seventeenth sunday after Trinity

Try and imagine the population of the USA, which is around320 million people, now multiply that number by 3, which makes around 960 million people.  That is the number of people worldwide the United Nations estimate do not get enough food each day.  Well over a billion people do not have clean drinking water, and at least 25,000 people, mainly children, die each day from hunger or causes related to lack of food and polluted water. That’s a third of the population of this town dying every day.

We are told that a significant number of children in this country live without sufficient food, and rely on free school dinners and breakfast clubs to ensure they are fed adequately. And yet the number of billionaires and millionaires has grown enormously in recent years.  One Russian billionaire owns 5 yachts, one of them big enough to have 2 helicopters on board, he also owns a small football team somewhere in London he bought with loose change in his pockets.

Forty percent of parables in the Gospels are about wealth, money and possessions, and how we as Christians should use them for the good of all our brothers and sisters.  Luke in particular is filled with stories about rich and poor, last week the Shrewd Manager and this week the Rich Man and Lazarus: 

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day”. 

This sort of description tells us he wasn’t just well off or prosperous, this man was seriously stinking rich.  He lived like a King, he was the Gospel equivalent of the super-rich, living in a gated community in an exclusive part of London, locked away from normal people, surrounded by a wall and a gate to keep people out.

This rich man is usually called Dives, Latin for rich. Every phrase Jesus uses to describe him adds something to the luxury in which he lived.  Only the High Priests wore robes of purple and fine linen, and they cost £40, which was an immense sum in those days when the average days wage for a man was 4 pence. What Jesus was describing of course was the Pharisees and High Priests who ruled the Jewish people in his time.  In a country where ordinary people were fortunate if they ate each day and very fortunate if they ate meat once a week, the rich man was feasting on luxurious food every day. The poor were existing on fourpence a day but were still expected to pay their Temple Tax, which kept the Pharisees and the High Priests in their luxury. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, who is a beggar covered with ulcerated sores, and so helpless he can’t even ward off the street dogs which are pestering him.  Interestingly Lazarus is the only character in any of the parables who is given a name, which translated means “God is my help”. You can imagine Lazarus lying there outside the gate, poor and weak through lack of food, looking in through the gate at the excess of the rich man, eating, drinking, entertaining and partying, and longing for the scraps which fell from the rich man table, to satisfy his hunger.

Finally overwhelmed by hunger and disease poor Lazarus dies and is taken up to heaven by the angels to be with Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith.  Then the rich man dies but ends up in hell being tormented, and when he looks up he sees Abraham with Lazarus in heaven. The rich man asks for mercy, for just a touch of cool water on his tongue because he is in agony in the flames of hell. What a reversal of fortune for Lazarus and the rich man!

Well of course the purpose of this story is to draw the comparison between the rich man, who showed no compassion and love to others and poor Lazarus who needed compassion and love. The rich man had all the financial means to help Lazarus, all he wanted was the scraps from the rich man’s table and he didn’t even get that. The rich man wasn’t deliberately cruel to poor Lazarus, he hadn’t ordered the police removed him from his gate, he hadn’t kicked him as he passed or personally harmed him in any way at all. The sin of the rich man was that he never noticed Lazarus who had become part of the landscape and simply thought it was perfectly natural and inevitable for him to lie in pain outside the gate and effectively starve to death.  It wasn’t what he did that caused the rich man to suffer, it was what he didn’t do which sent him to hell.

We may not like to admit it but this parable is a reflection on our lives today as well, about the one third of the world that lives in comparative comfort and the two thirds that live in poverty.  If you look at what we call the developed world, which is an awful phrase to use, we use 87% of the earth’s food and natural resources, we are the rich man and outside our gates, our borders, lie’s the world’s poor and hungry.  These people are so desperate and hungry they long to eat what falls from our tables, and will make whatever sacrifice is necessary to get into western countries.

Look at the poor people who try desperately to get into Britain each day from camps in Northern France, concealing themselves in lorries, even inside container lorries when they know they could easily suffocate, while we cry out about illegal immigrants ruining our country. Look at what France is doing to the Roma people, destroying their makeshift camps, treating them like animals, images rather reminiscent of Germany during the war I think one EU Commissioner called it.

We may try and fool ourselves into thinking that times are tough for us all because of the economic problems and budget deficit facing this country, and with the prospects of real and savage cuts to government departments budgets looming in October.  And of course it is true that over the past two years some families have been caught up in the downturn, have lost their jobs, their homes, their possessions, even their families, but as a caring nation there is always help available and people should not starve on the streets as you see in so many two thirds countries.  Compared to the average person in Tanzania where I was again in June we are positively well off.

You may have seen the TV programme recently about children and families in Zimbabwe, the image that stays with me is of that little boy digging for human bones to sell so he can afford to go to school and learn, what a contrast to our country, we are fortunate thank God, but we don’t think we are.

The message for us all from this parable is that Jesus warns us against the indifference of the rich man, he warns us against erecting our walls and locking our gates in order to keep the hungry and the poor and the disadvantaged out of our lives, he warns us against being greedy and selfish with our wealth, he warns us against not sharing with those in need.  In two weeks we will celebrate our Harvest Festival in this church and hopefully you will support our Widows and Orphans project in Tanzania, which we supported last year.  I will talk more about that then but East Africa has just experienced the worst summer for many years, drought conditions and wide spread crop failure.  Our money gave those widows and orphans the only hope they had.  Let us turn that hope into action for them.

Those who consider themselves God’s children have a duty of care to look after those in need.  Thos who worship God must show compassion to the hungry.  I have spoken about the poor in Tanzania because I know about their plight, but I also know that there are many poor and needy people in this town through my work for S.S.A.F.A. Forces Help and through contacts in this Church.

The project running on a Wednesday night in our Church Hall to offer food and compassion to people living on the streets of our town, is already attracting about fifteen people each time.  This is a real hands-on project showing those who are desperate and in need, those marginalised by society, that they are truly loved by God, and God willing this may turn some of their lives around.

The rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his rich brothers to repent and change their lives else they will end up in the torments of hell also.  Abraham points to the law and the prophets which have guided the Jewish people for centuries and tells the rich man if they are not enough warning to people to repent then sending a dead man back to warn them isn’t enough either.

You see we have all the warnings we need, we know what God through Christ is calling us to do, we don’t need God to send Lazarus back to warn us, we see the stark warnings in the faces of the poor and needy, the faces of the children dying through malnutrition and disease.  Jesus warned us that when the Son of Man returns he will separate those who have truly loved him and showed compassion to others. They will inherit the kingdom prepared for them just as Lazarus inherited his place in heaven.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, who was Beatified by the Holy Father last Sunday wrote, ‘I am a link in the chain, a bond of connexions between persons.  He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work’.  And of course that is what Newman did, visiting the sick and the many poor in the slums of Victorian Birmingham, comforting the bereaved, caring for those in the squalid prisons of the day. Newman was such an inspiration of God’s love and compassion in a very brutal world that many thousands lined the streets to witness his funeral.

God is calling us to show the same compassion and love, and in our own individual ways we can make a real difference to someone’s life.  ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me’....Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’. Amen.