Stubbornness of Heart - Lessons from Luke 16 and Dr Seuss’ The Zax.

A sermon preached on 25/9/22. Gospel reading - Luke 16. 19-31

‘Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed.’

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

ܞ

You may or may not spend as much time reading rhyming books as I do at the moment.

Some are, quite frankly, terrible –

    the meter and rhyme is so bad that you get tied in knots reading aloud.

Others are brilliant –

               and the meter just carries you along as you read.

One of the indisputable masters of the genre is Dr Seuss.

Even with all the made-up words,

               it’s such good poetry that you hardly ever stumble over it.

Dr Seuss has a story – that you may know – called ‘The Zax.’

It’s about two creatures, a ‘North-Going Zax’ and a ‘South-Going Zax,’

               whose paths collide, and neither will move out of the way of the other.

The North-Going Zax says that he will prove his resolve by standing still for fifty-nine days –

and the South-Going Zax retorts:

‘And I’ll prove to YOU,’ yelled the South-Going Zax,

That I can stand here in the prairie of Prax

For fifty-nine years! For I live by a rule

That I learned as a boy back in South-Going School.

Never budge! That’s my rule. Never budge in the least!

Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east!

I’ll stay here, not budging! I can and I will

If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!’

The world, of course, doesn’t stand still,

               and the last picture shows the two Zaxes, still standing face-to-face,

surrounded by roads and buildings,

               with a bridge right over the stubborn pair.

I’m sure we can all be a bit stubborn sometimes;

we know that feeling of not wanting to budge,

of being sure we’re right.

But like with the Zaxes,

               that feeling can get entrenched;

it can become part of how we see the world,

and when it does, it can be perilous to our spiritual lives.

This morning, Jesus presents us with a very vivid parable.

There is rich man, dressed in purple and fine linen –

               we are told that he feasts sumptuously every day.

And there is a poor man, named Lazarus, covered with sores,

               who longs for the rich man’s scraps.

The two men die,

               but their fates are reversed.

Lazarus enjoys refreshment in the company of the Patriarch Abraham,

and the rich man is tormented by fire,

               and longs for one drop of water from the tip of Lazarus’ finger.

The rich man is told that this is impossible,

and that a great chasm has been fixed between them.

When the rich man asks if a warning might be sent to his brothers

               - a warning about the fate that awaits them –

Abraham tells him that they have Moses and the prophets –

               If his brothers don’t listen to them,

                              then neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

This passage echoes many of the important themes of Luke’s Gospel,

most notably his concern for the poor,

               and the reversal of fortune ushered in by the Kingdom of God.

It is in St Luke’s Gospel that we read those words of Mary,

               said every day in the Evening Prayer of the Church:

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.

The fact that we see this teaching on wealth in Amos

               and in 1 Timothy this morning is a reminder to us that we need to take the Scripture seriously.

We shy away from talking about money because it makes us uncomfortable,

               and we know that most of us will only live up to this imperfectly.

But we can’t deny that this is one of the Bible’s most prominent themes:

Wealth corrupts, and the poor will see God’s justice.

Of all the characters in Jesus’ parables,

               the only one to be given a name is the Lazarus we hear about this morning –

a name that means ‘God has helped.’

This tells us all we need to know about Jesus’ teaching on wealth.

In the parable, there are two focal points of movement –

the gate at which Lazarus sits – an easy way for the rich man to come and go;

and the chasm that is fixed between heaven and hell,

               the chasm that Abraham says cannot be crossed.

But really the greatest obstacle presented to us in this parable is a stubborn human heart.

The rich man had plenty of opportunities in his earthly life

               to open his heart and mind to the promptings of God –

revealed in the Scripture

(hence the reminder about Moses and the prophets at the end)

but also through being confronted daily by basic human need.

But his stubbornness of heart has closed him off to the promptings of God.

The last line of the parable is in one sense about the rich man’s request

to send Lazarus as a warning to his brothers from beyond the grave –

but it is also a warning to us, and about Jesus.

‘Neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’

We need to have open hearts and minds,

that respond to the living God who speaks to us,

and to our brothers and sisters in need.

Of course, we are creatures of habit,

               we like things to be reliably the same –

               we get set in our ways

Never budge! That’s my rule. Never budge in the least!

Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east!

But in such attitudes lie great spiritual danger –

               we can find ourselves shrivelled and dried up,

                              before we have even realised it is happening.

To open our hearts – to learn to love more - takes practice.

If we don’t want our hearts to be closed off to God and others,

               to be a great, unpassable chasm –

Then we need to look for small opportunities for kindness and generosity.

After all, Lazarus didn’t want much – just what fell from the rich man’s table.

It would have been no effort for the rich man to meet Lazarus’ need –

he could easily have sent a servant out with the scraps.

But his heart was so hardened he had no empathy left at all,

No way of feeling moved for the plight of another human being.

And we must practice generosity,

               so that the same thing doesn’t happen to us.

When we hear the Scriptures, we need to ask what God is saying to us –

               to our lives, now and in this moment.

And we need to pray for the openness of heart to notice the needs of others.

It’s not easy – life is complicated.

There’s more need in the world than we can meet.

We’ll get it wrong sometimes;

We’ll misjudge a situation.    But that’s okay.

It is important that we pray for this daily renewal of our hearts and minds,

that we might learn to love others as Jesus loves them,

to love as we are loved.

In this Eucharist,

               let us come to the altar –

that here we might receive God’s renewing grace,

               and find our hearts open more-and-more each day

to God and to the world we are called to renew.

May these Eucharistic gifts – Christ’s very presence - soften our hard hearts,

and overcome our stubbornness

that we might hear his voice more clearly, and follow him.