One of my favorite scenes from The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis is in the final book entitled The Last Battle.  The scared dwarves are huddled in what they believe is a cold, dark, dank stable.  They are offered water and food, but they turn away from it believing it to be gray muddy water and rotten fruit.  What they do not realize is that they are not in a stable, but in a lush green field with their heads nestled up against the mane of the great lion Aslan who is offering them wonderful food and crystal clear water.  Eventually the dwarves are awaken from their dream like state and become aware of their beautiful surroundings.  They wake up amazed that reality, real reality, is so much different than they understood or perceived.  I firmly believe that this is also or should be the experience of Christian faith.  An awakening, a radical reconfiguration of who we are and what we believe about the world in light of a new understanding.  Not living day dreams or fantasy, but living the real reality of God.  I believe that Christian faith is an awakening from our own personal cold, dark, dank stables where we too believe what we perceive. 

          Much of the gospel message is an exposition of this change in perception. Changing our perception to match the real reality of God.   The most dramatic example of this is in the Beatitudes where the lowly of the earth are lifted up and the high are brought down.  Roles are reversed as the hungry are filled and the poor inherit the kingdom of God, while the rich and privileged loss everything.   Our passage makes a similar move.  It is the poor man who was previously hungry and covered with sores that is consoled by the angels upon his death, while his rich contemporary suffers in the after life.  The structure of this world is reversed in the afterlife.  The skewed reality is melded and molded to fit God’s reality.  For the rich man and Lazarus, it is only upon death that this real reality is revealed where the scales fall away from their eyes and they are able to see and understand as God does. And this is when the rich man, tormented in Hades realizes that he has lived wrong and when the poor Lazarus is finally consoled and fed.

          Lazarus is the only person in all of these parables that is named.  Think about it.  We do not know the name of the good Samaritan, the shepherd, the prodigal son or his brother, the woman who lost her coin, or the name of the infamous dishonest manager, but we do know the name of the poor man Lazarus.  How extraordinary is that? To go from being the hungry poor man covered in sores laying at the gate, to Lazarus, the only named person in all of the parables.  Of course that whole being waited on by angels thing is good too, but the care that God shows to this man is remarkable and life changing.  God showed that while he may not  have had a name or worth for the rich man and his friends God knew him and cared for him by name.  A place in heaven had been set aside special for him.  His life, his life here on earth was valuable and rewarded, although from the perspective of the rich man it was not.  In death, he was awakened to the real reality of his true worth in the eyes of God.

          The rich man is not alone though.  It is hard to say whether we would have stopped to help him either.  We would hope that we would, but one never knows.  Maybe he was a little too dirty to help or smelled, or maybe we were just afraid of the sores.  We could have thought that it was somebody else’s job to take care of this fellow and maybe they had just not been around yet.  Whatever the rationalization could be, it ends with us not helping him, which incidentally is precisely what the rich man did.  Our perception of the situation would keep us too from helping Lazarus.  I remember hearing a story of a women killed in New York City.  She was badly beaten and robbed in a parking garage but able to stumble out of the garage down the street and all the way to her home more than a mile away where she finally called for an ambulance.  Before the ambulance arrived she was dead.  From the moment she stumbled out of the garage to the second she reached her apartment, she would have passed no less than fifty people.  When the police went back to investigate, nobody along the street remembered seeing her, although they assured the police they would have noticed something like that.  Now we can write this off as just another case of callous New Yorkers, which by the way has never been my experience, or we can look into the mirror and realize that each one of us to some degree is the rich man sitting at his table while the poor Lazaruses of the world suffer and die. It is a wake up call.

          The primary purpose of this passage is not to depress us though.  I doubt whether its purpose is to scare us with the threat of hell either.  At the heart of this passage is the great awakening that both the rich man and Lazarus undergo and which we ultimately will wake up to as well.  They both come to realize that the way they understood their world was incorrect and that God was seeing things in a different way.  As I said in the beginning, I believe that awakening and transformation is at the heart of this Christian faith that we all have.  Waking people up to the claim that God is making on their lives:  That God loves you;  That God knows you, individually, by name; And that God has a purpose for you, regardless of your place in society.  It is a true awakening to the real reality of God that is only made apparent to the rich man and Lazarus upon death. 

          Unlike the rich man and Lazarus, we have the benefit of the gospel message.  And while the rich man might not have been helped by Abraham and prophet, we have Jesus Christ.  And we know that this message makes a difference in the world.  We know that people’s lives are changed by this message and that their eyes are opened to the real reality of God.  But it has to personal.  It has to be personal to you.  It is not just about right doctrine or belief, but it has real eternal and present consequences for people.  This awakening to the real reality of God has to be a personal motivation for us.        

          Motivation is important in ministry.  Not just my ministry, but the ministries that you all engage in as well.  We participate in ministry  for many reasons.  For one we are commanded.  “Go there for and make disciples and baptize.”  “Take care of widows and orphans.”  “Do this in remembrance of me.” And many other commands, push us out into the world to minister in Christ name.  Another  reason we minister is because we, particularly, are called to ministry.  Each of you has a particular call that Christ has made on you. Whether that is to serve as an elder, a liturgist, church helper, or a friend, all of us have ministries.  We also do ministries because others have seen the Holy Spirit working in us in a particular way so that they will say, “hey Opal Jane music seems to be a great talent you have.  Have you ever though about being a choir director?”  And while all of those are perfectly acceptable and true reasons to be called into ministry and to do ministry, I doubt that they are the most personal reason to do ministry.

           I grew up in a generation, like many others, that had its fair share of problems.  My generation grew up entirely during the technology era, which has blossomed into the Ipod, Blackberry, laptop, and digital cable era that we find ourselves in now.  Disillusionment and disconnection were hallmarks of my generation.  Many of my friends turned to drugs, lived lives of hopelessness, and some even tried suicide as a way out.  Described as generation x, y, and the millenials, we might be best described as the Lost Generation.  I minister, in large part, because of them.  Because of the ones who died, the ones who almost did, and the ones who were saved by the gospel message.  This is not a job for me, but a personal calling.  Personal for me and hopefully for you because those empty seats around you represent individual lives for whom the this better life in the real reality of God  has not yet started.  Out there in there, beyond the walls of this church, is Lazarus.  He is waiting.  He is waiting to be woken up.  He is lying on the metaphorical door way of your house, calling to you.  He is waiting on the gospel message, waiting to hear your faith journey, waiting for the next church mission trip, waiting on us to help open his eyes. Answer his call.  Help him.  Wake him up to the real reality of God’s love for him and for all of us.  Amen.