Trouble & Transformation

16^th Sunday After Pentecost

Proper 21C: Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15; Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16

1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

September 28, 2025

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s. Last week the lectionary delivered us quite the parable (Luke 16:1-13), one I know that I along with several of you have been chewing on all week – I say this because you’ve told me! This morning’s gospel passage also comes from the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke. While it may be less of a brain bender, it strikes me as no less challenging. The dangers of wealth are once again front and center. And while not explicitly stated in our story of the rich man and Lazarus, underlying it is the urgent call to be “abundant toward God,” to share of our resources for the purpose of collaborating in God’s just reign. As we practice such abundance together, we participate in enacting the qualities that Jesus, quoting Isaiah, declared as the heart of his unfolding ministry in the fourth chapter of Luke– good news to the poor, release of the captives, recovery of sight, freedom of the oppressed, the year of God’s favor (4:18-19). This vision built upon the foundation of Mary’s declaration in the very first chapter of this same gospel, that God had scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, brought down the powerful from their thrones; lifted up the lowly; filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty (1:52-53). This deep pattern, as we are invited to receive it, is an expression of ancestral promise, a call to action, and a vision of the mystery of resurrection life welling up out of death, transforming us and our world amid sorrow and deep brokenness, in the midst of events we cannot understand and that can feel impossible to overcome.  

The first and perhaps most obvious theme threaded through today’s gospel passage, is the danger of hoarded wealth. Jesus tells a story of “the rich man,” who traditionally came to be called “Dives” from the Latin Vulgate translation of the word “rich.”[1] Not only is Dives wealthy but he makes a point to display it as an expression of power: he “dressed in purple and fine linen and… feasted sumptuously every day” (Luke 16:19). Purple dye was rare and expensive in the ancient world as was feasting sumptuously on a daily basis when people like Lazarus were right outside, starving. Both practices are obvious forms of “serving wealth” and not God, to evoke the declaration at the end of last week’s passage (16:13). Or as the biblical scholar William Herzog notes, Dives is practicing conspicuous consumption.[2] Also noteworthy: the gate at which Lazarus is lying, was the entrance to Dives’ estate. But it was less an opening than a very visible barrier to create a class-based separation, to keep out people like Lazarus.[3] Meanwhile Lazarus is clearly suffering physically from the cumulative effects of systemic economic inequality. The detail that Lazarus “longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table” suggests that the scraps did not always make it to him (16:21). This scene of contrast now being set. An extreme version of someone who has and someone who has not.

But now when both of these characters die, a new order begins to show itself. First, when Lazarus is carried away by the angels to the bosom of the ancient patriarch Abraham, while Dives is buried, we begin to see another example of Luke’s characteristic reversals. This reversal becomes more clear as a chasm appears separating Dives on one side and Lazarus and Abraham on the other.[4] It is immediately obvious that a reversal has occurred, yet Dives is still operating from out of the old, oppressive system. Notably, he does not speak directly to Lazarus. He likely never had. Instead speaks solicitously to “Father Abraham.” Unbelievably, he asks Abraham to get Lazarus to do his bidding: “send Lazarus” to cool my tongue.[5] Really? Is this what Lazarus would prefer to do in eternity? But Abraham sets the boundary, notably not in a slam dunk, but with an invitation to perspective, to insight. Recall, Dives, that you had things in your earthly life that Lazarus did not, and now he is being comforted. Dives would appear to be an example of what the first letter to Timothy warns about “the love of money [being] a root of all kinds of evil,” and how “in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains” (1 Tim 6:10). Meanwhile, as Abraham and Dives continue their back and forth, I wonder what Lazarus thought about all of these third person references to him as he sat there. Abraham calls attention to the chasm fixed between them and Dives. This chasm is for Lazarus, as Herzog points out, a boundary protecting him from any impulse to respond to such requests, should his lifelong immersion in systemic inequality have undermined his resistance to Dives’ outrageous requests.[6] No, it was time for Lazarus to rest, to be healed, to be restored. Abraham further denies Dives a Jacob Marley-type scenario of warning his Ebeneezer Scrooge-like brothers – again, to be carried out by Lazarus, as if he is a pawn on Dives’ personal chess board. But the warning – or the charge “to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,” as 1 Timothy puts it (6:18) – has truly already been issued to the brothers. All of us are called to “take hold of the life that really is life” (6:19), to seek that life earnestly in our own lives and communities, to practice abundance toward God as faithfully and authentically as we can.

And this vision is of the Kingdom, the Dream of God as Verna Dozier terms it, in which the resources of this world are not hoarded but shared, in which the hurts of our world are healed, in which the oppression of our world is liberated.[7] This vision is good news to Lazarus but make no mistake, as Herzog notes, it is bad news to the rich man.[8] It is bad news to any who want to amp up systems of inequity, to gin up war machines, to take over lands, to imprison and cast out. This vision is a warning and a call to action. It is also a reminder of the transformative power of God. For even if Dives was unable to think beyond what might give him or his family some sort of advantage – if not exclusive access then at least a hedge against disaster – he was actually being challenged to acknowledge the power of God to radically reverse the order of the world we humans corrupt and break over and over again. The power of God to transform us, and with us our world, is a call we can take up in the here and now to be agents of that transformation. In our systems and through our relationships. In all the meager smallness we may feel in the face of overwhelming heartbreak all around us, we can respond to this call every day.

An inspiring figure who manifested this response is my colleague the Reverend Dr. Vicki Gray whom we memorialized here yesterday. Vicki is someone who embraced tremendous transformation in her life. And I’m not chiefly speaking of her being openly trans. Vicki spoke powerfully and repeatedly of her experience as someone who had been in the Navy, who fought in Vietnam and was horrified and haunted by what she experienced there. At a certain point in her life, she felt impelled to turn and address the systems of war, of exploitation, of degradation, that we of the United States participate in. She spoke powerfully for years of the horror that Palestinians have been experiencing particularly but not exclusively in Gaza, their oppression by Israeli government policy, and the complicity of our government in such policy.[9] As part of the Night Ministry’s Open Cathedral leadership, she connected regularly and compassionately with people living on the streets of San Francisco. She was a human being who connected with other human beings of various faith traditions and life experiences, supporting them, uplifting them. Vicki was prophetic and gentle at the same time, incisive and pragmatic. She put her trust in the God who redeems us, who transforms us, who raises us to new life, and she invited all of us to join in sharing that trust. Because something happens when we live out such faith together. We can share our perspectives, our varied wisdom, in ways that exceed what any of us individually could ever do. We can help uphold one another when the overwhelm gets too much and we cannot see a way forward. We can be the people of God participating in the living out of God’s dream, which is a dream of resurrection stretching out from this world into the next, transforming us in the midst of the horrors of this world, consoling us as we seek to overcome what we have wrought, giving us life and energy for the difference we truly can make. And it is a dream of creation finally, against all observable trends, being made new, all of us gathered around the God who made us, in Abraham’s bosom – yes, even Dives as well, I trust as one who is at the end of the day a Christian universalist. Thanks be to God for entrusting to us this holy work, for giving us examples of faithful, authentic truth-illumining  transformation, and for the gift of resurrection life and rest.

[1] Justo Gonzalez, Luke: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 195.

[2] William Herzog II, Parables As Subversive Speech: Jesus As Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisveille, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 117.

[3] Herzog, 118, 121; Gonzalez, 196

[4] Gonzalez, 196

[5] As Robert Farrar Capon comments, Dives “has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Send Lazarus, indeed! He still thinks of himself as a winner who by divine right can command lackeys like this beggar to fetch him drinks.” Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 314.

[6] Herzog, 123

[7] Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publication, 1991)

[8] Herzog,128

[9] See Vicki Gray, “From Destroyer Deck to Pulpit” as well as her sermons in Troublemaker: Troubling Words for Troubled Times. A Deacon Reflects on the Needs, Concerns, and Hopes of the World (Oklahoma City, OK: Red Moon Publications, 2013)