September 30, 2007
(Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 21)
The Burden of Comfort
by The Rev. Joe Behen, Clergy Assistant
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 • Psalm
91:1-6, 14-16 • 1 Timothy 6:6-19
• Luke 16:19-31
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Part of the message for us in today’s gospel is not unlike what it often is, but it bears repeating often. That is, our faith and our life cannot be divided by the chasm described in today’s parable. How we live and what we believe, or as the parable personifies it, Lazarus and Abraham, are intimately connected, perhaps even one and the same. The fleshing out of scripture in one’s life, quite simply, looks like caring for Lazarus. If it does not look like this outwardly, we can be assured according to Luke’s parable that its place in our heart is likewise out of kilter.
Tolstoy once wrote of a conversation “among leisured people” about their own comfort in light of the gospel. “Why do we live so?” exclaimed a youth. “Why do we do what we ourselves disapprove of? Have we no power to change our way of life? We ourselves admit that we are ruined by our luxury, our riches, and above all by our pride – our separation from our fellow men.” His father, however, suggests that while his thought is noble, he only desires to put this ideal into action because he does not yet know enough about life to make such a decision. “The execution of what is good,” he tells his son, “is complicated and difficult.” Then a middle-aged married man decides that he and his family should no longer live “in worldly fashion, nor to live for their own pleasure, but rather for the service of others and to live a brotherly life with all.” His wife, however, suggests that instead they should “let their children grow up quietly, and later on let them do as they please without coercion.” An older man in turn grasps the same ideal, but is told that after having worked in his time, it is time for him to rest and not to torture himself trying to change habits he has spent years forming. A stranger who had been silent exclaims, “What a strange thing! We all say that it would be good to live as God bids us and that we are living badly and suffer in body and soul, but as soon as it comes to practice it turns out none of us may live rightly: we may only talk about it.”
I like this story because it challenges my attempts to domesticate the gospel. We should keep in mind that this possibility always exists, our hearing what we want to hear in the gospel. But while there is truth to be considered here, Tolstoy’s story seems a bit cut and dried to describe the life of creative love that it seems to me that God intends for us. Fred Craddock once said that he believed that God gives to some the gift to make money, to make lots of money. And then,” he said, “they have the burden of what to do with it.” I was in a discussion recently with some friends from the cathedral, and we discussed the creative aspect of following Christ. There must be an infinite number of ways for one who has this gift of making money to use it in God’s service. I suppose that these ways never move very far from Jesus’ condensation of the law and the prophets that we heard back in July: “loving God … and loving your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10). Living this life, however, is not a black and white enterprise – it is a full color venture limited only by our own imagination.
Today’s parable from Luke does not place the rich man in Hades simply for being rich, however. He is there because of the chasm between himself and Lazarus – a chasm of his own creation. By justifying his lack of concern for Lazarus, the rich man created a vision of God that served his purposes. That allowed him to live as he chooses, while still feeling as if he were living as God would have. If true, his crime is not just forsaking Lazarus but is in fact idolatry. He has created his own god, a god who would serve his needs. He no longer serves the God that is, but the god that he wishes to be. Could it be that when we live merely to satiate our own appetite with little concern for others, that we are merely living by our most basic animal instinct? What if the difference between us and our animal relatives is the ability to choose to “love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves?” In other words, our ability to choose to love is the image of God in which we were created. Our choice not to love the Lazarus in our lives, then, creates a great void of indifference between ourselves and the stranger in need, and this void changes us. With each occasion of our turning away from the suffering around us, the image of God in us perhaps fades, ever so slightly, and the distance between ourselves and God, between ourselves and our neighbor, is slightly increased. How might this idea inform our understanding of Jesus’ teaching that it is only as a little child that we can enter the kingdom of heaven (Luke 18)? A child in whom God’s image still shines brightly. Our daily choices, then, cause God’s image in ourselves to either grow or fade. We begin a life trend, which, without intervention, will continue as is rather than change. “To those who have will be given more, and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.” (Luke 8).
Not long ago I looked at a bible study on this parable, and I was disappointed at what I saw there. The study directed the leader to present the group with two different responses to an encounter with someone holding a sign that reads, “Need help.” The two responses, of course, were to have something to give them or not. But the focus in both instances was on how it made us feel. It seems to me that this is precisely what we should not be asking. If our highest purpose in helping others is to feel good, it is ironically very close to the desire to be comfortable, but with the simple caveat that some poor folks get something along the way as well. That doesn’t sound much like the gospel. If that’s all we can teach about today’s scripture, then we shouldn’t be surprised that so few Christians live lives that look like the gospel.
In the end, we are to understand that Lazarus’s life condition is our responsibility. This is not about some abstract concept of “the poor.” Abstraction is the first step toward rationalization. We all know that we cannot alone feed the world. But the end result of our loving others is not even the point. It affects the other and it may even change the world, but we are to do it because it changes us. It brightens in us the image of the God that is. And it is this image that will change the world.
Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote that, “…we are the victims of our own way of life. When we succeed in cutting ourselves off from each other, when we learn how to live with the misery of other people…when we defend our own good fortune as God’s blessing and decline to see how our lives are quilted together with all other lives, then we are the losers. Not because of what God will do to us, but because of what we have done to ourselves. … Sometimes I think the worst thing we ever have to fear is that God will give us exactly what we want.”
Taylor goes on to suggest that we are not so much the rich man as we are his five brothers, who have indeed been warned that a chasm may be growing before us that we need to bridge immediately. May we take this opportunity to grow together in love of God and other people so that we may know the burden that comes with comfort, and to ask God that this burden may bring comfort to others. May God make us aware that we are changed by our choices and help us to choose to grow God’s image in us with every choice.
