"ARE ALL RICH PEOPLE GOING TO HELL?”

Luke 16:19-31
1 Timothy 6:6-19

By Charles H. Lippy
LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

Well, here I am again. After you bade me such a gracious good-bye just over a year ago, I am almost embarrassed to stand before you. My home remains on the market, I have divested myself of more than 4000 books, I have packed more than 300 boxes, but I have still not been able to sell my home, and two weeks ago I learned that my tenants of 4+ years in Charleston are moving out at the end of next month. My personal predicament made it very tempting to preach this morning from the lectionary text from the Hebrew scriptures, Jeremiah 32, which ends with the upbeat statement, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (Jer. 32:15). That is my hope, but in the meantime I live in the limbo of “not yet,” pondering how to pay two mortgages each month.

Then Dave Brown pointed out that today Pilgrim would celebrate Christian education and the host of folks who make Christian education possible in this place, thinking perhaps that as a retired professor, I might well want to extol the virtues of education, of faith seeking understanding as several giants of the Christian theological tradition have put it. Well, of course I want to do that. But when I read the parable in Luke and the epistle reading in 1 Timothy and what at first glance appears to be a blanket condemnation of wealth and of the rich, I could do nothing else than ponder the question implicit in those texts—especially in the story of the rich man and Lazarus--“are all rich people really going to hell?”

In a time of severe economic recession that shows no sign of abating, a time when every week hundreds of thousands more are looking for work, a time when all of us have had to ask what more can we do to cut back, it would seem that those who are rich are all the more removed from reality and most of us begin to think that all the wealthy share more in common with Bernie Madoff than they do with a poor beggar whose sores are licked by dogs.

Indeed, in Luke’s gospel, the rich always receive harsh treatment. Luke, much more than any other biblical writer, seems to present wealth as an almost insurmountable barrier to sharing in the good news of God’s coming reign. When you were a Sunday school child, if you memorized what we call the Beatitudes, I would wager that you learned the version found in Matthew (chap. 5) not Luke (chap. 6)—“Blessed are the poor in spirit” says Matthew. But not Luke. Luke is more direct: “Blessed are the poor”—a big difference between being poor and being poor in spirit. And to the statements of those who are blessed, Luke hammers away with a series of “woes”, the first of which is “Woe to you who are rich.”

And Luke does not stop there. Two chapters after our text for today, Luke recounts the story of Jesus responding to a certain ruler’s question about what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus orders him to sell all that he owns and distribute the money to the poor. Luke then observes that the ruler became sad, “for he was very rich. Jesus looked at him and said, ‘How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God’” (Luke 18:24-25). In our parable for the day, as in a story from the Jewish writer Josephus, the rich man moves from this life to an eternity of fiery torment. Unexpectedly and surprisingly, especially for those accustomed to thinking that the rich always get what they want, it is Lazarus, with his body beset by sores, who enters into paradise.

Yet there is something deeply troubling about this story. Nowhere does Luke suggest that the rich man did anything wrong. He committed no heinous crime in the acquisition of his wealth. We are not told that he mistreated his workers or underpaid them .Luke never intimates that the rich man duped and exploited the masses on his way to the top of the economic heap. Nor does Luke attribute to Lazarus any extraordinary virtue. There is no inherent goodness even in poverty.

But here’s the rub. The rich man did nothing; Lazarus could do nothing. The only fault, then, of the rich man was tolerating a social and economic order where injustice prevailed, where the rich became richer and the poor became poorer, of taking no action at all to alleviate the hopelessness and suffering of one like Lazarus who did not have access even to Obamacare, let alone a Cadillac health insurance plan. And that’s enough for Luke. It’s enough simply to ignore injustice. It’s not wealth in and of itself that creates the dilemma. It’s the inaction that allows the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor to thwart God’s reign from becoming reality and keeps it simply a distant, but dim hope.

For Luke, God’s reign brings a grand reversal of the status quo—hence Lazarus in paradise through no goodness of his own and the rich man in the throes of hell through no badness of his own. It is not what we expect. God surprises us by taking what we assume and turning it 180 degrees. Those who are marginalized become the privileged. Or, even more, as another New Testament writer put it in a different context, in Christ God has “made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us…creating…one new humanity in place of the two” (Eph. 2:14, 15).

In Acts, Luke gives us a glimpse of the ideal social order that he sees reflective of God’s reign, one that, alas, would not sit well in a culture captured by unfettered capitalistic consumption. In chapter 2 of Acts, as you well know, Luke portrays an early Christian community where believers held all things in common—a vivid image of the shattering of distinction between rich and poor.

My hunch, however, is that even if we have qualms about that sort of radical equality, most of us self-identify with the poor. In fact, when I shared the title of this sermon with one Pilgrim member, the response was, “Well, I don’t have to worry about going to hell because I’m certainly not rich.” But if we heed the gospel, the fact is that all of us are rich and none of us is akin to Lazarus and his body of sores.

This came through to me in a vivid way just over 20 years ago when I was honored to be part of a Fulbright study program in India for several months. One of my students, who had previously visited India, alerted me in advance: “As much as you know about India,” she said, “you will not be prepared for the smell of poverty.” Once I saw the throngs huddled under cardboard boxes along block after block of street after street in city after city, I knew that I was rich indeed—not Bill Gates rich or Warren Buffett rich or Oprah Winfrey rich, but rich. I think now of the millions in Haiti still consigned to poverty because of an earthquake, of those who five years after Katrina still have no homes or jobs—their fate compounded by oil that gushed from the ocean floor, of the millions in Pakistan thrown into refugee camps because of a flood, of those in Afghanistan and Iraq who daily cower in fear, of the homeless even in this “scenic city,” of Muslims in Murfreesboro and throughout this land who confront the injustice of ignorance and prejudice, of miners deep beneath the ground in Chile and their families waiting for a slow, prolonged rescue drilling process to bring new life. Yes…we—all of us--are rich.

Like the wealthy man in our parable, we are too inclined to sit on our “Blessed Assurance” and do nothing, for we do not see ourselves as rich. Instead, we point the finger at others. Deep down inside, we want the rich to get it. We want them consigned to hell while we bask in paradise. We want the grand reversal and cosmic surprise that Luke promises, but only because we think we’ll come out on top. We are like Bea Arthur’s character Maude, in that spinoff from the 1970s TV show “All in the Family,” who would turn in disgust to her husband, Walter, and mutter, “God will get you for that.” Woe to the rich, we say, as long as it’s not us. But as that cartoon character of generations past wisely noted, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Where does this leave us? Luke did offer a word of grace and hope, if we but hear it. God’s reign is coming. As Jeremiah put it, once again houses will be bought in this land! Elsewhere in the gospel, Luke describes a heavenly banquet where folk will come from the north, the south, the east, and the west (Matthew has only two directions not four)—a way of saying that, yes, one day all will be seated at God’s table. All will be one. And after the rich ruler departed in despair after being told to sell all that he had, the disciples realized that the harshness of that pronouncement applied even to them and pressed Jesus, asking, “If this is the case, who then can be saved?” It’s a rhetorical question, for they concluded that none was worthy of life in the paradise of God’s grace. But Jesus responded, “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.”

So if the rich man—and we are all rich—did nothing to deserve eternal torment other than doing nothing at all about injustice, and if the poor beggar did nothing to merit paradise other than being unable to end injustice, then rich and poor alike must trust in a gracious God who will see that justice—that which is just, that which is right—prevails and then one day all will feast at God’s heavenly banquet.