s. I really thought that the thing that God wanted for me was something that I was going to have to do alone.
I was going to have to go it alone because I couldn't lean on anybody else.
I was arrogant because I now see in middle age that I.
I do not know what to do as a Christian in these days of such cruelty and corruption.
And I am really afraid of becoming too adjusted, too used to the anguish of our time.
And I need some help compelling myself to do that which I know I must do.
I need in my grandparents language, a kick in the pants.
Pants purchased at a discount price.
Because if we're going to stand up for the women and the men and the children who are the Lazarus of our day, I do not want to have to face the risks of that alone. It will be scary, but it will be bearable if I am surrounded by brothers and sisters whose love for the world allows them to hold on to their joy, but also allows them to remain a little bit haunted in a way that our teacher was haunted by. That glorious challenge to lift up the disinherited before that infinite glory that he calls Father calls us home.
Amen.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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