The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost - The Rev. Colette Hammesfahr

 

Luke 16:19-31, September 28, 2025

        Dr. David Demko is a renowned gerontologist. A gerontologist is a person who studies human aging. He was hired by the U.S. Administration on Aging to do some research on life expectancy. He came up with a test, called the Death Calculator, that through a series of 55 questions, predicts what a person’s life expectancy may be. You can look it up online and anyone can take the quiz. I have chosen not to.

It starts with the age of 79, which is the average life expectancy of humans, and then adds or subtracts years based on your answers. They are simple questions: How often do you laugh out loud? Do you volunteer? Do you do puzzles? Do you live with someone who smokes? Do you own a pet?

        After each question, is a “FACT” about how that particular activity or habit in your life can add or subtract years from your life expectancy. For example, if you laugh out loud 3-4 times a day, you can add three years to your life expectancy because laughter releases endorphins, it elevates your mood, and it reduces stress. If you never laugh, it can take off 8 years of your life expectancy. If you can laugh at your mistakes and learn from them, you can expect to add a year to your life expectancy. If you take your mistakes too seriously and don't learn from them your life expectancy can be reduced by three years. Dr. Demko says that 80% of the factors that control how long you live, are related to your lifestyle, not your genes. How we live our lives is important.

             Our Gospel today is unique to Luke, and it shows us two very different people who have two very different lives. We see their lives before death, and we see their lives after death. It is a story of contrasts and reversals.

            We have a rich man and a poor man. The rich man has no name – the poor man is the only man named in any of Jesus’ parables: His name is Lazarus. The rich man is covered in elegant purple robes – the color of wealth and royalty. For Lazarus, all that we know is that he is covered in sores. I imagine that whatever clothes he was wearing were ragged and torn. The rich man feasts on the finest foods every day. 

            The wealthy often ate meals with their hands. Instead of napkins, pieces of stale bread were sometimes used to wipe their hands or to wipe their plates. Then these greasy pieces of bread would be tossed aside, often to the floor where servants or dogs might eat them. Lazarus came to the rich man’s gate every day, hoping to simply gather a piece of that used bread from the rich man’s table. The rich man had so much excess that even his waste would have been enough to feed Lazarus, but instead, he ignored him. When they died, the rich man was buried. Lazarus had no burial. Who knows if anyone even noticed he had died. 

        In this parable Jesus is telling us that how we live our lives is important. When they died, the rich man went to hell and Lazarus, the poor man, hungry and full of sores, went to heaven. That’s quite a turn of events. As the rich man, who once sat in the lap of luxury, now sits in the flames of agony, Lazarus, who sat on the street, hungry and covered in sores, sits at the hand of Abraham.

        Nowhere in the story can we find why the rich man was sent to hell. Nowhere in the story does it say that the rich man was a bad man. It doesn’t say that he did evil things. We don’t know how he gained his wealth – did he work for it, did he inherit it, did he steal it?  Every day, Lazarus came to sit outside the rich man’s gate. The rich man never shood him away. We could think that he was probably a half-way descent guy. He was just wealthy, and Lazarus was poor and disabled. So why was he sent to hell after he died? The rich man was not sent to hell because of the riches he had. The rich man was not sent to hell for what he did. The rich man was sent to hell for what he didn’t do. How we live our lives is important.

      The rich man was sent to hell for what he didn’t do. We often think that a sin is something we “DO”.  We think sin is an event we partake in, or an activity we do that is against what God wants of us. We think of sin as a physical action. Each week we confess our sins, we confess that we have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. The rich man was sent to hell for what he didn’t do. It wasn’t until he got there that he realized how he should have lived his life. How we live our lives is important.

        The Death Calculator developed by Dr. Demko is doing more than just predicting when we are going to die or how long we can expect to live. What the Death Calculator is really telling us is how we should live our lives, here and now. Because, how we live our lives is important. And while the Death Calculator tells us how we can nourish our bodies and live a better life, scripture tells us how we can nourish our souls and live a better life. It’s within our souls that we feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. It’s in our souls that we feel compassion. It’s in our souls that we feel God’s never-ending love and never-ending grace. It’s in our souls that we live spiritually.

        Now that the rich man has died, and has been sent to hell, he finally understands. But it is too late for him. Now all of a sudden, that he's living in this anguish, he has a concern for others. He is worried about his brothers and how they are living their lives. He begs Lazarus to help them. “Please help my family.” He wants Lazarus to come back from the dead and warn his brothers. The rich man now sees that how we live our lives is important. It is too late for him.

              Abraham says, “You think that a man coming back from the dead to warn them will help? They already have warnings from the Prophets and Moses and they didn’t listen. Do you think they will turn their lives around because of some guy who came back from the dead?” Abraham says that even if someone came back from the dead, to warn them, it would not be enough.

        This parable can sound quite similar to another story. Our story…yours and mine. It’s not really a parable or a story though. It is true life. Our story goes like this…There was a man, who lived among us. Like Lazarus, he had a name -- Jesus. Jesus lived a similar life to Lazarus. He was tired, poor, hungry, and humble. Jesus spent his life telling others how to live their lives. Because, how we live our lives is important.

        In this story, we are like the rich man. We tend go through our life with blinders on to what is happening around us. Just as Lazarus, Jesus died. But Jesus had a different death than Lazarus. Jesus was persecuted and then forced to carried a cross on his back. He was then hung on that same cross and died for you and for me. And after he died, he came back from the dead, with a promise of an everlasting life for us. He sits at the hand of his father, as Lazarus sat at the hand of Abraham. 

        And as Abraham said that no one would listen to a man who came back from the dead, we too struggle to listen to what Jesus has to say to us. As the rich man had the word of the Prophets and Moses to warn him, we have the word of God in scripture. Yet, we struggle.

Today, we are given a call for transformation. A transformation from what we normally do.         A transformation to live life now, for the promised life beyond. We are called to be in God’s word and act on it. Here, now, today. Because how we live our lives is important.

In the end, Lazarus was the rich man. Lazarus knew that his wealth was in God. Lazarus was welcomed into the kingdom of God. In his suffering, he was welcomed freely, simply because of his faith. In our Baptism, we are given the promise of the kingdom of God. We are given the opportunity to live out our lives as children of God, to not just see the poor and desolate but to help the poor and the desolate.

        Our final life expectancy is not what is important. It’s what God expects of us that is important. How we live our lives is important. Amen.