“Becoming A Person Of Substance”
Luke 16: 19-31
September 27, 1992
Lillian Hellman, the playwright once wrote: “God help all children as they move into a time of life they do not understand and must struggle through with precepts they have picked from the garbage cans of older people, clinging with the passion of the lost to the odds and ends that will mess them up for all time.”
I sometimes wonder how many parents pass on garbage so that “children will cling with passion to the odds and ends that will mess them up for all time.” I sometimes shudder to think of how many precepts we’ve passed on under the guise of good advice. I sometimes agonize as a parent to think how much we have messed up our children and probably subsequent generations.
That was the issue for the rich man in our Gospel this morning. There he was, stranded in hell. Finally coming to the realization that much of what he had been taught, he clung to passionately, had messed him up for all time. So he calls out to Father Abraham (not our John), “Abraham, go to my family and help them to unlearn those damaging lessons, help them to change those precepts that had been taken in isn’t terribly optimistic, I’m afraid to say. He answers, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they change if someone should rise from the dead.”
I am more confident: I have faith that God will keep trying, and I have a hunch if we can acknowledge what those precepts are, and how powerful a hold they have on us, we can begin, by the grace of God, to put them aside. In other words, I don’t think the rich man and his family were necessarily doomed to spend eternity in hell. There is a possibility of redemption, but first you have to recognize where you are (and I admit this takes imagination). And then you have to be willing to change.
We can speculate all we want about what some of the rich man’s precepts. What the garbage was that messed him up and caused him to land in hell. But I would suggest it might be a better exercise to ask what precepts, what odds and ends, have shaped our lives.
Let me share with you one of those precepts that I ingested unconsciously as I grew up. I was taught, subliminally, that one ought to become “a person of substance. Security, community standing, and happiness all seemed to depend upon being “a person of substance.” The odds and ends of what it meant to be a person of substance were picked up from the garbage cans of older people around me.
But let me switch the spotlight from me to you, or as someone said a few months ago, let’s stop preaching and start meddling. And let me ask you, “Do you think you are a person of substance?” Or if not, why? That’s the fundamental question every Christian must answer. Each of us truly needs to ask ourselves, “What am I worth?” And then we have to determine whether or not that makes us a person of substance. So what makes you wealthy or what makes you poor? What makes you worth a lot, or what makes you a marginal member of society? Who makes you a person of substance, or what makes you a person of substance?
A week ago Saturday night, I attended one of those black-tie with all the movers and shakers of the community were present: the governor, our congressmen, the mayor, most of the big businessmen, the heads of our educational institutions, even a bishop! Watching the parade of important people, I started asking myself, “Were these the people of substance? Were these the truly wealthy, and of what did their wealth consist?”
We have been taught and are under the illusion that money gives us substance. Or our bank accounts determine our standing in the community. But that’s just not true.
What gives us substance is that elusive thing we call character. And character is related directly to desire. Your character is molded in terms of your desires, your wants. Show me your want list or wish list, and I’ll tell you your character. For what you desire most, you become; what you hold closest, you become; what you wish for is what you become. Can you see that becoming a person of substance has everything to do with your character and little to do with what you have or will acquire?
Jesus contrasts the rich man with Lazarus. The rich man, sitting in hell, was only rich in material possessions. Lazarus had other, more important gifts: character, friends, community, relationships, and faith. All of which meant the person of substance was Lazarus and not the rich man.
Don’t misunderstand this Gospel lesson. Jesus is not glorifying poverty; Jesus simply is saying we are judged not on what we have, but rather on what we have given away. Stewardship is the ultimate test of substance, not ownership. Stewardship has to do with what you do with what has been given to you. Ownership has to do with what you have gotten. Put away half for your own benefit.
Karen said it very well last week in her sermon on community. She said the community is dependent on how much we can surrender, not on what we bring to the community. And that’s the secret of The Divine Community: the key to the Kingdom is dependent on what you have given away, not on what you have acquired. You enter into heaven on the basis of stewardship, not the basis of ownership.
Leo Bascaglia, the delightful, irreverent teacher and writer, was quoted as saying, “I have found myself in recent years unlearning more than I am learning. I am unlearning all the garbage I have collected.” As a child, I, too, learned a lot of garbage about what it means to be a person of substance. I thought it meant owning a lot, acquiring a lot, having a lot of toys. I now find it means something entirely different. I’m unlearning much of what I’ve learned (and I’m doing this by stretching my imagination) .
There is a later addition to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Imagine, if you will, that the rich man had died and was in Hades, the place of eternal torment. In his agony, he cried out for mercy. “Abraham,” he cried, ‘take me up to where you are.” At last, Abraham came to him and said, “I can only help you if you remember one unselfish thing you did while on earth.”
It seemed easy at first, but when the rich man began reciting his good deeds, Abraham looked them UP and they all seemed to be done out of self-interest. Nothing was wrong with his giving except that it didn’t count in terms of truly self-giving. Finally, at the point of despair, the rich man remembered a scrap he had once given to Lazarus sitting outside his gate. The rich man hated to mention it because it wasn’t much of a scrap. It was an onion, a poor, withered thing, a table scrap. But finally, he did mention it, and Abraham consulted the record. Sure enough, this one act had been prompted by unselfishness. Here was a true act of stewardship.
So down the limitless space that separated heaven from hell, the onion was lowered on a slender string. The rich man was commanded to grab hold of the onion in order to be lifted out of the place of torment. He grabbed hold of the onion and slowly began to rise. Then he felt a weight dragging at his feet. He looked down and saw other tormented souls clinging to him, hoping to escape with him.
“Let Go! Let go!” the rich man cried. “The onion won’t hold all of us.” But grimily, desperately, they held on, as the onion lifted them toward heaven.
Again he said let go, it’s mine. It’s my onion.„ At that point, the string broke. And still clutching the onion he had claimed for himself, the rich man fell back into hell.
Our whole life can be interpreted by that story. Are we people of substance? People who hear the words, “Welcome, my son, my daughter, this is the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of time.” Or are we poor people clutching our onions to ourselves, saying, “It’s mine. it’s mine.”
There is a line in one of GB Shaw’s plays;
Near the end, one of the characters says, “I was very stupid! I did cruel things because I didn’t understand,” and the reply is made, “Must then Christ die to be raised, in every age, to save those who have no imagination?”
I wonder, I wonder. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Amen