Douglass Church - Douglass Blvd Christian Church

I mean, if the rich man isn’t the hero and Lazarus isn’t a cautionary tale you tell your kids, so they’ll do their geometry homework and get into Harvard, then everything we’ve taken for granted as true about *this world gets chucked out the window.

If we’re judged more by how we treat the invisible people, the people everyone agrees it’s okay to ignore, than by whether or not we’ve checked all the boxes for morality everybody can see when we go out in public, that changes everything, doesn’t it?

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But here, I would like to suggest that Jesus isn’t just talking about people with money. He’s talking about the systems of domination, exploitation, and violence that keep money in the hands of the powerful and out of the "grabby" hands of the perpetually unsatisfied poor—because they’re always complaining about how they don’t have enough to eat or find shelter.

But Jesus turns that whole way of conceiving the world on its head. He winds up celebrating Robin Hood and trashing the Sheriff of Nottingham.

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Because they bear part of God’s heart with them, who do we care about so much that we’re willing to risk the wrath of the folks in charge just to welcome them, to have a meal with them, to call them our family?

We need to be acutely aware of the implications of this question in a world in which some of our fellow travelers have to point out to the rest of us that—given the suffering they’ve historically endured (and endure to this day)—their lives matter too.

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Part of the reason Jesus puts out this disclaimer about counting the cost is that too often people think they what they want from faith is ease-of-use, friction-free, pre-packaged, no muss—no fuss, no ironing necessary.

But Jesus knows that a few hardy souls aren’t in the market for easy; they want interesting. The kind of people Jesus is appealing to are looking for meaning, purpose, adventure.

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Jesus isn’t inviting us to forget about this world and concentrate on the next. He’s inviting us to begin living as if this new realm of God’s hospitality were already present, fully realized right here, right now.

And the thing of it is, when we begin to practice this sort of countercultural hospitality, we soon come to learn that we were never in charge of the guest list or the seating chart in the first place.

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So the question this story raises for us is, where are we working to bring tear down the barriers put in place by the powerful (intentional or not) that serve to keep people isolated, unseen, forgotten, but not yet gone?

Who are the bent-over people whose faces we lift to finally look in their eyes?

Will we be the people God depends on to see the invisible people and remember their first names?

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The thing is, though, you can’t see them from far off. You have to get right up next to people in order to see them, I mean really see them. And by the grace of God and the mystery of Christ, we’ve been brought near enough, according to Paul, to see them no longer as enemies, or aliens, or foreigners, or strangers, but as human beings, as the children for whom God is creating a whole new world.

And it is the one whom I thought was my enemy, the one whom, to me, was a stranger, who is bound with me (walls torn down) to be now the dwelling place of God.

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But Jesus says, “God has another world in mind, one in which there’s enough for everybody, and nobody gets forgotten. Even the sparrows and the hairs on your head have value. And here’s the thing, if the ruling authorities come after you for holding out for God’s new world rather than tucking your tail between your legs and settling for the one the powerful want you to think is inevitable, don’t worry; God will stand with you in the face of their wrath. If you’re unwilling to settle for this tiny pinched world of scarcity, God will hold you up, lest you fall.”

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