What is the Problem?

Luke 16: 19-31 
September 25, 2022

 

It’s easy to understand why Jesus shares this parable.

The Rich Man and Lazarus
James Jangknect

The Pharisees, religious leaders, it says, are lovers of the law.

They use it to their own ends and to their own benefits.

It also says that they are lovers of money.

They enjoyed the finer things in life

and gave no thought to the throngs of poor people around them.

This parable shows them how the law would convict them.

 

To be clear, this parable is not Jesus full-blown theology

of what happens after death and how salvation works.

If it was, we would all be in a lot of trouble.

It is a parable that says if you only had the law to rely on,

here is what the law would do to you.

 

So we have an unnamed rich man. He ate well, and he dressed well.

I think he is unnamed because he could be any one of us hearing.

We might say, in our defense, “well I don’t have a life

of obvious consumption, so this parable doesn’t apply to me.”

But expensive food and flashy dressing is not

in itself the problem.

 

What is the problem is that a poor man –

Lazarus, who does have a name –

has been laying at the unnamed rich man’s gate.

He’s sick, covered in sores and

the best part of Lazarus day was when the dogs

would come and lick them.

 

Lazarus wished that he could have

some of the rich man’s leftovers,

but obviously, the rich man didn’t care to share.

He didn’t care at all actually, it seems like

he didn’t even notice Lazarus, so he  

didn’t think that this poor man was his problem.

Maybe the unnamed rich man thought that he

was better than the poor people around him.

Maybe he thought his comfort was a blessing from God.

And the poor people, they all made bad choices,

they didn’t work as hard, they weren’t as smart,

they must have done something wrong

or they wouldn’t be in this position.

“Not my problem”, says the unnamed rich man.

 

And this is actually the problem.

“Not my problem” is the problem.

And we don’t have to be rich to have it.

So whether we consider ourselves rich,

or well off, or comfortable, or just getting by

it doesn’t matter, this parable is speaking to us.

 

So after he died, the unnamed rich man was sent to live in torment

and Lazarus was with the angels and father Abraham.

Which gives everyone else a good clue that

wealth is not a God given blessing and a license of superiority at all.

Everyone understands this, that is, except the unnamed man.

Because even after death he’s still arrogantly oblivious.

 

And just to prove that he still doesn’t get it,

the man calls over to Father Abraham and actually tells

him to send Lazarus over to serve him and bring him a cold drink.

Abraham tells them man, “No, we can’t do that.”
And the reason is that

“a huge chasm exists between Lazarus and the man.”

A chasm.

A great gap that can’t be crossed.

That is the problem here.

The chasm between people.

 
We know about this chasm in our world.

The chasm between people.

The chasm that we inherit, the chasm that we make even larger.

We have chasms of wealth, and income levels, debt levels,

we have chasms of age and generation,

we have chasms of zip codes and location.

We have created chasms of race and culture

in our country that determine so many other things.

We have people who are privileged by their circumstance

and people who are penalized by their circumstance.

 

Even if we’re not one of the conspicuously rich

like this unnamed man, we have reinforced this 

chasm between us and others. 

Especially those with less: less money, less security,

less privilege, less anything than we have.

 

We put physical distance between us,

and we put spiritual and mental distance between us too.

“At least we are not like them over there.” We say.

And when we keep others at a distance, we make the chasm larger.

We support or ignore systems and laws that

keep people in lives of debt and fear

and always on the brink of disaster.

We support laws and development that take away housing,

tax breaks and credits, debt relief,

and prevent people from earning a livable wage.

 

And then we look down on them for their suffering,

for a whole myriad of reasons:

They’re not as sophisticated as us, or as smart as us,

they’re not working as hard, or making as good choices,

they don’t use good grammar, or speak the language

they don’t healthy foods, they don’t look very professional.

Whatever the reason, we act as if their lives don’t matter as much.

Like the Pharisees, we love to use the law on others.

Not so crazy about it when it convicts us.

With our action and inaction, with our apathy

and ignorance, we have created a great chasm.

No matter what our financial status,

we are familiar with the chasm that exists between

Lazarus and this unnamed man.

 

-We have people spending billions of dollars on 10 minute

rocket rides while other people can’t afford medical care.

-A friend told a story how her husband works in a gourmet

food shop in New York City and a woman came 

in and bought $140 a pound goose liver pate that she was going to feed to her dog.

Meanwhile there are people who go to bed hungry.

-I’m spending $40 on throw pillows for my porch

while other people don’t have a place to live.

 

The problem isn’t the privilege in itself, it’s the chasm.

Each generation, each nation, each place

has created and grown their own chasms,

it can’t be blamed on one person, it’s not one person’s fault,

it’s taken years to build these chasms between people.

But this chasm is the problem. “Not my problem” is the problem.

 

The point of Jesus parable is to point out this problem.

And the point of this parable is also to say the time

to close our chasms is not later in God’s Kingdom, it’s now.

 

The unnamed man gets another idea,

he’ll do a good deed –  or his version of a good deed anyway.

He tells Abraham to send Lazarus,

(again Lazarus has to serve the rich man)

to go knocking on the doors of his family and warn them

of the consequences of this chasm.

  

Abraham says, “umm. Let me think about that for a minute.

NO.

You had all the information,

you should have fixed this chasm before.”

 

It’s not enough to say now, it doesn’t affect me,

I’m not going to get involved,

or this is too difficult to deal with ,

I’ll just let God sort the whole thing out.

This chasm is ours to sort out, here.

This is for those five brothers to figure out.

We all have been given the guidance of Moses and the prophets.

Now is the time to listen and understand those we look down on.

Those we think we’re better than.

 

Jesus has basically show us the choice,

we can be stiff necked and tough,

and cling to our self-righteousness and say,

“not my problem” and just ignore the whole thing.

Or we can realize now that and any problem

of my brothers and sisters is my problem.

 

For those of us who are not in Lazarus position,

it’s hard to find any good news for us in this parable.

It’s easy to find the bad news.

 

The challenge of this parable is that

The chasms that exist in our world are our problem.

For those of us with any status or wealth or privilege,

the chasm is ours to cross and heal in this world.

 

And this chasm is not something we can just throw money at

and have it go away, Like Jesus, we empty ourselves by,

eating with tax collectors and prostitutes and sinners,

be seen with the wrong people, listening to the cries of sick,

bringing good news to the poor.

 

And if we have access to the banquet,

we are inviting everyone into the banquet.

Time, understanding, compassion, vulnerability.

Those are the things that heal chasms.

Our job as Christians to close those chasms.

 

And the good news of this story is that

this parable is not Jesus full-blown theology

of what happens after death and how salvation happens.

We don’t only have the law to rely on.

 

Through the cross, Jesus has closed the chasm

between heaven and humanity.

We can rely on God’s abundance and

there is grace enough for everyone,

even those of us who have privilege here on earth.

God’s grace is for everyone equally.

There is no such thing as “not my problem”.

 

In God’s kingdom, we are all God’s problem.

We Can't Serve Two Masters

 Luke 16: 1-13    September 18, 2022

 

Oh my! This parable. This has got to be one of the most confusing parables. 

Most scholars don’t agree on what Jesus could mean.

I mean it’s easy figure out what’s going on,

but the message seems contradictory to things that we assume 

about Jesus and our place in the world as Christians.

So much so that we doubt our understanding of it.

 

As I said, the story itself is simple to understand:

A manager has been put in charge of his bosses  accounts

he’s been accused of being dishonest

and his boss tells him to clean out his desk

because his pink slip is on its way.

 

The manager knows he isn’t good at manual labor,

and he doesn’t want to be homeless, so he has a plan.

Make all the customers happy and they’ll be nice to him later

 and maybe they’ll let him sleep on their couch.

 

So he calls up Henry and says, “Henry,

how much do you owe my boss?”

and Henry says, 100 bucks.

So the manager says,

“why don’t you just give me 50 and we’ll call it even?”

and Henry jumps on the chance and is very happy.

Then he calls up Sally and says how much do you owe?

She owes a hundred bucks too.

He goes, how about 80, can you do that?

She’s like, “Yeah, I can do that right now.”

So, let’s do it and we’ll call it even.

 

Now, you think that the boss would be pretty angry

because there the manager goes again being dishonest.

But no, the owner of the business applauds the manager

He actually approves.

He says, “that was pretty clever.”

 

And the first confusing thing is that act is commended by Jesus,

he says, “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of 

dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes”

 

And the second confusing thing is that Jesus seems to discredit that

statement immediately in the warning in the next two verses.

 

“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much;

and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.

¹¹If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth,

who will entrust to you the true riches?

¹²And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?

 

So we have the story and then the confusing statement,

“make friends by dishonest wealth” and the warning, 

“whoever is faithful in very little is faithful also in much”

 

Now some scholars have said that the

Warning doesn’t belong because it seems to contradict

the story and the statement.

And some reasonable people say that the

statement doesn’t belong because

Jesus couldn’t be praising a guy who breaks the rules.

And some people say that Jesus never said the parable at all

and they choose to just ignore the whole thing.

 

Our discomfort with this parable

and why it causes so many interpretive gymnastics

is that we can’t wrap our heads

around the fact that Jesus is praising dishonesty.

Maybe as Christians, we’ve spent so much of our

history teaching each other that to be good Christians

means to follow all the rules, no matter how bad the rules are.

 

So this parable is so consternating because it doesn’t

go along with what we’ve been brought up with as Christians.

 

But I think we have to take Jesus at face value

And believe that he said both things and he meant them.

We just have to change our presumptions about a lot of things.

 

So I’m not exactly sure what’s going on here.

And I might change my mind next week, but here goes:

 

In the story, Jesus gives an example

of a manager being “dishonest”. Now he doesn’t rob people,

he doesn’t keep the money for himself.

He’s not that kind of dishonest.

What he actually does is he made up his own rules.

He changed the system.

 

And the system is this:

There’s a boss who has a lot of wealth and people borrow,

then they owe.  They actually owe a lot.

Most likely a lot more than they borrowed.

They are in debt. And debt becomes their status in life.

It’s very hard to get out of debt. Debts are an age-old way 

of keeping people subjugated to the debtors. 

That’s why the Hebrew scriptures actually tell people not to loan at interest. 

The people in debt have to keep struggling, they have to keep working, and they can never get ahead.

It works the same way today, people are swallowed up in

student loan debt, medical debt, credit card debt, payday loans -

Just in order to survive. Everyone’s following the rules, 

but the rules that are there make a few people really rich and make lots of others indebted to them.

 

But when the manager came in and forgives debts,

he just went and changed the rules.

 

This is not the way it was supposed to work.

You’re not just supposed to go forgiving debts.

If you just forgave debts how do we control people?

How would we know who is worthy and who is not?

People get upset when debts are forgiven.

There’s something about it, the little bean counter in all

of us goes crazy, we go, “that’s not fair. I had to pay,

why don’t they have to pay. What’s going on?”

The whole system of ordering and judging people is falling apart here.

 

But if you really look at it, everyone actually comes out okay:

The people who owed obviously benefit they are no longer in debt.

The manager benefits because he will be welcome into

the homes of the people who owed.

And even the boss benefitted because now he has $130

that he wouldn’t have had, and everyone in town

thinks he’s the greatest guy in the world. It’s win, win, win.

The only thing that isn’t happy is our sense of what’s right and fair.

And as I said last week, God stinks at math.

And as I said several times before, God isn’t fair.

 

And when Jesus says, whoever is faithful in little is faithful in much.

Maybe Jesus is saying that the “faithful” thing to do is to

change the rules. Even if this looks dishonest in the eyes of the world.

Remember, this is all in response to the fact that

the Pharisees and scribes have been grumbling.

“Why is Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners?”

In other words, “Why is Jesus rewarding people who have so much

repenting and changing to do?”

Don’t they owe debts? Shouldn’t he be telling them about

all the repentance they should be doing?

Shouldn’t Jesus be showing them tough love?

Shouldn’t Jesus be telling them all about their sins

and telling them that he won’t love them until they change their ways? If he just goes and eats with them and welcomes them,

then there’s no difference between those people and us.

If God loves them just the same, then we couldn’t judge them like we’re used to judging them. That wouldn’t be fair.

 

Maybe Jesus is saying the “faithful” way is actually

to not follow the rules. To change the rules.

Maybe Jesus is saying “honest wealth” is the one where

everyone gets the benefits that God gives and not just the few 

privileged ones who have been raised on the ladder of success.

 

Maybe Jesus is telling us that maintaining

the system is not the honorable way

and treating people with love and kindness is.

Maybe Jesus is telling us that the system is actually “dishonest”

and the “faithful” way is to go around it or change it.

Like I said, maybe I’ll change my mind later,

but this is what I’m thinking now.

 

So there was this Lutheran Church in Washington DC called

Luther Memorial place. It’s in the middle of DC in a depressed

neighborhood and like a lot of churches, it was struggling during the 

1970’s when members started to move to the suburbs.

The pastor at the time was John Steinbruck and when I was

in seminary he was a guest professor and I was in one of his

classes, so I heard a lot of his tales.

In the 1970’s, the church was severely declining and it was

struggling to survive. It was likely to close soon.

Then in 1976 there was a particularly cold winter and a couple of homeless people died of exposure. 

There wasn’t enough room in the shelter and a crisis was about to brew.

So one night, the pastor just decided to open the doors of the church and let people sleep inside the church. And he did it the next night and again. Soon there were hundreds of people sleeping all over the building. This was not how things were supposed to work.
Churches weren’t supposed to do this . You were supposed to get permission, you needed certain things in place, there was processes.

But Steinbruck said that “people were dying that night. To heck with the rules.” But he used more colorful language than that.

 

A friend of Bob’s was actually a member of that church at the time,

and I asked him, did it cause any trouble?

He goes, “oh my gosh yes, there was tons of trouble.”

Lots of members of the church were complaining about it,

council meetings were really tough for a while,

the city was causing trouble with codes and ordinance,

things went missing in the church, There was no place to have a meeting. It was real trouble. But the leadership saw something happening and they didn’t pull the plug on the operation.

 

Steinbruck told us in our class that even the Lutheran Church was not pleased with him. The synod asked for the parochial report.

They were getting mission funds and they needed to show that their worship membership was up to snuff to get the funds.

So he just counted every person that had slept on their floors for the past year –  675 that’s our membership. He said, (again not as gently as this) “If those people in Chicago didn’t like it, they could lump it”

 

People were very annoyed with him and the church on all fronts.

He didn’t follow the rules, he didn’t care for the process, the constitution, the laws of the city. He didn’t use polite language.

Homeless people aren’t members.

But that was a turning point in that congregation.

The church suddenly had a mission, a point.

The giant building that seemed too large for the congregation

served a purpose, the neighborhood fell in love with the church in a way it hadn’t before. Everything changed. They started N Street Village, which serves the homeless population in many ways in DC. They started the Lutheran Volunteer Corps in 1979.

 

The Congregation has been a wonderful and thriving place

for the last 50 years, a beacon to their community involving

many people in spiritual growth, service, and justice.

Now they are seen as a model congregation of the ELCA.

 

Did they follow the rules? No.

Did they the go with the system as written?

No. Especially in the Lutheran Church in the 1970’s.

 But was it a faithful use of what had been entrusted to the church? Yes. 

Was it in service to God? Yes.

Did everyone win in this situation?

- The homeless who were previously freezing? Check.

- The city didn’t look so heartless letting people die. Check.

- The congregation that was lacking a clear direction? Check.

- The national church that would come to see Luther place

 as a model of what a church should be? Check.

 

Maybe the most honest way of dealing with things 

is the way that looks the craziest and most unorthodox to the rest of the world.

 

Are we as Christians so bogged down with doing

the right and proper thing by the rule book that we

sometimes forget about taking chances for God?

 

What if the message of this parable is that Jesus wanted his church to stop clinging to rules and to actually be faithful?

To use the worldly wealth that we have - not to keep order,

but to throw things into chaos?

What rules and systems are we clinging to?

What faithful things are we saying, we can’t do

because maybe it breaks the rules as they are?

 

What if Jesus is asking us to throw our rule book away?

What if Jesus is telling us to stop being responsible

and start being faithful?

 

What if Jesus is telling us to break our own rules

that we’ve established? Could we get into trouble?

 

Sure. Jesus got into plenty of trouble for us.

 

Jesus said, “you cannot serve two masters.”

You cannot serve money, rules, or security

and God at the same time. Sometimes you have to choose.

 

Jesus is the unjust steward. He is the shrewd manager.

He knows that the world is not saved by rules, or doctrine.

Not through counting debts and repayments

and figuring out who was better than who.

 

Salvation came through Jesus, not through rules.

The world was saved by breaking rules and by putting love, grace, friendships, and relationships first.

Jesus saved all of us by releasing our debts. By just giving it all away.

 

Jesus is a crook, robbing the system of its power.

Giving life to those who don’t deserve it.

 

We were saved by a scoundrel, a rule-breaker a man who hung

to death between two thieves on a cross for his trouble.

 

Jesus was faithful with what was given to him

and in return he gave us true riches.

He knew he could not serve two masters.

And for our sake, he chose to serve God.

God is Bad at Math

 Luke 15:1-11

September 11, 2022

 

The Pharisees and scribes are wondering why

Jesus eats with those people.

Obviously the wrong people.

The tax collectors and sinners and the like.

Apparently, they are not up to snuff for some.

And Jesus tells them this parable.

The Found Coin
Lisa Konkol

 

Jesus asks them:

“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep

and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost?”

And I think today, we might think about that and

get all sentimental and say, of course you would

leave the 99 and go looking for a lost sheep.

We’re thinking of them like a pet, they’re cute.

But if you have 100 of them, they’re not pets.

They’re business. But people who lived at that time and knew about

shepherding and they would say, No I wouldn’t.

 

A reasonable shepherd would not leave 99 of

his sheep by themselves and go looking for one.

The other sheep would get lost too, it would be a big mess.

 

And Jesus also asks:

If you lost a coin that was worth about a day’s pay,

wouldn’t you spend a whole day of work looking for it,

and then when you found it, throw a party

which probably cost more than the value of the coin you found?

would that be a wise thing to do?

The answer is no, a practical person wouldn’t do that either.

None of these make much financial sense, the math doesn’t work.

You’re gonna eventually go broke if you do that.

 

 

You don’t risk losing 99% of your flock just to find one percent.

You don’t spend the value of two coins trying to find one coin.

The math just doesn’t add up.

The religious leaders must have that Jesus was crazy

to even suggest it.

 

And that is Jesus first point: He’s just not that good at math.

Jesus asked his followers last week if they calculated

the costs, but the fact is he doesn’t calculate the costs.

And that’s a good thing.

If you look at people only like numbers and their benefits

to society and your goals, like the religious leaders do,

then Jesus is doing a terrible job.

He’s not considering who he is being seen with and how

It is going to affect him in the long run. 

He’s not calculating what this will do to his reputation and to his brand.

 

It just doesn’t make good sense to go looking

for one lost one if you’re talking about sheep and coins

if you’re talking about objects, possessions, things,

the one does not outweigh the many.

 

But it makes complete sense if you’re talking about people

and family and relationships.

 

So while Bob has been gone I get to watch lots of

true crime shows.  And the worst most heart wrenching ones

are those where a person has gone missing without a trace,

and their family doesn’t know whether they are alive or dead,

where they are, or anything.

It’s kind of even worse than the people who

have family members who have been found dead.

 

For the families of the missing, they can’t really even mourn.

They have no closure.

They actually pray that something will be found, even if it’s bad news, it’s better than not knowing.

Being lost is terrible, especially for the people who are looking.

 

And many of them, their whole life is focused on the lost person.

And that does not seem unreasonable at all.

Because when you’re talking about people,

the math suddenly makes sense.

 

People are not commodities or things, or numbers on a paper,

they are people and every person is precious and valuable.

And that is the kind of math that Jesus is good at.

 

The fact is that people are often confused with commodities.

We are seen, and we see other people for the

monetary value that they provide.

We are valued for the work we have done or we did,

for what we produce, for what we have the potential to consume.

For our votes, or our market demographic, or how much we spend.

 

Churches even do this

We don’t always see people as individuals, we don’t see

Them all as children of God with different lives and opinions,

and hurts and experiences, but as attendance numbers,

or membership numbers or offerings in the plate.

We’re doing the world’s math when we do that.

 

And when we talk about Chimney Cove, to appeal to a certain

number of people on the Island who don’t see the residents

as often as we do, we might talk about the work they do

and how valuable their labor is for the other people here.

But make no mistake, we are defending real people.

Real children of God. We want justice for Maria, and Rivelo,

and the actual, real people and families who live there.

 

We may need to use the talk of the world to get our point across,

but we need to use Jesus math and remember we’re talking about real people.

 

As people of God, we always need to stop ourselves

from doing the world’s math, and we need to be doing Jesus math.

 

When Jesus eats with tax collectors and prostitutes and others,

he doesn’t just see sinners and people who haven’t lived up

to expectations. He doesn’t see commodities, 

he doesn’t see whether or not he will be impressive or shunned by being with them.  

He’s not calculating the return on his investment in them.

 

Jesus sees people. Brothers and sisters.

God’s family, people that were lost to God, but are now found again.

 

All people, no matter who or what they do, or where they’ve

been or what they’ve done are all part of God’s family.

We are all precious individual children, we are not just commodities,

or numbers on church rolls, or butts in seats on Sunday,

or money in the offering plate. We are God’s family.

And when we’re separated from God

in whatever way we find ourselves separated from God,

God feels it. When we’re lost, God is always looking for us.

 

Now sometimes humans end up giving up,

even on people we love, even on our families.

Sometimes there are times we need to let go of people in our lives.

And let go of hope or else we will just get swallowed up in disappointment again and again.

We’re only human.

 

But God never gives up. God never calculates the cost.

The lost are always on God’s mind and in God’s heart.

And God won’t stop.

And when even one is found again,

all heaven rejoices.