I’ll apologize at the beginning of this sermon that there will be talk of Christmas. No one like Christmas coming too early and September is certainly too early! However, I can’t help bring up Christmas because this gospel is so reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the story of Ebenezer Scrooge. Doesn’t this gospel sound like what would have happened to him if he hadn’t had his spiritual awakening, thanks to the ghosts of Christmas?

In case you’ve forgotten the story of Scrooge, he’s a wealthy, yet stingy and miserable man. According to him, everyone and everything must ultimately bow down to the almighty dollar or the pound, in his case. To Scrooge, if something doesn’t make you richer, than it’s worthless. Ultimately, he’s saved from his misery, that he didn’t even know he was in, by the ghost of his dead business partner (Marley) who was shackled by the weight of his sins and the subsequent journeys he takes with the ghosts of Christmas during the night of Christmas Eve.            

In today’s gospel, we have an unnamed rich man who feasted and did not care for Lazarus who longed for scraps at his gate. Historical note, it was customary in ancient times for wealthy people to share their extra food with people begging at their gates. It wouldn’t be normal now, but it was so normal then that some of these wealthy homes had benches built for the people to wait by the gate. It was within normal expectations of society that this rich man would have provided scraps for Lazarus and yet we do not hear that he did that. We only hear that Lazarus longed for the scraps, not that he got them.

Then after they die, the power dynamic flips and Lazarus is lifted by angels to be with Abraham, while the rich man suffers in Hades. He looks up and sees Lazarus with Abraham and sees that he suffers while Lazarus does not. So, he asks Abraham for help.

Abraham responds with compassion, calling him child, yet Abraham is still clear that the rich man is where he earned his place to be. And then he names the chasm that is between them as fixed and cannot be crossed. “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.”

The fixed nature of the chasm is interesting, since it seems to not fit with Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness and compassion.

In fact, in the very next paragraph of the Luke gospel, Jesus teaches his disciples this. “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive.” There is no fixed chasm present in that situation, the very next paragraph. And indeed the whole Bible is full of stories of forgiveness.

So, what fixes the chasm into place. Does it make sense that it’s God, or Jesus, or Abraham, or even Lazarus who fix this chasm into place? Or could it in fact be the rich man himself?

What is the rich man doing before death that he does after death? There are a few things to notice, so what do you see? Continues to not talk directly to Lazarus. He continues to not repent for not loving a fellow human, or even fulfilling basic societal norms in providing scraps. He continues to only worry about himself and his family. Continues to align himself with power (Abraham), ignoring who he sees as weak (Lazarus), and make demands for his own well-being. In other words, he didn’t seem to change a bit.

He went from feasting to suffering, but he’s still trapped by his worldview of who he is, who others are, and what God is to do for him. He may think, “I’m most important to me. Other’s needs are their own issue, and God is supposed to make me comfortable.”

This isn’t unlike Scrooge who, before his ghostly visitors, did not know he was imprisoned and suffering due to his own greed and self-centeredness. The rich man, after death, knows he’s physically suffering, but he doesn’t know what traps him there.

He doesn’t seem to know that he harmed Lazarus in life and that’s not good. He doesn’t know that he could change his behavior and he would be forgiven. There’s a lot he doesn’t seem to know and he’s stuck on the wrong side of the chasm, because he was still behaving as if his world view from his living days still applied.

Scrooge has this wise nephew who defends the value of Christmas to Scrooge’s many ‘Bah Humbugs’ about the holiday. This nephew says, “(Christmas) is the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

The nephew is talking about bridging the chasm, the fixed chasm that keeps people operating as if they are separate races of creatures bound on separate journeys. How many of us suffer on the wrong side of a fixed chasm that we barely recognize?

Lazarus is not on a separate journey from the rich man, and yet the rich man does not know it even in his suffering in Hades. The chasm is still there, fixed by his obstinate way of understanding the world to be all about him and his family.

Wealth has a way of doing this to our brains. In fact, there was a study that was done at a 4 way stop in Berkeley where the researchers put people in different cars and told them to drive a certain route to do something. However, the real experiment was to see how they’d behave with pedestrians at a certain corner while they were driving different cars, some nicer than others. And wouldn’t you know, the nicer the car, the less accommodating the drivers were of pedestrians. Apparently, the drivers behaved the worst in BMWs. When we feel wealthy, we can start feeling inflated in our self-importance to the point we don’t even recognize the humanity of the one suffering right in front of us. So inflated that we lose track of God’s role in our life. So inflated, we feel entitled to a world that caters to our comfort.

Wealth can go to our heads, but it isn’t necessarily the wealth that’s so damning in the text. Abraham says that the rich man’s family, who we can assume is also wealthy, has what they need to not suffer the same fate. They have God. They have Moses and the prophets. They have Jesus. They don’t need a ghost to go tell them to repent. They have the teaching to melt the chasm to nothing.

So, where are these fixed chasms in our lives? Where do we not see or acknowledge other people? Who do we think we are better than? Who scares us? Are we clear that others, those we are not fond of, are also beloved children of God?

In our gospel today, we don’t get to read about what happens when the rich man finally has his spiritual awakening. It’ll come, I’m sure. Abraham was being very patient with him. But we do have a description of Scrooge’s joy when he wakes up on Christmas morning, realizes that he isn’t dead, and that he hasn’t missed Christmas. Nor has he missed out on life! He woke up to experience the simple joy of truly seeing and connecting with other people, even though they may be on the other side of chasms that our social structures determine as important. He woke up to the fact that his joy was intrinsically part of the joy of others. That he was himself on the same journey as all those around him and was part of it all. He woke up and found the fixed chasm was gone.

Scrooge declared that morning, “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man.” And later Dickens writes, “He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness.”

Like Scrooge, we are people made to be with God and with each other, not separated by our own fixed chasms. We are made to be on this journey through life together. We are made to honor each other as children of God and in that honoring, we are given a glimpse of the Kingdom to come and yet here already.

AMEN