Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost: September 28, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson
Readings: Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 | Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16 | 1 Timothy 6:6-19 | Luke 16:19-31
Luke speaks a great deal about wealth and possessions in his account of the Gospel. The categories of rich and poor are employed regularly in Luke’s vision of the Great Reversal inaugurated by the coming of God’s reign. Mary’s Song sings of God filling the hungry with good things while sending the rich away empty. In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus pronounces blessing on the poor, the hungry, and the mournful, pointing to the promised fulfilment of what they lack, while warning the rich and the well-satisfied that the consolation and satisfaction they’ve already received would not last. Over and over, Luke centers the poor and the marginalized in Jesus’ ministry of liberation. Anointed by the Spirit, Jesus is sent to bring good news to the poor. Through parables about feasting, he instructs his disciples and would-be followers to extend table fellowship to the poor and the outcast. He tells the rich that their entrance into eternal life is dependent upon their selling their possessions and giving to the poor and warns that true life is not found in their abundance of possessions but in their richness toward God.
The categories of rich and poor and the vision of the Great Reversal are at the center of our narrative in today’s Gospel reading. An unnamed rich man and poor Lazarus – the former envisioned as one who sumptuously feasts and the latter as one who begs for crumbs. In the vision of the afterlife that Jesus casts, their fortunes are reversed. The rich man finds himself lacking all provision of comfort and satisfaction while Lazarus is carried by the angels to be with Abraham. For his part in the parable, Abraham plainly explains that the rich man had already received his good things and that Lazarus, who received only evil in earthly life, is now receiving his good things. The rich man, in agony, is inconsolable because of the great, uncrossable chasm that exists between him and Lazarus.
As we grapple with the meaning of this parable and its significance for our faith and life today, we would do well to keep our focus where Jesus bids us to look. We need not get stuck on trying to draw out a vision of heaven or hell, or in over-spiritualizing Luke’s understanding of money and wealth. These exercises distract our gaze from the chasm Jesus is warning us about, drawing our attention away from the heart of the matter. In fact, money, in and of itself, is not the heart of the matter in Jesus’ parable. The heart of the matter is, well, the heart. What is our relationship to wealth and money and possessions? And how does that relationship – whether of abundance or scarcity – blind us to the needs of those who sit in agony and need at our gates? This is not to say that wealth, money, and possessions – or desire for them – ultimately don’t matter as long as we’re giving charitably. Such an interpretation misses the point and flattens our understanding of our relationship to such things. We need only ask those sitting at our gates who live paycheck to paycheck, who struggle to make ends meet every month, who have to make a decision between paying a bill and feeding their child.
Money, and our relationship to it, is far more complicated than we often like to admit. Here, in Seattle, we live in an economy where the cost of living is 45% higher than the national average. Housing costs are 109% higher than the national average, groceries are 11% higher, and transportation costs are 30% higher. The living wage for a single adult household is estimated to be about $110,000. Add a spouse or partner with kids to the mix and that figure jumps to $278,000. Childcare costs a minimum of $30,000 per year per kid.
The median rent is $43,200 per year, and we now rank 3rd in the U.S. for highest median home prices. These numbers complicate our categories of rich and poor, and should nuance our theological understanding of money. Paul tells Timothy that money is a root of all kinds of evil, that those who want to be rich often fall into temptation and find themselves trapped by many senseless and harmful desires. But desire for money is not always desire to be rich – particularly, in our context, it is often about the ability to survive in an inflated economy where the chasm between rich and poor is growing ever wider by the day.
So what are we to do with this parable Jesus tells in our Gospel reading today? As we are so often with parables, we are invited to enter the story to see from a particular perspective. On the one hand, the rich man stands in for all of us. We are bid to take heed of the warning his character produces in the story. “Don’t be like the rich man,” Jesus warns – he lived his life oblivious to the needs of others, kept himself at the center of his own universe, consuming material pleasures without regard for the agony of those who sat at his gate. On the other hand, the rich man in the story has already received his eternal reward – he has no chance of redemption because death has already claimed him. So who are we meant to see ourselves through in this story? Perhaps the only answer to this is to see ourselves as the rich man’s siblings, as the ones for whom there is still time to listen to Moses and the Prophets. The ones for whom the barrier between our own comfort and the needs of others has not grown yet into a chasm but remains thin as a gate.
Last week, we held a Parish Town Hall to talk about our financial needs and planning for the next several years. Just as the picture painted earlier about the cost of living in Seattle complicated our categories of rich and poor, it also complicates how we, as a community, talk about our need for and use of money. There is no pat answer here, just as there is no pat answer about our individual and household relationships with money. But, again, we are bid to keep our gaze upon the heart of the matter to which Jesus points. To ask ourselves again and again – what is our relationship with money and how does it blind us to the needs of those sitting at our gate? Friends, these will be important questions for us to keep at the forefront of our continued discussions about the future of our parish. Overwhelmingly, those who gathered last week agreed that we stand at a moment of decision, a moment in which we must engage the work of redevelopment, of re-formation when we discern with one another who we are, who our neighbors are, and who we are in relation to our neighbors.
And if we sit long enough with this parable, we will discover that even the category of neighbor is complicated by it. Earlier this year we heard the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a parable that suggests “neighbor” is less of a category of proximity and more of a qualitative category of relationship and care. But this interpretation can also often tempt us to use the category of neighbor in theoretical ways, generalizing those who might fit the category rather than seeing real individuals and people as the ones to whom we are called to be a neighbor. But just as Jesus centered the real bodies and lives of the poor in his ministry, we too are called to do the same.
During my first call at St Paul’s here in Seattle, we spent a great deal of time learning how to de-generalize the category of neighbor. We gathered in a part of Seattle where many unhoused pitched tents along the sidewalks. Parishioners would often have to step over sleeping individuals to get to the front door. When the pandemic began, the number of those sleeping in tents on the sidewalk grew while the services they’d been accustomed to accessing in the area decreased. This led to greater instances of misuse of our property – drug use, vandalism, and defecating in our gardens. There were mixed feelings and emotions throughout the parish about what was happening, and an equally wide array of thoughts about what we should do to address the problems. Some options included hiring guards to keep people from misusing our property or putting up a fence to keep people out.
Through many prayerful discussions, the vestry and I ultimately came to the conclusion that these folks who were living around our property were not a problem to be solved but neighbors with whom we were called to be in relationship. Given the constraints we faced with opening our building due to the pandemic restrictions, we ordered a couple of wagons, purchased socks and snacks and water bottles. We began to walk our block every Sunday afternoon and talked to the folks living on our sidewalks. We got to know their names, we listened to their stories, we asked what they needed. Eventually, we began to venture further away from our block during our walks, through the Seattle Center, down to Broad Street, and back to the church. We developed an Amazon wish list to purchase things like shoes and clothing, radios and batteries, coats and rain gear, tents and sleeping bags. More people in the parish began to participate on our walks and those who physically couldn’t, supported the work financially or through making up snack packs for the wagon team to hand out. At the heart of this work was not charity – the stuff we gave out certainly helped those to whom we gave them – but the heart of what we did was about relationships. It was about getting to know those in closest proximity to us, getting to know those who sat at our gate, about seeing them for who they were rather than obstacles to step over or shoo off our property.
Who are we? Who are our neighbors? Who are we in relation to our neighbors? These are the primary questions of our re-formation and redevelopment as a parish. How will our resources aid us in both answering these questions and living out the vision those answers cast? Friends, this is the work to which we are called right now. It is not easy work – it will require that we face our fears and our discomforts, that we dismantle our internal biases and break open the social categories of rich and poor and neighbor. And if we are faithful in keeping to the heart of the matter, we will encounter resistance, we will encounter those who despise us for centering the poor and the marginalized. But, if we are faithful in keeping to the heart of the matter, we will also discover the treasure of a good foundation so that we may take hold of the life that really is life. Amen.
image: Homeless Jesus, Timothy Schmalz, Barcelona