THE CHASM

            One of the early lessons a pastor learns is that no matter how convincing the tale, no matter how heartrending the story you should never hand out cash to the stranger looking for a handout.  As the well meaning council president in my first parish told me—it’ll just end up buying a bottle of beer, a lottery ticket or cigarettes.  But over the years I’ve managed to find a way around the “no cash” rule—the grocery store gift card.  When I’m met with a convincing enough case, it’s off to the HEB customer service counter to buy a fifteen twenty dollar gift card that the person can pick up at a designated time with the stipulation that it’s not to be used for contraband of any sort.  After all, it’s about helping, not enabling, isn’t it?  These days, we have to be prudent.  We want to help, but goodness knows we don’t want to be supporting anyone’s addictions. 

            If there ever anyone was deserving of a grocery voucher from HEB, it would be the poor, hungry beggar named Lazarus.  Granted we don’t get a lot of helpful information to help us decide whether he is worthy—what he did to get himself in this situation, his background, how many times he’d been through rehab and so on.  And yet his plight is moving to say the least, lying at the rich man’s gate, with only the neighborhood dogs to keep him company as they licked his festering wounds.

            On the other hand, there is the rich man, “dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.”  Like Lazarus, we don’t get a whole lot of information about this guy either, whether he ever actually saw Lazarus or not, just that he never deviated from his policy of giving directly to street people.  

            What we see here is a wide chasm, a gulf between the way Lazarus and the rich man live—one who lives in utter poverty and total misery and the other who resides in the proverbial “lap of luxury”.  And yet, there is nothing new to us about this kind of arrangement because we already know about life in a world of “haves” and “have nots” where some are “blessed” and the others “less fortunate”.  There are the Bill Gates and the children starving in Africa.  It’s just the way it is living in the world we do.  But according to the story, the real surprise comes in the world to come as we behold the ultimate fate of these two characters, in the great reversal that God has in store for both of them when the rich man is in misery and poor Lazarus is the one who is blessed.

            At the beginning of the story we see the real world that is the world as we know it to be, one of “haves” and “have nots” where the rich get richer and the poor, poorer.  And the reality is not just a matter of our imagination, but a fact born out in the world around us, in the world that we have created.  The last thirty or forty years have seen a tremendous widening of the income gap in which economic growth has, by and large benefited the most wealthy among us.  Earlier this week, I was listening to a report on NPR about the impending strike by GM workers.  The report noted that in spite of massive corporate losses in recent years, chief executives had received millions of dollars in bonuses and stock options. And I’m sure we can all share similar accounts of what we’ve heard and read that point to the fact that contrary to our optimistic projections, we live in neither a land nor a world of opportunity, but of economic gaps, gaps that continue to grow wider and wider. 

            During my time in Nicaragua this summer, I was all too aware of these gaps.  Manuel…$90 a month which by Nicaraguan standards is good pay!...By contrast, workers in Zona Francas, made perhaps $1 a day…Blood pressure medicine, Daniello…  Nicaraguan Rice 5x more expensive than US rice…Closer to home, I sensed something of a gap in the whole discussion around the city council’s anti solicitation ordinance that began heating up once again this past week…although couched as a “public safety” issue, to read the various blogs and bulletin boards, its nothing more than a case of “getting rid of ‘those people’, scum bags, losers, riff raff and so on.”

            But finally, there comes the disturbing conclusion of the story, in which we behold a very different world, one not of our making, but a world as God intends it to be, a world where everything as we know it to be is turned upside down. 

            So, there are two gaps to contend with—a distance fixed by us and the economic systems that for the most part benefit us, and then there is a distance fixed by the justice of God.  What then are we to make of the text, of the chasms before us?  The story makes clear that what happens in the hereafter is fixed not by market factors, but the judgment of God and there’s nothing that can change it.   Which leads us to consider the gap in the world we know today, a world where a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, a world that where there is enough food to feed everyone but not enough will to do so.  Is this gap permanent and fixed?  Are we as Karl Marx and Joseph Engels concluded simply pawns in a game of economic determinism or is there still time to change? 

            There’s no question that as the tormented rich man looks across the wide expanse between himself and Lazarus, the gate is closed, but here in the present it’s a different story.  Despite the pull of market forces, the sway of economic realities, the power of the status quo, in this world the way is still open between the rich man and Lazarus, between us and the poor in far away corners of the world, on street corners, in wooded hideaways, in neighborhoods just a few miles away from us today.  

In the story, Abraham speaks of Moses and the prophets.  “They (that is the rich man’s five brothers) should listen to them.”  One of those prophets, Amos whose message we’ve heard the past couple of weeks has this to say, “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice at the gate; and it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious.”  The call to us, to you and to me today is a call to repentance, to turn away from all that separates us not only from God, but from our neighbor, not just the people who live on either side of us, who we work or go to school with, who look like us, talk like us and share more or less the same rung on the socio economic ladder, but the poor who are always with us, the poor whose backs have for too long borne the weight of our prosperity.  Such repentance has implications for how we live our lives, in the choices we make from the kind of food we eat to the clothes we wear to the words we speak to the way we view others. 

Who is it that lies outside the gate today?  May our eyes be opened to see, our hearts opened to move us, our hands opened to give that the Lord may show us all His abundant mercy.  Amen.

                             

Pastor Brian Peterson