A little background for today’s parable. Once again we find Jesus addressing the Pharisees, whom Luke describes as being critical of Jesus’ lessons on wealth on account of their own “love of money.” Fred Craddock describes the Pharisee’s theology as having comfortably joined God and mammon (the love of wealth) together. The Pharisees are wealthy men, and they believe this wealth to be indicative of God’s favor towards them on account of their piety, purity, and obedience to God. In other words, their privilege heavily impacted their position on the law and the prophets. Today’s parable puts this privilege in check. Trigger warnings seem to be all the rage these days. Not so for Jesus. He just drops this parable on them without warning. If the law and prophets haven't convinced you guys, is there anything I can say that will? He tells this parable knowing that he will die, and he will rise, and that for some...this won't change anything. But I think he tells this parable hoping things will change for some, and that those some will continue to teach of and live for the kingdom of God.
I’m not Jesus. Far from it. So I will issue a trigger warning for today’s sermon. I’m going to talk about privilege, white privilege, and the Black Lives Matter movement. I don’t do this to point out any particular fault in our congregation, but to speak to an issue that is bigger than our congregation, our city, our state. Our national social system is in need of convincing that there’s a problem.
There’s a social media “hashtag” being used to critique the reluctance of white churches to speak up about what’s going on: #whitechurchquiet. Here are a few tweets:
“Don’t pray for peace if you won’t work for justice #whitechurchquiet”
“White theology espouses joy will come after we die. Black/womanist theology finds hope in the here & now.#WhiteChurchQuiet”
“Will mention black lives lost in the people's prayers but no word in the sermon or from the pulpit. #whitechurchquiet”
“The 'peace' that church folk often pray for is just silence about our oppression & a return to the status quo.#WhiteChurchQuiet”
“We don't have to wait for the eschaton for the reversal and upset of privilege. #whitechurchquiet”
“white pastors scared to speak out because of the backlash they may receive. So they choose job over justice#WhiteChurchQuiet”
A few months back…maybe it’s even been a year at this point, we unpacked our understanding of the devil and looked at the remaining residue of fear mongering from the Church in the Middle Ages that still corrupts modern conceptions of heaven and hell. So right off the bat I’m going to put it out there that the Rich man and Lazarus isn’t a parable about the afterlife. Jesus goal is not to give a literal description of heaven and hell, though it can be and has been interpreted that way. The problem that comes with interpreting this parable too literally is the message that all rich people will go to hell, and that the road to heaven is paved in poverty, suffering, and sickness. The other danger of this interpretation is a complacency towards the needs of the poor now. They’re going to get their pie in the sky in the sweet by and by. Jesus’ ministry was not about inducing complacency toward the suffering of the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the outcast…so any interpretation of this parable, or any interpretation of Jesus ministry, of the grand sweeping life-of-faith, that would imply that God loves our suffering or causes our suffering as a sign that we’ve been chosen to be blessed in the afterlife…is a misinterpretation.
Ironically enough, the importance of interpretation plays heavily into why Jesus told this parable to the Pharisees. The Pharisee’s interpretation, however, is much to the opposite: they would hear this parable and see the Rich man’s wealth as a sign of having been blessed by God, and they would identify, likewise they would see the plight of poor Lazarus as somehow indicative of his sin, his flaws, his mistakes…he did something to deserve his suffering. And we know how they grumbled when Jesus healed on the Sabbath, or ate with sinners.
Certainly scriptures can be found in which the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer…just look at Psalm one: “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked….they will prosper in all they do. But the wicked will perish.” Jesus time and again reassured his listeners that he didn’t come to throw out the law and the prophets. But he did come to fulfill them, to interpret them and live them out in such a way that the kingdom of God would be brought near. Jesus’ interpretation of the law and the prophets forged a life that fit into God’s unfolding kingdom here and now, not by and by. Jesus’ interpretation of the law and the prophets called him to a life of selfless love, called him to a ministry of proclaiming good news to the poor.
The so-called “prosperity gospel” is one modern rendition of a theology built on the interpretation of prosperity as a clear sign of God’s favor. “If the Pharisees misread the law and the prophets in justifying a love of wealth, and if the rich man in the parable interpreted his and Lazarus’ conditions as evidence of God’s favor and disfavor according to a certain reading of the law and the prophets, then both the Pharisees and the rich man are judged by the very Scriptures they had used to justify their lifestyles.”
Fred Craddock identifies the subject of today’s parable to be about “correct interpretation of the law and the prophets….The story is addressed to Pharisees not simply on the issue of wealth and poverty but on a justification of their view on the basis of the law and the prophets.” Jesus told the story expecting them to identify with the rich man: a man whose wealth was taken as evidence of God’s favor. And the poor man, says Craddock, “is not his condition the punishment of God on a life unknown to us but known to God.”
I think we see residue of this in today’s emerging awareness of “white privilege,” and the cry for justice coming from the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement. Residue from a history where whiteness was scripturally interpreted as pure and good. Residue from a history where Scripture was interpreted to justify slavery. Residue from a history of segregation, employment bias, underfunded education, political underrepresentation due to gerrymandering, community isolation, unequal access to food and resources and transportation. But no, all of that is somehow stigmatized to justify the overwhelmingly popular position that the folks who live in the projects somehow deserve to be there, they’ve made mistakes, unwise choices.
This residue is what author Michelle Alexander calls The New Jim Crow. “Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an extraordinary percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a parallel social universe, denied basic civil and human rights—including the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. Today, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet as civil-rights-lawyer-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander demonstrates, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once labeled a felon, even for a minor drug crime, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal again. In her words, ‘we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.’”
Just as Jesus’ ministry, which used Scripture to raise and unite voices for justice and peace, was mocked and ridiculed by the Pharisees, so too do we see an ugly yet powerful condemnation of the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement. Just as the Pharisees misinterpreted Jesus’ purpose in healing, preaching, and teaching, so too do we see an angry misinterpretation of the phrase “black lives matter” as somehow suggesting that other lives don’t. There’s a great cartoon that captures this parallel. It shows Jesus delivering his sermon, telling the crowds, “Blessed are the poor…”, and he is interrupted by someone in the crowd interjecting, “blessed are all lives, Jesus.” Jesus was offering a critique of privilege and the status quo that perpetuated it to the peril of the poor…it was, in a sense, a call to confession.
God’s favor toward the suffering, the outcast, the hungry, and the underrepresented…also known as God’s radical love and grace and faithfulness…is well-documented in the Old Testament. In the parable, Abraham tells this to the wealthy man who is begging that someone go and convince his brothers to change their lives. “They’ve got Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” But the rich man knows that he missed the word of God, he misinterpreted it, something more is needed to open his brothers’ eyes to see what he had missed. Something like someone rising from the dead.
If I am not convinced by the law and the prophets that the power of God is not compatible with the power of privilege, then I can’t expect to be convinced by someone rising from the dead. But friends, we do have someone who rose from the dead. We do have someone who can tell us what the kingdom of heaven is like, who can call us to confession, who can offer us grace, who can lead us in the way of life that fits into God’s unfolding kingdom here and now. We don’t deserve this grace, we don’t deserve this love, but here it is for us to receive: the proof of God’s amazing love, that while we were sinners Christ died for us.
But this New Testament death and resurrection is just as easily misinterpreted as the Old Testament law and prophets. The word of God is misinterpreted if it is used as a protection of privilege. The word of God is misinterpreted if it permits complacency towards those who suffer now. The word of God is misinterpreted if it proclaims eternal suffering as God’s will for anyone. Suffering is the result of resistance to the life to which God calls us. But suffering is not punishment. Privilege enables some to avoid reckoning with this reality. Privilege empowers a gross misinterpretation of suffering as somehow being deserved. Privilege endangers empathy and compassion. Not suffering now, not suffering to come, but a radical reconciliation requiring a great turning of the world, a changing of hearts and minds, a shifting of the status quo, a redefining of “who is our neighbor,” a silencing of the stigmas that separate us, an un-silencing of the #whitechurchquiet, and a deep trust in the firm foundation of God’s grace.