Sermon: "The Chasm Within"- September 28, 2025

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Luke 16:19-31

The Rev'd Ezgi Saribay Perkins, Rector 

Transcript

I would not consider my family to be a religious or even remotely spiritual family, one that spent a great deal of time reflecting with me about the ethical and moral principles of life. Here are some of the questions I have been thinking about this week: From where, or from whom, did I receive my moral compass as a child? How did my community teach me to believe and act in ways that were right toward others and the world? Why did people close to me do the right things in a situation? What was their motivation? Surely there are people in this world who do the right thing for the right reasons, without any ulterior motive.

But like most kids, I was taught to do the right thing with the promise of a reward. Do this, and you can have ice cream, more time on the Atari, or a trip to the mall. When the matter was religious, however, the reward was far more serious, as was the punishment. Do this, and you will build your account with God in heaven. God will remember it on the last day when the great book of judgment flings wide open. If the plus signs next to your name outweigh the minus signs, you will be in heaven, and there will be a great party!

Considering the alternative, burning in hell without God and without water, made me afraid as a teenager. I began gauging my actions by the things my parents asked me to do in my moral life with others, as a means of pleasing God. Of course, in times when I fractured most deeply from doing the right thing, there came the threat of personal religious consequences: shame, embarrassment, and fear. Life eventually became a mathematical quest of trying to save myself by doing enough good works. And of course, the pats on the back and the praise of others for my good actions and successes were not too shabby for my ego either.

I think that transactional psychology of my childhood made me ripe for the evangelical preaching I was exposed to in my twenties, preaching that scared the be-Jesus out of me with pangs of hell. Once I encountered it, my moral compass, already familiar with a reward and punishment system, translated itself easily to a version of Christianity and felt right at home.

But life is not a black-and-white matter that can be sorted into the two banker boxes of good and evil. There is richer meaning to be found in God as pure love, and in imitating the actions of this God-man Jesus as a higher form of spreading love and mercy in this world. The basic psychological principles of my upbringing, and even of most of yours in the South, is why people continue filling the pews of mercy benches to this day. Fear of hell sells folks!

This text from Luke this morning helps us think about the reasons for and consequences of right and wrong moral actions, and what such choices do to our souls. Here is the danger to be mindful of before we delve in: when morality is reduced to a reward and punishment system, our moral life becomes intoxicatingly self-serving as unrecognizable as true Christianity.

The main message of our text today is this: the moral decisions we make in our lives on earth have permanent consequences in our eternal life with God.

First, there is a promise of a life after death in the story, in relation to how we lived in this world.

The parable gives us a promise and hope of a life after death. What strikes us first is the sharp contrast between the rich man and Lazarus. One is dressed in purple and fine linen, feasting every day; the other is covered in sores, longing for scraps, with only the dogs to notice him. Yet notice carefully: nowhere does the story say the rich man was condemned simply for being rich. Abraham himself was wealthy, and here he is pictured in glory. The problem was not the man’s purple robes or his banquets. The problem was that he could not see another person at his feast.

Day after day, Lazarus lay at his very gate, a living invitation to mercy, a chance to make his riches serve God’s purposes. And day after day the rich man saw past him, blind to his need. The detail is striking: the poor man longed to be filled with the crumbs that fell from the table, bread that wealthy guests used to wipe their hands after eating and then tossed aside. In fact, some of you remember that here in the South, bread slices at BBQ joints were once used as napkins. What was trash to one was the desperate hope of survival for the other in our story from this morning. And yet, between the rich man’s banquets and Lazarus’ hunger there were only a few feet of stone, a gate separating abundance from starvation. They lived side by side, but they might as well have lived in different worlds.

That is precisely the point. The rich man’s punishment was not for his wealth, but for his inability to recognize the humanity of the one at his doorstep. His life was narrowed to comfort, to consumption, to self. The poor man became invisible, and so the rich man’s soul became blind.

Here is where the danger lies: when morality is reduced to a simple reward and punishment system, our moral life becomes intoxicatingly self-serving. We begin to do good things not because we see the image of God in another, but because we are calculating our spiritual balance sheet. The rich man may have believed he was secure because he was “blessed” in this life. But love of neighbor could not be reduced to a transaction.

Think of it this way: we have all seen the news stories of influencers filming themselves handing a homeless person a sandwich, making sure the camera catches their good side. The hungry man becomes a prop, his humanity swallowed up in someone else’s brand. That is transactional morality in twenty-first-century clothing. It looks generous, but it is really about self-promotion. It is the same blindness the rich man carried all the way into eternity.

The parable makes clear that the rich man’s luxury ended at the grave, but his blindness followed him into the next world. Lazarus’ suffering ended at the grave, and he was lifted into comfort at Abraham’s side. This is not a call to romanticize poverty, but to awaken us to the truth: the moral principles and choices of this life carry permanent weight in the life to come. But when our good actions are only pursued as “spiritual brownie points” to get into heaven, they alienate us further from the God who calls us to love.

Secondly, there is a fixed chasm between two realms within the life after.

At the heart of the parable lies one of its most haunting images: “Between us and you a great chasm has been fixed.” This is not a casual detail about geography in the afterlife. It is a theological statement. Chasm is nothing less than the visible form of a moral and spiritual reality that has already taken shape in the rich man’s life.

Think of it: in life, Lazarus lay only a few steps away. The gate between them was not wide, a matter of feet, of stone, of a door opening or not opening. And yet that small space, crossed daily by servants and guests, became in eternity an uncrossable gulf. The blindness that had once ignored a beggar became the blindness that could not even comprehend grace. What begins as neglect ended as separation.

This is the theological truth: sin is not merely breaking a rule. Sin is the distortion of love, a turning inward, a refusal to see the other. Over time, that refusal hardens into habit, and habit into character, and character into destiny. The “chasm” is not so much God’s arbitrary punishment as it is the soul’s own chosen trajectory, time after time, come to full fruition. The rich man had lived for himself, and in the end, he was left with only himself.

C. S. Lewis captured this truth with uncanny clarity in The Great Divorce. He imagines hell not as a place of blazing fire but as a “grey town” where people drift further and further apart, because they cannot bear to live with one another. They move away, street by street, mile by mile, until they are locked in an eternal loneliness of their own choosing. The gulf is not forced upon them; it grows out of their refusal to love. That is precisely what we see in the rich man: even in torment, he still does not see Lazarus as a brother, but as a servant to be dispatched. The chasm is not only external; it has been carved deep within his soul.

The irony is sharp. The rich man’s torment is not simply divine wrath; it is the unveiling of reality. To live in love of self alone is to live in exile from God, who is love. The chasm, then, is not arbitrary. It is truth.

And so, the parable presses us to ask: what chasms are we digging now? What gates do we refuse to open? What self-blindnesses do we tolerate? For the promise of the Gospel is that Christ himself has crossed the ultimate chasm. Descending into death and rising from it, he bridged the gulf between humanity and God. Is that not an amazing gift, friends? But the chasm between one human heart and another is the one we are commanded to cross in this life, through mercy, before the grave makes it too late.

Lastly, the right moral path here and now is walked by listening to Moses and the Prophets, and for us, seeing in Christ their fulfillment.

The parable ends with Abraham’s haunting words: “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.” What does this mean? It means that the rich man and his brothers did not lack direction. They had the Scriptures. They had the commandments, the prophets’ cries for justice, the psalms singing of God’s care for the poor and oppressed. They already knew what God required. The problem was not ignorance, but willful neglect.

And here we reach the deeper point: the Scriptures are not simply a set of moral instructions. The Old Testament calls God’s people to live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. The New Testament reveals how Jesus himself embodies and fulfills those truths. If the first covenant told us what righteousness looks like, the second covenant shows us righteousness in flesh and blood. Jesus is the living Law, the Word made flesh, the prophet greater than Moses, the one to whom all the prophets point.

So what God calls us to is not merely a checklist of good deeds or rules of moral decency, but faith. Faith in the message of Scripture, faith in the One who fulfills it. True righteousness flows not from fear of punishment or hope of reward, but from trust in God’s character and love. It is faith that opens our eyes to see Lazarus at the gate, faith that frees us from the blindness of self-centered living, faith that bridges the gap between knowing the law and living the law.

Plain morality, taken by itself, can make us self-serving: do good so you look good, or do good so you avoid hell. But Scripture calls us into something greater, covenant faithfulness. The prophets thundered against empty rituals and self-serving piety, not because morality was unimportant, but because morality without faith is hollow. Jesus presses that truth home in this parable.

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is not simply about two men long ago. It is about us. It is about what we see and what we refuse to see. It is about the gates we walk past every day, and the neighbors who lie just beyond them.

The rich man’s sin was not caused by the fact that he was wealthy, but by the fact that he chose to stay selfish and blind. Blind to Lazaruses at his doorstep. Blind to the Scriptures he had known since childhood. That blindness became his destiny, a chasm fixed within his soul.

But the good news is this: Christ has crossed that chasm for us. In his death and resurrection, he has opened the way back to God. He fulfills Moses and the Prophets, not only by teaching us to love, but by showing us love in flesh and blood. He calls us not into a transactional morality, doing good so we can secure a reward, but to a faithful life of love that flows from trust in his great sacrifice.

And so the question is set before us: how will we live now? Will we measure our lives by pluses and minuses, tallying up a moral balance sheet? Or will we let the Scriptures open our eyes to see Christ himself in Lazarus at the gate?

The choices we make here echo into a different dimension and a destiny. The good news of the Gospel is that in Christ, we are not left to the realms of our grey towns alone. We are given grace to be different, to love freely, and to be willing to open the gates to Lazarus’ of our own lives. And in opening it, we might discover the very heart of God, the God who has already opened heaven’s great gates for us. And we realize, our souls are not numbers on a divine ledger waiting to be balanced, but beloved agents in the world of God’s redeeming and restoring love. What does acting as an agent for God’s redeeming love in this community look like for you right now? How are you challenged to act differently in light of this Gospel? AMEN.