How to Be Rich [Sermon]
There was a television show in the 1970’s called “All in the Family.” The family in this case was Archie Bunker, played by Carrol O’Connor, his wife Edith, played by Jean Stapleton, his daughter, Gloria, played by Sally Struthers, and her boyfriend and later husband, Michael Stivic, played by Rob Reiner, who you may know from This Is Spinal Tap and the new Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
For a time, neighbors of the white Bunker family were George and Louise Jefferson, a Black couple played by Sherman Helmsley and Isabel Sanford, and their son Lionel, played by Mike Evans.
Archie, sometimes called a “lovable bigot,” was a generally decent person who had prejudices about people different than he is. Those prejudices affected his relationships with his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and his Black neighbors.
Let’s go to God in prayer.
God of wisdom, may the words that I speak, and the ways they are received by each of our hearts and minds, to help us to continue to grow into the people, and the church, that you have dreamed us to be.
Amen.
In our Gospel reading from Luke 16, the rich man is being tormented in Hades.
It may be helpful to remember that Hades is the name of the Greek god of the dead and riches, and that in Greek mythology the underworld was also called by the name of Hades. That’s not surprising as the Gospels were written in Greek, with the possible exception of Matthew.
So the wealthy man ends up not only in the place of the dead, but the place of riches.
He sees Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. And he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to bring a bit of water to cool his tongue.
The thing I’m noticing this time is that he is asking for Lazarus, who was begging at his gate in life, to serve him now in death. Even in death, the rich man is maintaining the class difference between him and Lazarus: Lazarus is still one to be commanded and directed.
When Lazarus cannot be sent to the rich man, the rich man asks that Lazarus be sent to warn the rich man’s brothers. Abraham says the brothers have Moses and the prophets.
Moses is a reference to the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures, considered the teaching or the law, and the Prophets even more than the law call out the way the powerful oppressed the powerless. They already have, in writing, instruction on how to care for those who have little.
The rich man says his brothers will repent if someone from the dead goes to them. And Abraham says “’neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'” – Luke 16:31, NRSVue
Christian tradition is that Jesus rose from the dead. Are there Christians who are not convinced by Jesus?
A particularly prominent politician in the United States said there is a
“Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
Some point to a verse from the fifth chapter of 1 Timothy:
And whoever does not provide for relatives, and especially for family members, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
– 1 Timothy 5:8, NRSVue
as a way to assert that one’s first duty is for their own family.
Yet this verse is in the middle of instructions about care for widows, and which widows should be helped by the church. And the very next chapter is our Epistle reading today, warning against the quest for riches.
With Jesus we have stories about the faith of the Syro-Phonecian woman who pleaded with Jesus to heal her daughter or the Samaritan who cared for the Jewish man who had been robbed, beaten, and left for dead.
So it’s entirely possible that someone could believe a person has come back from the dead and still not listen to what that resurrected person has to say.
If it’s not a benefit to gather wealth, what riches can we acquire on earth?
Our reading from Timothy tells us
to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,
thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future,
so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
– 1 Timothy 6:18-19, NRSVue
We can be rich in character, in generosity, and in compassion for others.
A stumbling block to such compassion is prejudice. Prejudice is often easy to detect in others but more difficult to detect in ourselves. Like Archie Bunker, we may long for simpler times when people knew their place, whether by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or class.
For example, we may feel differently about a billionaire, a millionaire, a middle-class person, and someone who lives on the streets. In fact, we talk about the worth of people in terms of assets held minus liabilities owed: “net worth.”
Yet every person is created in the image of God, and is therefore of equal value.
So Lazarus, whom the Gospel names, is of equal value as the rich man, whom the Gospel does not name. And the “rich man, who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day” (Luke 16:19 NRSVue), considered his position above that of Lazarus who lived outside his gate.
We live in a time of rounding up unhoused people and moving them to places where they will not offend the wealthy as if being unhoused made someone less valuable than someone who had much.
But how much richer would we be if we heeded the advice of Moses and the Prophets, and of Jesus himself, to love all of our neighbors.
So my challenge to all of us this week is to notice when we think of someone as being as greater than or less than us, and why we think that.
In overcoming these biases, we can begin to gather the kind of riches that survive.
Amen
* Scripture quotations marked NRSVue are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. https://www.friendshippress.org/pages/about-the-nrsvue
* Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James version of the Bible.
#class #imagoDei #prejudice
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Jeremy Norton
Deborah Elizabeth Finn
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Little Hills Church