Listening to the Past; Living into the Future
a sermon by Rev. Rebecca Segers
09/26/04
Psalm 91:1-6; 14-16
Luke 16:19-31  

Well, folks, here we are!  How long did it take us to get here?  I would venture a guess that every single person in this room could have a different answer to that question.  The obvious one, of course, is 175 years, given that today is the day we’ve chosen to celebrate the 175^th Anniversary of the Presbyterian Church of Sweet Hollow.  But we could also respond “almost two thousand years,” if we looked at not only the history of this one particular church building in Melville on Long Island in New York, a part of the United States of America, but at our religious history.  Christianity has taken a long and winding and sometimes not pretty road to get us to this day and this time and this celebration at this moment.  And if we include the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, into our developmental thought processes, it’s taken us more like eight thousand years to get here.

We could also look at the question locally.  How long did it take each of us individually to get here?  The length of our lives, the parents and teachers and in some cases spouses and life choices that have brought us here to this day, joined to this community in a great or a small way – all these things can be said to have had an effect on us.  They’ve all added up to the reason that we’re each here today, breathing in the Spirit and feeling the connectedness of worshipping Jesus the Christ with others.

It has been a magnificent weekend.  One that we will not soon forget.  Filled with old friends and new ones, with laughter and talk and games and songs and lots of good food.  We are indeed rich, and hopefully feeling it.  Especially feeling the wealth and abundance that we share in community and love, but certainly not lacking for full bellies or clothes on our backs, cozy homes with solid roofs over our heads.  None of us can be unaware after a weekend such as this one of the many blessings we share.

In our Scripture reading today, Jesus is talking to a group not so unlike ourselves.  A group of Pharisees, people who loved the Lord and who tried their best to follow God’s law to the best of their ability, but people who also, the Bible tells us, were “lovers of money.”  Now, we like to say money isn’t that important to us, but in reality, how many of us are willing to sell all we have and give it away, living in less than the comfort that we have?  How many of us would be willing to give up going out to dinner or the movies when we’d like to?  Even if we’re on fixed budgets and can’t do it all the time, do you know that if you go out to a restaurant just once in your entire life – and not to a fancy one, a McDonald’s would count – you are richer than most of the people in the world.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s take a look at Jesus and the parable he tells to the Pharisees.

First of all, there’s a rich man.  This man is not identified by name, but by his conspicuous consumption – by his dress and his diet.  He wears purple.  Purple was a deep, rich color, one that took a long dying process.  As a result, it was an expensive fabric.  On top of that its usage was restricted by the Romans, who had set standards of who could wear purple and how much purple they could wear.  So the rich man of our story was probably a high-ranking official or a member of the royal family.

Not only does he wear clothing that differentiates him from the average guy walking around town, he lives in a gated community, separated from the riffraff.  Then there are his meals.  The Bible tells us he feasts sumptuously.  We aren’t given any more detail than that, but from the word “sumptuously” it’s pretty clear that he’s eating more than bread and olive oil on a daily basis.  We can picture this man and his lifestyle: He might be a little round across the belly, he reclines in rich robes eating grapes and drinking wine, served by others who cannot begin to ascribe to his lifestyle.  But what about his internal life?  It seems to be pretty superficial and transient – as we see as the parable goes on.

The next character Jesus introduces is Lazarus .  Interestingly enough, Lazarus is the only character in any of Jesus ’ parables to be given a name.  His name comes from Eleazar, which means “God helps.”  And it’s a good thing that God does, because no one else seems to want to, except possibly the dogs who lick his wounds giving him comfort.

Lazarus is so poor that he lies at the foot of the rich man’s gate, hoping to be tossed a crust of bread from that same rich man’s table.  Now, the verb for “to eat” used here – χορτάζω – is commonly used for feeding animals. And in this case, it is referencing the practice the wealthy had at the time of wiping their oily hands with bread in order to clean them after eating and tossing it onto the floor for the dogs.  Can you imagine?  Lazarus is essentially lying there, hoping someone will show him enough mercy to feed him dog food…but no one does.  Then these same dogs come and lick his wounds.  He’s probably grateful for the soothing feeling, but on the other hand, in a way, it is adding insult to injury.

This is the first part of the story and it ends badly:  Lazarus dies at the rich man’s gate – they have never spoken – their lives are entirely separate, divided by a gate and a table.

In the second part of the story, and the greater one as far as length is concerned, the rich becomes poor and the poor becomes rich.  The two men both die, we’re not told how, but one, Lazarus , is sent to the bosom of Abraham , a place that was designated with great honor in the minds of Jesus ’ listeners; while the other, the rich man, is sent to the underworld where his every moment is torment.  For many of these same listeners, the turnabout of their two situations would have been surprising, because it was believed that blessings in this life were a sign of God’s favor, and conversely, a difficult life hinted that you were not living up to God’s expectations.  So for Lazarus to be with Abraham while the rich man basically roasts in hell – well, that’s not the way the story’s supposed to go.

But this structure does more than lift up the lowly and punish the oppressor – however unintentional an oppressor he may be.  It hints that the fates of these two who lived such separate lives are really intertwined.  We, as human beings, have a tendency to see ourselves as the center of the universe.  Indeed, if we stand up and turn around, we truly are – each and every one of us is the literal center of his or her own universe!  The world begins locally with us, and then goes outward in concentric circles of importance.

However, our parable today suggests that this might be our truth, but it is not God’s.  We are all connected, even when we put up gates to keep us apart.  Many of you may have heard of the theory of six degrees of separation: it says any two individuals on the planet are separated by no more than six acquaintances.  You can start with yourself and end with a person who is currently fearful of dying in Darfur in the Sudan .  There would be between you and him or her only five or six people to reach a direct connection.  If this is indeed true, and mathematically, it is certainly scientifically viable, then not only are we hurting our brothers and sisters around the world with unethical practices, we are even more culpable by association.

Arianna Huffington talks about her early success as a writer.  She had spent the early years of her adulthood constantly concerned about money.  Would she be able to pay her rent?  Would her father have the extra funds to help her out?  Or would she have to ask her mother’s brothers, once again, for help?

Then with what she calls “head-spinning rapidity,” she was the author of a best-selling book.  At twenty-four years old, the very beginning of her career, she had things that she thought would take a lifetime to achieve: financial independence, offers to lecture, to write other books, to appear on talk shows.  She was traveling the world, “acting as if” she knew what she was doing, but inside, Ariana began to feel an inner struggle between secular seductions and spiritual yearnings, between, she says, hopes for the ephemeral and glimpses of the eternal.

She was sitting in her hotel room in some anonymous European hotel during a stop in her book tour.  The room was beautifully appointed: there were yellow roses on the desk, Swiss chocolates at her bedside, and French champagne on ice.  The only noise in the room was the cracking of the ice as it slowly melted around the bottle.

As she sat in the silence, a voice sang in her head.  It was her voice, but it sounded just like Peggy Lee , singing, “Is that all there is?”  Over and over, like a broken record, Arianna heard, “Is that all there is?”  She wrestled with this question and behind it, the implication that life’s goal is money and recognition, followed by the struggle for more money and even greater fame.  From deep within her came a resounding, “No,” a life-altering “No” that caused her to look at who she was and her foundational belief structures about the nature of life.

Ultimately, it led her away from the easy money of writing more books on the same subject and into the political arena, where she knew she could make a difference for those who were suffering the way she had before the success of her book.  She realized that the goal of life was not we can make of it, but of what it can make of us.  And she has been traveling that road ever since.

The rich man in our tale never got there, however, and even as he suffers in Hades, he still labors under some misapprehensions.  He sees Lazarus above him, now at ease and in comfort and he calls out – not to Lazarus himself, but to Abraham .  He asks Father Abraham to send Lazarus with drop of water on his finger to cool his tongue.  I’d like to make three small points about this interchange:

1. He is calling to Father Abraham , and by giving Abraham that honorarium – father – he is asking to be recognized as a child of Abraham ; he is claiming for himself the title of a devout Jew.  So notwithstanding his lavish lifestyle, he perceives that he lived a life of fidelity to his religious identity.
2. The rich man knows Lazarus ’ name, so must have known of his suffering at his doorstep to a greater rather than a lesser degree.
3. He still expects Lazarus ’ purpose is to serve him.  Even while suffering the torments of the damned, looking up at Lazarus in the spot he thought belonged to him, he is unable to see Lazarus as anything but beneath him.

How many of us are blinded to our own faults and shortcomings, too?  Interestingly enough, in the history of the Sweet Hollow Presbyterian Church, back in the olden days, the church held its members much more strongly accountable for their individual behavior… and sanctioned individuals if they weren’t “living up” to the church’s standards.

In archival searches, we’ve found records of a woman who was accused of having milked her neighbor’s cow and also having taken a fleece that didn’t belong to her.  Even worse, she wouldn’t acknowledge and apologize for her misdeeds!  The Session of Sweet Hollow called her in repeatedly – she mostly refused to show up – in order to talk with her about these offenses and set her back on the right path.

Another individual, a male member of the church, was called in because he was drinking and carousing and not taking care of his family properly.  He was told to straighten up and fly right and that until he did, he wouldn’t be allowed to take communion.  He agreed to take it on the chin and get his priorities in order.

Now, don’t worry!  As we today, listen to our past, I’m not suggesting that the Session begin calling people in to take them task for their behavior again.  But I am suggesting that you take a moment to look inside yourselves and see if you can find the places where you need to improve.  Let us ask God to remove the scales from our eyes, so that we can see the places where we are now blind to our own failings.

The rich man asks for help, but Abraham tells him there is a gap between them that is unbridgeable.  Once there was no chasm, only a pit of apathy and indifference between the two; now that the tables have been turned, there is no way to cross from one space to the other.

The rich man then makes his first admirable move – he asks for pity for his brothers and to have Lazarus go to them and teach them about charity to the poor and suffering.  Abraham reminds him of the prophets.  Surely as a good Jew, the rich man can remember Deuteronomy 15:7: “If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted towards your needy neighbor.”  Or Isaiah 58:6-7: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”

Apparently, the rich man does know the Scriptures.  He also acknowledges that there is little hope that his brothers will pay attention to them.  How much hope is there that we will heed them today?  We have a rich past here at Sweet Hollow.  175 years of people doing their best to follow God’s call.  But God’s call includes God’s word and the parable that Jesus tells us today is not an easy one to synchronize with the loving, all-forgiving Jesus we like to lift up.  By the end of the parable it is clear that those who refuse the needs of the wretched at their gate, those who will not hear the Scriptures’ call to be merciful to those who are suffering, have placed themselves beyond the pale of God’s mercy.

We must remember that truly following God means looking at our behavior and repenting where necessary.  The word repent doesn’t mean just being sorry when we don’t get it right; it literally means to “turn around.”  To change your behavior.

When I was a little girl in Sunday School, I remember one particular lesson so well.  It was the lesson that went along with the song, “I’ve got the Joy , Joy , Joy , Joy down in my heart.”  You remember that song, right?  Well, my Sunday School teacher taught us that the letters J-O-Y stood for who we were to serve and in what order: Jesus first, Others second and Yourself last.  Notice it’s not Yourself not at all.  It’s just keeping your priorities straight; something the rich man obviously failed to do.  And keeping them straight with the right attitude behind them.

You can’t give with resentment or you’re taking yourself and your needs out of the equation and that’s not right either.  George Buttrick said, “True charity is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not spasmodic or superficial.  Ameliorations such as food and medicine are necessary, but there is a more fundamental neighborliness.”  As important as it is to share our material possessions, the barometer of the soul is the attitudes we hold while we are doing it.

So ladies and gentlemen of the Presbyterian Church of Sweet Hollow, here are our choices.  How do we listen to our past and live into our future?  Do we choose to hear the Scriptures and repent?  Or do we continue to live in plenty while others around the city, the state, the country, the world are in lack?  And if you think you’re doing all you can, and have access to a computer, I ask you to go to a website that Rev. Robert Close emailed to me last week.  It’s www.globalrichlist.com.  When you get there, it will ask you to enter your household income and then immediately organize where you stand in the world community financially.  I did it and let me tell you, folks, it was pretty eye-opening.  It definitely made me committed to doing better and doing more…

How?  How about we continue to fill up the basket in the foyer with food for those who don’t have any?  Or join the Mission Team and make this the most successful Church Fair we’ve ever had, knowing that in doing so, we’re supporting the needy here in the Huntington area and out in the world?  We can also find organizations to support that speak to our own particular passion.  Suzanne Makros was telling me that the National Ovarian Cancer Association has designated September as Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month.  It’s amazing what God’s grace in one’s own life can do to make you reach out to others, isn’t it?

As most of you know, our Sunday School this year has gone to a new format – the Workshop Rotation Model – and our Christian Education Team have agreed to have the foundational principles undergirding all the work we do this year focus on mission and peacemaking.  You could pick up a week or two throughout the school year in an area that excites you – arts and crafts, music, physical large muscle games, drama and puppetry to name a few – and teach our children not only about the Bible, but about the principles of love and charity.

Rev. Paul Neshangwe is coming a week from tomorrow to talk with us about his work in Africa , specifically in the areas of race relations and HIV/AIDS Awareness.  As a church who sent seven AIDS kits overseas, wouldn’t it be great to come and hear him speak, learn more about this important mission field and perhaps how you might fit further into the equation?

There’s so much you can do, I can do, we can do as we look at and live into our future at this wonderful, historic, living, Spirit-filled body of Christ that we call the Presbyterian Church of Sweet Hollow.  Won’t you take a breath and a moment and re-commit yourself to God and the work that the Lord is calling you to do?

(Pause)

May we take Jesus ’ cue and all listen to our past – individually and collectively – that we might live faithfully and joyously into our future.  Amen.