Friday, March 23, 2007
Lent Reading Day 28

Lazarus and the Rich Man:
Luke 16:19-31

As I read this passage today I'm reminded of someone in my life who absolutely refuses to listen to what I have to say and what I think. This person claims to listen, to cooperate with me in joint ventures...and yet they absolutely refuse to hear me...they're convinced they know everything and that I'm a young - foolish idiot. What does it take to convince someone to listen - to get someone else to really hear us when we have something important, crucial, to share? This person makes me want to get in my car and express my well-known road rage in a front-page worthy matter....so what did Jesus feel like when he repeatedly was beating his head against a stone trying to share his 'bigger' vision of who God is, what God wants of us, and how God wants us to treat each other?

What does it take to open our eyes to what is happening around us? What does it take to open our eyes to the reality that our faith affirms - that we are in need of being saved everyday from the brokeness that characterizes our human condition? Now you might be wondering how it is that I'm affirming some sort of massively pessimistic calvinistic view of total and radical human deparavity as the quintessntial evil creature in creation....yet there is something broken about who we are deep inside, how we react to each other, and the world-system in which we live. We doubt ourselves - our uniqueness - making up for it by striking out at others, by doubting our self-worth, or by simply checking-out. We doubt our relationships don't we....assuming on a certain existential level that we'll be left out, that there won't be enough resources to go around for us to get some (wether that's love, time, food, shelter, energy, clothing, attention or even oil), so as we're hurt in life we gradually let mistrust emerge and become the foundation for many of the ways in which we act and react to and with one another. Looking at our world the system is broken...the rich get richer, the poor poorer, those who need have more need....their is a deep inequality, lack of justice and terrestial mistrust between the nations, the diverse cultures and different races within our world. In all of this our deep mistrust, fear, and anxiety that leads up to violence, competition, destruciton, and division ... directs us in a way more of death than life.

This brokeness of us, our relationships, and our world is what Jesus is talking about - it's what we affirm as reality through and in our faith, it's the problem or the thing that's broken that Jesus somehow fixes in his life, death, and resurrection. In him God turns the powers of the world upside down, transforming oppression into liberation, mistrust into grace, death into new life. What does it take to open our eyes to that need? .. not just some simplistic way of saying that a once-in-a-lifetime conversion-sort-of-prayer will solve all of the problems (of course it's a great start) but that we need to be saved every day, to have the liberating power of this resurrected Jesus become the currency with which we relate to one another, the vision on which we base our life, the love through which we trust that we are loved by God and then can learn from that point to love others and to love ourselves.

What does it take us to recognize that deep need within us, which on a certain level is so obvious? This is what Jesus is talking about....the rich man can't see it, or doesn't want to see it...ignoring his responsibility in continuing a broken system of injustice, and his own need for salvation. Even in his death and the afterlife he continues to treat the poor Lazarus as an errand-boy, someone of less importance than he, someone who seems to be less human. Jesus tells us this shocking parable to force our eyes open, to invite us not just to reflection but to life transformation and action. How are your eyes closed to your need for salvation, our need for salvation, and the need of the world for salvation? We're quick to think or see how others need to be saved.....it's much harder when it comes to seeing the log in our own eye, our own brokeness and then admiting it and asking for God's salvation to transform us directly and through our living-out-of-faith in the context of a community of faith. We're often so eager to judge the idea of salvation - to reject the notion of a faith that invites us to a deeper and newer way of living - to refuse the idea of sin - existential and universal brokeness that characterizes our human condition. Yet isn't that the thing that's broken - that we can't fix through our political parties, through the empowerment of the proletariat, the increasing power of technology, social programs, or modern warfare and the spread of democracy. We need a savior....and we can't save ourselves.