Sermon: The Chasms Between Us

Delivered at Zoar United Methodist Church in Greer, South Carolina on September 25, 2016

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The Chasms Between Us

Audio Version

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.  And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores.  The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.  The rich man also died and was buried.  In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side.  He called out, "Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames."  But Abraham said, "Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.  Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us."  He said, "Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house – for I have five brothers – that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment."  Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them."  He said, "No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent."  He said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."

Luke 16:19-31 (NRSV)

All I really want to do is to fall into

The emptiness that is

The space in between us

Erase it and bring us together again

From "The Space In Between Us" by Building 429

Jesus has just taught the Disciples that one person cannot serve two masters and that one must instead choose which master he or she will serve.  Specifically, He has said that one cannot serve both God and money.  The Pharisees, who have been among Jesus' most vocal critics, overheard what He has said, and they scoff at Him because they tend to be rather well-to-do.¹  Jesus then tells them a story about a man they would have considered quite successful.  This man is not given a name, though some people refer to him as Dives, the Latin word for rich.  This rich man wore purple robes made of fine linen, the type of expensive garments worn by the priests, and every day he feasted on expensive, exotic dishes.²

At the gate to the rich man's house, there lived another man, a poor beggar, who happens to be the only character from any of Jesus' parables who is ever given a name.  His name Lazarus is a Latinized form of the Hebrew name Eleazar, which means "God is my help."  Lazarus was covered not with elegant clothing, but with open sores that attracted unwanted attention from dogs.  To further illustrate the disparity between Lazarus's poverty and the rich man's opulence, Jesus says that Lazarus longed to eat what fell from the rich man's table.  In an age before knives and forks, people ate with their hands, and wealthy people would wipe their hands on pieces of bread, as we might wipe our hands on paper napkins nowadays.  This discarded bread is the the type of food Lazarus dreamed of eating.³

Both men die, and, in the afterlife, they both experience a reversal of fortunes.  Lazarus is escorted by angels to Heaven where meets Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people.  The rich man, on the other hand, descends into Hell, where he is licked by flames.  He looks up and sees Abraham with Lazarus by his side, and he calls out, "Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames."  Abraham replies that between them there is a great chasm nobody can cross.  The formerly rich man then says, "Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house – for I have five brothers – that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment."  Abraham replies that, if his brothers wouldn't heed the words of Moses and the prophets, they would not listen to a person who came back from the dead.

Typically when we imagine the inhabitants of Hell, we envision people who are writhing in flames, crying out in agony, and begging God for forgiveness, but this is not exactly what we see in Jesus' parable.  Rob Bell, in his controversial book Love Wins, makes the observation that the formerly rich man is not changed by his stay in Hell.  Consider the requests he makes of Abraham and Lazarus.  He's hot and thirsty, so he wants Lazarus to come to him and drip water into his mouth.  He's worried about his family, so he wants Lazarus to go to them and warn them not to make the same mistakes he made.  The rich man might have become the beggar, but he has not changed the way he views Lazarus, as evidenced by the fact that he wants Lazarus to go out and run his errands for him.  He wants Lazarus to serve him, proving that he still believes he is superior to Lazarus.⁴  He doesn't even speak to Lazarus directly; instead, he asks Abraham to tell Lazarus what to do.  The formerly rich man might have acknowledged that he made some mistakes to land him in Hell, but, even in the fires of Hell, he has managed to hold on to his arrogance.

That said, I ask, is the "great chasm" separating the rich man from Lazarus some metaphysical boundary between Heaven and Hell, or is it perhaps, as Rob Bell suggests, something within the rich man's heart?⁵  Even in Hell, the formerly rich man displays a lack of repentance.  In the New Testament, the Greek word translated into English as repentance is metanoia, which is literally defined as a change of mind.  It is used to describe a change of heart and mind that results in a change of behavior.⁶  The formerly rich man will not change his mind in regards to how he views Lazarus, and the hardness of his heart has left him trapped.  C.S. Lewis writes,
I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors to hell are locked on the inside...  They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.⁷

Lewis illustrates this idea quite vividly in his book The Great Divorce.  In this fantastical novel, Hell is depicted not as a lake of fire, but as a dank, dingy, drizzly town.  Every resident insists on having his or her own way, so people are unable to live in harmony with one another.  As a result, the city continues to expand as people move further and further outward to get away from each other.  A number of residents of Hell find their way to a bus station and take a flying bus ride to Heaven.  They are all more than welcome to stay in Heaven; in fact, they are all met by people they knew during their lives on Earth who actually beg them to stay.  Because they are accustomed to delusions and not to reality, they find Heaven uninhabitable.  Instead of staying and growing accustomed to the environment, a majority of the visitors, of their own free will, get back on the bus for the return trip to Hell.

Ultimately, any visitor who wants to stay in Heaven must surrender whatever it is that would keep him in his own personal Hell, but few in the story actually do so.  One man will not give up his belief that he deserves to be in Heaven more than a reformed murderer; another will not give up his cynicism; and one domineering wife will not give up her desire to control her husband.  In other words, they will not repent of their destructive ways.  At one point in the story, the protagonist meets his intellectual hero, who says to him,
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done."  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.  No soul that seriously and consistently desires joy will ever miss it.  Those who seek find.  To those who knock it is opened.⁸

Typically we assume that the rich man ended up in Hell because of his indifference toward Lazarus.  If we take into account the overarching narrative of Scripture, we might see that something else is going on in this parable.  At the very beginning of the Bible, we read that God created the world and all the creatures that dwell therein and saw that everything was very good.  A few chapters later, we see that everything fell apart when sin was introduced into the world.  The world was broken; humanity was fractured; and human beings were estranged from their Creator.  Throughout the rest of the Bible, we read of God's efforts to put it all back together again, first through the priestly kingdom of Israel, next through Jesus, and lastly through the Church, the followers of Jesus who carry on His ministry.⁹

The story finds its climax, of course, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  St. Paul includes in his letter to the Colossians what is thought by some to be an early Christian hymn.  This hymn proclaims that in Jesus Christ – "the image of the invisible God" and "the firstborn of all creation" – "the fullness of God was pleased to dwell" and that through Christ "God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things."¹⁰  The Greek word translated into English as reconcile is apokatallassō which means to "bring back a former state of harmony."¹¹  In Christ, God is working to restore what sin has broken.

God's work of reconciling all things is a recurring theme throughout St. Paul's letters.  Paul writes, in his letter to the Romans, that God's work of reconciliation had begun "while we still were sinners" or "enemies" of God.¹²  In his letter to the Ephesians, he writes that Christ "has broken down the dividing wall" of hostility between the Jews and the Gentiles "that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace."¹³  In another letter, Paul encourages his friend Philemon to welcome home his runaway slave Onesimus, not as a slave, but as "a beloved brother" in Christ.¹⁴  Paul writes most strikingly in his letter to the Galatians, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."¹⁵

God's work of reconciling all things to God's self through Jesus Christ has profound implications for our relationships with other people.  Imagine that people all around the world are moving toward a single fixed point. As they move closer and closer to that point, they are all, by necessity, moving closer and closer to each other.  In the same way, if we are all being reconciled to God, then we are all being reconciled to one another as well.  If being reconciled to God means being reconciled to one another, then, if we intentionally drive a wedge between ourselves and other people, we will also separate ourselves from God.  The things that alienate us from each other are things that alienate us from God.

Consider all of the biblical examples of ways in which one's relationship with God is directly connected to one's relationships with other people.  When one religious scholar asked Jesus which commandment in the Jewish Law was the most important, Jesus told him that the most important commandment is to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength.  He went on to say that the second most important is to love one's neighbor as oneself.¹⁶  I do not think that Jesus offered the scholar the second greatest commandment merely as a bonus: I think that Jesus had no choice but to give him both commandments because they are inextricably linked.  Similarly, St. John writes that anyone who claims to love God but hates a brother or sister is a liar.¹⁷  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that God will forgive our sins only if we forgive other people's sins against us.¹⁸  In one parable, Jesus says that we will ultimately be judged by how we treat "the least of these" – the the hungry and thirsty, the immigrant, the destitute, the sick, and the imprisoned.  What we do for them, we do for Jesus, and, what we fail to do for them, we fail to do for Jesus.¹⁹

In Jesus' day, the Pharisees were regarded as the good, salt-of-the-earth, religious folk, and they prided themselves on this fact.  They loved money because, to them, it was a sign of God's blessing upon them and thus another outward proof of their own righteousness.²⁰  This only created further animosity between the Pharisees and other people.  N.T. Wright points out that the Pharisees treated the tax collectors, prostitutes, and other outcasts Jesus befriended in the same way that the rich man treated Lazarus in Jesus' parable.²¹  To the Pharisees, there were the righteous and the unrighteous, the successful and the unsuccessful, the blessed and the wretched.  What if Paul had also said that, in Christ, there is no rich or poor?  What if money was not something by which to separate the haves from the have nots, but rather a means by which the haves could be God's blessing to the have nots, thereby closing the gap between the two?

In Jesus' parable, the rich man would have passed by Lazarus every day, but he was so absorbed in his own decadent lifestyle that he never reached out Lazarus to help him.  Perhaps the great chasm was fixed in place, separating the rich man from Lazarus and ultimately from God, because he had kept open the very type of fracture God has been working to close.  He was left to suffer alone because he refused to be reconciled to Lazarus: he would not look upon the beggar as a brother.  If the rich man had truly learned to love his neighbor as he loved himself, the desire to reach out to Lazarus and show him mercy would have naturally followed.

The divide between the haves and the have nots is not the only "great chasm" in our world today.  There are many chasms of bitterness, pettiness, injustice, arrogance, bigotry, fear, and hatred that separate people from each other.  These chasms form along boundaries of skin color, ethnicity, gender, religion, ideology, and socioeconomic status or along any line we draw in the sand.  Our first impulse is often to point our fingers at the people on the other side of the chasm, but playing the blame game only makes the rift even wider.  Consider all of the turmoil that exists in our society today because people are unwilling to simply listen to each other.  We must be willing to put our differences aside and reach across the chasm with open arms, open ears, and open hearts.

There is an old story about a man who had the chance to visit both Heaven and Hell.  He first visits Hell where he sees a sumptuous banquet.  He sees tables covered with food, but when he looks at the people gathered at the tables, he notices that they are all skin and bones.  He takes a closer look at the people and discovers that wooden splints are preventing them from bending their elbows.  They are all wasting away because they cannot feed themselves.  The man then visits Heaven where he sees a similar banquet.  He notices that the people in Heaven also have splints on their arms, but, unlike the people in Hell, they are all healthy and happy.  The man wonders why the people in Heaven are faring better than the people in Hell, until he sees one person reach across the table to feed the person across from her.  Like the people in Hell, the people in Heaven are helpless to feed themselves; however, they realize that they are still perfectly capable of feeding each other.  The traveler returns to the banquet in Hell and tells one starving person that, if he feeds the person across from him, the other person will return the favor.  The emaciated person barks back, "I'd rather die than feed that lowlife!"²²

If the "great chasm" isolating the rich man in Jesus' parable is indeed something in his heart, would he be able to join Lazarus in Heaven if he only learned to love Lazarus as he loved himself?  To be honest, I have no idea, for Jesus does not go into such detail.  The purpose of this parable is probably not to let us know what happens to people in the hereafter, but rather to teach us something important about living with each other in the here and now.  Nobody has any hard evidence regarding what happens to our souls when we die, so we can only speculate on the matter.  What I do know is that the time to make the changes we know we need to make is not after we die.  It is not when we are on our deathbeds.  It is not on New Year's Day.  It is not the day after tomorrow.  The time to repent and be changed is right now, for the present moment is all we really know we have.  If we are unwilling to change in the present, then why should we think that we will change at some indeterminate point in the future?

As followers of Jesus Christ, we know that love is our top priority.  Jesus teaches us that it is not enough to love our friends and family: we must learn to love our enemies as well.²³  In Christ, God is working to reconcile all things to God's self, so we must learn to see our enemies for who they really are, as estranged family members.  May God give us the willingness to close the gaps between ourselves and others.

Amen.

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

~ St. Francis of Assisi

Notes:

1. Luke 6:13-14
2. William Barclay.  The New Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of Luke.  2001, Westminster John Knox Press.  p. 253
3. Barclay, pp. 253-254
4. Rob Bell.  Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.  2001, Harper One.  p. 75
5. ibid.
6. Wikipedia: Metanoia (theology)
7. C.S. Lewis.  The Problem of Pain.  ch. 8
8. C.S. Lewis.  The Great Divorce.  The quote is from chapter 9.
9. N.T. Wright summarizes the overarching narrative of the Bible in this way in his article "How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?"
10. Colossians 1:15-20 (NRSV)
11. Blue Letter Bible: apokatallassō
12. Romans 5:8-11 (NRSV)
13. Ephesians 2:11-16 (NRSV)
14. Philemon 1:10-16 (NRSV)
15. Galatians 3:28 (NRSV)
16. Mark 12:28-31
17. 1 John 4:20
18. Matthew 6:14-15
19. Matthew 25:31-46
20. Barclay, p. 250
21. N.T. Wright.  Luke for Everyone.  2004, Westminster John Knox Press.  pp. 201
22. Wikipedia: Allegory of the long spoons
23. Matthew 5:43-48

The painting of Lazarus was painted by Fyodor Bronnikov in 1886.