Naming the Problem Correctly

Naming the Problem Correctly--August 10, 2018

Jesus said: "There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and 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 being tormented, he looked up 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 those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.' He said, 'Then, father, I beg you 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 goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' 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'." [Luke 16:19-31]

If a stranger shows up on your lawn someday, and then you open your blinds every morning to check and see that he's still there every day, there is a problem.  About this, both the Bible and so many loud voices of our day agree.

But we need to be clear at this point about just what the problem is.

See, many of the loud and powerful voices of our day would take that scene and say, "The problem is that you've got an intruder at your gate, and you have to get rid of them! Who said they're allowed on your property? Get those people off your lawn and send them back to... well, wherever they were before they got to your house!"

Ah, and this is where the loud and powerful voices of our day part company with the less bombastic but more confident voice of Jesus in the Scriptures.  The voice of Jesus, along with the chorus of voices we find in the Law and the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, would agree that there is a problem if you keep seeing a stranger on your lawn or at your gate with no change day after day.

But to be clear, the loud voices and powers of the day notwithstanding, the problem is not simply locatable in the stranger. The problem is not correctly named as "an intruder at the gates."  The man at the gate is not really the problem--he has a name, too, by the way.  He is a person, named Lazarus. The problem is you... is me... is all of us peeking out from behind our curtains, watching the stranger and assuming we are not connected, one to another.

The chorus of the Scriptures says it this way, "The problem is that you have a neighbor at your gate, and you have not invited him in!  You have the power and ability to invite him to your table, to share your abundance, and to attend to his needs, and yet you are upset that he is too close to your precious property?  Get him off of your lawn and welcome him to your table!"

See... we get riled up at a situation like Jesus describes here in this absolutely biting parable, but we get riled up for the wrong reasons.  The loud and powerful voices around us have got it all backwards, inside-out, and upside down!  If there's a stranger laying outside your gate and I keep watching him from the comfort of a McMansion in between binged episodes on Netflix and get upset that he's getting germs from his sores all over my nice lawn, then the problem is first and foremost ME.  There is something wrong with me that I am OK with the suffering of a man like Lazarus--a man with a face, a story, and a name as Jesus insists--but that I get upset when he is bringing his suffering too close to my comfortable and insulated life.  I am the problem first in that case.  I am the one who is truly sick. 

Open sores, after all, can have salve put on them, and empty bellies can have food put into them.  But self-centered, privileged, entitled, hardness of heart... well, that is much harder nut to crack.

Look, there's a lot going on in this parable that we will have to unpack at length on another day (or, preview of coming attractions, join me for a fall Bible study on the Gospel according to Luke!).  And there are a lot of ways we can get lost in the weeds in here with this parable by missing the point.  I have heard, for example, all too many sermons on this text trying to treat it like Jesus is giving a literal geographic description of heaven and hell, or trying to prove that this is a historical event just because Jesus gives one of his characters a name, or trying to insist that because we're saved by grace through faith, this story CAN'T be saying anything about how we are supposed to treat each other.  

And to try and deal with those all quickly, Jesus is crafting a story using (and then inverting) stock images and tropes of the Judaism of his day much like we would tell a joke about someone dying and going to the Pearly Gates to meet Ol' Saint Peter, but we don't actually mean to be describing the geography of heaven.  And the fact that Jesus gives a name to Lazarus (but NOT to the rich man, mind you) is important, but not to tell us that this is a historical event being recounted, but because Jesus refuses to treat the sick beggar as a faceless, nameless nobody, even if the world thinks that only the rich man in the house matters. And even though I am still convinced we are saved by grace through faith apart from doing enough good deeds to earn God's favor, I am also still convinced that Jesus intends this story to compel us to see that it is precisely the God of grace who cares about the people who are treated as expendable by the loud and powerful voices around them. And Jesus intends for us to see that if we are going to live in line with the values of the God of grace, we will see we are connected to the people outside our gates and on our lawns, and that we will share the bread God has graciously given to us because of that.

In other words, this is a story that is all about grace, but it will not sound like grace to us at first if we are more interested in hoarding "my stuff" under the illusion that it is mine to do with as I please, rather than first and foremost God's and has been entrusted to me in order that everybody be fed and cared for. This story is all about grace--the grace of abundance that had been lavished on the rich nameless man, grace that he squandered by thinking what was given to him by God was his own accomplishment, and grace that God shows to Lazarus even when his wealthy neighbor refuses to come to his aid.  

And yet, I suspect, this story upsets us rather than comforts us.  And if that is correct, my guess is that is because we have been listening to the loud and powerful voices of our day more closely and more attentively than to the voices of Moses in the Law and the Prophets after him, or even to Jesus himself.  We who talk a good talk about loving Jesus and wanting to practice our faith in Jesus freely... we have a way of not actually listening to him at all, because we know that if we actually listen to what he says about the neighbors at our gate, we will discover we have been seeing things all wrong.

Before we get to complain or whine about the world at large making it harder for us to practice our faith freely (and man, we are really good sometimes at that old saw), we should perhaps first see if the problem is actually... ourselves, and that we are the ones who have been keeping us from actually doing what Jesus says and seeing as Jesus sees.  Nobody else is keeping us from practicing Jesus' kind of neighborliness, which he himself insists has been THE dominant them of the Law and the Prophets all along.  We have been getting in the way of ourselves--we and our complacency, we and our love of stuff and use of people, we and our demonic insistence on putting ourselves first.

Yes, it is a problem if there is a stranger who keeps camping outside my gate or on my lawn, slowly dying of hunger and neglect.  But the real problem to name that situation is me and my damned (and I mean that literally) complacency and self-centeredness that treats him as expendable.  Yes, the stranger should not still be there on my lawn--but not because he should "go back to where he came from" before he came to my yard, but rather because Jesus says I should have been sharing my table, my abundance, and my gifts of grace with him!  Of course he should get off my lawn--I should get my head out of my rear-end and invite him to share my bread as a welcomed guest in my house!  He is, after all, a neighbor... and in the eyes of all the Scripture, Old and New Testaments alike, I should therefore love him as myself.

For too long, we have all been looking at our lives upside-down, inside-out, and backwards, thinking that we were fine and that "those people" were the problem. Well, it is time for our sight to be restored.

Today, may the God of grace, who never stops seeing the people like Lazarus, open our eyes, too, so that we can see beyond our blinds and our blinders, so that the curtains can be pulled wide, and so that we will open our tables to share the grace God has lavished on us with the neighbors God has sent across our path, too.

Jesus, give us your eyesight, your vision, your love, and your clarity to recognize the abundance in our hands as grace meant to be shared, and the people at our gate as neighbors to be welcomed at our table.