Sermon: Sixteenth Sunday of Pentecost
By the Rev. Ian Oliver
Pastor of the University Church in Yale,
Senior Associate Chaplain for Protestant Life, Yale University
(The following is a transcript of the service video, Sept. 28, 2025)
May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight. Lord my rock and my Redeemer. Amen.
What a delight and privilege to return to Memorial Church. As Alana said, the last time I was here was March 1st, 2020. And we all know what happened just after that. Not this time. I promise. Thanks to Reverend Potts and friends, Reverend Jones and Reverend Sullivan, and especially to my Yale alumni who have turned up here today, thank you all. I bring heartfelt greetings from your sister church the University Church and Yale.
But there is an irony in my standing at this pulpit this morning to preach on a scripture about the evils of loving wealth. Wealth is a touchy topic on campuses like ours today. We are in this strange season when our universities face the sanctioned confiscation of endowments and sustained harassment that stretches the imagination. Preaching about the problem of wealth perhaps hits a little too close to home today. I wish I could preach a gentle word of comfort to you, my friends, this morning, but Saint Luke and the lectionary don't let us off the hook. You need the second half of the gospel, where every chapter seems to illustrate Jesus's idea of what commentators call the great reversal.
Jesus says that over and over again in different frames. First shall be last and the last shall be first, blessed are you poor, but woe to you who are rich. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over all of the righteous. Luke's Jesus seems fixated on reminding us that the Kingdom of God that he is describing is nothing like the world in which we live it operates by a different set of rules. Today's parable is rather stark about those rules. It begins like any folkloric tale. “There was once a rich man.”
He dressed in designer robes every day, he lounged, and he feasted. And he enjoyed his wealth. And then there was Lazarus. A poor beggar laid at the rich man's door, sick and covered with open sores, but the rich man gave him nothing. And suddenly, we are then transported to a stylized picture of what happens when both men die. Lazarus rests in the healing embrace of Father Abraham, the ancestor of the people. But the unnamed rich man is in Hades. Suffering. In this sort of cartoon of the afterlife, the rich man can see Abraham and Lazarus, and he calls out across the canyon that divides him from them, and he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to him with a cool drink.
But Abraham calmly explains the great reversal. He says child, and yes, he is still a child of Abraham. You had good things all your life. And Lazarus had only suffering. And this is the way you were told it would be, Lazarus is now comforted, and now you suffer. Abraham is so matter-of-fact about it that the rich man is not ridiculed or attacked; the reversal itself is not debated or explained. This is just the way it is. Abraham is saying to the rich man, You built a great chasm between yourself and Lazarus, and the life that was, and now a great chasm separates him from you.
Now, lest we jump immediately to speculations about ancient cosmology or eternal reward or punishment, remember. It's a parable. But a parable that wants us to be imagining that God's view of wealth doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room. As Luke's Song of Mary says, “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 empty away,” which gets me to an unavoidable admission that I would love to avoid today. I am on the wrong end of this reversal. Though my grandmother would have said it's in bad taste to say so, I am rich.
Officially middle class in America, but on a global scale, I'm in the top 1 percent. Of course, I often still feel insecure. I think there's a whole industry out there to keep me insecure. And all things are comparative; I'm not Elon Musk, but that doesn't let me off the hook. You may be in a very different place. This is just me musing on a parable. And an even more problematic but inevitable admission is the fact that I work at a rich institution. Under threat, yes, but still for the moment rich. So, in this parable, where am I?
Am I rocked in the bosom of Abraham? Or am I abandoned to a thirsty Hades? I'm thinking back to a conversation long ago that I had with the theologian Doug Stern who was a friend who when I asked his advice as I was offered the job at Yale, he reminded me with a twinkle of all of the good work that I was doing where I was, service work in Nicaragua and fighting hate groups in our town, and he concluded, I guess what it comes down to is this. You can do what Jesus wants, or you can go to Yale.
It was tongue in cheek, but it still clanged loudly in my head. Living in a place of privilege can be tempting and dangerous, even or perhaps especially as that place is besieged. We can begin to think we earned our privilege. But the parable isn't done with me or us yet, thankfully. As always with Jesus, there is a twist at the end, a twist directed at those listening, which is us. The rich man calls out again across the canyon, Father Abraham, send Lazarus back to the world of the living so that he can warn my siblings so that they don't end up here in Hades as I did.
But Abraham gives this laconic reply. They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them. No, the rich man says, if Lazarus comes back from the dead, they will listen to him and change their lives and their ways. But with a sad finality, Abraham replies that if they don't listen to the law and the prophets, come, and even someone rising from the dead won't make them change. But Ba Dum Bum. For rich Christians like me who know how to make it sting. But the parable isn't as close as it once seemed. The siblings could change their lives and their ways.
They could remember Moses and the law that protects the powerless. They could remember the prophets pleading on behalf of the poor and the widows and the orphans. They could even perhaps listen to the witness of one who rose from the dead. Luke's Jesus even had his most harsh when his great reversal can feel like condemnation always extends mercy. And that's part of what draws us to Jesus. Somehow, he can do two seemingly totally contradictory things at once, pure; he can embody and speak both justice and mercy. He can tell a story like this one that feels like judgment but still leaves a door open.
He can paint our portrait of injustice in which we see the hard facts of our own society, but tells it so that there is an opportunity to change. My colleague Andrew McCowan wrote the Christian, hope, however, is not the virtue, and vice would be tallied up at the end, and consequences would be levied, but that the one who rose from the dead has already shown both God's mercy and God's judgment. At a time when both justice and mercy seem in short supply. Here, the world's refrain that says mercy for me, but justice for you. And we feel that tempting attraction.
But we remember as Reverend Jones sang from this pulpit two weeks ago in which I will definitely not do myself, that there definitely is amazing grace. So if Luke's Jesus leaves the door open, I wonder, will I change? Do I really want to? Wealth can, but does not have to, separate us from God. Wealth can be, but doesn't have to be, its own religion with its own articles of faith pure at its most basic, this religion says my money is mine. I earned it. I get to do with it what I want. No one can take it from me.
I can waste it, or grow it, or share it, and it's none of your business. Jesus, however, wants us to think about how wealth affects the state of our souls, pure how does it change my view of my own worthiness or unworthiness of others. How does it insulate me from the world's pain or shrink my concept of the common good? And what if those questions then spurred me to then begin asking bigger ones? Who made these seemingly inherent rules about economics, wealth, and poverty? Who made us servants of this capricious God of profit and loss?
To ask what systems in which I participate leave poor Lazarus on the stoop as I scan my retirement account. But I don't think Jesus condemns me. John 317 says indeed God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Not condemnation, but perhaps Jesus is trying to enlarge my world. To expand my sense of community and shrink my sense of property to get me to imagine that God is not somehow blind to wealth or the needs of Lazarus or my poor on my porch.
This God seeks to change the hearts of both the rich and the poor that the rich not presume on God's grace and that the poor never forget they are loved by God. Jesus wants to remind me I am only as secure as my least secure neighbor. And though this realization requires a countercultural consciousness and a change of life as radical as anything in the gospel. Justice and mercy are things that we can learn and ways that we can grow, and hearts can change, and I prefer to forget it, my heart is connected to my wallet.
To conclude. And to return to the immediate troubles that we share. On Thursday, I was listening to a favorite daily podcast from the British Jesuits. It has a nice song and a nice prayer; I love it. But on Thursday, this normally gentle moment was interrupted by a commentary on a passage from Luke. That stopped me and spoke to my heart about this moment that we face. It said If Jesus is the Christ, the anointed One of God, then neither Caesar nor Herod nor the chief priests are. If Jesus is, then they are not. If Jesus is proclaiming one God whose kingdom is just and peace and compassion, then the Emperor is not a god and Rome's oppressive kingdom is illegitimate.
It asked, do we sense the political implications of calling Jesus the Christ? Have we lost the political significance of what it means to call Jesus the Christ and to really follow him? And this part hit home. Have we reduced Christianity to a safe religion that has no critique of violence or misuse of wealth? Or oppressive power? And so, my beloved Harvard friends. If Jesus is the anointed one, the Lord. Then there are no others. And no other rule is legitimate. The good news we have been given is that there is a God who sees misuse of power, sees the growing chasm between the rich and the poor, and the encouragement of violence.
Our good news is that we worship a God whose justice is far deeper than we can conceive and whose mercy is even deeper than that, and whose kingdom, in spite of all of the evidence, is coming. As Kenneth Boulding once wrote in a favorite poem. Know this. Though love is weak and hate is strong, yet hate is short. And love is very long. Amen.