Family Service Sunday 28th September – led by Anne Walton
This week Anne arrived without her usual ‘minder’ (Natalie). Instead she’d persuaded Denise Williams to come to her Service before having lunch together. Denise and her family had worshipped with us many years ago before moving down to Devon but was now living in Sevenoaks. And in another surprise Kate Arnold joined us for the morning, up from the New Forest, a day after her 80th Birthday – providing another opportunity for a rousing Happy Birthday!
The reading from Luke 16 was the last of 5 parables, about the rich man and Lazareth. The first two were about the lost sheep and lost coin – wealth lost and then found, an opportunity for rejoicing. The next two, the prodigal son and the shrewd manager, were about wealth that had been squandered, or just not used, with the resulting crisis creating an opportunity for hearts and minds to change. The last one, the Rich Man and Lazarus, was a little bit different. It contained a warning about the cost of non-repentance.
Anne loves a good image to illustrate her messages, so this week we got the 4th Monkey. We were familiar with the first three, but the fourth was a clever guy, so engrossed in his mobile phone that he neither saw, heard, nor spoke – except perhaps to his phone. And then a link to poor Lazarus outside the rich man’s house. The rich man hadn’t appeared to see, hear or speak to the man at his gate. And Anne felt that this was because he didn’t value Lazarus in the way that God valued each and every one of us.
The parable was the only one where Jesus gave one of the main characters a name: and instead of naming the rich man, He named Lazarus, the beggar at the gate (Lazarus, Anne told us was derived from the Hebrew name, Eleazar, which meant ‘God has helped’ – and boy did he need it).
The rich man had worn expensive clothes and dined on rich foods, but his gate had been a barrier between the two main characters. Lazarus wore only rags and was always hungry, hoping to get a few bits discarded from the table. And however often that rich man had gone in and out of his doorway, he’d totally ignored Lazarus.
And, of course, therein lay the problem. Because when both of them died, their situations had been reversed. Lazarus had been seated right beside Abraham, being cared for by the angels, and the rich man was being tormented in Hades. But even in his torment he’d continued to ignore Lazarus and spoke instead to Abraham.
We might see this story as a simple morality play about caring for the poor, but for Anne the message from the morning’s reading was not about ‘bringing good news to the poor’. It was about repentance; what we did with our wealth, and what our wealth did to us. Because wealth could blind us to the fact that despite our earthly wealth, we were spiritually poor. And the door, the barrier, wasn’t between heaven and hell. The gap, as Anne preferred to call it was between what God asked of us, and what we actually did.
So, were our actions reducing or increasing that barrier: and if we had been increasing it, were we ready to have a change of heart and mind – to repent?
Well, the rich man hadn’t been. He’d still ignored Lazarus, speaking instead of Abraham. Even in death, the rich man had still been focused on himself and his own comfort. And the price he had paid for his non-repentance had not only been the flaming torment. He’d also had to endure seeing Lazarus being comforted by Abraham, on the other side of the chasm. A chasm that he’d created himself, making it wider and deeper each time he’d walked by Lazarus and done nothing to help him. That gap came from the assumption that Lazarus was worth less than him.
How did we close the gap that separated us from people we might see as less valuable than ourselves. Well, there was only one bridge – Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd. When we placed Jesus at the very centre of our lives and our hearts, Christ stood in that gap between ourselves and our misplaced values, helping us to see that sharing resources among God’s children looked a lot different to just giving away an excess to those less fortunate than us. Because in the end, we all stood in need of grace. None of us deserved grace, but every one of us was a beloved child of God. And so every one of us would receive grace.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 