On these county grounds were also those who were, as we used to say, "on the county." That is to say, those who had no way to make a living except to be recipients of public welfare. Some folks just had to live out there because they had nowhere else to live.
The county hospital was out there as well.
Some years ago, as county beneficences moved to other places, the county government moved to begin to develop some of those lands out there in an area of the county which falls within the city of Wauwatosa. Wauwatosa was looking for an increased tax base and businesses were looking for places to build new buildings. It looked like a good match.
While the explorations out in those properties were taking place, some light digging was going on and to the great surprise of the diggers, some graves were found. In fact, a potters' field was discovered in which the poor had been buried by the county over several decades. The graves were more than unmarked. The county had long ago forgotten that anyone had been buried there. Not only were the graves unmarked. The developers had discovered a burial land itself which had been long forgotten.
Several doctors from the Medical College began to exhume some of the bodies to discover who they might have been and why they died and why they might have been buried in that long ago forgotten territory.
It reminded me of the death and burial of Judas recorded Matthew 27. When Judas had finally understood the implications of his betrayal, he went out and hanged himself and the 30 pieces of silver were used to buy a plot of land in what Matthew calls a "potter's field." Through the development of language, the phrase "potter's field" has come to mean the burial place of paupers, strangers, foreigners and other folks who have no connections or identity. It is the burial place of folks who are unknown or disowned.
As we look at death, our burial places represent to us the values of the living. The cemeteries of the wealthy or the famous have become places of renown. The cemeteries of the poor, on the other hand, are unkempt and largely unvisited.
Jesus, in this difficult story means to reverse the way we look at life and death.
In fact, he forces us, through his extraordinary story-telling skills, to look at the after-life in such a way as to help us understand the way we live this life.
The story begins, "There was a rich man." Well, of course there was a rich man. There are always rich men. And they have a way of calling attention to themselves. So Jesus mentions him first. He is the main character of the story, but for unexpected reasons.
In the shadow of the rich man is a poor man named Lazarus. Poor folks are always in the shadow of rich folks. It should not surprise us that wherever we find great wealth it will be shadowed by great poverty.
The rich man is well dressed in purple and fine linen and whose every day meal was a banquet. If he heard Jesus say, "Do not be anxious about what you shall eat or what you shall drink or what you shall wear" he might have thought it just a bit amusing. These were not things about which he was much anxious. "His life is good, crowned with mercy and loving-kindness."(1)
We know this poor man as well. He is covered with chronic sores as the poor often are. He likely has no health insurance coverage. He eats the droppings from the table and he is so defenseless that he cannot even kick away the dogs who lick at his sores (a particularly unpleasant detail of Jesus' story).
You get the sense that there is this unbridgeable chasm between the rich man and the poor man. They couldn't possibly have less in common.
But then they die. And their fortunes reverse. Suddenly they have much in common. What the rich man had in life, the poor man has in death. And what the poor man had in life, the rich man has in death. And in spades.
This is an uncomfortable story in the extreme. Especially for those of us who are on the rich man's side of this story, who are not much anxious about what we shall eat or what we shall drink or what we shall wear. The rich and the poor are so very different in life and so very much alike in death.
Appearances which seem to be so important to us before death now seem to have no meaning or consequence. And those responsibilities we so assiduously avoided in life take on great meaning in the world beyond. It's called having a perspective on life.
It's called an ultimate form of maturity.
Dostoevsky has this story about a stingy old man who died. When this man was confronted by his judge at the end of the age the judge quickly condemned this stingy old man to a life to be spent in the lake of fire. But this man's guardian angel was assigned the role of defense attorney and the angel said, "But there was this one time in this old man's life when a beggar came by when this man was tending his garden. At first the stingy old man tried to get the beggar to go away and stop bothering him, but the beggar would not be so easily dismissed. So the old man reached into the dirt of his garden and pulled out an onion and handed it to the beggar. And the beggar thanked him and walked on."
So, the guardian angel said, "Please consider this when sentencing my client."
So, the judge turned to the stingy old man. Gazed at him for a long time. And finally he handed the guardian angel that onion and he said, "Here, reach this onion into the lake and let the old man grasp it and use it to pull the stingy old man out of the lake of fire. But if it breaks, then he must remain there for an eternity.
So the guardian angel reached to the old man with his onion and the old man grasped it and he began to be pulled out of the lake of fire. But then some other sinners in the Lake of fire tried to grab onto the old man's feet and legs as he was being pulled out. And the old man looked back in horror at these other sinners and he said, "No! This is my onion not yours" and he began to kick the sinners off of his legs. And in his thrashing about, the onion broke and the old man sunk into the lake of fire where he resides to this very day.
But even this story is more gracious than the one that Jesus tells. At least this old stingy man got a second chance. The rich man got no second chance. His request to have Lazarus go back to warn his brothers was rejected. Father Abraham in Jesus' story, simply says, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."
End of story.
Moses and the prophets had a tough but simple message.
Thou shalt not worship other gods.
Thou shalt not make images out of your stuff.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not covet.
Love your neighbor.
Love your enemy.
And the rich man seems to be saying, "I didn't understand those things in that way. I thought that those rules were for those who weren't self-actualized who needed rules to govern their lives. I didn't think you meant these things literally!"
This is a strange story really. It doesn't tell us what to do really. It doesn't tell us how to vote. The word simply seems to be, "You've been warned."
Someone once said that we should live our lives as if this were the first day of the rest of our lives. This story seems to suggest that we should live our lives as if this day were the last day of the rest of our lives. We should live our lives according to the things that matter to God, not to the economic structures that seem to dominate our existence.
I remember many years ago when we were working for the full employment bill that was entered into the senate by Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey, that happy warrior, had suggested that our economy would be much more stable if the government took on the role of being an employer of last resort.
And I remember very well the army of economists who defeated the bill (or watered down the bill) with the argument put forward with a scientific certitude that if we had full employment, we would have to have inflation. There was just no way around it. If we had low unemployment we would have too much money chasing too few goods and that would drive the cost of everything sky-high. So, in fact, a fully employed economy would be an unstable economy after all. We would pay for full employment with inflation. I wonder where those pea-brains with doctorates in economic theory are now that we have an economy that has record low unemployment and interest rates at 6.5 per-cent!
It may well be that God is right after all. All the scientific arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, our world would be better off in every way if we worried more about poor Lazarus than the rich man.
A final interesting and exceedingly odd fact about this haunting story: The poor man is remembered. His name is Lazarus. We know his name and so does father Abraham. The rich man never had a name or an identity. "He only had a social role that doesn't last and in the scheme of things is really quite insignificant. He is forgotten, unnamed, and abandoned. No name and no comfort, no future, no water [to slake his thirst]. And his future haunts our present."(2)
Allow this story to haunt you as you live out your life. And then you will be as haunted by the story of the potter's field out on the county grounds where the poor were buried without markers and without ceremony.
And then you will be haunted, as Jesus means you to be, by the strange
calculus of God's economy. And you will discover what it means to be truly
alive in the spirit of the living God.
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1. I am greatly indebted to Walter Brueggemann for the direction of this sermon. "On the Wrong Side of the Ditch . . . For a Long Time." In his collection of sermons, The Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness (Fortress Press, 1996). P. 136ff.