An Open Table where Love knows no borders

A Message from Hades

A sermon on Luke 16: 19-31 by Nathan Nettleton

Having just endured a federal election and with a state election coming up before the year is out, there has been plenty of rhetoric flying around encouraging us to think about how we will be better off under this policy or that policy, this government or an alternative government. Even when they try to get us to understand big picture issues like economic management or national security, they try to pitch it to our self-interest. The bottom line is our jobs, our housing interest rates, our safety. None of them seem to have any expectation that we will be concerned with what any of it means for anyone else but ourselves. I will admit that after yesterday afternoon’s stress-out, I would probably be a bit susceptible to a pitch to my football self-interest, but that’s another matter!

The story we heard Jesus tell in tonight’s gospel reading is sounding a very loud warning about the sort of self-interest the politicians are peddling. At first glance it can look like one of those stories that simply says the rich are bad and God favours the poor. After all, it is in the gospel according to Luke, and Luke is not exactly averse to making simplistic statements about wealth and poverty. But this time, there is more to what he is saying so we had best be careful not to simplify it if he hasn’t. There is a rich bloke and a poor bloke, and in the end the tables are turned by God, but there is something else we need to note about this story before we look at how and why they are turned. You see, the biggest part of the story, the part where all the action is and therefore where the attention is focused in the telling of the story actually happens after they have both died and all the eternal reward stuff has already been sorted out. As you hear that first part, the tendency is to ask yourself whether you are identified with the rich man or the poor man, but when we get into the real meat of the story, we find that we are not supposed to identify with either of them.

In this part of the story, the rich man who is now suffering a painful eternal torment has a conversation with Abraham, who for the purposes of the story functions a bit like the St-Peter-at-the-Pearly-Gates figure in popular heaven mythology. Abraham explains that there is absolutely nothing that can be done now to alleviate the man’s suffering. In a word, he says, “You’ve made your bed; now you’ve got to lie in it.” So then the rich man asks whether Abraham can send the poor man, Lazarus, back to pass on a warning to the rich man’s brothers and sisters so that they don’t end up in the fires of Hades as well. Now Abraham doesn’t mess around with pointing out the sheer arrogance of the rich man thinking that even now, he might be able to get poor Lazarus to run errands for him. Instead he goes straight to the heart of the matter and says, “They’ve got the teachings of Moses and the prophets, they should listen to them. They’ve got access to the Bible. What more warning do they need?” But the rich man keeps trying: “They’re not getting the message yet, Father Abraham. But if someone came back from the dead and warned them, then they’d turn their lives around for sure.” But Abraham says no. “If they won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, then even someone rising from the dead wouldn’t be enough to get through to them. Forget it.”

So, do the man’s brothers and sisters wake up to themselves and turn their lives around, or don’t they? Why aren’t we told? Because we are the man’s brothers and sisters. This is who we are supposed to identify with in the story. We have to answer the question for ourselves. We have to write the rest of the story with our own lives. We are not told whether the brothers and sisters are rich or poor or comfortably middle class. We are not told anything about them, because they are us. We can fill in the descriptions for ourselves. All we are told is that it remains to be seen whether we will listen to the teachings of Moses and the prophets, and it remains to be seen whether we will heed the warning being screamed by big brother from the fires of Hades, and it remains to be seen whether we would take any notice and turn our lives around even if someone did rise from the dead to get the message through.

So what is it, exactly, that the rich man is trying to warn us about from the fires of Hades? What is the message he was hoping he could get his errand boy to deliver to us? What has he now realised about where he went wrong?

Is it “don’t be rich”? Well, not exactly, although in some cases Jesus advised particular rich people that the only hope for them was to give it all away and follow him poor. But for some others, giving away half was fine, and in our reading from Paul’s letter to Timothy we heard some other advice for rich Christians about generosity, readiness to share, and a solid practice of putting their money into caring for others. So the message from big brother in Hades doesn’t seem to be as simple as don’t be rich. Clearly it has got something to do with his relationship with the poor man outside his gate. But again we’d better be careful not to be too simplistic about it, because the story doesn’t actually suggest that the rich man would have been better off in eternity if he had sent out to Lazarus a lamb roast and some medication for his sores and sent him on his way better off. Sometimes flinging a few coins to the beggar is just a way of getting them away from our gate and cleaning up the neighbourhood.

Certainly the rich man’s self-indulgence and callous disregard for the plight of Lazarus, who he had to step over every time he went out his gate, is given as the grounds for his eternal damnation, and we don’t want to minimise that at all, but the way people act comes out of the beliefs they hold about life and the world, so it is worth asking what sort of beliefs would leave us vulnerable to us following his example and disregarding the plight of Lazarus.

The most significant aspect of the belief system that is usually underpinning this sort of callous indifference is the belief that all that life is and all that life can offer are in the here and now, and there is nothing either good or bad beyond that. Such a belief deludes us into thinking that how we live now and how we treat others have no consequences other than the immediate here and now consequences. There are no big consequences. There is no calling to account. There is just this, now, and whatever we can milk out of it on our way through. He who dies with the most toys still dies, but at least he had the most fun on the way through. In death, all are equally dead, so if you’re going to be a winner, be a winner before death.

Now the politicians won’t tell you it in those sort of stark terms, but you can see how that sort of thinking underpins not only our individual greed and apathy, but the callous self-interest that is promoted as sound national policy. We can cut down forests that act as the lungs of the earth, because the earth won’t stop breathing in our lifetime. We can shut the security gates of our nation and leave the destitute of the earth lying in the gutter outside with the dogs will licking their sores, because doing so secures our standard of living and keeps them where they belong, in the sweatshops making our designer label clothes and sports shoes. And whether we store up a surplus like the rich fool of another parable, or whether we spend it freely like the prodigal son, both approaches are grounded in the belief that it is all ours, and that all that life has to offer is to be purchased and consumed before our time runs out. And so we huddle behind our security gates and our razor ribbon perimeter fences and close our ears to the cry of the asylum seeker at the gate and the drugged-out kid in the gutter and all the other voices of Christ coming to us in the least and the broken. And big brother keeps crying out in terror, “Send someone back from the dead to tell them: there is a whole lot more to life than what you can milk it for. Invest in building a surplus of love and peace to last for eternity before it’s too late.”

As we gather here each Sunday to worship the God who holds eternity in the palm of a hand, one of the side effects that hopefully affects us is the reshaping of our worldview and the refocussing of our hearts.

Week by week as we gather, we remind ourselves that we come before God in solidarity with the poor at the gate and with all who bear the wounds of a broken world, and hopefully as we do so, we gain the courage to open the gates, not to pass food out, but to welcome our needy brothers and sisters in to join us at the table. Week by week we confess that we have pursued our desires at the expense of others, and, despairing of changing the world, neglected to change even ourselves. And as we hear the words of grace, the promise of forgiveness, we are offered the possibility of beginning to live by a new script, to claim God’s love and to love God in others; to choose to be made whole and in our wholeness to bring healing and hope to the broken world at our gates. We gather here to meet with and listen to the one who has been raised from the dead; the one who opens our minds to hear and understand the teachings of Moses and the prophets, and the apostles too. We gather here to learn to see the world and its peoples as they are seen by the Christ who stands and sees from both sides of death at once. And as we see the least and the broken as Christ sees them, we will see him in them, and even as we reach out to welcome him into our lives as a beloved neighbour, the glimpse of his presence will pass and we will welcome the needy as our neighbours and love them as Christ has loved us.

And in that moment when the truth of our lives and of the whole world is enacted so transparently, we hold out empty hands, as people who know they cannot provide for themselves what they really need and who would gladly gather even the crumbs from under his table, and into our anxious waiting hands is placed what seems like a mere fragment, little more than a crumb, and yet in the most wondrous mystery of all the universe we find that Christ has not tossed us a token morsel, but given us his very self in such abundance that twelve baskets could not hold the surplus. This is our faith, and this is the faith that our brother in Hades is warning us to flee to from the deadly snares of self-interest and callous greed. This is the faith that will save us from the fires of Hades, and will save the earth and its peoples from eating itself alive in a feeding frenzy of selfishness and vanity.

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