Rich Han - Poor Man

luke 16:19—31

June 20, 1971

John I. Buchanan

Observers and analysts of American culture are saying that we are in the middle
of a process of change, far-reaching in nature and radical in significance.
Young people init the vanguard of the process; as usual, they are on the cut—
ting edge. And before we dismiss what they are doing and saying to us, we
need only recall that a few brief years ago we were muttering under our cor—
porate breath about long hair, side~burns, wide ties, and have since gradually
adopted the same while the young move on out to another frontier. In any case
two separate, but related, phenomena of youth culture are intriguing in that
from them we can learn a little about where the process of change is taking us.

First, it now appears to be indisputable fact that college students and
recent college graduates are concerned less about making money and concerned
more about doing something personally rewarding with their lives. That's a
recent but significant alteration in the fundamental ground rules of coming of
age in America. Not long ago ~ just a decade ~ the commonly accepted goals
were to go to college, to get a degree, to get a good job, to enter the con—
sumer oriented paradise of middle America. But today, survey after survey,
reveals that the young aren't buying it any more. More and more students are |
looking for viable alternatives such as volumtary service: young attorney's
are involved in legal aid societies: young physicians are starting community
health clinics: and even the President's new son-in-law did a stint with
Nader's Riiders.

Now, there is a sense in which the young are free to move in this direc—
tion as a result of their parent's hara work and sacrifice. There is a very
Teal sense in which parents goals get rejected because the children have
never known a time when those goals were dreams instead of everyday reality.
And yet change is afoot. There is more to life than riches, and a whole new

generation of people is in the process of ereating life-styles built on that

premise.

The second phenomena in youth culture is a significant revival of interest
in religion. The range is wide, all the way from Hastern mysticism to tho
fundamentalism of Youth for Christ. The cover article in this week's issue
of Time magazine analyzed the phenomenom and concluded that it is real, that
it is far more than a fad, that it means a new day for the Gospel of Jesus
Christ in the Church - if we are open to newness and change, or outside the
Church if we persist in ignoring it.

The characteristics of this new interest in orthodox Christianity sound
as if they were taken directly from the New Testament, Jesus Christ is regarded
as savior and lives are changed by the transforming power of God. The style
is open and straight forward and honest. The approach is totally personal.
Converts embrace one another, and express their newly found commmity in
Christian communes, drug rehabilitation centers. One leader of the movement
was quoted in Time, “I'm amazed at how many people I've counseled who have
never heard their fathers say 'I love you'",

iow, put the two together, and what I hear the kids saying is that life
ig too brief to be wasted in the persuit of affluence alone: that true joy,
or salvation, is to be found in deep relationship with other people ~ in open-
ness to everybody; and that the way to this new, incredible joy, is Jesus
Christ.

That is, I hear the same message from these two components of youth culture
that I hear in our disturbing New Testament lesson this morning. ~-

Rich man — poor man, a hackneyed, well-worn theme if there ever was one,
with shades of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchett, And yet, in this version
of the old story there are some uncomfortable revelations about you and me,
and the effect - in the words of one commentator ~— “leaves us unmasked and
defenseless." [Buttrick - The Parables of Jesus, p- 137]

The first part of the parable is a simple tableau. There are two

characters, a rich man and Lazarus, a poor man. The rich man is dressed in
costly purple and fine linen. Iwvery day he eats extravagantly. ind every

day, to the gates of his estate comes Lazarus, hungry, filthy, half clothed
with rags, followed by a pack of dogs. Lazarus comes every. day, we can assume,
because he is the beneficiary of the rich man's garbage, the main part of
which would have been those soraps of rough bread the wealthy used for napkins.
It is not a pretty tableau.

The second part of the parable takes place when the two men have died.
The rich man is in torment, the poor man is in bliss, symbolized by the bosom
of Abraham. 4 dialogue occurs. ‘The rich man requests a drop of water to cool
his tongue. Abraham refuses. There is a gulf between the two. .

Pinally the rich man requests that Lazarus be dispatched to warn his
brothers of their fate. This request, too, is denicd,

Now, for some observations. We are dealing with a parable — and the
biggest trouble with parables is that people try to make them say too much,
This is not a Rand McNally road map of etermal life. We are dealing here with
symbols, not literal fact.

The meaning of the story is to be found somewhere in the rich man's
predicament. The job of interpreting would be a lot simpler if there were
some sugtestion that he had been a bad man: that he had accumulated his
wealth by stealing and oppressing, or that he spat on Lazarus as he walked
by everyday, or that he ordered his servants to drive Lasarus away. But there
is no intimation that the rich man had done anything wrong. In fact, the
daily presence of Lazarus at his gate leads me to conclude that the rich man
fed Lazarus, perhaps sending more than the daily accuntulation of scraps and
garbage on occasion. Lazarus,came because he knew he would get food.

And so on the surface it looks as if the point of the parable is simply
that incquities in life will be remedied in the after life, which is very good

news to the poor, and very bad news to everyone here.

Me
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I think the point of the parable, poveree; is a little deeper than that.
I think the rich man's guilt was not in his riches. I think his sin was that f
he never really saw Lazarus. He passed him daily, to be sure. But to him
Lazarus was a social problem, a statistic, an unpleasant interuption who could
be dealt with by way of a few greasy left-overs. I think his sin was that the
relationship he chose to establish with this poor man was on the basis of
benevolent hand-outs, and that the effect of the relationship was, one- to
make him feel good and kind and charitable, and two — to totally strip Lazarus
of his dignity and worth and personhood.

I think there is a clear word here for us as individuals, and together ~
as the Church of Jesus Christ. As I was thinking about this sermon Friday
morning at eight o'clock, over a second cup of coffee, I received a telephone
call from the Department of Public Welfare. I am on the Board of Trustees
and a welfare recipient had sent me a letter - which I asked the director to
read over the phone. I shouldn't have. The writer was an 81 year old recipient
of Old Age Relief whose allotment was cut recently because of an increase in
Social Security Benefits. The writing and spelling and grammar were atrocious =
but the gist of the letter was quite clear, Here was a lonely, forgotten old
man who mattered to no one, and whose ability to survive depended on the
greasy scraps of breat .oled out by the State of Indiana. But his letter
transformed him from a statistic to a person - who had addressed me as a
person. In fact his letter stated - quite personally — that he needed to eat
just as badly as I do. ‘hat do you do with that? Forget it? Look the other
way? Return the old man to the proper manila folder? Suggest that he hire
an attorney and make a formal appeal? Or take a basket of food? You see,
the problem is that none of these gets the job done - and we are now stuck
with a person on our conscience.

It's a continuing kind of problem in our society. We're busy, hurried,

tending to our own vineyards. We don't have the time or the resources to

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golve the world's problems; we have plenty of our owt. In fact, we have what
the sociologists are beginning to call “compassion fatigue". Through the
mass media we are exposed to more tragedy and suffering than our sense can
assimilate. If My Lai had happened in World War II we might have read about
it in the history books. But this time around we were treated to a color
picture of a wounded nine year old shattering tie body of his six year old
brother moments before they were both shot. A cholera epidemic might be
reported in medical journals but today you can turn to page 25 of Time maga-~
gine and see a picture entitled ‘Mother watching her child die of Cholera.*

And so our senses rebel and refuse to record what we see. Our defenses

go up and we shut it out ~ in the same way that the rich man found a way

gracefully to walk by Lazarus every day. And the way we are able to accomplish
it is by jamming everybody into a category, into the suis anonymity of statistics:
epidemic victim: war casulty: welfare recipient. We can handle that,

The word here to us as individuals is quite simple and quite clear. Some-
one in our impersenal world had to remember that statistics are people. That
the weekly body count in Southeast Asia ultimately is reduced to one dead
individual and a widow and fatherless children. Someone has to bear the scorn
of society\s “realists” who can't be bothered with bleeding hearts. Someone
has to remember that we are brothers, that individuals matter, the people are
the only sacred entities in our common life ~ not the flag: not the Church:
not our ingti tutions — but people. The alternative is hell — the kind of
hell in which my aged friend already lives: . the hell of eiet Nam — the hell
of the ghetto. The hell of which you and I are already a part.

There is a word here for us as Church, as corporate entity which has
identity and life in the world. The Church through history has done more to
alleviate human suffering than all the other service agencies and organizations
put together. We don't want to forget that. But we do need to remember that
as society becomes more complex the Church's responsibility must become more

sophisticated. That is to say, the Thanksgiving Basket approach to the