Epistle. 1 John 4:7-21
Gospel. Luke 16:19-31
The Gospel appointed for today is an old familiar text. I've preached on it before and I've heard many sermons drawn from it. I've also heard entire dogmatic systems built from it addressing the life of the dead. I don't think that is the most productive thing to do with the text – St. Paul warned the Corinthians that one ought not speak much on these things, indeed, much of what that life is is 'inexpressible.' So it is my project this morning to simply analyze this rich man.
Right away, the reader is given a sharp contrast to consider: “So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried.” We are presented with the angels coming to take Lazarus and the rich man being buried. Luke has given us a motif of ascension versus descent in this clever sequence. We know that Christ did both, it is a core teaching of the Pauline epistles. He had to do both to redeem mankind.
Lazarus was presented as a pitiable character, somewhat like the victim that the Samaritan found. But the story unfolds a great reversal of fortune and the reader is led to understand that the rich man is truly the pitiable figure. He did not learn basic humanity in his life and so he must learn it in death. The rich man is an early case study that everyone will have a conversion at some point. As the story closes, he has learned to love his brothers. Jesus was unimpressed with that sort of self-serving love but its a start.
Now we are left with the prickly issue of whether the rich man's post-mortem conversion did him any good. There have been teachers throughout church history who have believed in the universal reconciliation of mankind to the Father – most notably Gregory of Nyssa. This idea has never been taken up as doctrine which can be definitively proven through Scripture or tradition. You have to go about making the case from principles of reason. But a passage like our Gospel today gives something of a toe-hold from which to start.
Another doctrine that is related to this idea is that of purgatory. How does one get from torments to paradise? And so the doctors of the church came up with the idea of purgatory – a period of refinement of the soul before it can come into the presence of God. Underlying this idea is also the assumption that most of mankind is unfit to stand in the presence of God without some extra help. That is true enough in its own right.
But the Articles of Religion, specifically the 22nd, take a dim view of purgatory and the Scriptures are mostly silent. But we are told that Christ has provided that extra help. We are told that he effected a change to the cosmic order and Satan can no longer accuse the saints. We are told that we now have a choice to live with God or to live with our own hate.
We can look at the oft-overplayed case of the thief on the cross. Christ simply told him: Today you will be with me in paradise. If anyone needed some time of refinement in purgatory, you would think it would be this malefactor. But he was given a better promise.
Lets return to the readings we read today. We should spend some time with St. John's epistle. We are given more information about the nature of God by John than by any other author, except perhaps the Psalmist. Here, John makes the case that God is love. We must keep in mind that when the Scriptures give us concrete affirmations like this it is almost always a description of the energies of God. We cannot define the substance of God. We can only glimpse the substance of God through the person of Jesus Christ.
The liberal theologian will go off the rails and start talking about God as an ideal and an influence. And by that they mean that God is an invention of man's mind that once served him well in establishing well-ordered society or some other evolutionary reason. This line of thought denies the person-hood of God and is bluntly condemned in formularies like the Athanasian Creed.
You may be aware that the Greek NT has several words which have all been transmitted into our English Bibles as love. It is thus necessary to go back to the original text to further study what is being talked about here. John consistently uses 'agape' to refer to what is being shared through the energies of God. This love is selfless, brotherly, and sacrificial. This is a love of affection or fondness but never of lust.
John intertwines his discussion of how this love should influence our lives with a profound reflection on how the process even begins. Agape begins with God and is shared with us. To whatever degree we are able to manifest it, we are reciprocating what God has first demonstrated. And without the action of the Spirit creating clean hearts and renewing right spirits within us, we would do a poor job of that. The historical witness of the Scriptures is primarily filled with accounts of dis-ordered love in action.
Our culture has largely lost the ability to distinguish disordered love from rightly ordered love. And intertwined in that problem is the related problem, shared with the liberal theologian, of being incapable of recognizing person-hood. It's not a new problem: Jesus was asked repeatedly “Who is my neighbor?” His audience did not want to recognize the person-hood of the other or love the other. This sentiment carries into the early church as the Acts records the struggle to accept the Gentile converts as full members in their own right.
But John has echoed St. Paul's discourse on love (1 Corinthians 13) in our reading. Paul told his audience that the true sign of being a participant in the life of God is not miracles but faith, hope, and love – and the greatest is love. Let me close with a quote from the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky:
That is not the life we have been called to and that is not the life of God.
Gospel. Luke 16:19-31
The Gospel appointed for today is an old familiar text. I've preached on it before and I've heard many sermons drawn from it. I've also heard entire dogmatic systems built from it addressing the life of the dead. I don't think that is the most productive thing to do with the text – St. Paul warned the Corinthians that one ought not speak much on these things, indeed, much of what that life is is 'inexpressible.' So it is my project this morning to simply analyze this rich man.
Right away, the reader is given a sharp contrast to consider: “So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried.” We are presented with the angels coming to take Lazarus and the rich man being buried. Luke has given us a motif of ascension versus descent in this clever sequence. We know that Christ did both, it is a core teaching of the Pauline epistles. He had to do both to redeem mankind.
Lazarus was presented as a pitiable character, somewhat like the victim that the Samaritan found. But the story unfolds a great reversal of fortune and the reader is led to understand that the rich man is truly the pitiable figure. He did not learn basic humanity in his life and so he must learn it in death. The rich man is an early case study that everyone will have a conversion at some point. As the story closes, he has learned to love his brothers. Jesus was unimpressed with that sort of self-serving love but its a start.
Now we are left with the prickly issue of whether the rich man's post-mortem conversion did him any good. There have been teachers throughout church history who have believed in the universal reconciliation of mankind to the Father – most notably Gregory of Nyssa. This idea has never been taken up as doctrine which can be definitively proven through Scripture or tradition. You have to go about making the case from principles of reason. But a passage like our Gospel today gives something of a toe-hold from which to start.
Another doctrine that is related to this idea is that of purgatory. How does one get from torments to paradise? And so the doctors of the church came up with the idea of purgatory – a period of refinement of the soul before it can come into the presence of God. Underlying this idea is also the assumption that most of mankind is unfit to stand in the presence of God without some extra help. That is true enough in its own right.
But the Articles of Religion, specifically the 22nd, take a dim view of purgatory and the Scriptures are mostly silent. But we are told that Christ has provided that extra help. We are told that he effected a change to the cosmic order and Satan can no longer accuse the saints. We are told that we now have a choice to live with God or to live with our own hate.
We can look at the oft-overplayed case of the thief on the cross. Christ simply told him: Today you will be with me in paradise. If anyone needed some time of refinement in purgatory, you would think it would be this malefactor. But he was given a better promise.
Lets return to the readings we read today. We should spend some time with St. John's epistle. We are given more information about the nature of God by John than by any other author, except perhaps the Psalmist. Here, John makes the case that God is love. We must keep in mind that when the Scriptures give us concrete affirmations like this it is almost always a description of the energies of God. We cannot define the substance of God. We can only glimpse the substance of God through the person of Jesus Christ.
The liberal theologian will go off the rails and start talking about God as an ideal and an influence. And by that they mean that God is an invention of man's mind that once served him well in establishing well-ordered society or some other evolutionary reason. This line of thought denies the person-hood of God and is bluntly condemned in formularies like the Athanasian Creed.
You may be aware that the Greek NT has several words which have all been transmitted into our English Bibles as love. It is thus necessary to go back to the original text to further study what is being talked about here. John consistently uses 'agape' to refer to what is being shared through the energies of God. This love is selfless, brotherly, and sacrificial. This is a love of affection or fondness but never of lust.
John intertwines his discussion of how this love should influence our lives with a profound reflection on how the process even begins. Agape begins with God and is shared with us. To whatever degree we are able to manifest it, we are reciprocating what God has first demonstrated. And without the action of the Spirit creating clean hearts and renewing right spirits within us, we would do a poor job of that. The historical witness of the Scriptures is primarily filled with accounts of dis-ordered love in action.
Our culture has largely lost the ability to distinguish disordered love from rightly ordered love. And intertwined in that problem is the related problem, shared with the liberal theologian, of being incapable of recognizing person-hood. It's not a new problem: Jesus was asked repeatedly “Who is my neighbor?” His audience did not want to recognize the person-hood of the other or love the other. This sentiment carries into the early church as the Acts records the struggle to accept the Gentile converts as full members in their own right.
But John has echoed St. Paul's discourse on love (1 Corinthians 13) in our reading. Paul told his audience that the true sign of being a participant in the life of God is not miracles but faith, hope, and love – and the greatest is love. Let me close with a quote from the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky:
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal.
That is not the life we have been called to and that is not the life of God.
