Kingdom Servants - 4 - Self-Awareness

Scripture: Luke 16:19-31

Luke 16:19–31 NIV

19 “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20 At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21 and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. 22 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’ 25 “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’ 27 “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, 28 for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ 29 “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’ 30 “ ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ 31 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”

9/28/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Standard

Opening Prayer:

God of power and justice,

like Jeremiah you weep over those

who wander from you,

turn aside to other gods,

and enter into chaos and destruction.

By your tears and through your mercy,

teach us your ways

and write them on our hearts

so that we may follow faithfully

the path you show us. Amen.

Self-Awareness

Cartoon Morality

I met a couple of people at Disney last week who gave me a better perspective on who I am. The first was a young man named Austin. He was an elementary school-age child, out with his grandma on a special trip instead of being in school, and was very excited to meet Winnie the Pooh. His grandma told us that his very favorite was Bluey. He could tell us all about Bluey. His favorite episode was Magic Xylophone and he could probably walk you through that episode and many others in great detail. While I haven’t seen many of those shows myself, I remember my younger years being filled with cartoon adventures. At the end of each episode, they would give us a moral to the story, reinforcing whatever lesson was hidden in the fun. So I could relate to Austin on that level.

I could also relate to him in another way. He was having a hard time that day being around so many people. Some of you know what it’s like to have physical, mental, or emotional health that shifts with the weather—when everything feels fine one minute and completely different ten minutes later. Our systems are meant to work for us, but sometimes they seem to work against us. I didn’t just feel bad for the young man—I empathized with him.

We all cling to our favorite characters, the wild adventures they take us on, and the lessons they teach us. But more than the moral at the end, we remember the journey along the winding road to get there.

I think that’s a little like how the disciples felt about the parables of Jesus. Each parable had a moral to the story. Sometimes he gave it directly; other times he left them to figure it out. When the characters or settings are unfamiliar to us, it’s tempting to skip to the end and get the point. We don’t care about Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers, G.I. Joe, Ninja Turtles, Winnie the Pooh, or Bluey—just give us the point so we can move on, decide if we’ll apply it, and get back to what we were doing.

But when we treat Jesus’ teaching that way, we oversimplify. We might look at today’s scripture and say, “Rich people go to hell, poor people go to heaven.” That’s it. However, by not walking through the whole story, getting to know the characters, and following Jesus around the curves, we miss the depth of what he’s teaching.

It’s the difference between going on a trip with Jesus and having him send you postcards. It’s not the same at all. One of the most significant aspects of following Jesus—something we can easily overlook when we become preoccupied with leading others—is that discipleship is a journey of self-discovery and self-awareness. We don’t figure it out by ourselves. We come to know ourselves more in the company of others, and we know ourselves best by being with Jesus.

Islands in the Sea

Our passage today centers around two characters, a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus.

The rich man had a safe and secure life. He lived in a home with strong boundaries, and he may have had servants who attended to his needs, allowing him to remain comfortable. Jesus doesn’t tell us that he was powerful or that his wealth was excessive. He wasn’t necessarily showy or wasteful. He simply had enough money to take care of himself.

Lazarus, on the other hand, was a beggar. He had no home. He had no shelter. The only thing Jesus tells us is that he had sores from sickness or injury. Life was very hard for him. People either didn’t notice him at all or treated him like a pile of garbage they didn’t want near them. The dogs tormented him day and night, licking his wounds. And if people even saw him, they didn’t do anything about it — because in their eyes, the dogs mattered more than he did.

The picture Jesus paints is a stark contrast: one man secure and cared for, the other abandoned and ignored.

Jesus gives us a snapshot in time: the rich man reclining in his living room while the beggar Lazarus is dying right outside his gates. We do not know if this scene lasted just minutes or stretched over years. It does not matter because part of what Jesus is doing is showing us what our communities, and maybe even our world, look like by example.

We are used to thinking in terms like this. We can break the world into little puzzle pieces, set dividing lines, and recognize that some pieces are different than others. With a few exceptions, most people stay in those same pieces throughout their lives.

I started reading a book last week. It introduced me to a German sociologist who challenged that whole puzzle-piece notion. He suggested that society is more complicated than that, more like a series of little islands in the sea. Sometimes those islands communicate and form relationships. Sometimes they do not.

In his view, our identity is not based on where we are or who we are around, but who we communicate with and who we do not.

You may have experienced this yourself. Growing up, when I was taught the differences between men and women, it was not from the Bible but from picture books. In those pictures, girls wore dresses and boys wore pants. Even then, I could tell it was not entirely accurate, because the women in my life wore pants whenever they wanted.

Life was relatively simple on that little island of my childhood. Then one day, I saw a Scottish man playing the bagpipes and wearing a kilt, which to me seemed like a skirt. Later, I saw Japanese samurai who wore robes and sometimes armor that looked like gowns. I was forced to make a choice. Either I could dismiss them as strange and insist they were wrong, or I could take the risk of communicating, learning how they saw themselves and how they perceived me.

It is not that I had to agree with them or believe everything they believed. But by communicating, I could learn something that helped me see them, the world, and even myself more clearly.

There is such a thing as truth. There is such a thing as right and wrong. But when we try to skip to the end without paying attention to the story, especially the story Jesus tells, we miss it. The rich man lived on his island, blind to Lazarus just outside his gates. And Jesus’ warning is clear: if we refuse to risk communication, we will never see others or ourselves the way God wants us to.

Finding Out Otherwise

Jesus tells us that the rich man and Lazarus both die, and in the afterlife, they are no longer confined to the small social islands they lived on before. The rich man is suffering terribly, treated like garbage, with no purpose other than to be burned. He has no name, because rich men in the afterlife are a dime a dozen. Money is meaningless, especially money from a lifetime ago.

Riches may bring fame and make you a household name among people you have never met, but not in God’s kingdom. It is Lazarus, the poor, sick, and injured beggar who was treated like garbage his entire life, who is now being held and cared for by Abraham, the father of the promise. The one to whom every Jew clung, hoping to be counted among God’s chosen people and inherit the blessing.

In torment, the rich man cries out to Abraham, who is his father too. Lazarus is oblivious, but Abraham, perhaps representing our Heavenly Father, sees the man and hears his cry. The rich man begs for just a drop of water to ease his thirst. But Abraham tells him the chasm is too far, and that justice is being done. The rich man had his time of satisfaction, and now Lazarus, who lived in torment, has found his.

The tables are turned. For the first time, the rich man begins to see people outside himself. His family members are no longer heirs to his wealth, but they are in terrible danger. It might be too late for him, but perhaps not for them, especially those he has raised and taught to see the world the same mistaken way.

So he pleads with Abraham, “Send someone to warn them. Let them know what really matters, not just for this life but for eternity.

Abraham replies, “They have the law, they have Moses and the prophets. Everything they need has been right in front of them. They chose not to see it, just as the rich man chose not to see Lazarus.”

And because they refused to see, they never truly saw themselves.

In one last attempt, the rich man says, “If someone came back from the dead, then they would listen.”

But Abraham answers, “Even if someone were to rise from the dead, they would not listen.”

Most of the time, when I read this passage, I think about Jesus’ own death and resurrection, and the profound impact they have had on billions of people. But Jesus told this parable before his death. And he was not the only one who died and came back to life. There was another man, one the religious leaders knew by name. They ignored him in his suffering, and when he was raised, they plotted to kill him again. His name was Lazarus. Lazarus. Lazarus.

So Father Abraham was right. They had the law and the prophets, but they would not listen to them. They even had a man who died and came back, and they still would not believe.

Many of those leaders were wealthy. Many avoided the poor because they did not want to be bothered. Many believed the suffering around them was deserved.

The more we dig into this story and follow Jesus through it, the more we begin to see reflections of ourselves.

The Moral to the Story

There is a moral to this story, and it is not that poor people go to heaven and rich people go to hell. You will not find that anywhere in the Old Testament, either among the Law of Moses, or the prophets that Jesus referenced in this parable. If the afterlife were that simple, we would not even need Jesus. The Law and the prophets were not enough. That is the first step in understanding the Gospel — recognizing that we need Jesus.

And the moral of this story is also that we need each other. Not just to survive or thrive, but to see ourselves more clearly. To have real self-awareness. We do not get that from sitting alone in a cave or living on an isolated island. At creation, when God said it was not good for people to be alone, it meant more than gathering in small pods of family or friends.

Often in the Old Testament, tribes and extended families were as spread out as states. And Jesus points out how wide the divide can be between brothers and sisters who need each other both in this life and in the life to come. Lazarus needed the rich man while they lived, and the rich man needed Lazarus after they died.

In both cases, the issue was not simply a matter of right or wrong. It was blindness to the bigger picture. We cannot see what we cannot see. We do not know what we do not know. Our vision is filtered through our own eyes and experiences, our ears that miss things, and our minds that compare everything new to what we already know.

If you truly want to see and understand the world God made, you must take the longer route — finding and interacting with people different from you, listening to them, and trying to understand what they have experienced in the world we share.

We learn more about ourselves through every relationship we have. Some things encourage us, reminding us we are not as bad as we thought. Other times, we are convicted by what we see in others. Most of the time, as we look at God’s curious and wonderful creations, we see reflections of ourselves. The way I saw my own struggles reflected in little Austin. And whether those reflections encourage or challenge us, they remind us that we are not alone.

But even at our best, humanity falls short. Which is why we need Jesus. You could travel the whole world, across all time, and never meet someone more different from you than Jesus. He is the only one who left heaven to be born here with us. The only one eternal, who holds all creation in his hands, yet became small enough to be held in ours. Our understanding is incomplete without him.

The law and the prophets taught us that we need God and each other, but we have never fully grasped this. We need more. Not only openness to talking with strangers, but also the presence of Jesus, shared among us.

As Jesus taught in Matthew 5:43, we must love and communicate not only with friends and family on our little islands but also with our enemies. And we cannot do it without him leading us. But if we are willing to reach out with his love and grace to those we cannot see eye to eye with, then we will see them more clearly, we will see the world more clearly, and we will see ourselves more clearly.

And as we move toward that perfect love Jesus commands in Matthew 5:48 — loving others as he loves us — we will begin to see like him as well.

Closing Prayer

Lord, this world you created is full of wonder. And every rock and tree and puddle and cloud is a testimony of your goodness and majesty. And all of creation pales compared to the wonder of each individual person we meet. We could never know everything. And we may never truly, fully understand each other the way you understand us. But with your help, you invite us to reach out and try.

We know the lessons that we learn from each other, just like the lessons we learn from you, are not quick little morals. They are long and winding adventures. And the purpose of going on them is not to pick up a nugget of wisdom at the end, but to be changed, to become more like you.

Lord, help us have the courage to connect, to be with you, to be with those we don't know how to be with, and to allow you to do that work in us. As you prepare us to live in that perfect love with you and one another forever. In Jesus' name, amen.