September 28, 2025
Pentecost 16/ Proper 21, Year C
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex CT
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-5; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31
We’ve all seen them, stopped at a stoplight coming off the highway or at a busy
intersection, holding their cardboard signs asking for help. Maybe they are veterans or
unhoused or just plain hungry. And we sit there hoping the light will change or the traffic
will move before they get to our window, or we pretend that we are on the phone or
whatever it is we can do to look the other way. All these nameless people whose
desperation has led them to this, begging from strangers.
But Luke’s beggar is not nameless; his name is Lazarus. He’s the only poor
person in the gospels with a name at all if you don’t count Bartimaeus, the blind beggar
in Mark whose name just means son of Timaeus, so not really a name at all (10:46-52),
or the demon-possessed man earlier in Mark who says his name is Legion which just
means there are a lot of demons inside of him (Mark 5:9). No, in this instance, Luke
gives the impoverished one a name but, interestingly, does not give a name to the rich
man.
Lazarus took up his position at the rich man’s gate, so every day, this well-fed
guy walked or rode in and out of his house and can not have missed the person in
rags, begging, his sores being licked by dogs. But he might as well not have seen him
at all as he went into his house to a feast undoubtedly prepared by his servants as a
man starved just outside.
Last week, I told you to always pay attention to the first person mentioned in this
series of parables in Luke – there was a woman with ten silver coins, there was a man
who had two sons, there was a rich man – and usually we can understand that first
person as the God or Jesus figure in the parable. In this one, we are thrown a curveball,
because if there is one thing we know about God, it is that God sees us. God knows our
names. God does not step over us to go inside and lock the heavenly gates. The name
Lazarus means “God is my help.” And I hope you have figured out by now that, from the
beginning, Luke’s Jesus is all about lifting up the poor and lowly, casting down the
mighty, and condemning the hoarding of wealth, so this particular rich man is not the
God-figure here.
Earlier in the letter to Timothy we heard one of the most oft-quoted texts about
money: “The love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10), a statement which a lot
of preachers are quick to point out means that you can have all the money you want
as long as you don’t love it too much. That’s not actually what it means at all; it means
that our love of money prevents us from seeing what’s really important. We are
shielded by our privilege, just like the rich man in our parable. His sin is not just that he
does not give money to this poor man named Lazarus. It’s that he doesn’t even see
him. Even when the rich man dies and is suffering in Hades, he doesn’t speak directly
to the poor man. No, he begs Abraham to have Lazarus bring him some water.
Here he is, this man who had everything handed to him on a silver platter when
he was alive, and, even in death, he is still ordering people around. He doesn’t speak
to Lazarus. He doesn’t appeal to him or apologize to him. He asks someone else to
give him an order. The chasm that separated them in life continues even beyond
death.
And when Abraham refuses to give orders to Lazarus, the rich man tries to
strike a bargain: send word to my brothers to amend their ways so they don’t end up
like me. Now, I don’t know if Charles Dickens read this parable as part of his research
for A Christmas Carol, but I imagine the scene in which the ghost of Christmas yet-to-
come shows Ebenezer Scrooge his own grave, sometimes rendered on film as a fiery
furnace, that might have occurred to Dickens. And in the case of Scrooge, having
three ghostly visitations actually worked. He changed his ways, mended relationships,
and saved Tiny Tim. There will be no such ghostly visitation in our story today.
It may not be explicit in this parable that Luke is not really talking about just any
rich man, nameless or otherwise. Immediately before our reading begins, Jesus refers
to the Pharisees as “lovers of money” (Luke 16:14). Writing decades after the
resurrection when the conflict between the followers of Jesus and the Jewish religious
leaders was at a fever pitch, Luke is adding fuel to that fire, accusing them that even
the resurrection of Jesus – a dead man come back to life – was not enough to
convince the Pharisees any more than it would convince the rich man’s five brothers.
There would be no Ebenezer Scrooge-like amendment of life here.
In the parables we have heard over the past several weeks, it has been clear
where God shows up, but it’s also important is to try to figure out where we are in the
story. Maybe there are times when we are like the rich man, maybe not so extravagantly
wealthy, but blind to the need of the beggar at the gate or the one at the stoplight.
I don’t think Luke intends that we see ourselves in Lazarus. Some of us have
surely been poor and sick, but Luke seems to be making Lazarus as wretched as the
rich man is grand.
We’re not Abraham. At least I don’t think that we are.
Who, then?
I believe that we are the brothers, the ones needing a sign of what the
consequences of our obliviousness to those in need might actually mean. Friends, we
have seen the risen Lord. We have heard what the prophets and evangelists said time
and again about the poor and the widow and the orphan, and yet we so often still walk
on by, closing ourselves off from those at the gate. Out of sight, out of mind. Yet seeing
is the first step to compassion. To look into someone eyes to say, “I see you,” may well
be the path to redemption, because once you have seen, you just can’t look away.
Once you have seen, you will move heaven and earth to ease the pain and sorrow of
the world.
Contrary to what many would have you believe, this parable isn’t about the next
life. It isn’t about going to the fiery underworld because you didn’t do the right things on
this side of the grave. No, it is a cautionary tale for living God’s reign right now. We who
have heard the prophets and have witnessed the resurrection need no other sign.
Lazarus still sits at the gate, waiting for us to see.
When the Letter to Timothy says that we are to “fight the good fight of the faith”
(1 Tim. 6:12), the fight may be less about trying to win souls for Jesus than a fight
within ourselves to simply be the people God calls us to be: people who pay attention,
who seek and serve Christ in all people, who see and act for the good of all our
neighbors, those we welcome into our homes and those who sit at the gate, those who
come to our soup kitchen and those who suffer alone.
May God grant us all the courage not to look away.