A System Wrapped in Purple Robes: Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
By Lenny Duncan
Gospel Text: Luke 16:19-31
I am always incredibly grateful for the Gospel of Luke. Not only does Year C remind us that God’s most loved children are typically the poorest among us, but often they are facing intersecting identities, hardships, and, compared to today, a host of disabling health events.
We are often dropped in the middle of the muck and mire of 1st-century Palestine and see a Jesus among the people, of the people. But the class distinctions aren’t blurred, but highlighted by and then intentionally crossed by Jesus over and over again. As a poor person who watched their mother struggle to afford medication to breathe her whole life and was taken in her sleep at a young age, a father who had several disabling events and undiagnosed neurodiversity who died in the high-risk situations he was never given the tools to avoid as a Black man raised in the 60s, a childhood where dinner was never a guarantee, made me more open to hearing the message of the Gospel of Luke.
It’s the Gospel that got under my skin. The itch I just can’t scratch, no matter how far away I feel from the church, or the people of God, and lately, I couldn’t feel further away or less connected to the shiny and happy people of a Sunday morning, the pulpit, and the often completely devoid of power and uninspired rituals we continue to do in church. I am in the context of the United States, and for better or worse, as an American, I will be impacted by my U.S citizenship. Two weeks ago, or almost by the time you read this, we went through one of the great U.S national rituals-the purity test. Our preaching, our social media, and our years of writing were examined to see if you celebrated the death of a political activist, and if you were properly grieving this death. If they weren’t, they were fired across industries-professors, major news columnists, late-night TV comedy hosts, hospitality workers, and probably hundreds more people we will never know.
Quite the turnaround for a country you wouldn’t even know had an education system if it wasn’t for the school shootings every other week.
We have one good earth we know of, and it is so good that God wants to inaugurate her Kin-dom upon the good earth’s earthy black and brown soil, to outline the shape of heaven along the curves of the deep caramel brown riverbeds, mountain ranges rising like the spine of this good earth and the foundation of a new tomorrow.
Much like our friend the Rich Man a super common target of the parables of Jesus, and one must assume of the parables other teachers were sharing with their disciples, for Jesus to not only use the “house of the Rich man” multiple times, but for it to be used with such frequency it is recorded on precious scroll space that scribes of the era hated wasting. We often think Jesus is moralizing, or perhaps teaching about the power of greed and money, and this is partly true. The text right before is the oft-misinterpreted divorce text that was not a text saying all divorce was bad, as we are aware, but about the rights of the poor widows, children, and the families who are often moved about like livestock by powerful men, and the priests who approve it all are right there. Jesus aimed the divorce text at them, and that was because they thought the dishonest manager parable ridiculous. Again, they knew these stories; Jesus didn’t invent them, he was taking common metaphors and stories used in rhetoric and flipping them on their head.
The Rich Man is the hero of the stories in many cases. Even in this story, according to the authors of the Gospel of Luke, the Rich Man is following what were the customs of the day, and outwardly, what most people believed was a good and holy life in 1st-century Palestine.
For many but certainly not all in 1st century Palestine’s listeners' ears, even in Jesus’s version, clearly, Lazarus in this story was the one who was either a sinner or his parents were sinners, and even if it wasn’t a result of sin or God’s punishment, it was still unholy to invite an unclean person to the dinner table. Also, as the Rich Man, why would you pollute your dinner table with this person, whose mere presence makes this entire meal no longer clean in the eyes of God or to the eyes of the Rich Man? What if another guest comes along?
I used to think that the interpretation of the people of God in the 1st century Palestine was incredibly harsh. A people that Jesus would sound like the radical one for suggesting everyone deserved healing, or that the ultra-rich could be anything but touched by God, or that the prophets came for the oppressed, not the powerful.
This is the world we live in now. That is us.
In the United States of America, thanks to Grants Pass V Johnson, if you are houseless, you no longer have the right to not be incarcerated indefinitely by most legal understandings. Can’t pay rent, you are no longer a citizen or have the rights of one, no longer just in practice. The Environmental Protection Agency is being undone from the inside, and the glut of oil, fracking, and dumping continues unabated here. With the planned facilities for the 21st-century arms race towards artificial general superintelligence, the plans to inaugurate their own heaven on earth, even if it ends up being a simulation in the end, the civil unrest here and around the world, we might lose the only good earth we know. Any of these crises is enough to undo us all, yet we live in a system here in the U.S, wrapped in purple cloth, like the Rich Man fed the most sumptuous meals, we can’t hear Lazarus right outside the door. I will say lately it feels like they have tied the purple robes around our arms at dinner and are force-feeding us the meal, but I digress.
Purple, of course, was a sign of wealth because it was extracted from sea snails by murdering these creatures for the color of their lifesblood, and it took so many to accomplish this, the darker the purple on your robe, the more wealth one was indicating. Even in the time of Christ, until the Earth Liberation Front declared that some would destroy our good earth just for profit, thus economic sabotage was the only way forward, the powerful have used the exploitation of this good earth and dominionism as the cudgel they not only beat the poor with, but they slowly cut the bonds of affection across people of good conscience everywhere.
Perhaps Lazarus is the age, the era, the inflection point we are living through right now. Perhaps we are the Pharisees laughing at Christ, because if oil and gas stopped worldwide today, how many of our churches would close? How many of our churches will be open after AI replaces an already bloated “knowledge worker” space? What are we to do?
May I suggest a funny ol thing? Faith in the God of the Gaps.
The God of the gaps is a term that was applied after Newtonian Physics was widely accepted hundreds of years later, and it refers to some notations that Newton made. He measured the distance between the Earth and the Moon almost within inches of location, or rather, distance and velocity relative to the Earth. He shows all the mathematics and proofs, and at the end, he notices that if his equations are correct, eventually the Earth would fly out of orbit and the solar system, yet it clearly hadn’t. He knew his math was correct. So he writes, I guess God just steps in every once and a while to fill in the gaps.
Jesus, in his version of his story, at one point says that Moses relays to The Rich Man:
‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. 26 Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’
Right now, I feel like the Rich Man. I followed the prescribed American way of life in the old U.S., played by the rules of civic dissent, and felt it was finally safe for Black trans people to get to work on the real issue that will work us all if we don't stop corporations from destroying the only good earth we know.
Now I can’t quite see that day or a bunch of other things, like what solutions get us to finally use some of the fruits of our science for the people, like the plasma project at ITER, which could end the need for fossil fuels almost day one. Or the fact that we know the helium 3 on the moon could provide unlimited H20 and O2. Or that the U.N. reported just a few years ago, if we found space to plant 2 billion trees on this good earth and cared for them, we could turn back the last 50 years of climate warming.
Like the Rich Man, I can’t see how I get across this great chasm, but I will rely on the God of the Gaps to step in. I will continue to have faith in the God who takes the powerful and throws them down from their thrones, and who wants the kin-dom of the Creator here and now on this good earth.
The only one we know of.
Author Bio:
Lenny Duncan is a They/them fatale. PhD fellow at the Graduate Theological Union. History of the esoteric, occult, strange, and in resistance to the colonial project. Lenny has written several books and more of their writing can be found on their Substack.