Luke 16:19-31, The Rich Man and Lazarus

10/09/11 Luke 16:19-31 Grace UMC

It would be very possible to preach a sermon on any number of topics using the story of the rich man and Lazarus. One could prepare a sermon on the reward for the righteous and the punishment of the wicked, or about what happens to us once we die, or perhaps the give and take between receiving blessings during this life and those that we receive in the life to come. There are many ways we could look at this, but I want to draw attention to the last interchange between the rich man and Abraham.

"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.'"

The rich man's reaction is something that has found a prominent place throughout Christian history in the writings of various people. How often have we heard of people who lived their whole lives, pushing God off until tomorrow, until finally there came a time that there were no more tomorrows? Immediately, such people, we read, are overwhelmed by remorse. What they would not give for just one more day, to go and do what they ought to have done before but had, tragically, left undone.

What is more, we see this day by day in our own lives, even if in a somewhat less extreme form. How many of us can remember what we used to do when we were teenagers and wish we could go back and tell the teenage version of ourselves that we should live differently, that we should make better choices? How many of us look at the state of the world today and realize that people today are making the same mistakes we did yesterday and haven't learned from them? How many of us wish we could just sit people down and talk some sense into them, to teach them what we have learned over so many years and with so much pain?

The fact of the matter is that, when I look back on my life, just about every bad decision I ever made was preceded, at some point, by someone who was older and wiser than I was, who warned me about the temptations and trials that I would go through, and they knew what they were talking about because they had gone through them already and had watched their friends and everyone they knew, in addition to total strangers, go through them. They could see with the clear vision of hindsight what seemed far less clear to me at the time. I ought to have trusted them. The fact of the matter, however, is that I not only didn't listen to the voice of experience, I don't know for sure if I could have done so. I am repeatedly amazed at our ability, as human beings, to simply brush aside anything that we don't want to deal with.

This is precisely what Jesus is getting at with this story. The realities of reward and punishment are as clear as can be to the rich man. He is experiencing one for himself and he can see the other one before his very eyes. Surely, if someone who had this kind of first-hand experience could come and bear witness to what was coming, everyone would listen, it would be indisputable proof of what the future held in store, and nobody would have to endure what this rich man had to suffer.

It is an argument that makes a lot of sense to us. If someone who was dead could come back to us and share their experiences, wouldn't that seem to be the ultimate proof? And yet, I think that, when we think this way, we tend to overvalue the role of miracles in the act of convincing human beings of the truth of God. Take, for example, the story of the Exodus from Egypt that you all probably learned in Sunday School or, if you are like me and didn't grow up in the church at all, probably learned it from various movies that are made every so often about it. Imagine the scene in your head. Ten plagues are unleashed on the Egyptian people who had gone from hosting the Israelites, to dominating them and making them their slaves. The land is plagued with the turning of water into blood, overrun with frogs, gnats, and flies. Livestock was struck with disease, boils broke out on all the people and animals, terrible thunder and hail storms ravaged the countryside, locusts came and devoured the produce of the land, unnatural darkness covered the whole country, and finally the firstborn sons were killed. But that is really only the beginning. The Israelites were then led across the sea, which was parted to let them pass. Even after these astonishing miracles took place, that was not the end. Every day, the people were given Manna from heaven to eat and were led, day in and day out, by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

These were people who had seen more miracles in a matter of weeks than most of us have ever seen or will ever see over the course of our whole lives. If miracles could convince people beyond a shadow of a doubt of who God was, surely the Israelites would have been convinced. After all, it had profound consequences. Without God, they were slaves, now they were free. They owed everything, not just in a spiritual sense, but in a very literal sense, to the God who redeemed and saved them. And yet, when Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak with God, what do we read? We read that the people lost patience, that they pressured Aaron, their priest, to make a golden calf for them to worship because, after all, whatever might have been the case before, they haven't seen God move lately. For goodness' sake, it had been a whole month without a dramatic miracle, never mind the fact that they were still eating bread from heaven and always lived in the sight of the pillar of cloud and of fire.

I still remember when I first noticed this as I read the Bible. I remember longing for God to move with power in the community in which I found myself, that he would perform undeniable miracles, signs and wonders, so that true revival would break out. When I saw the Israelites in this light, for the first time, the thought crossed my mind, "If God did everything I asked him to do, and did all kinds of miracles, it might not really convince anyone, at least not for long." It started to make sense to me why God would give such a serious law to his people. They, just like we, are easily distracted, and need not just a miracle, but a whole way of life that is devoted to God. It wasn't that God wasn't able to do miracles, or held back from doing them; after all, he did them all the time, but it seemed that God knew all too well that, at the end of the day, miracles only go so far in transforming hearts and lives.

But that isn't all. Let us look at the New Testament, at the life of Jesus. Everywhere Jesus went, he healed the sick, he restored sight to the blind, he made the lame to walk again, he did amazing things. However, we read, in Mark's gospel, to speak of nowhere else, that, one morning, when a crowd of people had gathered to be healed, Jesus left town, saying, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." Jesus seemed to be more interested in proclaiming his message than healing the sick, although he certainly did that, too.

You know, it is interesting that Luke's gospel records a story where a man begs that a man named Lazarus be sent back from the dead in order to tell people about the life that is to come. The reason it is so interesting is because in John's gospel, we read an account of Jesus raising a man named Lazarus to do precisely that. The fact that Jesus had an advocate who everyone knew had been dead, in fact, had been dead for several days, but had come back, did not convince people who had already made up their minds not to believe. Instead of being convinced, they simply included Lazarus in their plans to kill Jesus.

But one of the most astonishing things that I ever read in the Bible about this is something that I never noticed until someone pointed it out to me one day. It is such a famous passage that I must have read it over and over again, but had just never noticed it. At the very end of the Gospel according to Matthew, when Jesus is about to give what has come to be known as "The Great Commission," we read this. "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted." Some doubted! Can you imagine that? There they were, face-to-face with the Lord, resurrected in glory, Jesus Christ, who was clearly dead just the day before, and some doubted! Not only was it, apparently, not convincing to people who hated Jesus that he raised Lazarus from the dead, it wasn't even convincing to the disciples that Jesus was resurrected.

It was not until Pentecost that people really began to understand what Jesus had said and done; it was not until the Holy Spirit came upon the church that everything began to make sense. Before Jesus was crucified, Peter denied him and ran away, after he was raised, he decided to go back to fishing; it was only when he received the Spirit that Peter became the mighty leader of the church that we remember.

When we look at the issue in this way, we can really see that Jesus' story of the rich man and Lazarus is not merely a warning not to trust in miracles as the primary convincing force, but is truly a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. What does Abraham say? "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." On the one hand, it tells us, as we have been discussing so far, that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to overvalue miracles as a means of conviction, but it also tells us that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to undervalue the convincing power of the word of God, especially as made manifest in human beings.
You see, lots of people went to see Jesus as a miracle worker, but it was only when the disciples, empowered by the Spirit, began to go out and preach that people began to respond. Once again, they performed miracles, and miracles never dropped out of God's interaction with humanity, but it wasn't the miracles that had the impact on the people, it was the word of God, backed up by the power of the Spirit. Peter and John heal a crippled man on the steps of the Temple and are met with nothing but anger and skepticism from the authorities. But when Peter stands up and preaches, when he shares what God has done, the impact he has made, three thousand people were added to the number of believers.

I have emphasized that, in spite of the fact that miracles do not seem to play the real backbone of the plan of God to minister to humanity and transform lives, that is not to say that God doesn't do the miraculous. Far from it. Though I have been here for only a short time, I know that this congregation has been touched by genuine miracles. Many of you have been touched, either directly or indirectly, by the fact that God has and does still move mightily in ways that bear a striking resemblance to the healing and transformational miracles of the Old and New Testaments. And even though I don't know all of you so I can't say for sure, but if you are anything like the rest of humanity, there are still days where you feel weak, that you have your doubts, that, even if your faith seems strong, you don't always live in the full, unbridled confidence of the truth of the Gospel, in spite of the undeniable miracles you have seen and even experienced. In fact, I have a feeling that many days can go by with not a thought about those miracles, until you are reminded by someone else or you deliberately remind yourself of the power of God in your life.

The point is not to say that miracles don't happen, because they clearly do, and it is not to say that they do not have a profound impact on those they touch, because they clearly do, but it is to remind us that the power of God is most manifest, not in what the world would call clearly miraculous, but in the word of the Lord, spoken by ordinary people like you and me, who are empowered by the very Spirit of God. This is precisely why I will say now and you will hear me say again, that Pentecost is without a doubt the single most frightening day of the Christian year. It is the day that we are forced to come to terms with the fact that the disciples with whom we identify so strongly in the gospels, because they are weak and broken people, just like you and me, are utterly transformed into mighty heroes of faith, who speak the word with boldness, who go into the world and make a difference beyond what they would otherwise be capable of because they are united to the ministry of Jesus Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

You see, brothers and sisters, that Spirit of God that made Peter preach with boldness, that gave the force to his words that transformed the hearts and lives of three thousand people in a single morning, is promised to you and me as well. The only difference between the Peter who denied Christ and the Peter who laid his life down to be killed for his faith is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that, the scriptures teach us, takes up residence in our lives as those who belong to Christ.

What I am saying is that we, as human beings, have a tendency to say things like, "If only this miracle would happen, if only we had this kind of program at our church, if only we had these kinds of people to lead and participate in the ministries of our church, if only things were different than they are now, if only they were the way things used to be." And you know what? None of those things we long for are bad things, and, to be honest, they already exist in various ways. The point is that God is not calling us to something that is too hard for us, not because we are capable in ourselves to follow God's call, but because we, too, have been indwelled by the Holy Spirit.

Jesus' story told us to consider the words of Moses and the prophets. So let us consider what Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty. "Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." The command to go and make disciples is not something that is far off, not something that we need to go and find a miracle-worker before we can do it; it is not something that requires a special insight above and beyond what we have in Moses, the prophets, and Jesus Christ, but requires only that faithful people listen to what God has said and is saying, and do it, knowing that the word of faithful people, undergirded by the Spirit, is more powerful than the mightiest miracles. So, let us go and trust that God will take even our words and transform lives. Let us pray.

AMEN