Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC January 26, 1986
I am Dives; and I have come to you today only because for this brief moment the unbridgeable is bridged, the chasm is spanned. I can speak to you only for a little while, and even then I am not certain that I can fully get through to you. Our worlds are so different, our circumstances so much at variance.
But then in a sense I have always lived in a world different from most people. You see, I was, in my former life, quite comfortable. I was living very well indeed, able to have a generous supply of friends, able to eat well and dress well and keep up appearances. Not necessarily your everyday working stiff kind of existence. I had all I wanted and more, and kept a sizable stable of friends happy as well.
Oh, that's right. You are wondering why I am speaking about what used to be, you are puzzling at this talk about my life before, my other life. Well, I don't quite know how to tell you this -- but, well, you see, the truth is, I am dead. That's right, dead. Dead Dives. Dead, gone, buried, and now, great God, I am in torment. You can scarcely believe what is happening to me; for me there is unspeakable agony, for me there is nothing day in and day out but the fire that burns but does not consume, nothing but the anguish of remorse; nothing but a penetrating longing in my heart that I might escape. That is why I am coming to you today, that is why for this moment at least Father Abraham is permitting me to reach out and to speak from across this chasm. There is something I must tell you -- something you absolutely must hear.
Let me begin by telling you about the house of Dives and about what we were able to do there. You see, I lived in a fine home in an upscale section of the city, and, quite frankly, most of my time and energies were spent in maintaining myself and furnishing the home and in entertaining my friends. Now I ask you, whatever could be wrong with that? Isn't that just good stewardship? Isn't that simply prudence? After all, as a good solid believer I felt that I understood that the Lord had blessed me with all these things and that the stewardship of them was mine and I needed to preserve them and take care of them and … oh, my God, how things have changed! How things have changed! Things, indeed. That was at the heart of my problem. I loved things. I told myself I was taking care of all this as a responsible person who obeyed God's commands, but now I know that I loved things, I loved them for what they could do to me. How mistaken I was! But that's getting ahead of the story. Let me continue.
Near my home there was a shelter for homeless people; I had joined in the protests when it was opened just three blocks over from where I live, because it seemed to me that the city government just did not understand that people like this do not belong in our kind of neighborhood, that it will reduce property values, that it will be a danger to our children, that respectable women will not feel safe on the streets. Oh, wait, there I go again; I guess this is no time for me to get on my soapbox about that. A little too late for that kind of rhetoric.
As it turns out that shelter was not too bad after all. We did not see or have too much trouble from the residents. But there was one of them, a man whose notoriety became so great that there was no ignoring him. Honestly the way the guy manipulated the press and got his name and his picture in the papers was beyond me! I rather believed in the old idea that the only time a decent person's name appeared in the papers was when he got married and when he died; When he died! Oh, my Lord, I did die. Somehow it never really occurred to me that I would. Oh yes, of course, up here in my head I knew that sooner or later all men must die, but, well, everything went so well and so smoothly that I never gave it a second thought. And, you know, in our church they never say much about messy realities like that; spoils the beauty of the worship service, you know.
At any rate, this old reprobate kept making a fuss about how he was hungry and others were feasting, about how he had no place to live and others were warm and comfortable. I tell you, if he had spent half the time earning an honest living that he spent blabbering to reporters and making wild accusations, I suspect he could have provided for himself the way the rest of us do. After all, you know, I did get mine the old-fashioned way, I earn it!
But that cut no ice with the press. Here is this welfare cheat, this lazy, shiftless vagabond, Lazarus, they called him, and he is camping outside my front door, demanding something to eat, demanding to be let in. And, just for effect, I believed, he lured a pack of mangy old street dogs, mere mongrels by the looks of them, and outside my door they all camped, wailing and growling and scavenging. Yes, I mean Lazarus and the dogs. Couldn't tell sometimes who was barking and growling the most, the man or the dogs. The whole lot of them were disgusting and gave quite a start to my guests one night. Honestly, when my friends arrived, the last thing I wanted was for them to have to confront this disreputable, unshaven, smelly apparition, flapping his toothless gums at them and trying to put the touch on them.
Well, that evening we called the city police, and they did nothing except draw more newspapermen and more photographers. Said something about his being within his rights, out there on public property. And did I really want to create some bad publicity for myself?
So my guests and I decided on a kind of compromise. We were not about to let the whole evening be ruined by this nobody -- what was the name again? Oh yes, Lazarus -- curious, his name means, "God helps." I'll bet that was not his real name, I'll bet he just made that up to court sympathy from everybody. We were not going to let our evening be ruined, and so we decided that he might just as well have our hand-cleaning bread. You see, it was our custom not to use napkins or cloths to clean our hands, but we wiped them on cheap bread which would absorb the grease and other moisture, and we would just throw that bread away. Nobody would think of eating the stuff. It wasn't any good, it was just for taking up the mess from our hands and our table, but hey, it did have some nourishment value. Let him have the bread and be satisfied. And so we just pitched the stuff on the floor and let him, and by the way, his pack of foul-smelling dogs, have at it after we had finished.
Now do I detect that you feel that was not a very sufficient response? Do I read in your faces that this does not appear to be very charitable? I think I should tell you some things about myself.
First, about my religion. I was a good solid member of the church, specifically the Sadducee Park Church. It was a good church, with fine folks in it, and we believed, in our own quiet way, in the goodness of the Lord. We believed that because all around us were the evidences of the Lord's blessing. A good many of us drove new chariots to church every Sabbath, worried only that we had to park too far away for the sake of comfort and convenience -- some actually had to park perilously close to the homeless shelter. Others of us had furnished our homes with the latest styles from Jerusalem, and some were able to wear designer togas from Rome. Calvinus Kleinus, Guccia, Givenchius Fratri, and all the rest. More than all that, had a cool kind of religion – cool, as in calm and urbane. Cool, as in not believing too much about too many things.
For example, in the Sadducees church, you know, we were quite skeptical about life after death and about unpleasant doctrines like the last judgment or heaven or hell. We left that to the legalists over at the Pharasabyterian Church or the tongue-speaking fundamentalists at the Full Torah Fellowship International or the church over by the shelter, I think they called it the Greater New Fire-Baptized Holiness Soul-Saving Synagogue. Not for us. Not for Sadducees. Ours was a cool, respectable, distant faith.
Oh, my friends, how I have learned now that all that coolness may very well bring you to some heat in the end! All that cold and callous respectability, how it stokes the flames for me now:
But I should tell you also of my approach to charity. I did what I could, you know, and thought that was all anybody should be expected to do. I did what I could, I had my secretary pop off a check every year, every year, mind you, to the United Way, and whenever our church took up its mission offerings, I dropped in a little something for Lottie Moonberg or for Annie Armstein. I gave something to everything. I'd have you notice that I gave even to that stinking beggar at my door. What could possibly have been wrong with that?
Well, that very night, as we were enjoying an after dinner sip of this new wine I had found -- sparkling Bethlehem, I think it was -- there was such a clatter out at the gate as I had never heard. Sirens and shouting and dogs barking; what a furor. And when we went to see about it, it turned out the old boy had died out there. Lazarus had had the ingratitude to eat my food and then expire right there on my doorstep. To tell the truth, I was glad to be rid of him, and was not a little pleased that I would never see him again. O my Lord, never to see him again – how I wish that it had really been true!
We went back in and finished our drinks, and I let my guests leave early, because I was not feeling too well. I think I caught a chill standing out in the cold night air watching the rescue squad try to pump life back into Lazarus' wasted body. The temperature was cold indeed that night. Cold, cold indeed, why do I torture myself by thinking about what it means to be cold? I would gladly be that cold again now if I could.
I was not feeling well, not well at all. And as I lay on my bed, I felt a panic seize me … something was wrong, terribly wrong. I was dying, great God, no, I am dying, dying.
And so, as I have told you, Dives, that's me, I'm dead. It was a lovely funeral. This time I made the papers, too, but would you believe it, they printed something about Lazarus' death on the front page, even though he had no funeral at all, and my funeral notice was buried in the classifieds. But it was a lovely funeral, cool and calm and collected. I was glad no one wept; that's so emotional, so unpleasant, so unsophisticated. So uncool.
But, great God, look at me now. I did not even expect to be aware of anything at all after my death, but I am aware, I am more than aware. I am in torment. I cannot begin to describe to you how I feel. It is as though the heat of a hundred suns blazes in my mind, and I cannot quench it. It is not so much a matter of temperature, it is more that there is a burning agony of the spirit which will not be satisfied.
And my eyes, when they lift up from these endless hours of remorse, see old Lazarus, gathered to the bosom of Abraham, happy and contented, feasting in the love of the Father as I used to feast at my table. And now I am the beggar, I beg for mercy, I cry for but a drop of water to quench my thirst, I hope for but a little of the Lord's mercy, but it's no use, no use at all. How hot this place is! How hot is it? Not the heat you measure with a thermometer so much as the heat of an unbearable guilt that I did not reach out to my brother. Hot with the fires my own spirit continues to stoke, for I can not undo what I did, I cannot do what I failed to do, I cannot cross back over the divide. There are some things we cannot change once they are done. Searing into my heart like the blacksmith's tongs, for I did not reach out, I did not care, I did not see the poor, I did not involve myself in person with those who have needs. I lived well, and I kept the rules, I did my churchy thing, but, great God, why did I not see that I had a brother there in whose life I could have involved myself? And so now I suffer the heat of a thousand desert suns.
But wait; there is something else I must say. I have brothers yet, other brothers. Father Abraham, there are some whom I love; will you not have mercy on them? Send someone, send a message, send Lazarus himself, use every means possible to warn them that they too will perish. Lord God, can we not send them a message with urgency? Can we go so far as to send them one who comes back from the grave and warns them of the foolishness of their ways? Lord, they are like me; they are good folks, and they rather imagine there will be no reckoning. If you will not help me, Lord, will you not send them a message?
May it not be that if one were to rise from the dead, that might get through? May it not be that if very God himself, the Lord of life and death, were to come and stand in our midst, that that might speak to every man and woman who believes himself to be self-sufficient? May it not be that if God made flesh, come as a tiny fragile infant, come to live and teach among us, come to suffer the very worst that we could do to him – may it not be that that would appeal to the stone-cold hearts of humanity? May it not be, Lord, that if you yourself were to bridge the breach and span the chasm, that if you were to love so much that you came into these burning flames yourself to snatch us as brands from the burning, may it not be that such an act would jar us loose from our self-centeredness?
May it not be, Lord, that even in this hour of torment I can speak to someone and urge him to reach out to his brother, his sister? And how hot is hell? Hot enough for Dives to wish no company here, no fellow travelers. Hot enough for Dives to know that he has made a fool of himself by his callous unconcern. Hot enough, hot enough and to spare.
