A sermon on Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 & Luke 16:19-31 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

A few days ago, at the United Nations General Assembly, the President of the United States of America told the nations of Europe that they should follow his lead and “end the failed experiment of open borders”. Describing Europe as being overrun with dangerous immigrants, he said, “You have to end it now. I can tell you, I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

There is a ready audience for such harsh rhetoric. As much as he’s speaking to the United Nations, the President is always preaching to his base, to the MAGA crowds whose ongoing support needs to be constantly cultivated. But support for these ideas is certainly not confined to the USA. We in Australia certainly can’t point the finger, because we introduced offshore detention for asylum seekers even before the USA. When our then Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, explained the idea to Donald Trump, the President is reported to have said, “That’s great. We should do that here. You guys are even worse than me!”

There are already significant anti-immigration movements in many European countries, and here in Australia just a few weeks ago, thousands of people took to the streets demanding an end to mass migration, most of them unaware that those rallies were initiated and organised by neo-nazi groups. Such views have plenty of mainstream traction too. Andrew Hastie, who is seen by many as the next leader of the federal Liberal party, has also been stoking fears that Australia is losing its culture and identity by letting in too many immigrants.

The US President knows that he can mine a rich vein of fear and resentment when it comes to immigrants, and we can generally rely on him to voice these things in the most stark and unpolished terms. But timing can sometimes be an extraordinary thing, and I’m quite sure that the President did not realise, as he urged nations to close their borders or end up in hell, that this Sunday millions of churches around the world would be hearing Jesus tell a story of a rich man who closed his gates to keep out the poor and ended up in hell himself.

Before I unpack this parable further, let me comment on two common mistakes you should avoid as you read it. Firstly, do not read it as evidence for the existence of hell or for descriptions of what hell is like or who ends up there. If Jesus had said, “Two Irishmen arrived at the Pearly Gates …”, you would not take it as evidence of the literal existence of a set of pearly gates. You would recognise that he was simply employing a familiar image from jokes and folk stories, and working it into his message. This is the same. It is a parable, not an underworld geography lesson. Jesus borrowed this already familiar story, and put his own spin on it.

Secondly, don’t mistakenly think you are supposed to identify yourself with either the rich man or Lazarus in this story. Jesus is inviting you to identify yourself with the rich man’s siblings to whom the man is desperately trying to send a warning from the fires of Hades. The question Jesus wants you to ask yourself is whether you will just follow your rich brother’s gate-closing example, or whether you will instead listen to Moses and the prophets, or be convinced even by someone rising from the dead. The US President has given his current answer to that question this week. May God have mercy on him and change his heart.

So with those two errors out of the way, where do we go with this? I want to try to join the dots between a number of things, and as I join those dots, I’m hoping that a picture will emerge about how we face the future with hope and grace, without sticking our heads in the sand about the looming threats.

Let me start with the dots I’ve already joined: the parable Jesus tells, and the US President’s speech to the United Nations. Obviously there is a difference there in that Jesus talks about an individual with a closed-gate policy, and the President is talking about nations. It’s on a completely different scale. But elsewhere, Jesus scales up the point he is making here to the international level. The message of this parable can be found scaled up in Matthew 25 where Jesus describes a judgement of the nations on the basis of how they treated the least of these. “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.”

This is important because, as much as Jesus wants to change the heart of each individual, he also wants to see God’s kingdom of compassion come on earth as in heaven, and unfortunately one or two billionaires opening their gates and sharing their billions is not going to change much. Large scale change will have to come at the national and global level. If it were Jesus addressing the United Nations, the message would have been different.

But the version we heard tonight from Luke’s gospel reminds us that the individual level is important too. We might not be able to do much, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything.

To join another couple of dots, let me jump across to our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah. As I’ve mentioned a few times in recent weeks, Jeremiah’s preaching was warning the people of Judah that as a result of their rejection of God’s ways, they were now sitting ducks for the advancing imperial army of Babylon. In tonight’s extract, we pick up the story when the disaster is right at their gates. Jerusalem is under siege by the Babylonian army, and Jeremiah is in prison in the heart of the city for having predicted it. Talk about locked gates! Jeremiah is behind locked prison gates inside the locked city gates with a powerful besieging army outside. He knows there is no escape for himself, or for his nation.

And yet, in this story, when a relative comes and invites Jeremiah to buy a block of land, Jeremiah goes ahead and buys it. In the circumstances, that’s a bit like an imprisoned Palestinian being offered an apartment tower in Gaza at full price today. Why would you buy real estate that is currently being destroyed and taken over by an invading army?

But Jeremiah sees purchasing the block of land as a witness of faith and hope in a worthwhile future. There will be a life worth living beyond this crisis, and Jeremiah is willing to invest in that hope. And to join some dots, our other readings spoke about investing in the future too. The Apostle Paul told Timothy to urge wealthy Christians to share generously in order to “store up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future” (1 Timothy 6:18-19). And in the parable we began with, Jesus describes the rich man in Hades trying to get a message to his siblings in order to secure their future from the fate that has caught up with him.

Another dot to join. Some of you will have read the article I circulated about the Australian guy who is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, studying past civilisational collapses and what they can tell us about the future. How many of us always wanted to do that when we grew up?! Anyway, things like the collapse of Judah in Jeremiah’s time are exactly what this guy studies, but as you will have seen if you read it, when he applies that learning to looking at the future, he is talking about not only social and political collapse, but the ecological collapse that climate change is threatening to produce. And like Jeremiah, he urges us to invest in a good future rather than succumb to despair and apathy.

But interestingly – and this is where the dots really join up – his research suggests that “societies that were more robust, inclusive, and equal tended to cope better” with external threats like major climate changes. Societies with massive wealth inequality and economic exploitation tend to be more fragile and collapse from within. And given that our world so closely mirrors the extreme inequality of this parable of poor Lazarus lying outside the gate of the rich man, that research suggests that it is no surprise that we are facing political and social collapse and that we seem completely incapable of transcending our differences in order to cooperate on tackling threats like global warming.

So if, like the rich man’s siblings, we are being urged to listen to Moses and the prophets, and to the one who rose from the dead, and like Jeremiah, to imagine and invest in the future, even as everything seems to be collapsing around us, what might that look like?

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus is clearly warning us what path not to take. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, many of us get stuck in a place where the only vision of the future we can get our heads around is surviving as prosperously as possible for as long as possible, and then passing on our inheritance to help our offspring do the same. And if surviving is the extent of our imagining of a future, then building walls and locking the gates to keep out anyone who might want a share of our wealth makes perfect sense.

Already, the masses trying to migrate to wealthy places like Australia, America, and Europe include many people fleeing violence, poverty and oppression, and before long they will be joined by those fleeing places that are becoming uninhabitable due to climate catastrophe. Will we answer the call of the US President to seal our borders and leave them lying at our gates while we “drill baby drill” to pay for our extra air conditioning, or will we answer the call of Moses and the prophets and the apostles and the one who rose from the dead, to be generous and ready to share whatever we have, even when there might not be enough to go around.

I acknowledged before that one or two billionaires opening their gates and sharing everything won’t solve global poverty, so you and I sharing our modest resources is going to solve even less. But none of us is individually called to save the world. We are simply called to show the love and compassion of God in our little contexts, and pray that God might multiply the loaves and fishes of our contributions.

As we contemplate how to invest in the future and make our contribution to it, it is important to recognise that there is a difference between positivity that amounts to little more than a head-in-the-sand denial of reality, and positivity that looks reality in the face and responds by planting flowers in the cracks. Jeremiah didn’t buy the land because he was pretending that the Babylonians would just go away. Instead he was imagining his way into the hope of a distant future, and doing things that would bear witness to that hope in the here and now.

For us, the future might look quite quite dystopian, but like Jeremiah, that doesn’t mean that we can’t imagine and invest in beauty and love and compassion. And it doesn’t mean that we can’t invest in people. The call to the rich man’s siblings was to see the poor at their gates and to humanise them. The rich man in the story was no doubt aware of Lazarus – he had to step over him every time he went out. But he didn’t really “see” him, see him as human, see him as someone of dignity and worth. Even in the most dystopian of futures, we can invest in seeing one another’s humanity and responding with love and compassion.

If we are among the lucky few who do not have to flee in search of refuge, then we will be among those who have to choose between offering refuge and refusing refuge, slamming the gates. The question will be, what kind of world do we want to contribute to, to invest in. Because as the rich man in the parable found, the kind of world you create may turn out to be the kind of world you have to live in. If you would hope that gates would open for you if and when you need them, then begin now by being a community that models the opening of gates and offering welcome and refuge to someone lying outside.

One open gate won’t save the world, but it will be a sign of hope, a sign of promise, a sign that we still believe in the possibility of a future that is infinitely more beautiful than the hell we have created for ourselves up until now. It is a future that is not measured in size or longevity, but in the quality of relationships, the depths of mercy, the richness of love and compassion. It is a future that is not dependent on social and political infrastructure, but on a willingness to humanise one another, to invest heavily in reaching out across tribal boundaries with grace and generosity.

This is where true hope for the future lies, and it begins with opening the gates.