A Fremont couple decided to vacation in Florida during the winter. (Like that never happens) They planned to stay at the very same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. But it wasn’t easy to coordinate their travel arrangements because they both had demanding jobs and hectic schedules.  So, the husband ended up leaving Grand Rapids and flying to Florida on Thursday, and his wife planned to fly down the following day.  So, Thursday night comes and he checks into the hotel, and decides to send an e-mail to his wife to reassure her that he’d made it safely.  However, when he was typing her email address he accidentally left out a letter, and without realizing his error hit ‘send’ and off it went to a wrong address.  Meanwhile.....somewhere in Houston, an elderly widow, whose husband had been a priest, had just returned home from his funeral, and thought she’d check her emails, expecting messages of condolence from relatives and friends.  And this is what she read:
To my Loving Wife.  I expect you're surprised to hear from me. They now have computers here in all the rooms so you can send e-mails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and have checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then!  P.S. Sure is hot down here!

Well in today’s gospel reading there was a man who was certainly feeling the heat too.  For the second week in a row we have a parable of Jesus that is deeply challenging and slightly unnerving.  If you’ve been in church for all of September you’ll know that the Gospel readings for the last four weeks have all featured parables of Jesus.  We’ve had a host who gave a banquet, a man who built a tower, a king who went to war, a shepherd who lost a sheep, a woman who lost a coin, and last week we had a dishonest business manager who used his master’s wealth to make friends with people.  Today we have a tale of irony about two men who are polar opposites of each other.  They really are worlds apart.  One moves in the company of royalty.  In fact, he possibly is royalty, given that he wears purple cloth.  He has a condo in Beverly Hills, a suite in Manhattan, and a modest fifty acres in the country.  His clothes bear the labels Gucci and Armani, and his car has a silver lady on the hood.  Bank executives take him out to lunch, hoping to be given the chance to look after his wealth, while the value of his investment portfolio compares well with the GDP of an entire African nation.  The other man, well, he just lies at the gates to the rich man’s mansion, and waits to die - invisible, except to the rich man’s dogs that routinely lick his festering body.  This wretched soul has nothing but a name - Lazarus (not to be confused with the real-life Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, whom Christ raised from death.)

Well, the good news for Lazarus is that this parable is a rags-to-riches story.  The bad news for the wealthy man is it is also a riches-to-rags tale.  Both men die and Lazarus, says Jesus, is carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.  The rich man goes in the other direction.  In torment, he looks up and sees Lazarus next to Abraham, and he calls out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to give me some water.”  But Abraham says, “I can’t do that.  During your lifetime you received good things, and Lazarus had a terrible life.  But now he is here in comfort, but you are suffering.”  But the rich man says, “Even if he can’t come and give me a drink then please at least send him to my father’s house, and warn my five brothers to start living right and avoid this awful place.”   But Abraham replies, “They have the Bible – if they won’t listen to that, then they won’t listen even to a dead man who comes back to life and talks to them.” 

Now, obviously this parable raises big problems for modern Christians like us.  So, before I try to explain what it means I want to tell you what this parable does not mean.  And first let me say that Jesus is not trying to teach us about the nature of heaven and hell, or how a person gets to those two destinations.  If the only piece of Jesus’ teaching we had was this parable then we could be excused for thinking that Jesus is saying ‘if you’re poor in this life then you’ll go to heaven when you die, and if you’re rich you’ll go to hell.  End of story, no ifs or buts, that’s all there is to it.  Sorry, and all that.’  But this is not the only piece of Jesus’ teaching we have and so we know that to interpret the parable in that way would be out of keeping with other things Jesus teaches.  The New Testament makes it very clear that it is faith in Christ that puts us right with God, not how much or how little money we have.  Having money is not a sin, and lacking it is not necessarily a sign of God’s blessing.  So this is not a story illustrating how we can get ourselves into heaven.  And similarly it is not about what heaven and hell are like.  We can be very distracted by that picture of heaven as being a place where we snuggle up with Abraham, and hell as being a place of fiery torment.  But we need to remember that this is a story invented by Jesus – it’s a parable, and Jesus did not intend it as a literal description of the afterlife. 

So let’s not be sidetracked by the question of heaven and hell.  This parable is about one thing, and one thing only.  And here it is.  ‘The soul-destroying disease of apathy.’  If I were to ask you to name this rich man’s biggest sin, I wonder what you’d say.  (Don’t worry I’m not going to.)   Was it self-righteousness?  Maybe.  Arrogance?  Perhaps. Greed?  Certainly, that was there.  But I think his biggest problem and the thing that sent him to his final destination was apathy.  Maybe many years ago, perhaps when Lazarus first showed up at his gates the rich man noticed him.  Perhaps he even took pity on him.  It’s possible that when he glanced out of his window he saw this pathetic figure of a man huddled in the street and he called a servant and asked him about him.  Maybe his heart was even moved slightly by the suffering of Lazarus.  But instead of acting on what his heart was saying he decided that life was too short to pay attention to such distractions.  He may have said to that servant, “It’s a tragedy, I know, but it’s just the way of the world.  The poor will always be with us.  It’s a crying shame, it makes me so angry, I wish it could be different, but what can one man do when the whole system is broken?  We need to be realistic, get on with what God has called us to do and not waste our time trying to solve a problem that will never go away.  What’s the point of helping one unfortunate person when there’ll be another one along to take his place?  And in any case, if you do help such people you will actually be harming them - it will only encourage them to hang around the streets and live off charity rather than taking responsibility for themselves and getting a job and finding a place to live.” 

And so as the weeks went by and turned into months and then years maybe Lazarus became a permanent fixture and the rich man just didn’t notice him anymore.  He became blind to the suffering, oblivious to his very existence.  Hearts do that.  Over time they become closed, hard, calloused.  The owner of the heart never sets out with that end in mind.  But gradually as time passes, he or she notices that there is no place for others in that heart, no feeling for those who suffer, and no love for God or mankind.  In order to act with healing and kindness you have to have compassion.  And in order to have compassion you have to see the suffering.  You need to see, then have compassion, then act.  Seeing - having compassion – acting.  The rich man didn’t act because he had no compassion, and he had no compassion because he’d stopped seeing.

This week has seen the resurrection of Gordon ‘Greed is good’ Gekko in cinemas around the country.  Remember him from the movie Wall Street 23 years ago?  Well maybe the rich man in the parable was less Gordon Gekko, the ruthless racketeer who’d sell his granny, and maybe he’s more like … me.

Back in the greedy 80s, long before I was ordained, I lived and worked in London.  Each day I took the Underground railway to work.  I had about a 500-yard walk from the train station I got off at to my office.  And one day as I was making this short walk, I noticed a homeless person sitting on the street huddled in a blanket asking politely for money from passers by.  Now I was used to homeless people, but this man seized my attention.  He was young, was wearing surprisingly good clothes; he spoke with an educated accent, and had the look of someone who was not used to a life on the street.  And I passed him by.  The next day he was there again.  And the next.  And by now he was getting inside my head.  I started to ask myself questions about this young man.  Why was he on the street?  Did he have a drink or drugs problem?  Was he mentally ill and unable to cope with life in conventional society?  Had he been abused or treated cruelly by his family and run away from home?  Where did he come from?  What was it like to be him, robbed of his dignity, his comforts and the basic human right to have a roof over his head and food in his stomach?  And so I decided to do something.  After three or four days of trying to ignore him the next morning I was going to stop and ask him my questions.  I wanted to listen to his story and was going to try to help him in some way to recapture the divine spark in his soul which his circumstances had all but extinguished.  And so that morning I got ready to go to work with purpose.  I sat on the train rehearsing what I was going to say.  I imagined the conversation we’d have.  I had a couple of pounds in my pocket that I planned to give him, maybe take him to a coffee shop and sit with him for a while.  So I got off the train, went up the escalators and out into the London morning.  I was nervous.  Scared even.  I’d never done anything like this before.  And I got to the shop doorway that had been home to this young man for the last three days.  And he wasn’t there.  And he wasn’t there the next day.  And I never saw him again.  Maybe he moved on to a more lucrative street to beg on.  Maybe he came to his senses and sought help or returned home.  Maybe he was befriended by a businessman who explained to him how he could make good money if he went to a certain part of the city and stood on a particular street corner and ‘entertained’ other businessmen.  Maybe a few days later his lifeless body was dragged from the River Thames.  I don’t know.  The only thing I know for sure is this: I was able to have compassion and act.  I could have demonstrated God’s love for him, and I didn’t.  Maybe the spirit of that rich man, the apathy that came from growing blind to people’s suffering, maybe that was in me.  Maybe it still is.  Maybe to truly be the hands of Jesus I need to put myself out there in a place where I can be hurt and rejected and misunderstood and taken advantage of.  Maybe that is the place where Jesus goes; the doorway of vulnerability, the street of compassion, the place of the cross.

C. S. Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless and airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers ...of love is hell.

Friends, we don’t have the money that the rich man in the parable had.  And we don’t literally have homeless people sleeping rough on our front doorsteps.  But we do have other things: lives that have received blessings too great to number and too wonderful to describe; eyes that can see the suffering of a fallen world of broken men and women; hearts that have been touched by the compassion of Christ; and opportunities to act for the love of God and the blessing of others.  You don’t need me to list those opportunities.  Some of them are obvious; others are known only to you.  And we have one other thing- the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit to give us the resources we need to be the eyes, the heart, the feet and the hands of Christ.