Being Uncomfortable
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 28, 2025
The Rev. Josh Evans
St. John’s Lutheran Church
Albany, NY
This is an uncomfortable gospel.
For Lazarus:
who in life was economically destitute,
covered with painful sores,
without even a crumb to eat,
the hunger pangs gnawing away inside of him,
overlooked and passed by,
with only the feral dogs for company.
For the rich man:
who in death is tormented in Hades,
agonized in its flames,
without even a single drop of water to cool his tongue,
without hope for redemption,
even for his brothers who are still living.
This is an uncomfortable story,
its happy ending for Lazarus tempered by the rich man’s agony,
their places in death reversing their stations in life.
“Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed,”
Abraham declares – their eternal fates sealed.
And what of the “great chasm”
between Lazarus and the rich man in life?
A chasm we know all too well –
as the price of pretty much everything soars
while families and individuals struggle to make a livelihood –
as billionaires line their pockets with tax cuts
and the rich get richer.
According to a report last year from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office,
the top 10% of American families hold 60% of the nation’s wealth as of 2022,
with the top 1% alone holding over a quarter of the total wealth at 27% –
while the bottom half of families holds a mere 6%.
This isn’t exactly groundbreaking news
for anyone paying even the slightest attention,
but the numbers are staggering.
It’s uncomfortable –
almost as uncomfortable as it is to talk about money in church.
And yet:
Jesus himself had a great deal to say about money and wealth:
At the beginning of his Sermon on the Plain –
that’s Luke’s version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount –
Jesus’ beatitudes begin with a direct address:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours in the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.” (Luke 6:20-21)
Compared to Matthew’s more generic 3rd-person version –
“Blessed are the poor in spirit…
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…”
(Matthew 5:3, 6) –
Luke’s wording is more physical, more literal, more real:
“Blessed are you who are poor…and hungry now…
Blessed are you who weep now…”
And perhaps most striking of all in Luke’s account
is Jesus’ pronouncement not just of blessings, but woes:
“Woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.” (Luke 6:24-25)
It’s a direct reversal of the blessings –
a move Luke is so keen on making –
and you can even hear the echoes of Mary’s song:
“[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
[God] has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:52-53)
Some time later, responding to someone in the crowd
who sought to pull Jesus into a family dispute over their inheritance,
Jesus warns them
to “be on [their] guard against…greed,”
urging them to resist the endless acquisition of more and more possessions.
(Luke 12:15)
Instead, Jesus teaches his disciples,
“Sell your possessions and give alms.” (Luke 12:33)
And as we heard in last week’s gospel,
right after another uncomfortable parable in its own right,
“No slave can serve two masters…
You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Luke 16:13)
All this talk about money and wealth is uncomfortable –
and when it comes to the teachings of Jesus,
it’s also impossible to avoid –
and it leads to some pretty uncomfortable stories.
Lazarus sat at the rich man’s gate
for an unspecified period of time –
but long enough, apparently,
for the rich man to know his name.
And the fact that he knew Lazarus’ name
would imply that he knew Lazarus was there –
and still he chose to continue to ignore him.
This unnamed man,
whose only identifying characteristic is his wealth,
who presumably had every resource at his disposal
to help many Lazaruses,
ignored the one man just outside his gate.
“But if you could just send Lazarus to my father’s house
to warn my brothers…”
he pleads.
“They have Moses and the prophets;
they should listen to them.”
It’s an uncomfortable message –
and it’s not original to the teachings of Jesus,
or even his mother’s song.
“Woe to those who are at ease in Zion
and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria,”
we hear from Amos,
a fiery prophet known for his unrelenting emphasis on social justice –
a tremendous source of inspiration for the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and others
who have throughout history taken up the cause of social and economic inequality.
Amos, who announces God’s judgment on Israel
for “trampling the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
and pushing the afflicted out of the way.” (Amos 2:7)
Amos’ judgment is clear –
God’s people have forgotten how to share their wealth with the poor –
and Amos’ famous call to repentance is clearer still:
“Let justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)
From the prophets and forebears of Jesus
to Jesus himself,
the biblical witness is clear:
God is a God of the oppressed,
a God who does not sit around banquet tables
in gaudy and gilded ballrooms with the rich and powerful,
but a God who would rather stoop down beside the likes of Lazarus at the gate,
who sees him, sores and all.
“Blessed are you who are poor…and hungry now,
for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.”
And what of the rich man?
Woe to you…because of your wealth? Not exactly.
The rich man’s wealth doesn’t condemn him
any more than Lazarus’ poverty saves him.
That’s not the point.
Money isn’t inherently evil.
But “the love of money” – that’s different.
“The love of money,” as the epistle writer puts it,
“is a root of all kinds of evil.”
Not the only root,
but still a pretty pernicious and pervasive one.
Woe to the rich man because of his wealth? No.
Woe to the rich man because of
how he let his wealth and his stuff get in the way,
blinding him to the very real need literally right in front of him,
hardening him to the brokenness of the world.
How tempting it is to blind ourselves to that brokenness,
to distract ourselves from the pain and the need all around us –
in the endless stream of news headlines, reels, and posts,
each one increasingly harder to digest than the last.
One of my seminary professors, Dr. Kadi Billman, now retired,
captures this tension well in a short essay,
in a particular setting I can picture all too vividly because I’ve been there,
but a scene that could just as easily be transposed to any city.
Dr. Billman writes: “When I walk the ‘Magnificent Mile’ in Chicago, with elegant shops on one side and gorgeous flowering boxes stitched down a street crowded with gas-guzzling SUVs on the other, I ‘walk the mile’ with scores of bedraggled and ill-looking people holding out their paper cups close to the doorways where vast amounts of money will be dropped daily (including some of my own bills, which I do not place in all the outstretched, empty cups). I am worried about how inured [accustomed] I seem to be becoming to the pain I see all around me; how adept at barely seeing even the things that are stealing life in sips; numbed by the consumerism…and unable to take action to close the distance [chasm] between myself and others who are close enough to trip over.” [1]
It’s an uncomfortable reality.
How tempting it is to blind ourselves to the brokenness –
and how crucial it is to stay awake,
to soften our hearts of stone for hearts of flesh
beating in time with the heart of Christ,
as the hymn text puts it,
“so may all bruised and broken lives through us your help still find.” [2]
“Hope depends…on the capacity for defiance,”
Dr. Billman writes.
A defiance and a way of acting in the world
that is “nurtured by a life of prayer that reminds us, again and again,
that we are not, finally, the ones who justify God’s ways,
but creatures who are justified only by God’s grace
and charged with not missing the pleasure
that comes from trying to make a more just world.” [3]
It is uncomfortable –
this whole being a disciple of Jesus thing.
It will take us to places we don’t want to go,
make us confront realities we don’t want to see.
And yet this is what it is all about:
to be uncomfortable with being uncomfortable;
to take notice of the stranger at our gate,
the poor and the oppressed and the vulnerable in our midst,
the children for whose future on this planet we fear;
and to strive for God’s justice
and a world where all are seen,
all are fed,
all are safe,
and all are loved –
here and now.
[1] Kathleen D. Billman, “Practicing Pastoral Care as a Theologian of the Cross in an Age of Glory: Charism and Challenge for Pastoral Care,” in Mission with the Marginalized: Life and Witness of Rev. Dr. Prasanna K. Samuel, ed. Samuel W. Meshack (Tiruvalla, India: Christava Sahitya Samithi, 2007), 266.
[2] “O Christ, Your Heart, Compassionate,” Evangelical Lutheran Worship, 722.
[3] Billman, 267-268. Emphasis mine.
