Homily, September 28, 2025, Rev. Holly Cardone

Lazarus and the Rich Guy

September 28, 2025

I have a hard time with money. I don’t like it, and I find it bothersome to make it and manage it. Money for me is an irritating necessity that demands attention, discipline, and responsibility. Thank God, I found a 12-step program that has transformed my relationship with money.

But it hasn’t transformed my resentment that celebrities, rock stars, and athletes make more money—much more money—than teachers. That’s crazy to me. An article from the Brussels Times in 2020 said the 10 richest people in the world had more wealth than the combined GDP of the 85 poorest countries. According to OXFAM’s 2024 report, billionaire wealth surged by $2 trillion—three times faster than in the previous year—while nearly 5 billion people became poorer.

And don’t get me started on the billions spent on prisons instead of drug treatment, education, and rehabilitation. Or the fact that it costs less—way less—to put someone experiencing homelessness into permanent supportive housing than to keep them cycling through ERs, jails, and shelters. Or that it would cost $40 billion to end world hunger while Congress spent $874 billion on defense in 2024.

In our passage this morning, Jesus is speaking to two groups. First, the Pharisees—rule-keepers who lacked the humility to acknowledge their own sin. They could follow regulations, but not justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Second, his followers—financially, emotionally, spiritually, and physically a mess.

Just before today’s story, the Pharisees, “lovers of money,” heard Jesus tell the parable of the Shrewd Manager and ridiculed him. Jesus responded: “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts; what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.”

Then comes our text: A rich man ate the best food, wore the finest clothes, and at his gate lay Lazarus, whose name in Greek means “Whom God Helps.” Lazarus, poor and covered in sores, longed for scraps, while dogs licked his wounds. The rich man ignored him. Both die. Lazarus rests in the bosom of Abraham, finally fed and comforted. The rich man ends up tormented in Hades.

The rich man begs Abraham: “Send Lazarus with a drop of water to cool me.” The nerve of him—he still sees Lazarus as a servant. Abraham replies: “No, the chasm cannot be crossed.” Then the rich man pleads: “At least send someone to warn my five brothers.” Again, Abraham refuses: “They have Moses and the prophets. If they won’t listen to them, they won’t listen even to one risen from the dead.”The rich man’s brothers would never have listened to Lazarus anyway. Wealth had blinded them. Like today’s billionaires, they had theirs and didn’t care about those starving outside their gates.

Someone once asked Glennon Doyle, “Why do you cry so often?” She answered: “For the same reason I laugh so often. Because I’m paying attention.”

That’s it. Money isn’t the problem. Not paying attention is the problem. The rich man never saw Lazarus. He walked past him every day, in fine clothes, on full stomach, and didn’t see him.

Over and over in the gospels, Jesus pays attention to the least of these—the forgotten, the cast-aside. In the ancient world, family and tribe meant everything. But if you were sick, unclean, a widow without sons, or somehow a threat to the tribe’s stability, you were cast out. Purity codes dictated who belonged and who didn’t.

And then Jesus came. Healing, restoring, welcoming the outcast. Like the woman who had bled for 12 years in Luke 8. She touched the hem of his robe and was healed. When he insisted on knowing who touched him, she came forward. He saw her—the one invisible for over a decade—and restored her. Or in John’s gospel, the Samaritan woman at the well. Boundaries were clear: men didn’t speak to strange women, Jews despised Samaritans. Yet Jesus saw her, recognized her as a child of God, and spoke to her.

The problem isn’t money. It’s sight. To truly see another—to the point they feel seen and known—takes effort. It’s not just glancing at the person who is homeless, addicted, mentally ill, grieving, or afraid. To see is to recognize our shared humanity. The God-spark in me is also in you.

We are the same. Our hearts beat, lungs breathe, blood pumps. We get hungry, angry, lonely, tired. We laugh, cry, grieve, rejoice. We love.

The rich man and his brothers never recognized their shared humanity in Lazarus. Like so many today, the rich man lived in fear of losing what he had, fear of sharing. And so he ended up tormented in Hades. Don’t we see the same torment in our “rich men” today? Wealth beyond measure, yet lacking compassion, love, empathy.

And here’s the tragedy: compassion, love, and empathy aren’t prized in our world. Greed and hate often carry more weight. But as followers of Christ, we are called to live differently—to live lives marked by compassion, love, and empathy.

The gospel warns us not against wealth itself, but against blindness—the blindness that comes from protecting what we have instead of seeing who is right in front of us. The rich man missed Lazarus every single day. He missed the very presence of God at his gate.

Jesus calls us to pay attention. To see those the world ignores. To recognize that Lazarus still lies at our gates—in our neighborhoods, our shelters, our prisons, our streets. To see them is to see Christ himself.

Because in the end, it’s not about how much we have. It’s about whether we see, whether we love, whether we remember that we belong to one another. Amen.