"The Great Divide" - Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

The Great Divide
Lent 4 – Narrative Lectionary 3
March 26, 2017
Grace, Mankato, MN
Luke 16.19-31

During summers while attending college I was fortunate to be a mailman in the St. Paul postal system. In doing so, I worked mostly from first the Uptown and later the West Seventh branches, which included the Summit and Grand Hill areas. For a white boy from suburban Richfield who didn’t have much, it was an eye-opening experience in so many ways. I was astounded to see mansions on Summit Avenue give way to decaying buildings in a mere block or two. Obvious wealth and abject poverty existed side by side.

It was a pattern I’d see repeated elsewhere. In Washington DC, the capitol area would contain both expensive town-homes and decrepit apartment buildings. And in Pike County among the hills of Eastern Kentucky, the heart of coal mining country, has the highest per capita rate of millionaires, you’ll find tar paper shacks around the bend from ornate mansions. Frankly, it was—and still is—confusing to me. How could some people have so much and others so little?

Someone has joked that the world is divided into two types of people: those who divide the world into two groups and those that don’t. Like many sayings of this sort, we find that there is some truth in it. The parable that Jesus tells, with its gaping chasm and stark contrasts, provoked me to thinking about our divisions. But, before I say more, it’s important to remember that parables are not meant to be systematic theology. Rather, parables are meant to help us enter the mystery of God’s kingdom and stretch our thinking about what that kingdom is like. As such, although they use a picture of how things are, parables are intended to prod us to imagine what might be.

In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus uses a common situation (rich and poor) with a familiar folktale (Abraham and Sheol) to debunk a common idea. It’s an idea that many still hold today, that the rich are rich because they’re morally good and therefore blessed by God and the poor are poor for the opposite reason. The stark contrasts between them in “this life” and the chasm in the afterlife got me thinking about the great divides in our own.

What was particularly disturbing to me is the seemingly hopeless nature of the divisions, both in the parable and in our world. As in Jesus’ time, we still have division between the haves and the have nots. In addition, there are political divides (red vs. blue); gender divides (male vs. female); racial divides (black vs. white); psychological divides (mentally ill vs. “sane”); ethnic divides (you name it); and religious divides (Muslim vs. Christian). I know there are others, and even these divisions are more complex than I’ve stated them.

What is even more disturbing is the realization that these divides are almost entirely of our own making. It seems to me that we make our own hells every time we draw some kind of line, when we say, “I’m this and not that.” We somehow need to fully embrace that fact the differences are not divisions. But what can we do in the face of chasms that seem insurmountable to overcome? The answer, of course, is Jesus, but not in the way you think. The answer isn’t that “everyone needs Jesus.” That’s true in its own way, but not helpful because it just creates another chasm or division. I think that the way forward is repentance, which in this case means embracing Jesus’ vision of what matters in this world.

As David Lose reminds us, this is a parable, not a prediction. That distinction is important because it means that the ending can be rewritten. How? Because indeed someone has been raised from the dead and in so doing is able to bridge the divides in the world. Through Jesus’ death, the greatest divide of all between God and humanity, has been crossed.

It’s the breaching of the divide that spurs us at Grace to continually ask how we live out the vision God has for humanity in this parable. It’s why we welcome everyone to Holy Communion, open up our building for community groups, and will be renovating it to serve our community even better than we are now. You see, our faith tells us that there really is only one kind of people in the world: those who are beloved of God. As you go through your week, I pray that your imaginations would be stirred so that we may begin to live into the reality promised by Christ. Amen.