Sunday September 28th, 2025 Worship

When we get frustrated at the people in our life when they have selective hearing, just know that we are in good company! I’m sure we have all had experience with people who hear what they want to hear or conveniently forget that we asked them to do something. We may even be the ones with selective hearing at times… Even if we don’t have experience in our own life, we can watch it play out in the world around us all the time. One of my favorite t-shirts of Emily’s says, “Don’t hear what I didn’t say.” Sometimes, people will interpret what we are saying by adding in something we didn’t say, and other times a part of what we did say will be ignored, no matter how many times we say it.
This same dilemma is at the heart of our readings today, as Luke’s Gospel continues this teaching about wealth and Amos persists in calling out the harsh judgement reserved for those who are perpetuating the inequalities in the world around them. The Scriptures intentionally draw out this comparison between those who have an excess of wealth and those who have nothing; emphasizing how the one is lounging around, well fed and caring for their every whim, while the other side isn’t even able to eat the crumbs from the table. Luke’s Gospel goes so far as to tell us that Lazarus was in such a poor state that the dogs even licked his wounds, seemingly implying that even the dogs were better cared for than Lazarus.
Again, this week, we don’t have to stretch our imaginations too far as we see what this looks like in the world around us. When I was on internship, Phinney Ridge hosted Tent City on their front lawn, and I reflected about the experience of listening to people that drove by in their fancy cars complaining about this sight on the front lawn because they didn’t want to see it while they were going home to their multi-million-dollar houses. Even today, we see so much of this in the desire to criminalize people experiencing homelessness because we as a society don’t want to witness and be confronted by this vast imbalance of resources. Our neighbors experiencing homelessness are then transformed into something less than human in our collective brains so that we feel more comfortable.
To go back to the Scripture readings, we get this dichotomy, and Luke goes on to give us this illustration of the fabulously wealthy rich man suffering in the flames of torment while Lazarus has been lifted up to be with Abraham, presumably in heaven. What astonishes me about this whole scene is that the rich man still sees himself as Lazarus’ superior, asking for Abraham to send Lazarus to bring him water (Luke 16: 24) and to send Lazarus to his family to make sure his brothers don’t follow in his footsteps and end up in Hades (Luke 16: 27). Even in death, he still wants Lazarus to do all these things to ease his burden, when he didn’t even see Lazarus as a human when they were both alive. Even in his torment, the rich man still only sees Lazarus as a tool to use for his benefit.
This is where it can become easy to interpret this reading as a terrifying tool used to coerce us into caring for our neighbors so that we don’t end up in the flames like this rich man. But, I’m going to encourage a different view of our Scripture today. I don’t think this reading is meant to scare us and cause anxiety about where we are going to end up at the end of our life. As I’ve told you before, I’m not a big fan of imagining God as a big scorekeeper in the sky, because we are not saved by our works. Instead, I think it is calling us back to the Biblical understanding of what it means to listen to God, to live according to God’s teachings as a response to our salvation through God’s grace. Because, at the heart of this, we get the unnamed rich man asking to have Lazarus sent to his home to tell his brothers, and Abraham responds by saying: ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ (Luke 16: 31). Abraham is stating this in all seriousness because he is genuinely saying that they have already been told everything they need to know, they just need to listen to Moses and the prophets. They have already been told over and over again, so why should he send Lazarus assuming that it will be different this time.
When Scripture talks about listening, it goes beyond just our hearing with our ears, but requires what we are hearing to change our hearts and our actions. Listening, when it comes to what God is commanding, means obeying, in the original Greek and Hebrew. It means not just hearing, but doing. Even the first readers of this Gospel were being reminded because they knew how the story ended, yet they still needed to keep coming back to these teachings. As we too continue to rely upon the teachings of Moses, the prophets, and Jesus to guide our understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Are we taking to heart what is being taught about loving our neighbor and caring for the poor? Are we letting the teachings about God’s love, compassion, and mercy shape our theology and our way of speaking about who God is for us and the world? I mean, our Psalm today is profound in the way that it talks about what God is doing in the world, what God desires us to be a part of in the world! This is strong language about how God loves and cares for those we cast aside or see as less than; God is and will continue to turn the broken ways of the world around and we are called to participate in that. Yet, as humans, we often want to listen to the other interpretations that allow us to be more comfortable instead of having to confront the realities of our world.
These readings go beyond wealth to teach to the heart of our faith, recognizing that the way we see and treat our fellow humans, and the rest of God’s creation, tells us a lot about how we understand our relationship with God. While I originally thought this was an odd pairing of readings with our Fall Kick-Off Sunday, I actually think they go really well together. Because, as we begin our new chapter together, we recognize that the history of this congregation is just another chapter in this whole arc of God’s interaction with the world. We are not writing a new story, but continuing the old, old story, wrestling with very similar problems to those experienced by the varying peoples of our Bible.
When we hear the readings today, we are called to listen to what God is trying to teach us about our own lives and our own reality of the world. We are called to not selectively listen to the teachings of God, using God as an excuse for our behavior that harms and oppresses others. As a community, we are invited into relationship with one another so that we can experience the reality that everyone has a name and a story. And that our individual stories are a part of our larger communal story, which is a part of God’s even larger story. We get to look at all chapters of the story as we try to figure out what it means to be faithful, listening to the stories of those who came before us, and being grounded in the foundation we have in God, who is turning the world around. May we continue to listen to these stories, as each repetition enables these stories to be written on our hearts so that the love and grace of God is evident in our words and actions.