Playgrounds and Theme Parks
Over the past few years, I’ve become more acquainted with
playgrounds, as my nephews naturally gravitate toward any space that has a
large slide or a swing set. To be quite honest with you, playgrounds make me
anxious. They are a natural social mixing bowl. You never know who else will
turn up at a playground. The other parents or guardians may by the last people
on earth that you would choose to sit beside or have a conversation with, but
there they are, right next to you, and either you maintain an awkward silence
or stumble into an equally awkward conversation, searching for some common
ground.
I marvel, though, at how my nephews’ experience seems to be the exact opposite. They are in their element, in the zone, whether that’s seeking maximum speed on the slide or scrambling up the side of a climbing wall. And if another child is sliding on the slide or climbing up the wall, then suddenly they are friends. It does not matter what age or gender or race or class or intellectual ability, they are trading tips or egging each other on or screaming or giving commentary on each other’s adventures. Granted, this does not happen every single time there’s another child nearby, but it happens often enough that I can’t help but watch in wonder. I may feel like there is a chasm between me and my neighbor, but no such chasm has been fixed yet between the children on the playground.
I’ve noticed something similar at theme parks. Several years ago, I went to Kings Dominion. I’d been plenty as a child and a youth, but it was my first time back as an adult. As I rode one roller coaster after another, I noticed something. On the ride, screams of terror and delight blended indiscriminately among all the passengers, everyone joined together in the primal thrill of stomach-churning drops and neck-jerking loop-de-loops. At the end of the ride, there would be occasional exclamations and banter shared between strangers, people as different as you could imagine, some dressed to impress and others looking like they threw on the first thing they could find, some speaking with a country twang and others in a city slang. I found myself thinking, if these people were addressing each other on social media, it’d probably be with a volley of put-downs and threats. There would be a chasm between them. But here, with everyone in the same boat—metaphorically speaking—here they were momentarily friends. Companions in a shared adventure.
Exchange Your
Currency
I have sometimes heard sermons speculating what today’s scripture might reveal about the afterlife. But I think such speculation misses out on the message. Without fail, every time that Jesus makes mention of what might happen after death (and it’s worth noting that he frequently employs the images and metaphors of the Hellenistic-Jewish culture of his day), his focus is squarely on how we live in this life. For him, the matter of ultimate concern is not where we end up when we die, but how we live right now, before we die. Whatever might happen next, he seems to suggest, is part of the same reality in which we’re living now. It’s just an extension. As in life, so in death.
Right before today’s parable, Jesus is instructing his disciples how to live right now with regard to money. He tells them, “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth” (16:9). However you interpret that descriptor, “dishonest”—is he referring to money made dishonestly, or is he suggesting that all money is somehow “dishonest” or a lie?—however you interpret that word, Jesus is clearly issuing a revaluation of our lives. He is inviting a currency exchange. Friends matter more than money.[1] If you have money, he says, spend it to make friends.
Paralyzed
With today’s parable, Jesus appears to offer his disciples a negative example of his instruction. He shows them a character who does not take the advice to exchange money for friends. Like the rich fool from an earlier parable, whose land produces an abundance and who decides to accumulate his riches for a rainy day rather than share it with his needful neighbors (12:13-21), the rich man in today’s parable has evidently amassed a fortune. He wears the clothes of a social elite and hosts sumptuous feasts every single day. Lazarus, the poor man at his gate, is hungry and would love to have the leftovers of the rich man’s daily feasts, just the crumbs, but even that the rich man withholds. (We might wonder if he just throws it away, in a manner that mirrors how today in our nation between 30 and 40 percent of the food supply is thrown away into landfills—over 133 billion pounds of food, or $161 billion worth.[2])
If you’re like me, this parable hits hard. As a person who has a bank account, which is sort of the financial equivalent of the barns that the rich fool builds to save the copious fruits of his harvest, I almost reflexively hear Jesus telling me to give my money to the people around me without bank accounts. And I’m not sure I’m mistaken. Some people like to point out that when Jesus tells the rich ruler to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor, he is zeroing on the particular hangup of one individual. He’s not speaking to all of us. But elsewhere in Luke, he does address his followers collectively, and he says things like, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms” (Luke 12:32-33); and, even more pointedly, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions” (Luke 14:33).
Such a command—“Give up all your possessions”—is paralyzing for me. It’s paralyzing because I hear it as a threat. I hear it as a loss. But if I listen closely to the rest of the parable, I discover a chink in my own thoughts, a little opening where maybe God’s grace can gain a foothold.
The tragedy for the rich man in today’s parable is not that he ends up in Hades, tormented by a fiery thirst. That thirst, that torment, is symbolic of the real tragedy, which has as much to do with his life as it does with his afterlife. Abraham explains, “A great chasm has been fixed,” he says, between the rich man and Lazarus (16:26). In other words, your situation right now didn’t happen out of nowhere. It is simply the extension of your life, in which there was already a great chasm between you and Lazarus. You were so close to each other, and yet you couldn’t have been further away.
How Ancient
Christians Survived the End of the World?
A series of recent studies have corroborated what common wisdom has long told us: money cannot buy us happiness. The Harvard Study of Adult Development—which began in 1937 and tracked the levels of happiness across the lives of its original 268 participants and the lives of their offspring, which number around 1,300—found no correlation between money and happiness. But it did find a strong correlation between relationships and happiness. Which is to say, it nearly reached the same conclusion that Jesus did, when he advised, “If you have money, spend it to make friends” (16:9). Trade in this world’s currency for the currency of God’s kingdom.
Another paper from Harvard puts its conclusion a little more provocatively, “If Money Doesn't Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren't Spending It Right.”[3] Among its several recommendations are that a person “use their money to benefit others rather than themselves.” Again, sounds sort of like what Jesus is saying.
As I was pondering these studies this past week, I also read somewhere that a great historian, Edward Gibbon, advanced the argument that one of the reasons the empire of Rome fell was that as its population became more Christian, there was greater divestment of funds away from civic institutions to the poor.[4] While historians disagree about the extent to which Christianization may have weakened the fabric of the Roman empire, I find it to be worth pondering. At the end of the world (as they knew it), the ancient Christians were actually accelerating the end of the world rather than resisting it. They were giving their money away. And they were making friends. That is how they survived the end of the world.
From the World to
God’s Kingdom
What liberates me from the paralysis that I feel when I hear today’s parable, is the memory of my nephews playing on the playground, joyful, free, with no chasm between them and the children around them. Or the memory of Kings Dominion, where for a blessed, holy interlude in all our lives, the chasms were bridged, and everyone had a sense that we are all in this together. There, on a rollercoaster of all places, everyone had stepped out of the lies of our world—the lies of money and prestige and power—and into the truth of God’s kingdom (“God’s Dominion,” if you will!).
Giving up one’s possessions is a paralyzing thought. But that’s looking at the loss. The gain is God’s kingdom, chasms bridged, brothers and sisters untold. My present mindset has been so warped by the world around me that conceives of things like private property and some people being “worth” more than others. But as I read today’s passage, I get the sense that the mindset of God’s kingdom is radically different. God’s kingdom invites me to repent not from possessions, but from the idea of possessions. It invites me to see others the way my nephews see others on the playground, or the way rollercoaster passengers see one another. We’re all in this together. We’re all companions. We’re all children of God, blessed and beloved—and what God has given, has been given for the good of all.
Prayer
Who desires to hold us close together,
As a hen gathers her brood:
Where chasms have already grown
Between us and others
By differences of money, race, culture, and more,
Reorient our hearts to the brotherhood and sisterhood of your kingdom
…
Help us to unlearn the lessons of profit and control,
And to relearn what children know:
That we are all in this together—
Together in your love.
In Christ, who promises us your good pleasure: Amen.
[1] Even in the most practical
terms. For money is volatile, it comes and goes, and when it goes…will you have
relationships of care and support to carry you through hard times? Or will you
find yourself alone and alienated?
[2] “Food Waste FAQs,” https://www.usda.gov/about-food/food-safety/food-loss-and-waste/food-waste-faqs,
accessed March 24, 2025.
[3] Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T.
Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson “If Money Doesn't Make You Happy Then You
Probably Aren't Spending It Right,”
[4] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1851).