Preaching Thoughts on a Non-Preaching Sunday

On those Sundays when I am not preaching and hear rather than speak a sermon, I often find myself wondering what I would have done with the same scripture verses.  One hazard of being a pastor is the difficulty of listening to another's sermon without critiquing.  But besides that, I often make judgments about the scripture itself.  Sometimes it is, "Boy, I wish those verses had showed up when I was preaching."  Other times it is, "I'm glad someone else had to wrestle with that."

Today is somewhere in between.  On the one had, Luke 16's parable of the rich man and Lazarus 16 is rich with sermon possibilities.  But on the other hand, the text speaks a message that may not be all that palatable.  And so this is also a text that often gets domesticated.

Like Mary's Magnificat earlier in Luke's gospel, this parable speaks of a radical reversal, of the poor lifted up and the rich pulled down.  Such language is unpopular.  We prefer that all be lifted up, but Luke says in several places that good news for the poor is coupled with bad news for the rich.  Because of our discomfort, sermons on this text often turn the parable into a lesson on helping the poor.  We take a little food to homeless shelter and feel good about ourselves even though we remain heavily invested in a world where our suburban lives are sustained by migrant workers, children in third world factories, and our nation consuming unfathomable and unsustainable quantities of the world's resources. 

How do you preach from a text where good news for some means bad news for others, and you're among the others?  How are the rich and comfortable to find some good word in Jesus' Kingdom parable of reversal?  To be honest, I am not entirely sure.  But I suspect that good news for us starts when, like members of AA, we admit who we are, when we admit that our things and our personal comforts often blind us to those who are first in the Kingdom of God.  I'm not sure we can hear much good news in these verses until we take that step.

Click here to see today's Lectionary readings.