Walking with Blinders On

The Texts for this sermon are 1 Timothy 6:6-19 and Luke 16:19-31

Walking With Blinders On

I went to college in a small community nestled squarely in the heart of Western Pennsylvania Amish country.  Every day, we’d hear the buggies driving through our campus as the Amish came into town to buy groceries, to find work with other local families, or to be picked up to be driven out of town to wherever else they needed to go.  Early in the morning, late at night, we’d hear the buggies coming through, “clop clop clop clop clop”-ing down the road.  Living near Amish neighborhoods actually takes a bit of an adjustment, as I’m sure people who have been through Bowling Green can attest.  You have to be ready to brake quickly when you crest a hill and see that Amish buggy suddenly coming up very close to your front bumper, and then you have to wait - often for miles at a time, for the road ahead to be clear enough for you to get around them, or for them to steer their buggy further onto the shoulder to give you space to get around.  You learned to be more attentive, to watch for the bright orange triangle on the back from further down the road.

Now, as I’m sure we’ve probably seen from time to time in passing an Amish buggy, the horses pulling the buggy wear a piece of tack on the sides of their head called blinders.  These are a common thing on driving horses because horses are actually easily distracted at times, and even more easily spooked, especially when they’re on the side of a roadway hauling a buggy with other vehicles and semi-trucks whizzing past them at 65 miles an hour.  The blinders help keep the horse from seeing those things suddenly popping up in their side vision - otherwise, horses would get frightened and take off or rear up, sometimes causing buggies to tip over or crash and injuring the people within them.

This piece of tack is so familiar that it has even been incorporated into our own daily speech and imagery.  We sometimes talk about people, saying that they’re “walking with blinders on” when we think that they have too narrow a vision or that they don’t understand the bigger picture in a situation.  

This is what happens in Jesus’ parable about the rich man and Lazarus, too.  There’s really no other way to describe this situation that occurs between these two vastly different men at the beginning of the story, is there?  On the one hand, we have this rich man who wears the finest clothing and eats the choicest foods every day.  And on the other, there is poor Lazarus at the gate, covered with sores, yearning for even table scraps, being licked by dogs.  It’s an incredible visual for its simple use of contrast and difference.  And then that same contrast occurs a second time in the great reversal that Luke’s Gospel emphasizes time and time again - the rich man finds himself in a place of torment and want, while Lazarus is taken up by angels to be comforted and fed by Abraham.  As we see it, the rich man gets what he deserves for treating Lazarus so poorly and Lazarus is finally given the comfort he never received in his earthly life.

But the more I looked at this passage, the more something stuck out to me: we see the rich man as this terrible, horrible person who deserves everything he gets and who, even in death, continues to try to manipulate the situation to his own advantage and to order Abraham and Lazarus around to give him water, to warn his brothers, to do things for him.  But take another look at the beginning of this parable - what does the rich man actually do in these first few sentences?  We form a picture of this rich man, whoever he is, walking past Lazarus on a day to day basis, looking down his nose at the man, sniffing in disgust, maybe even chasing Lazarus away from his gates from time to time.  We tend to see the rich man as actively mistreating Lazarus in some way, actively oppressing him and refusing to do anything to help the person at his doorstep.  But the rich man doesn’t do any of those things.  The parable doesn’t even have him interacting with Lazarus in the least - even after they both die.  The rich man isn’t some evil dastardly villain here; to be honest, it would actually be better if he were.  This rich man does nothing more than walk with blinders on.  He simply doesn’t see Lazarus.  He turns a blind eye to the man at his gates, never interacts with him, doesn’t seem to even know that Lazarus exists until he sees Lazarus at Abraham’s side.  And somehow, that makes it seem even worse than it would have had Lazarus been actively mistreating Lazarus.

The rich man simply did nothing.  He puts his blinders on and chooses to be ignorant of the man at his gate.  He chooses to focus on his own situation, to enjoy his fine clothing and meals.  For the rich man, and really, for much of the Israelite community, this beggar Lazarus was barely a person at all.  In fact, to many of the people of the Israelite community, the belief was that Lazarus actually probably did something to deserve the sores on his body and his low status in society.  The Pharisees who were listening to Jesus’ teaching and ridiculing him openly were active purveyors of this kind of “Prosperity Gospel” thinking that claimed that God blesses people with riches and curses or punishes people with sickness, sorrow, and poverty.  To them, the rich man would have seemed well within his rights to pass by Lazarus without a second glance or thought to the man.  Lazarus was reaping what he sowed, whatever that may have been.  After all, God only helps those who help themselves...  the Pharisees were able to point to plenty of places all throughout the Hebrew Scriptures that showed that God blesses those who are faithful, who obey God and who worship God, but that God punishes those who are not faithful with horrible afflictions like the one Lazarus had.

But Jesus’ parable reminds the Pharisees that there is more to Scripture than that; that there are laws that explicitly command the Israelite people to take care of the poor, to allow them to glean heads of wheat from the fields, to provide for the widow, the orphan, and the alien in their land, to love their neighbor and to seek justice in all things.  And so when this great Lucan reversal happens and the rich man stands before Abraham to beg, Abraham puts the problem plainly to the rich man: “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.”  Was the rich man faithful and blessed by God for his faithfulness?  He may very well have been - who’s to say but God?  But the rich man ended up missing the other half of the Scriptures that call for us to use the blessings which God has given us to the benefit of others.  He let his own riches distract him and draw him away from whatever it may have been that allowed him to be so blessed in the first place.  As Paul might have put it, he became “haughty” and “set his hopes on the uncertainty of riches,” rather than on God who provides those riches.  He let his riches become blinders to him, and so in the end, he had already received his reward there on earth and thereby let go of the greater reward which he should have strived toward in the life eternal.

There’s nothing wrong with being blessed by God or even with allowing yourselves to be blessed by God - but we need to be humble about our blessings and remember to let God be our vision when it comes to how we use them.  And we, especially, should have an even greater expectation to do this, since where the rich man never got his wish that Abraham should send Lazarus back from the dead, we have received the benefit of the rich man’s wish in Jesus Christ.  Jesus not only spoke once more to the core of the law and the prophets, but he also came back from the dead, so we have received so much more than the rich man was given.  And if we have received this much more, then how much more will we be held accountable if we allow our own vision to become distorted and distracted by wealth, if we allow ourselves to be blinded to people who are in need and fail to show them compassion?

We need to be reminded by this parable of the absolute danger of walking with blinders on.  We need to pray constantly that God will open our eyes to the suffering and the pain that happens in our very midst and ask God to help us to be compassionate, to speak and act into that suffering.  Otherwise, we put ourselves in the very same place as the rich man.  We need to take the blinders off and be ready for what God enables us to see - it will probably scare us.  It will definitely overwhelm us.  It might make going forward harder and possibly mean we don’t always stay on the straight and narrow path, but with God at the reins behind us, we can be confident that we will get to where we’re meant to be.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.