The ditch

Proper 21 C 2010
(Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31)


A young preacher told of a conversation she overheard outside of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. One man told another, “Man, I’m just starting out in recovery, and each day is hard.” The second man he spoke to laughed and said, “Dude, I’ve been in recovery for years, and every day that same ditch is right there in front of me.”

That’s a 12-Step version of the ancient desert saying, “This is our life: we fall down, and we get back up again.”

That ditch and that harsh, no-nonsense wisdom is right in front of us today, and it is good that we are here to face it together. Jesus tells a haunting and rather dark parable. “Be nice to poor people” is the simplest meaning if we are looking for a moral. By all means, be nice to poor people. But the parables are never just morality tales—they are stories of the strange reality that is the Kingdom of God and how the Kingdom calls us over and over to change and transformation. And that is never easy.

A few years ago Phil Collins sang a haunting song, “It’s just another day for you and me in paradise...” as we walk by while the poor call out for help. It was just another day in paradise for the rich man in Jesus’ story, with the poor man waiting at his gates for a hand-out. The rich man is not a bad man. He’s just living his life as it is, where there are rich and poor and isn’t that too bad, but there’s a lot of poor and I am only one man, and what can I do?

The rich man has no name. The poor man has a name—Lazarus, which means roughly “God has helped.” This story is about to flip our world upside-down, since in our world the rich and famous have names and the poor have none.

The rich man dies and enters a harsh reality—it is no longer just another day in paradise for him. He who doled out scraps to Lazarus begs for Lazarus’ finger to moisten his mouth. Have you ever looked at the fingers of a poor homeless man? Those are the fingers that the rich man begs to be put between his lips.

The father of his nation says, “No my son, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed…” Who can cross over that?

That ditch is right there in front of us, and that chasm has been fixed. What can we do? How can we deal with the ditch, how can we cross the chasm opened by our blindness to the truth of God’s kingdom?

We can make a bid on a wild hope. Jeremiah was in jail while the Babylonians were beating down the gates, and what does he do? He swings a real estate deal with his cousin, right when property values were bottoming out and the Babylonians were just dying to depreciate values even more. Despair and flee? No, buy the land and seal the deal. Live and act in hope, and the God of hope will fulfill the promise—land, freedom, and new life. Ask people recovering from the hopeless hell of addiction about the wildness, the pure improbable faith of hope when they are locked in despair.

And we can fight the good fight.

One thing we learn in martial arts is to never give up, to never, ever stop fighting. Only the teacher calls the end of the match. Says Paul, Paul who no doubt saw wrestling and boxing matches in Tarsus and Corinth: “Fight the good fight of the faith...make the good confession...just as Christ Jesus made the good confession before Pontius Pilate.” Ours is a fighting life—never stop fighting, even if we are knocked down or see defeat before us.

Jesus ends his parable on a dark note. I believe he asks us these questions:

No matter how long we’ve been on a Gospel path, do we see that ditch before us, the chasm that is fixed if we take for granted the way things are, the way we ourselves are, the way we are living today?

Do we wish to bridge that chasm, to deal with that ditch?

Do we wish to live into a wild hope, the hope that we might live a different and transformed life, and that we might transform life for the poor of this world?

Do we believe that the fight is worth fighting, that it is worthwhile to get back up when we fall?

If we answer yes, if we even want the courage to be able to answer “yes”, then we’ve made Jeremiah’s crazy land deal, we’ve made Paul’s good confession. All that remains is to fight the fight—to live the upside-down values of the kingdom, where the poor have names and where we are to live and to be the abundant mercy of God.

And so we will fall down, and get up, together with one another and with the Spirit. Never stop fighting. Only the teacher calls the end of the match.

And only the Teacher gives us the promised glory when the match is finally over.