Unpoor, unkind, uncool, and ungodly

Luke 16:19-31

Three or four months ago, maybe more, I was driving along and came up behind one of those big orange Action buses. Plastered across the back of the bus in large, rather roughly formed letters, was the word ‘unworry’. I later discovered that this was an advertisement for NRMA insurance. But I didn’t know that at the time. The word irritated me. ‘Unworry’, I said to myself, ‘that is unbeautiful, unEnglish, and I’m going to unremember it from this moment on.’

But of course (clearly) I didn’t unremember it. The ad people aren’t drogos. They know exactly what they are on about. Their dreadful word achieved in my brain precisely the reaction they hoped for. I couldn’t forget it because it was so unexpectedly unappealing. Later I saw refinements of the same ad on tele, with some young person telling me not only to unworry, but to unstress and unconcern myself. It’s so irritating. But it is a highly effective way to get the message across. Had the back of that bus said, “Insure with NRMA and feel safe and secure”, I wouldn’t have bothered to read it, and if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have remembered it a nanosecond after the bus passed out of view. The messages are basically the same. ‘Unworry’ means ‘feel safe and secure’. But its presentation of the subject, because it is negative and a bit affronting, flies under my defensive radar and hits its target. I’m touched by it as I am not touched by its positive equivalent.

Jesus seems to have understood this reverse cycle communication technique in his day as thoroughly as the ad agencies know it today. The parable we read from Luke 16 a moment ago is a perfect example. Just a few chapters earlier in the Gospel (chapter 10 to be precise) a lawyer asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus responded by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. Now that story is a positive statement of what it means for us to share the life of God. The Samaritan man comes across a poor fellow who has been beaten and robbed and left to die on the side of the road. Unlike the priest and the Levite before him, he stops, tends the victim, carries him on his own donkey to a nearby inn, pays for his accommodation and further medical attention, and assures the innkeeper he’ll be back to meet any other expenses he may incur. Jesus finishes the story by saying to the lawyer, ‘go and do likewise.’ This is what a person who seeks to live in the company of God looks like. I you want to walk with God, says Jesus, do likewise. But we get so used to the message. ‘Be kind. Help your neighbor.’ Sure. Sure. We’ve heard is all a thousand times before.

But in Luke 16, where Jesus is addressing some well-to-do religious types, he goes down the ‘unworry’ route of communication. He tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus. And this is a story about what not to do, and not to be, if we want to participate in the life and the kingdom of God.

I’ve tried to summarize the basic points of the story in a series of unlovely words (like the NRMA ad) as my sermon title. The rich man (sometime called ‘Dives’ in Christian tradition; a name which, I am told, comes from a Latin word for riches); anyway, the rich man, let’s call him ‘Dives’, is unpoor, unloving, uncool and ungodly. And that’s about as un-Christlike as you can get. So here is the photographic negative, as it were, of the Good Samaritan positive picture of discipleship.

Let us look briefly at each of these awful ‘un-words’. Dives is unpoor. Actually, the story paints him as seriously rich. Dressed in purple (the colours of royalty) and fine linen. Feasting daily, high on the hog. Living in a gated palace whose walls kept the wrong people, people like Lazarus, at bay. The story indicates that the man was probably rich in anyone’s estimation. Top of the pile, even if you looked towards the big end of town. But he was certainly relatively rich, if you looked at the circumstances of Lazarus who lay at his gate: hungry, sick, incapacitated. The contrast was stark: poor, unpoor.

But Dives was not only unpoor, he was also unloving, unkind and unseeing. I suppose you could say he practiced a certain kind of charity toward the man at his gate. Lazarus survived by eating the leftovers the rich man threw out. But beyond that, nothing. Dives just didn’t see the reality that was being played out at his very doorstep. Or if he did see it, he decided to take no action to address it. He shared nothing of his excess to alleviate the suffering of this ‘neighbor’ who had fallen on hard times. How different from the Samaritan.

Dives is unpoor and unkind; he is also uncool. I know I am really pushing linguistic ghastliness with this one. But I just couldn’t resist it. The first half of Jesus’ story tells of the tragic contrast in this life between the Dives the rich man and Lazarus the poor man. But in the second half of the story, after both men have died, the situation is absolutely reversed. Lazarus goes to be in the presence of Abraham in glory. Dives winds up in Hades and really feels the heat. ‘How uncool can you get?’, the story seems to ask.

Unpoor, unkind, uncool and finally ungodly. This is the true point of the story, and sums up all the other ‘un-words’. As the good Samaritan reflects by his life the characteristics and values of God’s life as disclosed to us in the life of Jesus, Dives, the rich man of the story, displays the reverse characteristics and values. In short, he portrays the opposite of the nature and intentions of God. If we take Jesus as our central clue to what God is like; and if, with Paul, we say that life with God means, to allow the same mind that was in Christ Jesus to live in us; then we see that this parable portrays aspects of un-discipleship, or un-Christ-mindedness, very clearly indeed.

Christ comes to this world without wealth or power. No purple clothes, except in mockery at his final trial; no palace and gated grounds, in fact nowhere to lay his head; no sumptuous meals, except the last supper where he gave his body and blood for the life of others. And yet he gave unstintingly to the poor; he fed the hungry generously, often with baskets left over, we are told. He healed the blind, gave voice to the deaf, enabled the lame to leap with joy. The outcast and shunned, exemplified especially in the lepers of his day, he embraced, touched, spoke to with compassion, cleansed and restored. The mirror opposite to Dives. If this Jesus is God’s Son; Dives is ungodly in his living. Just as if this Jesus is God’s Son, the Good Samaritan is godly in his.

I must say I am sorely tempted just to stop here and let us all draw our own conclusions. But that would be a cop out. I know that talking about the spiritual meaning of wealth, which is what this story of Jesus is about, is difficult for us. I guess that is precisely what the unlovely character of the story highlights. But perhaps, like the ad on the Action bus, we sometimes need an ‘un-story’ to get through to us.

So, I will say a bit more. But mainly to indicate what challenge this story of Jesus presents to my life. None of that may be relevant to you. You must judge that.

1. This ‘un-story’ presses me to judge my own riches by looking, not at the top end of town, but at the bottom end. It is easy for me not to feel rich in our Australian society. I see CEOs of companies raking in millions of dollars, and millions more if they happen to get fired. And I think, well I’m not well off. Look at them. Jesus’ story asks me not to look that way, but the other. Look at Lazarus, Graeme, then speak to me of how poor or unpoor you are.

2. If I engage in this exercise of relative wealth evaluation, the story of Jesus then pushes me to be a bit more generous, a bit more loving, in sharing the good things that I enjoy relative to others. And here I want to say one last thing about the ugly word ‘uncool’. To be ‘cool’ (in our colloquial sense of the word); to be ‘cool’ with God in this life and in the next, is to share in the generosity, the self-giving nature of God’s love, because that is who God is. Or, to put it in the negative, as we have been all along this morning, to be hard-hearted is to put a gulf between us and God. It’s not that God stokes hell fires hot for those who do things God disapproves of. It is, rather, that the habitual practice of unlovingness, of heard-heartedness, inevitably leads me further and further from the place where God dwells. And that has consequences of isolation, from God and from other people, in this life and the next.

3. But Jesus’ story nudges me beyond simply the question of personal generosity. It has social and political implications. The gap between rich and poor is a matter for our society as much, or more, than it is for us as individuals. Now I pay taxes. So do you. And the tax I pay is by far the greatest monetary contribution I make to the people beyond myself. It outweighs my specific charitable gifts by quite some. But taxation, among other things, is our social way of trying to even out the gulf between the haves and have nots. It’s a rough and ready way of addressing the Lazarus problem, of course, but it is real and operative. So if I pay taxes to our Governments, and if my taxes are a way of trying to do better for the wellbeing of everyone in our society, and not just some of us, then I have a right (and perhaps an obligation) to say something about how my taxes are used. Thus I think we Christians need to speak up a bit more on how we see the meaning of wealth and poverty in our society. Of course we are only one voice among many. But we can speak. We can vote. We can write to our representatives. We can talk to others about the Dives and Lazarus problem in our world. We know it’s there: indigenous health; asylum seekers; chronic unemployment; foreign aid; failing hospitals; aged care, and so on. Let’s not give up on doing things more justly, more lovingly as a nation. It’s theologically important.

4. And finally the church. One of the most important jobs of the church is to be a sign, a pointer to the life of God, and the ways of God in the world. We can’t bring in God’s kingdom of course. That is God’s work. But we can be a sign of its coming. The Dives and Lazarus story indicates one way in which that sign can be made, or not made. This is the reason why I am so delighted that our community has already raised some ten thousand dollars for flood relief in Pakistan. It is practical help of course; but it is also a sign of what we believe about God in the world. And it matters.

Let me finish with a story. Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, was once asked what marked the first sign of civilization in any culture. The questioner expected the answer to be some tool, or craft, or art form. But Margaret Mead responded by saying, ‘The first sign of civilization is “a healed femur.”’ She went on to say that no healed bones are found where the law of ‘survival of the fittest reigns.’ A healed bone shows that someone had to do the injured person’s hunting and gathering until the injury could mend. Someone has to care enough to provide for the wounded and hurt so the individual could heal.

Let’s aim to be a community of the healed femur, in Christ’s name.

Graeme Garrett

Canberra Baptist Church

Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

26 September 2010