Sermon for the First Sunday after Trinity: “The Lazarus in Our Lives”

This sermon was originally preached at Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Sherman, Texas, on Sunday, June 22, 2025.

Texts: 1 John 4:7-21; Luke 16:19-31

Martin Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor in 1930s Germany who was a part of the Confessing Church, which resisted the policies of Hitler. Niemöller is less known than his compatriot Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but he has left us with a haunting poem about indifference in the face of tyranny:

He writes,

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

…

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

…

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

…

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak for me

…

Niemöller writes about indifference to the suffering of others, because they are not us. They are different from us. We don’t care what happens to them. We do not advocate for them. But then when the hand of the oppressor reaches out to grab us, no one is there to advocate for us.

This extreme indifference, this lack of love for one’s neighbor is exemplified in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.

It appears only in St. Luke’s Gospel. Our Lord describes a Rich Man who lived in luxury and a poor man named Lazarus who lived at the edge of his property. Lazarus was a pitiful sight: emaciated, desperate for food, and covered in sores, which the dogs came and licked. The Rich Man could have helped Lazarus, but he did not. He continued his life of ease, caring only about the satisfaction of his own desires.

Both men died and found that their fortunes in this life had been reversed in the afterlife: Lazarus was now at rest and the Rich Man was now in torment.

Is this just, for the Rich Man’s fortunes to be reversed so grievously? How do we know that the Rich Man knew about Lazarus? We might say, “Maybe he just didn’t know that Lazarus was suffering in this way.” But we know he did because he refers to him by name: “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to bring me relief.”

The Rich Man knew his name.

Lazarus was not just one of countless beggars whom the Rich Man might encounter on a trip to the city. This was someone he knew, someone on a first-name basis. The Rich Man knew Lazarus, knew that he was at the gates, knew how much pain he was in, but he did not care. He showed him no compassion, no sympathy, and he gave him no aid. And then Lazarus died at the edge of his property.

And even in the afterlife, the Rich Man doesn’t seem repentant: he doesn’t apologize to Lazarus for his indifference, doesn’t confess his hardheartedness. He sees Lazarus afar off but doesn’t even speak to him— he speaks to Abraham… who understandably is not interested in sending Lazarus across the chasm to help someone who clearly has not had a change of heart.

All this points to the truth that we cannot close our hearts to our neighbors. We cannot see others in need and close our hearts to them. We cannot view others with indifference, not caring about them or considering their suffering.

Whether we love the people in our lives is the test of our Christianity— the test of whether we can actually love God.

“If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

If we want to be capable of loving God, we must love other people. And there are many opportunities every day to do a small kindness to others: to give to others, to suffer with others, to enter into their situation, if even just a little.

And we can do this whether or not we think they “deserve” our help— which is a prideful way for us to be thinking anyway. C.S. Lewis was once rebuked by a friend for giving spare change to a beggar.  “He’ll just use it for beer,” said his friend.  Lewis paused and responded, “But if I kept it, that’s what I would use it for.” When we help others, through time or energy or money, they may indeed take our help and use it in less than helpful ways. But then again, we waste and misuse our resources too. And the Lord is merciful to us all.

If we are going to call ourselves Christians, we must love other people. That’s the most basic thing I’m saying in this homily. We must have love in our hearts for other people, whether they are close to us or far away from us, whether they’re people we know or people we just hear about. We must love other people through the way we treat them and through the way we view them.

Because how we treat other people is just an extension of how we view them.

And this is a discipline, because it is extremely easy in the current moment to look upon groups of people we don’t like and dehumanize them. Political leaders in our country are calling their opponents “vermin”; saying that certain people are “not human, they’re animals”; describing certain groups of people as “poisoning the blood of our country.” (By the way, the last time a world leader said that a group of people was poisoning the blood of the nation, it didn’t end so well for the world).

This is the rhetoric that surrounds us. It is dehumanizing. It is not a Christian way of speaking; it’s demonic, in fact. In the latter days, the love of many will grow cold, and we see this coldness in the way the powerful in our country are talking about their enemies. It’s filtering down to us. We must resist this. We don’t have to agree with what everyone does, but we must be the first to say that other people are not animals, they’re not vermin, they’re human beings made in the Image of God. Like Lazarus, each of them has a name. And if we close our hearts to others when they are in misfortune, what is to stop others from closing their hearts to us when we are in misfortune? Like Niemöller, we may find that there will be no one left to speak for us.

We must love every Lazarus in our world, even if they are covered in sores and pitiful. For in a special way, Our Lord identifies with such people. He is the true Lazarus. He was poor and despised. He was covered in sores and wounds, and he died “outside the gate” on the edge of Jerusalem. Jesus identifies with the poor and the suffering, and if they come to us and we despise them, we despise the Lord.

So as you go through your week and you encounter other people or you hear about other people and their suffering, be attentive to your heart. Do we care about the suffering of others, or are we indifferent? Do we close our hearts to others, do we reason that their suffering is their fault, that they are only getting what’s coming to them, and that therefore they are unworthy of our compassion? In so many words, Do we care about other people and what happens to them? Because if the fate of the Rich Man is any indication, our salvation depends on it.