On Jesus and the Poor
TranscriptioN
Good morning. I'm Alexi Laushkin, a member here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. Let's pray together.
“Gracious Father, we thank you for these words from the Gospel of Luke. May they touch our hearts. May what is from you and throughout the centuries of the Church meet with us who live in a relative place of prosperity today. In the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.”
This is not the Gospel of Luke passage, a particularly easy passage of Scripture, and it's not one that's often preached on or talked about, in part because we don't necessarily like, as modern Christians, this conflict between the rich and the Gospel. It's uncomfortable. Does it literally mean that someone who is rich and unable to think about the poor and who has oppressed their neighbors will go to hell? Feel that tension. Does this Gospel really mean that? Is this another in the line of the teaching of “it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to inherit the kingdom of heaven”? Is this one of these teachings out of the Gospel where you have the rich ruler, and another teaching of the Gospel, come to him and say, “Lord, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus says to him, “Sell all your possessions and follow me.” Does that mean that the rich must sell all their possessions to follow the Lord? Feel the discomfort of this Scripture.
I certainly did in preparing for it. So I'm going to give kind of three overviews as we go through the Scripture. One, talking about the text itself in light of the tradition of the Gospels: Luke, Matthew, Mark, and John. The second, the tradition of the Church as it relates to the poor, talking about Franciscans, Methodists, William Wilberforce, part of what we should think about today. And third, practical application for what it means for us in Northern Virginia, in our personal habit, in our close personal relationship, and the practical vision of our Church, which is to be a people transformed by the Book of Common Prayer, uncommonly together.
So the Gospel of Luke passage—what do the Scriptures have to say about the poor? Well, Luke, if you're a student of the Gospels, is particularly focused on the least of these, the poor. In parts of the Church and the tradition of the Church, you might hear Roman Catholic brothers and sisters talking about the preferential option of the poor. What do they mean by that? That God has a special place in His heart for the poor, the least of these, the marginalized. And the Gospel of Luke tradition—certainly I do a lot of racial reconciliation work in ministry. If I go to a historic black church, the Gospel of Luke proclamation, where Jesus is starting his message that He has proclaimed the good news to the poor in the year of the captive and the release of the captive, a year of Jubilee. It's an essential part of how they think about mission and ministry. And Luke takes on this focus.
Mark and John, the Gospels, also take on this focus of the God's people doing incredible acts of loving service. The Gospel of Matthew talks about acts of sacrifice and forgiveness as part of the testimony of the Scriptures. So all four Gospels agree that there is something specific and special about the kingdom of God and how it transforms our understanding of relationships.
Ancient Israel, as well as much of the ancient world, was a relatively hierarchical place. And so if we were visiting at the time of Jesus, we would notice the difference in the ancient world between those of means, those who have riches, and those who do not have means, and those who do not have riches. The Old Testament text tries to deal with this sense of the have and the have-nots through this concept of Jubilee, a specific pattern in the Scriptures that debts ought to be forgiven after a certain period of time. You know, some will say seven years, but the actual practice of Jubilee actually varied quite a bit in terms of Israel's history. What I'm trying to say, though, is the Old Testament talks a lot about debts, and land, and wages, and the importance of those things. And the prophets themselves—Amos, certainly Daniel, and in various ways certainly Micah—talk about God's people neglecting matters of justice, matters of the least of these.
And I, myself, and I've talked previously about concepts of injustice in the American context. I've often talked about immigration, that we have a segment of people in the United States who are not under the law, but are asked to work for lower wages, and they often can't access the justice that they need in things that happen to them.
So the Testament of the Scripture often talks about the poor, but what does the Gospel of Luke really do about this witness? Well, it is in a fundamental way, both what Luke 16, this rich man, and the rich man who goes and asks Jesus, “How might I go and inherit eternal life?” are honing in on something that is an important part of a kingdom myth-busting, is how I would describe it. Which is that both this man and the rich young ruler who goes to Jesus, we're not meant to think of them in this text as unholy, sinful, impious. In other words, we're meant to think of these as fairly pious Jews, since they have followed the law, they have honored their mother and father, they have tithed, they worship the one God of Israel. We're not necessarily meant to think that they are not necessarily pious, but what Jesus is pressing into is that they can't leave their own personal injustices aside and inherit—be part of the inheritance of God's people. They can't leave it aside.
So let's get into the text. How bad is it? Well, there's a rich man who's dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. So what are we supposed to think about that? Think about someone who lives in Aspen, Colorado, a very wealthy part of the United States, who has no burdens. Maybe they live in Hollywood. Maybe they live in—cough, cough—McLean. But perhaps every day they have inherited wealth, or you think of a modern American today whose inheritance is from their parents or their grandparents, and they don't need to work per se. They can set their agenda every day.
And this young man—well, this is not necessarily a young man—but this man loves fine clothes. He loves shopping at Tysons, too, every day. At his gate lay the beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores. So, friends, if you've ever seen the poor and the least of these in this area, you often might see them maybe as not having a regular bath, but usually you have to go out of the United States to see someone who's truly beaten up and covered in sores. And so if you've had a chance to do missionary travel, or sometimes you will find this or come across someone in the United States who is badly in need with open sores. I myself have been able to witness someone with sores, but also someone who recently had been tortured, and it's a ghastly sight. So the text is not trying to help us pull away from the fact that it would have been pretty obvious to this rich man that Lazarus was in need. You know, there was no excuse. He was literally bleeding outside of his gate, longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table.
Can you imagine that the text here is giving us the example that this wasn't a one-time thing, or perhaps he just ignored it one day, and he was just too busy. Ah, he didn't do it right at one time. That's not what the text is saying here. The text is saying that this was constant. So for the sake of our time, let's imagine that maybe Lazarus was there for a year and a half, okay? A year and a half. Every day, the rich man would have seen this. You can imagine what he might have thought about Lazarus: like, oh, again? At my gate? Oh, I don't want to look at him. Oh, fine. Here's something for him to do. Here, Lazarus, you know, go do something. Clean the house a little bit. I'll give you maybe a little bit of a scrap. Imagine that there's a relationship here that's ongoing, because this is what the text is calling us towards.
The time came when the beggar died, and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. So it's interesting. There's a communication happening here in the life to come. And the rich man sees Abraham and Lazarus. And what does he do? Just to show you the sense of unrepentance here in the text. He goes, Abraham, my equal, time for me to talk to you, right? Look at the pride here. Abraham, my equal. He doesn't talk to Lazarus—Lazarus, he knows. Abraham, he does not. But he addresses himself to Abraham. “Father Abraham, have pity on me.” Then look what happens. “Send Lazarus. Send the servant. Send that poor man who was there to serve me once again to serve me again. Notice the insidiousness of this unrepentance. Send him to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.”
And so yes, the text talks about the reality of hell, the difficulty of hell, the torment of it. And it is a real reality. It is part of our witness as Christians. It is serious. And now the rich man, who in his days had luxury, is hoping beyond hope, because he was a man who lived with dignity, that another, who he perceives as his equal, might be able to help him. What does Abraham say? “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received good things, while Lazarus received bad things. Now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. And besides all of this, between us a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from here to us.” The importance of Jesus, friends, the chance to decide, is in this life, not in the life to come. These are the days. These are the hours. These are the weeks that separate one destiny from another. Even Abraham can't change that—he makes that clear. There's no change. It's a grave text.
He answers, “I beg you, Father.” Again, who does he say to send? Lazarus. Send Lazarus. Send the servant. Look at how unrepentant this is as an attitude. He doesn't say send Abraham, send yourself, send an angel. Send Lazarus. The contempt in this relationship. “And send Lazarus to who? To my family.” So this man obviously had love in his heart for his family, but not for the poor, not for the wretch in front of his door. “For I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so they will not also come to this place of torment.”
Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.”
“No, Father Abraham.” He's really serious—more serious than he ever was about helping Lazarus. Really serious about this. “But if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”
And Jesus, in His own foreshadowing, because this is a teaching of Jesus, says it this way: “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
The Gospel of the Lord will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
This pattern in humanity to disregard the poor and the least of these, the other, is so deeply ingrained that the gospel reverses it in such a marvelous way. And we have trouble with it, both in the personal sense of having trouble with it, because in the American society we like to distance ourselves from this problem to the degree that our whole cities are planned. If you do public policy advocacy, our cities are planned to be away from the poor.
The most contentious city council meeting in America is low-income housing, let me tell you, and that's true everywhere. We don't want the poor near us. They can be another part of town. We don't want to hear their plight. We don't want to know about their problems, because their problems are not our problems. This is the same rich man's spirit that infects us.
And it's not just an American phenomenon. I was in Rome, the Lord being my helper this week. It's an Italian phenomenon. I've been in parts of Africa. It's an African phenomenon. This impacts all of humanity, which is why the gospel is so serious about the upside-down kingdom, about the kingdom of God and God's people, where the rich are not honored more than the poor, where there's a level set.
And that needs to impact how we think about the mission of our church. It needs to impact our personal attitudes. And in the gospel of Luke, it's not just the material poor, but the Hebrew word used is outcast for the poor.
And so the poor also include people we don't really want to talk to. So in Luke's gospel, that includes tax collectors, not necessarily people of no means, per se, but people outside of our orbit. And so at the most basic sense, the four witnesses of the gospel tell us prejudice has no place in the Christian life.
Prejudice has no place. Animosity has no place. Greek, Jew, Gentile, white, black, Asian, Republican, Democrat, has no place. And this is why, when we look at contemporary things, we have to, when we engage in these political questions, because sometimes, especially in the 20th century, we can hear the poor and we can think, oh, it's about politics, right? So I've been in many churches where, when we talk about the poor, someone will pipe up, oh, but Jesus said, the poor we will always have with you. It's not that serious. Oh no, it's that serious.
Luke makes it that serious, my friends. And it's not a political question, though it can be used politically. But it's why the kingdom of God can't align itself with any temporal power. Not right, not left. Not to say some get it closer in a small age and some get it further in another age, but we have to resist the temptation that fundamentally the future of the world depends on a nation or a political party.
In the book of Revelation, towards the end, the fall of Babylon, the fall of the earthly kingdoms of the world, and what happens? Well, at the end, I was reading it as part of my morning devotion. There's a mourning for Babylon, and I want you to think of Babylon as political power, the political power of the earth. Why? Because people can't get rich anymore. That's why they're mourning. The second reason underneath it is that it comments that Babylon had still contained within herself slavery, the oppression of people to people, the disregard of the poor. Same witness. Same witness.
The beginning of the text, for the Bible, it's Cain and Abel. The end of the text, it's Babylon falling. Same witness. Same text. Talking about that no earthly kingdom will be free totally of exploitation, but by God's help and the help of Jesus, we are to be free of that type of attitude in our heart and to the best of our ability and the best of our choices, free from it in our decision-making. So when we don't get easily captured by left or right, by the glories and the bad days, we are in our own way reclaiming our kingdom of inheritance that says ultimately the kingdom of God engages in the world but is above the world, and that we are a people of hope, even though the American church has not done very well with this, that we believe that this is a place where neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Greek nor slave, neither black nor white, neither Asian or Hispanic, have to be in separation, that there is one gospel, one Lord, one faith, one baptism.
That's what we proclaim as God's people. We live into it in sometimes in an imperfect way, but that is the vision. It's the vision that Luke calls us back into.
Jesus himself calls us back into. Why? Because fundamentally people like to exploit each other. They like to get away with it, and yet the gospel doesn't let us, and it won't let us. Whether we talk about it or not, it won't let us. Jesus is so serious about it. He contains this teaching within a teaching about heaven and hell. That's serious. It can't get more serious. It's that serious for us as well. What do we do with this? Well, we have witnesses within the church.
St. Francis, the way that he took this teaching out of the Gospels, is they would go out and he sent his disciples out, and he did not pay them. Can you imagine unpaid clergy? He did not pay them. They were to go out in simple wear, much simpler than what I'm wearing. They were to go out in essentially what I would call today street trash clothes in plain color, so you can imagine old clothes, maybe your oldest clothes in your wardrobe.
A Franciscan would go out. They would go out together, men and women, and they would go out and just preach the gospel, and they would minister to people without food and without money, and what would they do at the end? They would go for the humility of begging for food for dinner. Can you imagine begging for food? Could you imagine encountering someone on the Washington Metro subway?
They say they're a priest. They pray for you.They heal, you know, they comfort you. They're able to really encourage you in the faith, and at the end of that, they say, can you buy me some McDonald's? That was the Franciscans, their witness in the early days. It's uncomfortable to think, you know, clergy person asking me for food at the end. This is what the Franciscans did, but it wasn't just the Franciscans.
In other generations, you had the Jesus Passionists. In other generations, you had the Methodists, John Wesley himself, preaching to workers in England who were fed up with being oppressed for their wages, and he would preach to them where? In the open air, which was humiliating in that context.
It was seen as something you shouldn't do, and yet he did it, and people's hearts were transformed. In our days, further on, you had the witness of William Wilberforce speaking out about the injustice of slavery, and today we have many smaller works and acts of justice radically caring for the poor. Does that mean I'm saying, everyone, we need to go become Franciscan or Methodist and just follow, you know, the latest, what sounds really good? No, I'm not saying any of that.
What I'm saying is, God has sent witnesses about this teaching, and some of their teachings are really radical, and so when we think about the personal application, what does this mean for us? We have to think about what are some of the habits that are from church history that might apply to us today. Well, one big habit is to avoid one of the easiest Christian sins that's out there, which is the sin of Christian prejudice, to hate your brother and sister because you don't understand their politics, or you don't understand their background, or you don't understand why they think the way that they do. It's a personal growth to repent of the prejudice that we have towards our fellow Christians of various backgrounds, and to seek to learn from great sources. There are great sources in the Anglican tradition. Yesama Kali is an ACNA priest.
There are great sources there, just ways to get started on how to think about how to grow in heart posture, or ask the person you might have a prejudice towards, what are some things that help me understand how you follow Jesus better? Because much of these things aren't over doctrine, though those are there as well, and doctrine is important to defend.
It's important to follow the canons and institutions of the ACNA, but oftentimes what I discover is people just have prejudice, and it's mostly over politics, friends. I've been doing this for 15 years in various churches, mostly over politics at the end of the day. How could you believe that? How could you think that? All of that.
So we have to have a heart posture of openness, and listening, and prayer. Second, more practically, on the actual poor that we see in our world, Jesus's teachings, you know, we're gonna have a Lent coming up during Advent. You could do it now.
You do it during the small group formation time that you have. A personal commitment to give to everyone who asks of you, in some way, according to the measure of grace that you have for them. Oftentimes when we're encountering the poor, we can think, ah, they're gonna use the money for their drug addiction, and they're not gonna do it right, and this and that, and you think about how God must think of answering our prayers.
Well, if I give grace to this daughter, they're just gonna do it again. How could it be they're just gonna do the same sins? And so we have to have mercy, as much as God has had mercy on us. But prudence.
So if you don't want to give funds, buy a meal. You don't want to do that, give water. You don't want to do that, you can approach myself or Father Morgan, you know, we'll give you ministries that you can refer them to, you know, whatever it might be.
There's just this personal habit of being grace-filled. Whether the person's in a good spot or not a good spot. Of course, this is not a teaching to radically abandon your sense of safety or any of that.
It has to be according to who you are. God gives us for generosity of the heart according to the person. So use prudence within all of that.
The second is a little harder, which is we are to remain open in our closest relationships that give us the most heartache. And that could be another sermon, so I'm just going to be brief on this. But it means that the people who give us the hardest time, we are to remain forgiveness oriented and open to their needs. Oftentimes you will find people who are in need.
I encountered a gentleman maybe about 16 years ago who walked into our church at the time, and they were certainly hallucinating, not in their right mind. Another member and myself put them up in a hotel room. We reached out. They had a lot of family. Part of what had gone on is the family was so tired of the person not wanting to address their own illness that they had created some distance to the degree they didn't know where their family member was.
And so this requires part of the daily taking up of our cross when it's long-term need from a close family member where it's just hard, you can't convince them to do the right thing. And yet the Gospels ask us to be tender enough that that they might not become truly abandoned, because oftentimes this is the case with some of our most severe homeless and difficult folks. So there's part of the grace that we need for those who have wronged us 70 times 70 times, right? That's part of the grace there.
And the third is an important understanding that God can help us and in prayer with these difficult matters. It's not about perfection, which is so much a part of our American Christian mentality. We just want to check the box.
We did it, Lord. We've loved everyone. We've overcome all our prejudices. We've done it all, Lord. I've done it all for you. What more should I do? We have this sense that the Apostles oftentimes have. We've done it right. Bless me, God. This is not the attitude of a father towards a child. I don't want any of my five children to be like, “I've done it right. Bless me, Father.” Instead, it is a relationship deepening.
And this is also part of our witness according to how we're made, according to our station in life. And to remember what is radically true of the Gospels, more true than any political promise, that Jesus has accomplished in himself the reconciliation of all things, that the injustices of this life have an answering point, that all the things that we would like to be true of God are actually true in Jesus himself. He's good and personally good to each of us, whether we are rich or poor, things have gone well or not gone well.
And he asks us as his children to be open to blessing those around us that we might encounter who are the least of these, the outcasts, the unfortunate ones, and not to close our voice to them, whether they be nearby, which is sometimes the hardest, or a chance encounter, which is oftentimes how we experience this more often.
And so all we do at the end is say, “Lord, be with me. Help me.” And it pushes us into the daily patterns of prayer.
“Let me be open, Lord, if I encounter you in a stranger today. In the name of Jesus. Amen.”
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited using ChatGPT.
