"Better Off Dead" Vance L. Toivonen
READING Luke 16:19-31
"There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.' But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.' He said, 'Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house -- for I have five brothers--that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.' Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, 'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"
READING Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat
…we are entering a phase where we are going to see the digitization, virtualization, and automation of more and more everything. The gains in productivity will be staggering for those countries, companies, and individuals who can absorb the technological tools. And we are entering a phase where more people than ever before in the history of the world are going to have access to tools – as innovators, as collaborators, and, alas, even as terrorists…That is why I introduced the idea that the world has gone from round to flat. Everywhere you turn, hierarchies are being challenged from below or are transforming themselves from top-down structures into more horizontal and collaborative ones…This flattening process is happening at warp speed and directly or indirectly touching a lot more people on the planet at once…And that is why the great challenge for our time will be to absorb these changes in way that do not overwhelm people or leave them behind. None of this will be easy. But this is our task.
SERMON
Last week Call Holvenstot stood up here and made a confession. It was during announcements, but it wasn’t really an announcement. Cal mentioned his Catholic upbringing, and the fact that how he felt about what he was sharing with us would have sent him into the confessional booth. Well, let me say that we would need a very big confessional booth. For we all bear the weight of this global sadness, especially since, on some level, we are responsible for it. Our privilege convicts us. And we cannot avoid this conviction. Even Johnny Cochran, were he still alive, could not navigate our defense. We live in; we wallow in the global inequity of this world. It is an unavoidable fact.
The story of the rich man and poor Lazarus in Luke’s gospel turns this inequity into a kind of fantasy film where the realms the afterlife are somehow visible to one another, and the inhabitants of both have social discourse with one another. The poor man, Lazarus, has spent his pathetic, sore-infested, poverty-stricken life begging at the gate of a particularly wealthy man. This is the first thing that strikes me about this story – the poor man has a name, and the rich man does not. It is, perhaps, a literary device to validate the impoverished and to discount the wealthy, to turn the tables, so to speak.
The turnabout is set in the vicinity of life after death. The rich man is condemned to Hades, a place the Hellenized world of the late 1st century knew very well. Hades was not only a place in Greek mythology, but also the brother of Zeus and Poseidon. It was, then, first and foremost yet another of the Greek pantheon of Gods. Only secondarily was it a large netherworld.
What Luke is likely referring to in this story is a suburb of Hades, called Tartarus. Tartarus was the region of Hades that specialized in punishment and torment and suffering. When people say of certain other people that there is a place reserved in hell for people like that, they’re probably talking about this particular region of Hades.
As a side note, I’ve often found it interesting that people who talk about people who are going to hell always refer to other people. I rarely hear people seriously condemn themselves or their friends and family to such a place. It’s always someone else, and always someone with whom there is some sort of social disconnection. I can honestly say, though, that there is not one soul on this planet that I would wish to condemn to some nether-region of torment for eternity. I do take Jesus’ teaching about loving one’s enemies very seriously. And love never runs out of chances to get it right.
So, Luke places the rich man, who did very well for himself in this life, in this place of torment and agony, which was literally in flames. So tormented is this wealthy man in eternity that when he sees Lazarus luxuriating with that big Kahuna of Judaism, Abraham in some cosmic region far out of the reach of Tartarus, (which we could, I suppose, call heaven), he cries out to Abraham. He cries out and asks not for a jug, not for a glass, not for even a thimble-full – but for merely one drop of water. Abraham does not comply with his request.
Instead, Abraham makes a little speech about how he had it made in his former life, and how Lazarus got the short end of the stick. Turnabout is fair play, some anonymous soul once uttered for the first time. Everybody gets their 15 seconds of fame. Everybody gets what’s coming to them. The good guys always win in the movies, right? I mean, this makes sense to us. It is the doctrine of retribution. It is reaping what we sow. It is all of that and more. We get this. This makes sense to us.
So, along comes Thomas Friedman suggesting that there is a kind of leveling going on in this world. The countries of India and Pakistan and China, among others are experiencing economic growth like at no other time in their history. People who once were poor and utterly destitute are finding ways to be sustainable. But this is just the beginning. This leveling will continue, and, unless we blow each other up first, it will force us to share the resources of the world in ways that we have never shared them before. This is simply my way of giving us a practical example of what I am about to say.
For me, the message of this little Jesus story from Luke is that heaven and hell and the after-life are not ideally the goals of living this life. To the contrary, the goal is for us to need neither one. The goal is for us to live in the world together in such a way that we do not feel compelled to send anyone to the deep, dark, and hot suburbs of Hades. The goal is to live in a world so equitably that we no longer need to climb over the bodies of our fellow humanity, bombing and killing and maiming one another, either physically or spiritually, in order to get to some heavenly location in the sky, by and by. The goal, it seems to me, is to so live with one another that we understand that this is precisely the point – to live together with one another.
Deriving its genesis from our work in the Saving Jesus course (shameless plug…on Sunday mornings before worship at 8:30), it dawned on me as I read this story again with fresh, new eyes that Jesus could very well be the poor man, Lazarus in this story. Those who claim to be followers of Jesus, then, are not the followers of a rich, successful, enterprising leader who is out to squash the competition, but rather one who sits at the gate of the wealthy with the other poor and disenfranchised souls on this planet, calling out for mercy, and equity, and justice.
What I indicate by pointing out Friedman’s seminal work is that this process of equitability is already occurring; or at least that the table is being set for a potential equitability. It still depends on what we do with it, and how we react to it. If warring and fighting continue to be our reactions to this global shift in how we live together, then we will likely continue to think dualistically about the wonderful place we’re headed when we die, and the terrible place we wish the people who do not think like us, or look like us, or speak like us, or smell like us, or act like us, or live like us to go when they die. We’ve got to stop this way of thinking about one another.
Advent is only a few months away, a time when churches traditionally recall the words of Isaiah (40:4), that every valley will be lifted up, and the hills and the mountains will be flattened. The goal is, to use Friedman’s language, for the world to be flat – truly level. Advent foretells the coming of God’s kingdom, a kingdom that is indicated by a great leveling, an equitability never before witnessed among mortals. If we could tap into this coming kingdom, living every moment of our lives mindful of this leveling, our collective consciousness might just get us there – or at least closer to there.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a world where no one wished the death or eternal damnation of others, and where not one soul, because of suffering or poverty or oppression or injustice, wished themselves better off dead? Such a world begins right here (visual: point to brain), and right here (visual: point to heart).