What comes to mind when you think about heaven?
According to studies, about 90% of us believe there’s a heaven, and about 85% of us think we’ll go there when we die. Here’s something that is odd to me---80% of women think they’re going to
heaven, but only 69% of men do.[1]
I’m betting just about 0%
of us think of heaven as going to sit in the lap of Abraham. Am I right?
But that’s what happens to the man in this parable we just read from
Luke 16. That’s just one of the reasons
this is an interesting parable. In it,
we get three different scenes – one on earth at the rich man’s house where we
see Lazarus laying outside his front door, and then two scenes of the afterlife
– Lazarus in heaven with Abraham, and the rich man in hell in eternal torment.
Luke gives us vivid descriptions of both the richness of the rich man and the poorness of Lazarus:
·
The rich man is clothed in purple, the color of
nobility or royalty, and in fine linen.
He eats sumptuously, feasting every day on fine food. He lives in the lap of luxury.
·
In stark contrast, Lazarus apparently has little or no
clothes. We know this because we can see
his skin that is covered with sores. He
longs to have even just the crumbs from the rich man’s feast. His only friends are the dogs who come to
lick his sores. For the rich man it’s feast and for Lazarus it’s famine.
Notice that Luke doesn’t tell us the rich man’s name, but he
does tell us the poor man’s name – Lazarus, which means “God is my help.” Lazarus is
the only character in any of the parables that gets a name.
In this parable, there are two great chasms. The rich man is in agony in the flames of Hades
and calls out to Abraham in heaven for some relief. But Abraham cannot help him because of the
great chasm that separates heaven from hell.
Abraham tells the rich man that this chasm is uncrossable. There is another chasm in this story. It is
between the rich man and Lazarus in life.
This one isn’t uncrossable but it might as well be because the rich man
does not cross it. Maybe he doesn’t even
see it, just like he doesn’t seem to see Lazarus.
Life and afterlife.
This has been a busy week for my DVR recording TV shows. Maybe
it has been for yours, too. This was the
week that many TV shows started their new seasons, and some new shows
premiered. One of the new shows is
called “The Good Place.” It’s
on Thursday nights on NBC (or any night on my DVR) and stars Kristen Bell as a
woman who has died and wakes up to find herself sitting in an office. Ted Danson is sitting behind the desk and
reassures her that she has come to “The Good Place.” The show doesn’t use the words heaven or
hell, but that’s definitely what they want us to think. Kristen Bell’s character is surprised to find
herself in the good place for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is
that she wasn’t a very good person in life.
In the show, she keeps trying to cuss and the words will only come out
as sanitized versions. For example, she
says fork a lot! When Ted Danson
explains to her how people get to the good place, he tells her that a
remarkably small percentage of people are good enough to get in there. Admission is entirely based on good deeds.
What’s wrong with that premise? For a TV show, nothing because it’s fiction
and you can do whatever you want with fiction.
But in real life, admission to heaven is not based on good deeds. Salvation comes through faith in Jesus
Christ, and even that faith is a gift from God.
That’s what our reading from Ephesians 2 is talking about.
God saved
you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a
gift from God. 9 Salvation
is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about
it. 10 For we are
God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the
good things he planned for us long ago. (Eph 2:1-10 NLT)
We might be tempted to think that the story of the rich man
and Lazarus is telling us that it’s the rich man’s lack of good works that kept
him out of heaven. It’s not his actions,
although his actions are certainly telling.
They reveal a man whose heart was far from God, otherwise he would have
been concerned about what God’s concerned about, namely people in need, like Lazarus.
We have to be careful not to mix this up. Through faith, the Holy Spirit renews us and
guides us and helps us to do the good things that God has planned for us. We
cannot earn salvation through good works.
But we find that our faith and
our gratitude for salvation prompts us to action.
We see this sequence in the greatest commandment as well.
The first part is to love the lord your God with all your heart, soul,
mind and strength. (Luke 10:27 et al).
That’s what gets us started, and what prompts and equips us to love our
neighbors as ourselves. Without the love
of God, we will not be able to sustain the love for our neighbors. The first part provides the motivation and
the strength for the second part.
We see this in another parable – the story of the sheep and
the goats. Jesus says to the goats,
“Away from me. I never knew you.” The goats ask for explanation, and he
explains that when they didn’t feed the hungry or give water to the thirsty or
welcome strangers, it is as if they didn’t do these things for Jesus
himself. The point is that those who
love God and are seeking to do God’s will would have loved these people. Our good works are the outflow or symptom of
our faith.[2]
It’s like taking your computer in for repair. For the technician to be able to figure out
what’s going on in the computer, you have to give him access to it – the
password to get in. Otherwise he won’t
be able to do anything at all and it’ll just stay like it was. If you give him access, he’ll get into it and
clean things up and get them running right again. And it’ll run great for awhile and do lots of
good things, but every now and then you’ll need to take it back for more clean
up. It’s like that for us, too. For God to work in our lives we have to give
him access – use the gift of the faith that he’s given us to accept the grace
and forgiveness being offered, and accept the new life Jesus brings us. And he’ll get inside and clean some things up
and get us back on track and running right and doing good things, and the more
we give him access, the more he can do in us.
When we let God have access, we get a generous opportunity, which is to do the will of God and to know
the blessings that come with doing God’s will.
In the process God helps us change from a perspective of entitlement to
one of stewardship. We see entitlement
in the rich man[3]
– all this is mine and I’m entitled to enjoy it. Instead, he could have been thankful to God
for giving him all that he had and used his richness to bless others.
God gave the rich man a generous opportunity. God was generous to the rich man, and God
generously put Lazarus right on his doorstep, a most convenient opportunity to
share his blessings.
Whenever I read this story about the rich man and Lazarus, I
get to thinking . . . Who is on our doorstep? It can be easier to be generous to different
organizations, to send money off to different countries, and fail to notice the
need right in front of us.
There’s a pastor who tells about a time when he was about to
send away the stranger at his doorstep.
He lived in the house on the church property and a young man came to his
door asking for help. The young man
turned out to be the son of one of the church families. He struggled with alcohol and had gone away
and come back so many times that his parents had given up on him. The pastor was trying to keep up with a busy
agenda that day and was feeling somewhat sorry for himself, so he wasn’t
feeling very charitable. He said to God,
“Lord, I can’t take care of every drunken beggar in this town.” In response, a voice seemed to say, “I didn’t
ask you to take in every drunk—just this one.”
And so he did.[4]
What
opportunities is God putting on our doorsteps to share the blessings that we’ve
been given?
·
Are we responding with cheerful gratitude or
grudgingly minimal response?
·
Or are we turning a blind eye, looking past those
right before us to do something easier or more acceptable?
·
Have we allowed a seemingly uncrossable chasm to exist
between us and someone who needs our help?
One thing that is very clear in this parable – we don’t have an unlimited supply of
opportunities to be generous. The
ultimate reality is that life is finite, and so are the opportunities. Opportunity is on our doorstep, but so is
death. I don’t know if your week was
like mine, but it seemed that death was in view daily. There was a lot of it this week on my
Facebook feed. Three friends lost their
mothers this week, and one her father. We
heard a lot this week about people getting shot. Life and death is our reality. Both are always happening.
The juxtaposition of death and life this week got me to
thinking metaphysically. In our parable
we see life and death almost overlapping, as both are in view in the telling of
the story. And I got to wondering….
What if heaven
isn't a place or a time (future) but a dimension that we only intersect with in
fleeting moments in this life . . .because we are bound to this place and time
and linear thought . . .but that we get glimpses of when we worship and when we touch sometimes heart and when we do something that impacts eternity?
And is so often the case, I discovered I’m not the first
person to think about life this way. You
might already be thinking of some stories or movies that play with this
idea. Some ancient people had a theory
about this idea. The Celtic spiritual tradition says that
heaven and earth are actually rather close together and that there are thin places where the distance between
them is much smaller, where the veil between heaven and earth is quite thin.[5] In those places it is easier to feel the
presence of God and to have glimpses of heaven, and to see God’s glory.[6]
I do believe thin places exist, but I don’t think they are always
static places. There are certainly
places that are special because they show us the glory of God through their
beauty or because special things happen there.
But we ourselves have the ability
to create thin places whenever we give God complete access to our hearts and
lives. We make thin places when we pray and sing and worship God
with all our hearts. We make thin places
when we reach out to other people
and touch their hearts. We make thin
places when we do the will of God.
“And the
world is passing away along with its desires, but
whoever
does the will of God abides forever.”
–1 John 2:17
·
Churches can be
thin places but they aren’t always.
·
St.Vincent’s House is often a thin place for me, and for people who come
there looking for hope and reassurance.
I found a thin place this week watching the season premiere
of the TV show The Voice. This is a
show where people come and sing for a panel of judges who can hear them but
can’t see them. The judges will accept
or reject them based on their singing
alone, and often based on some rather intangible
qualities that can come through in a performance. Many of these performers see this as their
one chance to live their most deeply
heartfelt dream. Some of these
performers have known incredible
heartbreak and that comes through in their singing and allows their
performance of that song to be a thin place.
Most of them don’t mention God, but I
felt like I was hearing the heart of God through them.
Where and when have you experienced thin places?
Sometimes a hospital
room is a thin place. There was
college student doing an internship as a chaplain at a hospital. It’s a tough internship at first because the
student has very little training before they start visiting patients and their
families. In one of this chaplain’s
visits, she walked into a room where a man sat beside the bed of his wife who
was unconscious. The man had just been
told that his wife had very little time left.
He was angry at God and not much interested in talking to the
chaplain. He told her, “Unless you can tell me where God is in
this, you can leave.” The chaplain
stood there unsure what to do or say.
She said a silent prayer. “God,
help me.” And suddenly she was overcome
by the man’s grief and she began to weep.
In that moment, through that
chaplain, the man was able to see the heart of God. God was there weeping with him. And the chaplain stayed and sat with him for
quite awhile.[7] That was a thin place, a generous opportunity
to encounter heaven on earth.
God gives us a lifetime of opportunities to know him
personally, to know his generous grace, and to be a part of heaven on earth.
Once we are dead, the opportunities have ended, but the most amazing thing
about life is that every day, every
moment is a new opportunity to have
a fresh start and to find and create thin places through our heartfelt
seeking of God and of sharing
God’s love and grace with other people. Sometimes
it might seem like there are uncrossable chasms between us and God, and
between us and other people, especially between us and people who are different from us.
Every moment until we breath our last moment is an
opportunity to cross those chasms, and to find or create thin places.
Let us thank God for all of these generous opportunities.
Melissa, I truly enjoyed reading this week's blog post. It is very insightful.
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