Sermon, September 30, 2001
17 Pentecost; Proper 21, Year C
The Rev. Lowell E. Grisham
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Fayetteville, Arkansas

Gospel — Luke 16:19-31 The story of the rich man and poor Lazarus

Maybe some of you saw an article I wrote recently for a newspaper conversation with Pastor H. D. McCarty. Our topic was salvation: What is Salvation? I said that salvation is a process toward wholeness, and I used nine related images from scripture to describe the experience of salvation: salvation as liberation from bondage, reconciliation from estrangement, salvation as enlightenment, forgiveness, as experiencing God’s love, salvation as resurrection, as food and drink, knowing God, and salvation as the Kingdom or Dominion of God. If you would like to know more, our friend Marcus Borg has the best short summary I know of salvation in a chapter at the end of his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time.

I mention that collage of salvation images to offer a wider context in order to look at just one of those images: salvation as enlightenment. Many years ago I heard a scholar with the marvelous name of Sam Hill speak about the differences between Christian denominations. He explored the strength of each Christian church by posing the question: "If Christ is the answer, what is the problem?" Each Christian denomination seems to have a favorite way of presenting the problem that Christ saves us from. For Baptists, he said, the problem is sin and damnation; for Presbyterians, it’s wrong belief; for Lutherans, it’s being justified; and for Episcopalians, Sam Hill said, the problem is blindness. Episcopalians have a gift for recognizing human failure as a problem of not seeing the world as God would have us see it. We are all blind; but it is a vincible blindness. And we can be restored to healthy vision by seeing reality through the lens of Christ – the process of salvation as enlightenment.

The gospel story today is a story of blindness. For all of those years, the rich man, living in the security of his comfortable home, turned a blind eye to the presence of Lazarus the poor man who sat by the gate. Maybe he saw Lazarus as an image on his retina, but he didn’t truly see Lazarus as his brother, as a person for whom he had a responsibility.

Maybe the rich man lived in a fantasy world. Maybe he thought that the world was structured in such a way that the rich deserve what they have with no responsibility to the poor because they have earned their possessions. Maybe he believed that the poor deserve what they have. It’s just the way things are. There are some who lie outside the gate in complete misery, and there are others who are better off, inside the gate, safe and comfortable in their possessions. Maybe he thought that’s just the way life is.

For those of us who are rich and comfortable, and I count myself as one, it is so difficult to see the relationship between my wealth and another’s poverty. I know that I ought to be able to see, but my eyes glaze over in helplessness in the face of awful things. The great evangelical social activist Jim Wallis noted that there are around 908 verses in the Bible on the evils of rich people. One time he went through his Bible and cut out all of those verses that had to do with the problem of riches and poverty. He ended up with a Bible completely in shreds! You take these words out of the Bible and you don’t have much Bible.

And yet that is what most of us do. We put a microscope over those verses that we like, and we snip out those verses that we don’t like. I understand how the rich man could be so blind as to ignore Lazarus. I’m pretty determined to be blind about so many things. It would take someone rising from the dead to get my attention.

Most of us have a vision problem. There is much that we refuse to see. Salvation as enlightenment enables us to see life in its true reality, to see it filled with the glory and beauty of God even in its suffering that looks like the cross, even in the suffering and death of the innocent.

Our nation is going through an eye-opening crisis. Because of the harrowing violence that has landed inside our gates, we are having to look and see people and places that we’ve been blind about. We are seeing with new clarity the suffering of women and children in a place called Afghanistan. Others are asking us to look at the hundreds of thousands who have died miserably in Iraq, and the thousands in Palestine. There are millions around the world who are blaming the rich for the suffering of the poor. And now we need their friendship, because our eyes have been cruelly opened to our vulnerability to radical extreme evil.

I believe this is a moment of great opportunity. Energized by a common threat, compassionate people from around the globe have a new motivation to unite to help take care of each other. We need each other for our protection. As we begin to pay attention to those we may have ignored, we can begin to work together on solving the destabilizing problems of poverty and oppression. Our eyes have been rudely opened to see a new relationship between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. The fate of people in far away lands now matters to us in a new way. Maybe we can begin to forge alliances that can bring new hope to the whole world.

The vision of God tells us that our neighbor matters. It used to be that peace in our own neighborhood was enough to ask for. Now we realize that the only thing that makes sense is world peace, world justice. The whole world is our neighbor.

There is a popular slogan that you may have seen on bumper stickers: "Think globally. Act locally." That sentiment makes more sense now than ever. We can create a community of peace here in Fayetteville. We can open our eyes and see with compassion the Lazarus at our gate. We can welcome the stranger, unite to protect each other, listen and see those who may be outside our gates, and give them not only the needed crumbs that fall from our table, but also the justice and freedom that all people deserve.

We’ve begun some of that work here at St. Paul’s. Through our Community Clinic at St. Francis House we offer health and dental care to thousands who have no insurance. Through our Community Meals venture with Central Methodist we feed the needy. Through C.E.O. we support those in crisis, and through Seven Hills Homeless Center we help some of the most vulnerable of our neighbors. And, I dare say, each one of you has some ministry of caring and outreach for a friend in need or for strangers. One of our teens has begun a new ministry to take house-shoes and other necessities to the most needy in our nursing homes. Every act of care and reconciliation impacts the entire world for good.

But the first need is for us to see the need. We need our blindness healed. Salvation as enlightenment is having God give us vision. And what would we see? We would see the image of God in every person. We would see the presence of Christ in every suffering. We would see the power of the Holy Spirit working to heal every form of brokenness. We would see Lazarus. We would recognize him as God’s beloved child. We would see the suffering of Christ in his wounds. We would see the healing power of the Holy Spirit restoring him to wholeness. And we would be empowered to act, to participate with God in the reconciling work of salvation for Lazarus, which is directly connected to our own process of salvation, which is the best thing that we can do to participate in God’s unstoppable salvation of the world. If you can see that, you are being enlightened. And enlightenment is a far happier condition than blindness.

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