Month: September 2025

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on September 28, 2025. Based on Luke 16:19-31.

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Consider the scene in A Christmas Carol when Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley. Marley says to him, “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it, link by link, and of my own free will I wore it. Would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have labored on it since. It is a ponderous chain!”

Scrooge asks for comfort, but Jacob says, “I have none to give. Mark me! In life, my Spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our moneychanging hole. I never knew that any earthly Spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Yet Oh! Such was I! I cannot rest. I cannot stay. I cannot linger anywhere.” Scrooge asks, “Seven years dead. And travelling all the time?” Marley replies, “The whole time. No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.

“Oh! Captive, bound and double-ironed, I never knew that no space of regret can make amends for one’s life’s opportunity misused!!”

Scrooge says, “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.” “Business!” says Marley. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business! At this time of the year, I suffer the most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me? Hear me! My time is nearly gone!”

Poor Marley lived his whole life committed to building his wealth. Only at the end, when he was confronted with the impact of his choices on the people around him, did he realize how far he had gone wrong. He sought to keep Scrooge from making the same mistakes with his life.

In our reading today, we meet another character who must bear the remorse of a life wasted. In tradition, the rich man is often called “Dives,” which is just Latin for “a rich man.” He is unnamed in the parable, like almost every character in almost every parable in the Gospels. The rich man lived very well. It is said that he feasted sumptuously every day, that he celebrated ostentatiously. A feast for one person isn’t much fun, so presumably he had guests coming and going every day. Did he not celebrate the Sabbath? Why interrupt the fun? Keep the party going! He dressed in purple, a sign of royalty because of the extremely high cost of purple dye. Conspicuous consumption, demonstrating his wealth and standing in the community. He was like the men cursed by Amos: “Woe to those who … lounge on their couches …, who sing idle songs …, who drink wine from bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!”

For at his gate lay Lazarus. Poor man Lazarus, sick and disabled. He is the only named character in any of Jesus’s parables. His name means “God has helped,” or perhaps “God will help.” Gee, it doesn’t seem like God has helped him. He lay at the gate nursing his sores. Our translation says, “Even the dogs licked him.” Another translation I read says, “BUT the dogs licked him.” It may seem strange to us, but having dogs lick your wounds was actually considered a healing treatment. Dog saliva has antibiotic and other healing properties, and archaeologists have found evidence of healing cults with packs of dogs from Mesopotamia to Greece. So perhaps that’s how God helped poor Lazarus, by sending wild dogs to care for him when the rich man would not.

Every day, the rich man held sumptuous feasts. His guests would come and go from his palatial estate, stepping over Lazarus each time. They couldn’t be bothered to rescue him. Maybe they gave him some alms, maybe he was able to get some leftovers from the rich man’s table, but mostly, he starved and suffered.

Honestly, most of us are not much different from them most of the time. When I’m in a strange town and a panhandler asks me for help, I usually ignore them. Here in Rolla, I help the homeless at the Mission, but realistically, I’m helping an organization that serves people rather than helping people directly and individually. I do my best to engage with the patrons, but focus primarily on cooking and serving rather than on chatting or providing any other help. When I encounter a homeless person at the Mission, I see their inherent worth as a beloved child of God. When I encounter a homeless person on the streets, I do my best to avoid eye contact and get on with my day.

So anyway, the rich man and Lazarus both die and are in the afterlife. God helps Lazarus: he is accompanied by Abraham and welcomed into God’s family. But the rich man received his reward in this life and suffers in the age to come. I think it’s unwise to read too much into this parable—I don’t think Jesus was trying to describe every aspect of the afterlife and its eternal nature. But he did explain to the Pharisees and his other opponents that our actions in this life have consequences.

Did the rich man learn from his mistakes? Was he like Jacob Marley, filled with remorse and seeking to change his ways? Not really. He wishes he wasn’t suffering, but he hasn’t really changed.

The rich man spies Lazarus with Abraham. He calls out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames.’ Hmm. Here he is, tormented for some reason having to do with the way he lived his life, and what does he do? Start giving orders. He knows Lazarus by name, so he admits that he saw Lazarus lying day after day at his gate. Rather than acknowledge Lazarus’s inherent dignity and obvious value in God’s kingdom, he asks Abraham to send Lazarus over to help him out. He wants Lazarus to do for him in Hades what he would never do for Lazarus in this life. He never offered food or money or healing to ease Lazarus’s suffering, and yet he commands Lazarus to help him! When Abraham says that’s impossible, the rich man doesn’t relent. He keeps going, telling Abraham to send Lazarus on an errand like Marley’s visit to Scrooge.

But Abraham knows better. He knows that Lazarus isn’t an errand boy, but instead is a beloved child of God and a citizen of God’s kingdom. God has been speaking to humanity for thousands of years, from strolling in the garden of Eden to visiting Abraham to leading the Israelites out of Egypt to guiding the prophets down through the centuries. Every Israelite should know God’s Truth, God’s guidance for building a just and loving society. If they don’t, no apparition will save them.

Jesus was perhaps referring prospectively to himself. He came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. He stood in the tradition of the prophets, reinterpreting the Torah for a new generation. The whole Bible teaches us how to build a just and loving society; Jesus boiled it down to the Great Commandment: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus is reminding the Pharisees, who were devoted to the study of the Law, that they already know what they should do. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Did the rich man act as Lazarus’s neighbor in life? No. Did he act as Lazarus’s neighbor in the afterlife? Still no. He simply refused to learn. He refused to acknowledge that Lazarus was indeed his neighbor.

Abraham demonstrates the upside-down nature of God’s kingdom. Throughout Luke’s Gospel, the persistent message is that the first shall be last, the last shall be first, the lowly will be lifted up, and the mighty will be torn down.

The challenge before us is to live now as if God’s kingdom is already here. In our epistle reading today, Paul tells Timothy, “Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” Neither Jesus nor Paul, nor James nor Peter nor any other New Testament author, had many positive things to say about wealth. Partly that reflected the Roman society at the time, in which wealth was almost universally the product of extortion and exploitation of the poor. But partly, these authors recognized that wealth is a trap. First we want enough to eat, and then we want better food, and then we want to eat in nicer places with people serving us.

We get on the hedonic treadmill. That’s a term coined in 1971 to describe the fact that most people’s level of happiness is fairly stable despite external events. We are sensitive to changes in wealth, but quickly adapt to the change. We buy a nicer car, but after a month or two, we hardly notice the fancy features that seemed so important when we were shopping for it. So we strive for something else to fill that void, that yearning for good things in life.

Now, my grampa always used to say that it’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick, and that’s basically true. Up to a certain level, maybe four or five times the poverty level, increasing income does make a significant difference in lifestyle and contentment. But eventually, you reach the point where your needs are being met and increasing wealth doesn’t really affect your emotional state.

What we often observe is that people want more money to show that they’re “winners.” They use income or wealth as a way of keeping score. Consider billionaires like Elon Musk: there is no way he could ever spend his fortune, and yet he is driven to make more and more and more. Indeed, that’s the hallmark of the hedonic treadmill: the desire for more.

The rich man of our parable seems to fall into this category. It’s not enough for him to have good food and nice clothes. He must feast sumptuously and wear royal purple clothing. Not only is he comfortable in his wealth, but he is extravagant in spending it to demonstrate that he’s a winner.

And what do winners do? They step on those they believe to be losers. This was the rich man’s real sin. Rather than seeing his situation and Lazarus’s situation as the result of the whims of fate, he puffs himself up and ignores the needy man who is literally at his gate. He physically blocks Lazarus out of the party, while emotionally blocking Lazarus out of his heart. Not even the fires of Hades can demonstrate to him that Lazarus is beloved by God and should be treasured by all of God’s people.

In every human society, there are two ways people are organized. One is nearness of relationships—your innermost circle such as your nuclear family, then ever-widening circles of family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and fellow citizens of your community, nation, and world. The other is hierarchy—who has higher status due to wealth, education, power, race, gender, and so forth. The rich man was deeply embedded in this perspective. But Jesus teaches us that there is a third way to organize people—nearness to God. We more nearly approach the divine as we prioritize caring for one another.

So I don’t believe that money is the root of all evil, as today’s epistle is sometimes interpreted. Rather, the love of money instead of the love of God and God’s people can corrupt your desires and blind you to the divine spark residing within each person, each child of God. Let us seek to invite all of God’s people to participate in a foretaste of the heavenly banquet for which we all are bound. Let us seek to see Lazarus and his kindred at our own gates, and in serving them, draw nearer to God. Amen.

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Preached on September 14, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Luke 15:1-10.

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Chapter 15 of Luke’s Gospel could perhaps be titled the Book of the Lost. We have a trilogy of parables. First, there is the parable of the Lost Sheep. Then there is the parable of the Lost Coin. I read both of those today. Then the third parable is variously called the parable of the Lost Son, the Prodigal Son, the Two Sons, the Prodigal and His Brother, or the Forgiving Father. That third one is too complex to study along with the other two, so the lectionary creators leave it out of today’s lesson and instead put it back in Lent. Remember that these two parables build up to that famous story.

For today, let’s focus on the first two parables. First, the Lost Sheep. Obviously, the original audience for Jesus’s preaching and Luke’s writing would have known a whole lot more about sheep and shepherds than most of us do. I’ll tell you what I know, though. Sheep are almost too stupid to live. For millennia, they have been bred to be docile. They don’t just wander around. They go where they are guided to go. So if a sheep is lost, it’s because it was left behind when the shepherd moved the rest of the flock along.

A friend of mine told me a story about her son’s cat getting out. This cat figured out how to bypass a locked pet door, climb over a 6’ fence, and go down the street and into a storm sewer. That was an animal with some agency, an animal who wanted to be somewhere else and purposefully escaped from its owners.

Sheep aren’t like that. They’re more like our old dog Gypsy. She was about half-blind and half-deaf, so when we visited my in-laws, she would just wander around following her nose. She didn’t move fast, and she didn’t try to run away. She just kinda wandered. We weren’t paying attention, and she couldn’t hear us when we called, so she ended up across the street and down by a neighbor’s house.

That’s how sheep are. They don’t run away. They just eat tasty grass and follow it where it goes. Slowly, with no real direction. So if a sheep is lost, it’s not the sheep’s fault—it’s the shepherd’s fault for not paying attention.

Here we have a shepherd who messed up. Or maybe there were a bunch of shepherds tending the flock, and they all thought someone else was taking care of this one particular sheep. So the one sheep gets left behind when they move the flock along. The good shepherd cares about all of his sheep, so he pursues the one who was lost. When he gets back, he’s relieved and overjoyed that he has found it!

In the same way, the second parable describes a situation where the woman screwed up. She had ten coins, each worth about $100 today. Now, a coin doesn’t just wander off. Clearly if she lost it, it was her fault, even more so than the lost sheep. I know that if I had ten $100 bills in a drawer, then checked and saw that there were only nine, I’d go looking around the house to see where I might have left the other one! Or I might wonder if it was stolen. I might even panic a little. But when I found it, I’d be relieved and thankful.

The setup for these parables is that the scribes and Pharisees are grumbling that Jesus welcomes tax collectors and sinners. Jesus is teaching that he was sent to the lost sheep of Israel, that he was sent as a physician to the ill, and that he is the bridegroom of a marvelous wedding feast. Where the scribes and Pharisees want to erect barriers, Jesus seeks a bigger Table.

So Jesus is seeking the lost, as the Good Shepherd or as a woman seeking what is valuable. Jesus seeks lost people, though, not sheep or coins. But by telling these parables, he is reminding his audience that agency resides not in the people who are lost, but in the community that has lost them.

When we read these parables, we are tempted to think that the shepherd or the woman is analogous to God. That gets problematic when you think, Did God lose people? I thought God loved everybody and was everywhere! To which I say, Amen! God never loses anyone and is always available. The kingdom of God is at hand! God is right here, right among us, waiting for our awareness.

No, I think the shepherd or the woman is analogous to the Church (with a capital C). Jesus would have been referring to the Jewish establishment, but the same holds true for the Christian Church. We are supposed to be Christ’s body, but we frequently fall short of our calling. One way that we fall short is that we fail to serve as God’s ambassadors to the world, and we fail to tend our sheep and treasure each member of God’s family.

And I want to be clear here that I’m not talking about this particular congregation, or anyone in particular within this congregation. The truth is that the big-C Church has lost at least one and probably two or three generations. In the 1950s and ‘60s, there were tremendous cultural tailwinds propelling churches of all types. Nowadays, there are huge cultural headwinds that we are fighting against.

Everyone has a theory about why we have lost succeeding generations. Let me tell you mine. At some point before I came of age—perhaps in the 1970s—an idea took root among American Christians. Parents were taught Proverbs 22:6, “Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray.” So, the emphasis was on getting children into Sunday school and keeping them on track until they were confirmed or baptized as teenagers. Then, job done. As a result, most kids drifted away from the church just as soon as their parents stopped forcing them. They were left with a childish faith—not child-like and innocent, but poorly formed, like if you dropped out of school after sixth grade. As I recall, there were about a dozen kids in my confirmation class in 1986, and by the time I graduated high school in 1991, I was the only one still attending worship. Some of that dozen eventually made it back to church, if Facebook is any indication. But not all of them.

So succeeding generations over the past fifty years have placed less and less emphasis on developing a mature, adult faith. As a result, we have lost a lot of sheep and a lot of coins. It’s not that they were raised in the church, drifted away, and will come back when they have kids. Instead, they were never raised in a church at all, so there is no “back.”

Meanwhile, around that same time, the Church bifurcated into liberal and conservative branches. I’m speaking theologically more than politically, although there is some correlation. The old mainline churches—PC(USA), Episcopal, United Methodist, ELCA Lutheran, and so forth—are in the liberal theological tradition. Too many mainline churches are afraid to stand for anything. They’re milquetoast and tepid, like Laodicea in Revelation—neither hot nor cold. Meanwhile, the conservative branch—Southern Baptist, Church of Christ, Assembly of God, and so forth—are increasingly vocal, in ways that are frankly offensive to a broad swath of the younger generations. So, many Millennials and Gen Z adults reject all of Christianity based on the vocal part that they disagree with, never hear about the mainline traditions, and have never gone to church, so they figure it’s all irrelevant to their lives.

That’s what I mean by cultural headwinds. Again, I’m not necessarily talking about anyone in this church. I mean, no matter what choices my kids make about attending church, it wouldn’t matter to us, because they live in Providence and Chicago. Rather, we need to be concerned about the Millennials and Gen Z adults in Rolla. What message have they heard about Christianity? Mostly, it sounds a lot like the scribes and Pharisees. Mostly, it sounds like, “You must do XYZ in order to be acceptable to God as we understand Him.” Mostly, it sounds like, “Everything that matters to you is unacceptable in God’s eyes.” Mostly, it sounds like, “We have exclusive access to God’s Truth, so you need to do exactly what we say or you’re doomed to eternal conscious torment in a lake of fire.” Rarely does it sound like, “God loves you, come on in!” Rarely does it sound like, “Tell us about yourself and help us learn about God from your life experiences.” Rarely does it sound like, “God forgives you, no matter what, and has chosen YOU to be a part of our family.” Rarely does it sound like, “We don’t know all the answers, but we’ll help you find your own path as we tell you about ours.”

Wouldn’t it be great if someone outside the church heard those messages, and could really, truly believe them? Wouldn’t it be great if someone who has never experienced Christ’s love in their life could feel it through us? Wouldn’t it be great if someone could receive new life, abundant life, through a loving, supportive community that helps them navigate the spiritual challenges they face?

Let me tell you about a few encounters I had in the past week. First, Wednesday night, I had my first youth Bible study over at the LGBTQ+ Rolla Community Center. The story there is that a teenage girl asked her mom to find her a Bible study. The mom reached out to our organization, and I said, “Sign me up!” Well, so far, she’s the only one who has come. But that’s OK. I’m sowing seeds in the world. I’m giving her tools to defend herself against people who use the Bible as a weapon. I’m helping her to grow into an adult faith, a deeper faith with stronger roots. And maybe, the ideas and Christian love that I sow in her will bloom into something great among her friends and more broadly in the community.

Thursday, we had Sacred Paths, our campus ministry. I’m concerned about its future because some key members have already graduated and a few others are graduating soon. But one freshman came for her third time, and two sophomores came for their first time. We had a great conversation—everyone was engaged and listening to one another. We’re all in very different places on our spiritual walk, and that’s OK. I don’t think we could come up with a clear statement of faith that we all agree on. Some believe 100% in the divinity of Christ and that our God is THE God. Others are something like agnostic, but find meaning in following Christ’s teachings. And maybe someday, the seeds we plant, the openness we share about our different life experiences, will blossom into God’s presence in their lives.

Then later Thursday night, I had a Zoom chat with Michele White. She attended this church for a short time right before the pandemic shut everything down. She was one of my graduate students who came to Common Call and now lives in Denver. She was really struggling, spiritually. The murder of Charlie Kirk troubled her—not so much that he is dead, but the conflicting emotions she had over his killing. As we talked, it was clear that she has a great circle of friends, a chosen family, but doesn’t really have a spiritual community. True flourishing requires a connection to God, and even though I feel God’s presence when I pray and when I’m out in nature, I mostly experience God through community. We talked for a while, and I counseled her on finding a way to connect to spiritual community.

So, all good, right? Well, one other thing happened. I had posted on Facebook that I was hosting a Bible study at the LGBTQ+ Rolla Community Center, and that sent one person into a tailspin. He has clearly been hurt, deeply, by the Christian church. Just the fact that other members of our community might want a place where they can pursue God’s kingdom brought up all sorts of negative emotions. That’s a huge part of what we’re fighting against here. If someone has been hurt deeply by any Christian church, they paint all of Christianity the same way. Saying “I’m not like that” isn’t sufficient. Only positive, deep relationships can heal the hurt, if ever it can be healed.

So that’s where I am. I recognize that there are many people who have been cast out of the church, or whose only experience of Christianity is negative, or who know that there is Something More out there that they feel drawn to and need help figuring things out. If I can help just a few people flourish who otherwise would have turned their backs on God and would have floundered in despair, I will be a success.

So my challenge to you is, Who do YOU care about? Who will YOU find and welcome in? Where will YOU go to seek the lost, to share God’s love with them, and bring them into Christian fellowship? Where will you proclaim the Gospel for the salvation of humankind? How will you exhibit the kingdom of heaven to the world? And what will you do to heal the damage that has been done in Christ’s name, to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity, and to guide people into a healthy relationship with one another and with the God who loves them?

That’s my challenge to you today, and every day. May God bless your seeking, that in seeking, you may find. Amen.

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