Proper 21 (Sept 25-Oct 1)
Texts: Luke 16:19-31;
Amos 6:1, 4-7
YouTube: https://youtu.be/lt-1p2fHVK4
Sermon Take-Home Notes
LEARNING THE CATECHISM OF THE GREAT CHASM
In much of my adult life, it has been helpful for me as a white male — essential, really, as I’ve come to see it — to learn about privilege. I’m ordinarily a quick learner about most things, but not this. The big challenge for someone like me is that privilege is often invisible to me. I simply don’t see it.
To use a different metaphor, it’s like riding your bike with the wind. You don’t notice the wind until you turn around and start going against it. Women and people of color know the resistance of sexism and racism (and now learning from LGBTQ+ people, as well) because they are going against that wind all the time. As a white male I never have to experience that resistance because our culture is set up for me we to ride with the wind.
But let’s return to the reality that privilege is invisible to me. It has taken the kind and gracious guidance of female colleagues to learn to spot my male privilege. Things like learning to notice in group conversations who gets listened to. I can now sometimes notice when a female colleague speaks and basically gets ignored. It goes right on to the next male colleague, and everyone is riveted by what he says. And that, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. It has been a similar process in learning to see racism. I’m getting better at it, but it is still so often invisible to me with my white privilege. I depend on people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ colleagues to see it.
I bring this up because I think invisibility is an important dynamic in this morning’s parable about a rich man and Lazarus. When they both die and are in the afterlife, all of a sudden the rich man can see this great chasm between himself and Lazarus and Abraham; and he can see that their fates in life are reversed. Lazarus is cared for at the side of Abraham. The rich man is in torment, no longer having his basic needs met. What I want to propose to you this morning is that the rich man, through his hoarding of wealth throughout his life, had been building this chasm between himself and others all through his life. It has been invisible to him. While he was the one having all his needs met — something he has become so accustomed to that he even expects Lazarus to serve him in the afterlife! — the chasm was invisible to him. While he has lived this long life of self-sufficiency, he was unknowingly building this chasm of isolation between himself and others. And now that he suffers such isolation in the afterlife, there is no one there to comfort him. He was able to live a life of wealthy privilege that included ignoring people in need right under his nose. He couldn’t see the chasm he was building throughout his life until he died.
To help you see what I mean, I’d like to offer up a parable by Charles Dickens which I think has a very similar dynamic. It’s one we know so well, Dickens’ holiday classic A Christmas Carol.1 The role of the rich man goes to Ebenezer Scrooge in this parable. We are so familiar with the visit of three ghosts on Christmas Eve, the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. But there is a first visit from a ghost which sets all of that up: the ghost of his dead partner Jacob Marley, who also had lived a life of isolation of a rich man. Scrooge notices that Marley is burdened with dragging long chains with him wherever he goes, and they have the following exchange:
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost.
“I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
Scrooge trembled more and more.
“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!”
Do you see what I mean? Similar to the invisible chasm that the rich man in Jesus’ parable had worked on all his life creates, the rich men in Dickens’ parable are forging invisible chains which can only be seen from the perspective of the afterlife. Scrooge can see Marley’s chains, but he can’t see his own, which Marley informs him are even now quite a bit longer than his. And how do Marley and Scrooge forge these chains? By remaining unaware of their wealthy privilege such that those in need under their noses remain invisible to them. All they could see was there own business dealings, primarily with other wealthy men. When Scrooge, still clueless to his privilege, praises Marley for having been a good business man, Marley responds:
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business! . . . At this time of the rolling year,” the spectre said, “I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!”2
We know the rest of the story so well. Scrooge is visited by the other three ghosts and undergoes a radical conversion, a transformation, from greedy and stingy to generous. But I would characterize that conversion as learning to see his privilege. The three ghosts, with their rapid-fire rehearsal of Scrooge’s life, help him to see how he himself came to privilege the pursuit of wealth above the pursuit of faithful and loving relationships with others. So he converts to a life of valuing relationships with fellow human beings above that of the wealth he has accumulated — which he proceeds to share generously with others. ‘It is said that no man possesses the knowledge of how to practice Christmas more than Scrooge.’3
We might ask if there is any hope for rich people. Clearly there is in Dickens’ parable about Scrooge. What about Luke’s Gospel? In this morning’s parable, the fourth encounter with a rich person in the middle part of Luke’s Gospel, it is too late for the rich man — like it was for Jacob Marley, we might add. Jesus also makes it too late for rich man’s brothers, unless they finally decide to listen to the prophets. Dickens gives us hope for rich folk by showing us a converted Scrooge. Luke will finally give us similar hope in the sixth and final encounter of Jesus with a rich man: Zacchaeus the tax collector in Luke 19, who undergoes a conversion. So, yes, there is hope that even rich people can find the Christmas spirit and convert to a more generous life.
But I believe that both Jesus and Charles Dickens are pushing for something more. They are pushing for us to learn from Moses and the prophets. They are pushing for us to learn about the ‘catechism’ of this great chasm which wealth tends to create. The point of Jesus’ parable is for all of us to see the great chasm between wealthy and poor as a great problem for humankind throughout our history. If we can see it as a problem in the afterlife, then we need to learn to see it as a problem now. Such great chasms between the rich and poor create unstable societies for everyone. These chasms prevent everyone from reaching their full potential for being more truly human. God did not create us to accumulate wealth for ourselves. God created us to, as Jacob Marley puts it, make humankind our business. The common welfare is our business. Jesus makes it clear that this has been a theme of Moses and the great prophets for centuries. We need to learn to listen to them.
The book by Ched Myers that has been my guide in reading this middle section of Luke’s Gospel names the chapter on this parable as the “catechism” of the Great Chasm.4 It is time that we absolutely must learn from the age-old immorality of living with a huge gap between rich and poor. He begins the chapter by citing studies of this gap throughout history. We might assume that this gap must have been much worse in the Roman Empire of the First Century, but here’s the facts. At the time of Jesus about 1.5 percent of the population held 20 percent of the wealth. In America today, 1 percent of our population holds about 38 percent of the wealth — twice as bad as the Roman Empire!5 And those figures are from nearly ten years ago. What will they be after passing the Big Morally Repugnant Bill which represents the largest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in our nation’s history? We are currently on a path of widening the great chasm, not shrinking it.
Charles Dickens lived in the first century after his fellow countryman, Adam Smith, founded the economic system known as capitalism.6 From its very beginning many people have noticed that it had the tendency of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Whatever its good qualities may be, its tendency to widen the great chasm has existed since the beginning, and writers like Charles Dickens have stood as its critics. Capitalism as we know it is no way to build a just society. More than three centuries of experience prove it.
Siblings in Christ, as followers of Jesus, who ushers in the reign of God and God’s economics, we must learn to stop worshiping capitalism and seek to fix it. Let me say that again: we must learn to stop worshiping capitalism and seek to fix it. Capitalism has made the millennia-old problem of the great chasm worse, not better. As citizens in a democracy, it is well within our purview to advocate for economic policies which reach the concrete results of shrinking that chasm. It last happened in the aftermath of the Great Depression — which, if the truth be told, should have been our own historical catechism to teach us the dangers of a Great Chasm. Many economists do take that to be a lesson: that the Great Chasm between rich and poor in the 1920’s was a significant factor in bringing about the Great Depression. It harms us all, this way of doing economics. The fixes to our system in the aftermath led to a slow shrinking of the gap between rich and poor from the 1930’s to the 1970’s. Then, Reaganomics came onto the scene, and we’ve been widening the gap again ever since.7
Let’s take to heart the lessons of this morning’s parables, from both Jesus and Charles Dickens, and learn the catechism of the Great Chasm. Learn to make humankind our business. To make the common welfare our business. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 28, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/lt-1p2fHVK4
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843. There have been many published editions since the first. My copy is Chicago: ACTA Publications, 2010.
2. Dickens, Christmas Carol, both quotes are from the latter third of “Stave 1.”
3. Dickens, Christmas Carol; I was paraphrasing the penultimate sentence of the book: “it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”
4. Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025); Chapter 11 is titled “Catechism of the Mega Chasma.”
5. Myers, Healing Affluenza, 164.
6. Charles Dickens lived 1812-1870, publishing A Christmas Carol in 1843. Adam Smith lived 1723-1790, publishing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776.
7. Many economists tell this story, since the data regarding the wealth gap couldn’t be more clear. My favorite is Joseph Stiglitz in several of his books, including The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do about Them [W.W. Norton, 2015] and The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future [W.W. Norton, 2012].
