First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Jeremiah 32 and Luke 16

“The Irony of Freedom”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

September 30, 2007

Many years ago, early on a Sunday morning I walked from the manse to the church. It was a routine. In the quiet, before anyone came to worship, I would run through the sermon and listen to see if it "preached." I came early enough that if it didn’t preach, there would be time for amendment or revision.

Pastors don’t say this enough, but I am preaching to me too. I am not here to convict you, but to offer the word of God to us. I don’t struggle over what to say to you, but what God is saying to us. It’s a fine line and sometimes a sticky wicket. This is long way to say I need a time to listen before I speak.

On this one Sunday morning though, my time of attention or solitude was interrupted. I was midway through the text, pausing from time to time to correct a word, smooth a transition, and just before I resumed speaking on one such editorial moment, I glanced to the side and there were people in the pews, a couple about midway up to my left. I closed my eyes and looked around again. There were no people. They were gone.

The couple I saw for a moment, they appeared to be a husband and wife, were not ones I recognized. They were dressed in clothes that were not in fashion; the woman was wearing a hat that had fallen from its vogue many decades ago. For the moment I saw them they were just sitting there like any other parishioners.

Needless to say I was spooked. I didn’t run out of the sanctuary, but I thought about it. When I resumed my sermon, though, it was with a different tone. Instead of it being just to myself, there was a sense of presence, a kind of fullness to the empty room.

From that point on I have never looked at a sanctuary the same. For me it is as if the walls are not only covered in paint, but also the living prayers of generations; for me it is never empty, but ever full.

Now that you are good and concerned let’s talk. Protestants don’t believe in such things. We don’t. We don’t pray to the dead or for the dead; we don’t wear saint’s medals or light lots of candles; and we don’t have masses or services for the dead after the funeral; we don’t do purgatory, and if the truth be told, most of us don’t do Hades, or Hell. We just feel free to say we don’t believe in it. We’re smarter than that, more enlightened, better informed, evolved or some other form of arrogance related to education and eighteenth century western philosophy.

And for those of us who do believe in such things we speak of them askance, or to the side. When I meet Roman Catholics in town who listen to this service on the radio they often do the same thing. They look around to see if there is a nun on guard or a priest within earshot and then they say, “I’m Catholic, but I listen to you on the radio.” When Protestants speak of the dead as more than simply “gone” or when they espouse a belief in Hell or if they were so bold as to wonder out loud “is it weird that I feel my father is in the room sometimes even though he’s been dead for years” we look around to see if the really sophisticated people are listening lest we look like a rube.

I mention this because it is not the point of our Gospel lesson. Luke records this fantastic tale of Jesus: a poor beggar is in the bosom of Abraham and a rich man is in Hades and they are talking to each other over an impassable chasm. Now there is a great point to this parable, but it’s not about people being dead, but alive; nor is it an argument for what life looks like in the next life. These are parts of the parable, but not the point.

I mention this because in Jesus’ day the idea of Hades and a chasm and angels and spirits returning to speak to the living would have been seen as just the trappings of the story. Of these the listeners would have said, “okay, so there is the chasm, the dead, Hades, Abraham and Lazarus walking around . . . so what is your point?” But not so much for us.

For us these things are not mundane, but fantastic. We don’t speak of Hell today nor the torment of the flames, we’ve crafted a much more benign god who is just a big bundle of love. And for this reason it is hard for us to see the point beneath all these images and ideas we have worked so hard to put aside. There is so much here we’ve rejected (we don’t talk about these things), it’s near impossible to see what Jesus actually wants to say in the parable.

The story of the Rich Man and Lazarus is a parable. Being a parable it is best understood by finding the contradiction of what we assume and then listen for the profound opposition, the tension. In this parable the easy assumption is that Heaven and Hell are the decisions of God, which you can merit, or influence by good deeds. God looks over the books, weighs the profit and loss of your life, and then decides who gets in and who is sent away. This parable is meant to say, not quite. No. That is not quite it.

And that is a big contradiction of a basic assumption. And in the parable Jesus does his best to cover the truth he wants to convey in layers of misdirection so that by the time we actually find what he wants to say we are ready to listen.

He says things that are supposed to distract us and have us off chasing rabbits for a time. Parables do this as a device to gain attention more than anything else. The biggest misdirection in this parable is the poverty of Lazarus. That Lazarus is poor yet now at rest, that the Rich Man ignored him each day, or that somehow if only Lazarus had been invited in all would different is nothing but a huge misdirection. Lazarus here is like a box a great gift comes in: you have to open it (or ask of it), but ultimately it must be left aside.

This week in our lectionary Bible study at Ives Hill one of the members said something so lovely and profound and it just whisked Lazarus away; and in doing so it revealed clearly how poverty and Lazarus are not the point of the parable. She said, “you know, the Rich Man is still bossing Lazarus around.” And it’s true. The rich man doesn’t speak to Lazarus, saying, "O Lazarus how wrong I was to leave you in misery; forgive me and let me be your servant in paradise; if you could forgive me perhaps that would soothe my misery.” He doesn’t say anything like this; in fact he never actually speaks to Lazarus.

The rich man addresses only Abraham as if it is still beneath him to speak to Lazarus. "Father Abraham, tell Lazarus to bring me something to drink I am quite parched by these flames; Father Abraham tell Lazarus to go to my house and speak to my brothers.” The rich man is bossing Lazarus around and never for a moment says, my life should have been different, my riches were squandered and I should have given them away helping the poor like Lazarus. We may read this into the story, and that is part of the misdirection, but it’s not the point.

The point of the parable is the irony of freedom, the irony of our freedom more importantly as this is not about God’s freedom, but ours. Our freedom and God’s freedom are different. That is why the lectionary people put Jeremiah as the Old Testament reading today: for Jeremiah is all about how God’s freedom and our freedom being different. Jeremiah is writing at a time when God’s freedom is being revealed in sharp and profound ways; and how by their deeds the people of Judah had forsaken their freedom. By their sins they had literally enslaved themselves.

Before Jeremiah the prophets had always come and said, if you repent and believe, then God will restore. It was as if God were bound to do so without the freedom to let go. Jeremiah gave a different image. He came and said, repent, don’t repent, it doesn’t matter. The Babylonians are coming and it’s really going to be bad. His point was: while God may still be free, we are not.

In Jeremiah we see that God makes promises and fulfills them, but also has the freedom to not make promises, not bless, to punish, to forsake. God isn’t bound to just be nice; God is God and the Babylonians are coming. One of the greatest choices in reading Moses and the Prophets is whether you read them forward from Abraham or backwards from Jeremiah. With the latter the picture of God’s freedom is wild and unsettling.

The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus is supposed to be wild and unsettling because Hell is the irony of freedom. It is. Hell is the irony of freedom because no matter how gracious, no matter how loving, no matter how much redemption God stands ready to impart, it is our choice to accept it, just as it is our choice to reject it.

The Rich Man never says, get me out of here; he just wants a drink. He never laments or repents; he is, in essence, where he has chosen to be. Hell was his choice and this is the reason it must be. (Here is where you are supposed to squint your eyes and say, “wait a minute.” That is what a parable is supposed to do.) Hell, or Hades, in the parable is where the rich man decided to be. This is what Abraham is trying to tell the rich man about his brothers. Remember Abraham doesn’t say, Yes, I will send Lazarus and others to warn your brothers; he says, they have Moses and the Prophets, they can figure it out on their own; their choice is what it is. And then he adds the kicker, where this parable really takes it up a notch, “not even someone rising from the dead will convince them.” We can reinterpret these words to be: not even my dying and rising will sway them.

With this we are really close to the irony of freedom. Abraham says, God’s mercy is God’s mercy, just like his wrath is his wrath: yet, no matter what, God will not take your freedom. You may be enslaved, you may squander every good thing, you may even choose Hell like the rich man, but never, never will I take away the spirit that can make those choices. That is yours.

At times, after a stinker of a sermon, I remember the vision in my early church and wonder if listening to me preach was the punishment or Hades that couple must endure. Yet, then I turn it around. What if a great cloud of witnesses, hoping, praying, waiting for us to be the church, to be good men and women, to make good choices, surrounds us? What if we are just one course of a living sanctuary? I see this church, not simply as us, but a whole cloth of woven generations with voices of the living and those who have been gathered.

It’s hard for us Protestants to imagine a world so filled with layers and connections. For us the individual is nearly enough for our imagination. It is just as hard for us to imagine such a thing as Hell. It was very hard for Jeremiah to convince the people that by their choices, by their own freedom they had brought slavery upon themselves.

I believe we’ve all heard images of Hell or Hades that are meant to spook, meant to frighten. But no one was afraid in our parable. That Hell must real if our freedom is real is a hard message; it is true, but not very good news.

The good news is that it is near impossible for us to see this church and ourselves as something unto himself, something for itself. The Rich man was meant to be an image of someone who had pulled the world around itself, someone who was crafting their own hell. Such is just not the case here.

We cannot be who we are without being mindful of others. Far from hell, I believe we are building the kingdom of God.

Many people have come to me in the last two months and said this to me. Not the hell part, but something that sounds like the kingdom of God. By bringing the Malawians here we are different, by bringing them in my home they are not people of poverty they are my friends, my brothers and sisters; they have a name. The larger world, in essence, has come closer as the kingdom of God. The complete indifference of the rich man to Lazarus is not an option for us. Our youth cannot pick up a hammer or see an image of Mexico or poverty and not think “it’s not just about me.”

We have an amazing freedom. The irony of the freedom is that while it can be used to help, to heal, to lead us to give our life away, it can also be used to pull the world in around us where everything revolves around us. This is the same freedom the generations prior to us were given. I hope they are watching; I hope they believe their prayers are being answered; I hope they are listening. Amen.