Sermon on Luke 16:19-31
Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS
March 14, 2021
You never know where Bible study is going to take you and this week I went on a deep dive into snails. Specifically the Murex mollusk, which is a predatory sea snail that produces teensy tiny amounts of dye.
Back in Jesus’s time, Phonecian artisans and merchants became rich by unlocking the secrets of using these snails to dye garments and other fabric. Contemporary artisans have reconstructed what that process might have looked like and they tell us that it takes about 120 pounds of these snails AND 48 hours worth of labor to produce 1 gram of powdered dye that can be used. That 1 gram of powder is enough to dye about one shirt sleeve. [1] The dye was, quite literally, worth more than its weight in gold.
These mollusks make a color called Tyrian purple - sometimes imperial purple, as it was only worn and used by emperors and the uber-rich. One-percenters, we’d call them today, I suppose.
So when Jesus begins his story, “there was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and feasted sumptuously every day,” THAT’S the purple he was wearing. Before he even closes himself into his gated community, before he even sits down to eat (with servants no doubt waiting on him hand and foot), before he even goes to work in the morning (if he worked at all) - he is already benefiting from hours and hours and hours of smelly, hard labor to create the dye for his clothing. He is already clad in opulence on multiple levels.
Jesus told this story in Luke’s gospel to a group of folks who were out-of-step with his teachings about wealth and money. Jesus in Luke’s gospel is consistently concerned with justice for the poor and marginalized. Remember: Jesus’s mission statement in Luke is to “bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, restore vision, and bring about Jubilee.” (Luke 4:18-19).
When he starts talking about giving away everything you own and how it’s more likely for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich person to get into heaven and how we can’t serve both God and our love of wealth….well, let’s just say there were some folks who thought these views were a tad extreme.
The extremes are what we have in this story. The rich man (who is, interestingly not named….both giving him an Every-rich-man kind of quality AND making him seem less important than Lazarus who IS given a name) - the rich man is REALLY rich.
Who are parallels in our world today? For sure we’re thinking of people like the billionaire class - folks who have so much money we can barely conceive of it. I did some fun math and figured out that if a rich person today had a net worth of $190 billion (and some folks do) and decided to take just 5% income from their investment earnings, their billions would generate over $9 billion a year. If they gave away just those earnings (and kept the $190 billion they had to start with) it would be enough to give every person in the U.S. without a home over $17,000 a year. In other words, every single person without a home would make more money from this thought experiment than they would working a full-time job at the federal minimum wage. And the rich person would still have ALL the riches they started with.
Those billions could buy a whole lotta purple clothes.
At the other extreme, we have Lazarus. He is as poor as the rich man is rich. Every day he sits outside the rich man’s gate hoping even a crumb of food will be tossed his way. He is hungry, he has significant health problems (and, we assume, no access to health care), and he has dignity problems. [2] Dogs come to lick his open sores. And dogs were not regarded in Jesus’s time as cuddly pets. They were wild scavengers that annoyed folks. To be licked by a dog was demeaning.
Biblical scholar Amy Robertson notices the contrast between the two men’s attire. The rich man is so rich he’s clothed in purple. Lazarus is so poor he barely even has proper skin covering his body. [3]
We know, of course, that even those who have clothes and a place to call home struggle with the same things Lazarus struggles with: food insecurity, lack of access to health care, being looked down upon by others.
I’ve always thought it was a horrific indicator of our society’s priorities that we have a term: “the working poor.” How do we live in a world where a billionaire can generate millions upon millions of dollars a year in interest on invested funds without lifting a finger while others work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and still cannot afford the basics? There is not one single state in the U.S. where a person working a full-time minimum wage job can afford a two-bedroom rental. [4] We have an economic system where people can starve while working hard and people can get richer and richer by doing nothing at all. How does this make any sense?
Now, I know it’s tempting to look at this story and say, “I can’t see myself here. I don’t wear clothes created by the sacrifices of thousands of mollusks and I have skin covering my body and food in my cabinets and a bed to sleep in at night.”This is a story of extremes and most of us don’t fit into either character’s shoes.
But the lesson is still an important one, I think. Because this cautionary tale is still instructive for anyone who has a roof over their head, food in the fridge, and clothes in their closet.
A couple of months after finishing up his Ph.D., while he was still settling into the pulpit at the Dexter Ave Baptist Church in Montgomery, a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached a sermon on this text. [5] In it, he cautioned his flock against several things. First, he said, don’t get distracted by the setting of the afterlife. This is not primarily a story about what happens to us after we die. It’s clear that Jesus wants us to primarily be focused on what we’re doing here and now. He’s using the setting of the afterworld just to make sure we’re sitting up and paying attention.
Next, Dr. King warns us that we can’t oversimplify the rich man’s issue. He’s not necessarily a terrible person just because he has money. In fact, I’d argue that his looking out for his relatives who are still alive is evidence he has a heart, right? The problem is not wealth. The problem is what the love of wealth can do to us.
And that’s where Dr. King starts to speculate about WHY the rich man is such a villain in this story. What, exactly, are his faults? And I think these matter because I think even those of us who are comfortable-but-not-wearing-snail-dyed-clothes every day are very tempted, in our hyper-capitalist society, to have these same problems.
First, Dr. King says the rich man is self-absorbed. He may see Lazarus outside his gate, but he doesn’t really SEE him and KNOW him. He clearly has not entered into a relationship with him. Second, King says the rich man has lost his ability to sympathize with Lazarus and others living in poverty. We don’t know why, exactly, but the rich man has lost his ability to have compassion for others. He was able to walk past another hurting child of God, day after day, and not do anything about it.
The biggest problem, though, is what King lifts up last. And that’s this: the rich man had accepted the status quo. Somewhere along the way he bought into the popular lie that good people are rewarded with money and poor folks must have done something bad to deserve poverty. King says, “There is a gulf that originates in the accident of circumstance. Circumstances make it possible for some people to get an education, while other people are denied the opportunity. Circumstances make some people rich...while others are left gnawing on the crumbs of obscurity.”
King says there was a circumstantial gulf between the two men. And the rich man’s sin was not that the gulf existed in the first place - that may have happened by accident. The sin was that he accepted that gulf as the natural order of things. The sin was that he did nothing - not one single, solitary thing - to bridge the divide.
There are two barriers in this story, friends. Did you catch that? Lazarus sits outside the rich man’s gate. The gate is constructed and impermanent. It can be changed. But once the two men are in the afterlife the barrier is fixed. A chasm exists between the two men and even Father Abraham cannot find a way for them to cross it. It’s a done deal. A permanent barrier.
What are the barriers we erect to keep “the other” out? What are the gates we put up - as individuals, communities, as a congregation - that keep us from seeing one another? Knowing one another? Valuing one another? Having compassion on each other?
And how might those same gates keep us from seeing the economic systems that degrade, demean, enslave? How can we actively tear down those barriers and be people who see and know each other and work for most just economic systems so that all people can not just survive, but thrive?
Abraham says, “You’ve got the stories of Moses and the prophets to guide you.” Turns out we’ve got the story of the rich man and Lazarus, too.
Lazarus means “God has helped,” by the way. Thank God for the stories of Jesus which help us remember how to live.
SOURCES:
[1]https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/colour-purple-dyeing-techniques-phoenician-sea-snails With gratitude to Amy Robertson for keying me in to the snails and the significance of purple dye.
[2] Narrative Lectionary podcast from Working Preacher for March 14, 2021
[3] Bible Worm podcast for March 14, 2021 with Robert Williamson and Amy Robertson
[4]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/minimum-wage-workers-cannot-afford-rent-in-any-us-state.html
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