Wealth, in the Bible, is  not to be used selfishly.   Wealth is for sharing.  And the underlying world view, is that we are in this together...so that if I am rich and you are poor, something is out of kilter, and it's my job-as a rich person-to help put it right.

That sounds so simple...but it fact it is deeply counter-cultural...both then and now.   It may even go against human nature.  A baby's first word may be Mama and her second word Dada, but surely the third word of every human child is MINE.    MY blocks.   MY toy.   MY cookie...and if you take it away, I will scream.  You have to teach your kids to share...it doesn't come naturally.   And most people, I think, think of their wealth as their own.   My income, my car, my groceries.   When you have something, you protect it, you don't want it to get stolen...because its yours, not theirs.  (Sometimes locking things up all the time is a bother.   A friend of mine says you shouldn't own anything that you'd mind having stolen.)

Jamie, who preached the stewardship sermon last week, reminded us, that we keep on learning to share all through our lives.  We learn it, we forget it, we have to relearn it.

The rich man's sin is  that he is TOO rich, and that he uses his riches only for himself.   He dresses in expensively dyed fine cloth, and he doesn't just have an occasional party-we hear that every day- he feasted sumptuously . He's like the people we heard about from the prophet Amos:  who lounge around partying, and eating and drinking too much. Some theologians would argue that all of them are, in fact, thieves.  Listen to St. Augustine:

God does not demand much of you. He asks back what he gave you, and from him you take what is enough for you. The superfluities of the rich are the necessities of the poor. When you possess superfluities, you possess what belongs to others. . . .  Do you think it's a small matter that you are eating someone else's food?

I'm struck by the images of separation in the story. There's no interaction between the rich man and Lazarus. We just get the image of-here's the rich man-and here's the poor man. And then they die. In life there would in fact have been a real wall between them-a rich person's house in antiquity was walled, so that its gate could be closed at night-and in death they are separated by some kind of chasm-a vast gulf so great that their fates are sealed forever.

And I have in my mind's eye of the kind of image you can often see when you're read a magazine or a newspaper-maybe a photo of starving children-with their ribs all exposed, and their matchstick arms-and next to it an advertisement for clothes or jewelry or cars or investment brokers.