Luke 16:19-31
Lectionary 26 in Ordinary Time 19th Sunday after Pentecost September 25, 2016
I have a friend named Jane who collects prints and figurines of roosters. When she told me she does this, I thought how hard they would be to find. I had not seen any anywhere. Well, maybe one or two. But once they were brought to my attention, I started noticing roosters. Do you know how many there are once you can see them? (This is going to be like a song stuck in your head. Now you, too, will start seeing them everywhere! Please don’t report back to me where you have seen them. I do not collect roosters. I don’t collect anything. Except cookies. And chocolate.)
We are like that, aren’t we? We tend not to see things that are right in front of us—roosters, car keys, eyeglasses, people. Have you ever brushed by a person who is obviously poor, maybe even someone holding a cardboard sign that says something like “Looking for work?” Maybe you’ve barely glanced at someone with a disability or a person with an obvious mental illness.
Have you yourself ever felt invisible? Do you remember a time when you were not heard? I will always remember an incident from when I was working at a manufacturing company in rural Alabama in the accounting department. One of the shop supervisors was not giving me information that I needed. I explained to him the purpose and requirements for the report I was compiling, and asked him to provide me with the figures I needed. He turned to me and said, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.” I suppose I could have felt flattered by being called pretty, but I didn’t. I felt dismissed. This supervisor did not see me as a competent professional.
In a recent article, Lori Lakin Hutcherson, the founder and editor-in-chief of Good Black News, responded to a question about white privilege.[1] She explains that the racial tensions we are seeing today come from, and I quote, “the lifetime of pretty much every black or brown person living in America today regardless of wealth or opportunity.”[2]
Some of the incidents that Hutcherson describes are subtle, like her recounting her college acceptance to Harvard. When she told people that’s where she was going, they look at her in disbelief, and asked, “You mean the one in Massachusetts?” It was a different response than the white male friend of hers got when he said he was going to Princeton. You may have seen a video of an incident in which a white woman in a grocery store paid for her food with a check, no questions asked. When the next-in-line black woman paid with a check, she was asked to show identification.
Do we notice these kinds of things? Maybe we even do them without recognizing we are? Every time things like this happen, every time that we fail to see people as mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and neighbors, every time we do not recognize the value in people, the chasm between us broadens and deepens.
The chasm between Lazarus and the rich man had begun long before our story begins. The rich man never saw Lazarus as a person with needs and wants. He certainly did not see him as deserving any human dignity. There was Lazarus, covered in sores, and the rich man covered in the finest clothes. Lazarus ate scraps from the table. The rich man “feasted sumptuously every day.” The rich man probably died of a heart attack. When Lazarus died first, it was only time he was first at anything. Even in death, the rich man, not even speaking directly to Lazarus, wanted him to serve him. He maintained his attitude of privilege, and failed to see Lazarus as his equal. The rich man failed to see the injustice.
This reminds me of Senator Elizabeth Warren grilling the CEO of Wells Fargo about allegations that Wells Fargo established quotas for new accounts, and then opened accounts without customers’ permission. The CEO, who I will not name, as the rich man in our parable was not named, earned a salary of 19.3 million dollars and increased the value of his stock in the company by 200 million dollars.
Warren pushed the CEO for accountability. She charged, “’OK, so you haven’t resigned. You haven’t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings. You haven’t fired a single senior executive. Instead, evidently, your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don’t have the money for a fancy P.R. firm to defend themselves.’”[3] This CEO plummeted into his chasm without an ounce of remorse, just like the rich man in our parable.
The problem with the rich man in our story was not that he was rich. Money isn’t the problem. It is, as Timothy says, the love of money. It is valuing something so much that you step over people to get it. It is not always money. It may be our ego, our intellect, our reputation, or something else, that causes us to mis-order our relationships.
There have been times in each of our lives where we have been the object of someone’s impaired vision, and times when we are the ones who have failed to see. God brought his friend Lazarus back to life, changed the heart of a tax collector, and blessed a young peasant girl to be the mother of our Messiah. God has promises us that the blind will see, and the last will be first. Jesus gave his life for those promises.
We, the blind and the broken, gather around the Lord’s table where we will feast on bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ. There we are forgiven and loved, that we may go out into the world to see others as Jesus does. When we go, we will see people, poor, lonely, and grieving. We will see the underdogs. And the roosters.
~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-i-said-when-my-white-friend-asked-for-my-black_us_578c0770e4b0b107a2415b89? Accessed September 15, 2016.
[2] Ibid.
[3] http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elizabeth-warren-laid-the-smackdown-on-wells-fargo-ceo/ar-BBwpZ1t accessed September 16, 2016.
[i] This is a parable that follows the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the Prodigal, and immediately after the parable of the dishonest manager. This parable is introduced by Luke saying, “The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, (the previous parables), and they ridiculed [Jesus]. So he said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.” [Luke 16:14-15].
The idea of the dead returning to visit the living was common in the ancient world. This parable is not intended to be a systematic theology or teaching about the afterlife.