Loneliness and Community

Image credit: Lazarus and the Rich Man, Caricature showing the Duke of Wellington eating at table with a footman standing behind him. He is approached by a starving man who holds out a petition. Anonymous. British, 1830. Metropolitan Museum of Art From Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN

Proper 21 (26), Year C
28 September 2025

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16
1 Timothy 6:6-19
Luke 16:19-31

Knowing that loneliness is a burden I am grateful for the community of the Church. I am also grateful for other communities, which can also gift us with friendship and thus be bearers of God’s grace, even if they do not know it or it is never made explicit. But I remain thankful for the community of the Church because our friendship is not based on whether we have the same interests or whether we like each other but on the fact that God has made us God’s friends, which helps us overcome the obstacles we put in each other’s way. I am thankful for the community of the Church because we do not have to pretend that we are perfect because we gather as loved and forgiven sinners. After all, we begin our worship with the confession of our sins. And I remain grateful for the community of the Church because God is present in our midst, in Word and Sacrament, and because being in God’s presence changes us.

The parable Jesus tells and that we read today tells the story not just of rich and poor, of obscene wealth and extreme poverty, but also of great loneliness.
The rich man lives a life isolated from the world around him, even if only by choosing to avert his eyes. He is as disconnected from anything that makes life worth living as the Elon Musks of this world who think only they should have children, with many women, because the genes of the rest of us aren’t worth preserving. It is an entirely materialistic world view that has no place for compassion, love, empathy, neighbourliness, for anything that makes life worth living.
Lazarus literally lives at the rich man’s gate but no act of kindness, no charity, no food scraps come his way. Only the dogs have compassion and lick his wounds, releasing the natural anti-biotics present in their saliva. It is no wonder that some prefer dogs to people.

Lazarus is lonely because he is not the recipient of compassion, because even though he is visible, he remains unseen, unheard, and disregarded, except by the dogs. In the economy of peasant farming, he is probably crippled by debt, lost his land, and has no access to food, let alone medical treatment. It is no wonder that he dies.
But of course, all of us will die.

The rich man also dies. That he dies despite his wealth is reminiscent of the Rich Fool in Luke 12. There are things we cannot control, no matter how hard we try. Most of the parable describes what happens following the death of these two neighbours. It is, however, not a description of heaven or hell. Jesus tells the parable as illustration of the poem that is inserted between the preceding parable and this one, where it says,
⁹And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
¹⁰‘Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. ¹¹If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? ¹²And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? ¹³No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’
The poem teaches us three things:
We cannot serve God and mammon, because material possessions inevitably take over. This is why John Wesley said, “When I have money I get rid of it quickly, lest it find a way into my heart.”
Secondly, since we are not able to handle mammon, the proper use of which is to give it away in the way the dishonest manager did a few verses earlier, you will not be entrusted with the truth, which is the greater treasure. Quite possibly, you won’t be entrusted with it because you are too busy with your wealth.
And thirdly we learn that our possessions are God’s anyway, they are not our own.¹

The rich man and poor Lazarus have both died.
The poor man goes upstairs and the rich man goes downstairs. The poor man finds himself in the bosom of Abraham while the rich man is being tormented in Hades.
This is the point where we are tempted to turn the story into a moralistic tale, and who could blame us for it would give us great pleasure to see the rich punished by God, except that we may find out that we are the rich. That is always the problem with assuming the scriptures are speaking to others but not to me.
The story does not make such moral declarations. It simply states that angels carry Lazarus to Abraham while the rich man is being tormented in Hades.

The two were separated in this life and now they are separated in the next life. The rich man tries to order Abraham to order Lazarus, whose name he knows (!), to relieve his suffering and to warn his brothers. We see that the story critiques those for whom the scriptures are not sufficient (Abraham says that his brothers have Moses and the prophets) and it anticipates disbelief in the resurrection (“If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets …”). More importantly we see that the rich man shows no contrition and has no repentance. While he knows Lazarus’ s name (which means “God is my help”), he does not regard him as a person. He sees no connection between his blindness to the beggar at his door and regarding his wealth as entitlement and his place in the afterlife. He isolated himself from the poor and that isolation has remained. Obtuse is not strong enough a word.

Jesus tells the story because wealth makes us blind. It leads to entitlement, to abdicating social responsibility by insisting that we earned everything we have, in direct contradiction to the words of the Lord to the Israelites as they are about to enter the promised land:
¹⁷Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth.’ ¹⁸But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your ancestors, as he is doing today. (Deuteronomy 8)

Conceit leads to loneliness. We see that through his disregard for his neighbour the rich man himself has created this great chasm. Jesus tells the story as a warning.

It is important for us to remember that the story describes the reversal of the afterlife not as judgment for if it described it as judgment our life would be ruled by fear, for like the young man who sought to follow Jesus and turned away grieving, we too have many possessions.

In a book on friendship, the theologian Paul Wadell references the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas who describes the virtue of charity as a life of friendship with God.² A few pages later, in a chapter entitled “Worshipping Dangerously,” Wadell references Aquinas again. To worship dangerously means that we come to worship not as consumers but allowing and even expecting God to change us. Aquinas said about Holy Communion, about the Eucharist, “This sacrament does for the life of the spirit all that material food and drink does for the body, by sustaining, building up, restoring, and contenting.” But there is a crucial difference between food for the body and food for the soul. When we eat a meal, the food is digested and assimilated into our body. However, when we come to the table of the Lord to receive the body and blood of Christ, it is not Christ who is changed according to us, but we who are changed according to Christ.³

That is why being friends with God makes us friends with one another, eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ makes us more like Jesus, however slowly. It means that in a world of loneliness we need not be lonely, and those we encounter need not be lonely either.

That is God’s gift.

Amen.