Hilton Head Island, SC – October 24, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 12:13-21; Luke 12:22-31
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And (Jesus) said to them, “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” – Luke 12:15 (RSV)
I want to begin by telling you something I have never before said in any sermon I have ever preached in any of the five churches I have served as a minister. That’s because I never thought about it before now. Every one of those congregations consisted of people who, on average, were somewhat more wealthy than most of the other people who lived in those communities. Only a small number of them were very wealthy, but compared to most of the rest of the people living in those places, they were a little to considerably better off than average.
Wealth is a topic frequently addressed in the Bible, especially by Jesus. I tell you this to suggest that whenever I have preached sermons about wealth anywhere, which I have done many times through many years, in general it has been people of wealth who were more likely to object to what I said than anyone else on any other subject. I would not be surprised if some of you might think I have negative thoughts about wealth, but I assure you I do not. By itself wealth is neither positive nor negative. Being poor is usually thought to be negative, and for most poor people it probably feels very negative, but for those who possess wealth, it clearly needs to be stated that wealth in itself is neither a plus or a minus, either to God or to anyone who is relatively wealthy compared to most other people. It is our attitude toward assets which determines whether or not they are, for us, positive or negative.
The parable of the rich fool, or what I choose to call the parable of the rich man and his barns, is found only in the Gospel of Luke. Like the Good Samaritan from last week, for some unknown and unknowable reason, Luke alone chose to include this parable in his Gospel. The story was prompted by a man who said to Jesus, “Teacher, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.”
Jesus of Nazareth did not just fall off a first-century turnip cart, and thus he was not about to try to sort out a dispute which was the sole responsibility of this man and his brother to settle. “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” Jesus asked this stranger. He followed up that statement with this one which no doubt the man did not expect to hear: “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” Jesus deduced the man thought his brother was taking advantage of him, and that was a dispute about which Jesus knew he could say nothing that would be helpful either to the man or to his brother. He also wanted the man and everyone who heard him to know that if we imagine the number and value of our possessions is the only gauge we use to determine who we are, we don’t know who we are and we haven’t really lived at all.
Further to address this issue, as Jesus frequently did, he told a parable which forced the man to think about his dilemma from an entirely different perspective. There are only five verses in this parable, but every word in every sentence is packed with meaning. So, to make a short story even shorter: The fields of a rich farmer brought forth unusually plentiful crops, so much so that he couldn’t store all the grain in his storehouses. Therefore he tore down the old storage buildings and built much larger ones.
Does that sound like Jesus was anti-wealth, or that I am anti-wealth? Not so. Wealth isn’t the problem. The problem, if there is one, is what wealth does, who it does it for, and what is the attitude of those who acquire it.
Thus the rich farmer in Jesus’ parable tears down his storehouses (not really “barns” as we visualize red wooden barns), and he builds bigger storehouses. The farmer says to his soul, “Soul, you have enough grain to last for years! Take it easy. Eat, drink, and be merry; you have the whole world by its tail, bucko.”
So far, so good. “But,” said Jesus, “God came calling on the rich farmer, and God said, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and all this stuff you have acquired, all these assets you have amassed, whose shall it be? Whose, huh?’” said God to the rich fool of a farmer.
Too many people, especially males of our species, spend too much of their time with their friends Dow, Jones, and Nasdaq, but now primarily with their smartphones. Hourly they check to see how their investments are doing. Many of those people greatly increase their assets by daily watching what happens to their stocks and bonds and other types of investments. That is all well and good, it really is, depending on what they DO with what they acquire. How do they perceive what they have amassed? What is its purpose? The farmer in the parable didn’t do anything with his wealth. He just continued to grow it --- in his case literally. More crops, more money, more barns - - - but for what? For too many investors, investing becomes the sole meaning of their existence. To them it is their occupation, their profession, their vocation.
“Vocation” is really a religious word. It literally means “calling,” which implies a calling from God. Is anybody called to the vocation of investing? It certainly is possible that those who are good at it may indeed be called to it. But what do they do with their calling? What do they do with the increasing earnings from their investments? Are those earnings only for them and their families, or do they produce their wealth also to benefit the world around them? Wealth in itself is neither positive nor negative. What any of us does with whatever wealth we have determines whether it is good or not, although ultimately it is God who decides that, not us. That is what Jesus was talking about in this parable and in his commentary on it after he told the parable.
When I was in my teens and twenties I knew a man very well who saved a lot of money in the first twenty-five years or so of his business career. Then he retired unusually early. Essentially he spent the remainder of his years invested his money very wisely. His investments grew, and grew, and grew. But he never did anything with his assets; he just kept acquiring more of them. He did not spend the income he earned from them, nor did he give it away. He just kept amassing more. He was like Donald Duck’s miserly Uncle Scrooge, who horded all his money but never spent any of it on anything or anybody.
Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett are three of the wealthiest people in America. I was disappointed when Bill and Melinda recently decided to divorce, but they both have agreed, at least thus far, to continue as the co-directors of their charitable foundation, which is by far the largest in the world. Warren Buffett is so impressed with both of them and their foundation that he, with them, has willed everything in his estate to go the Gates Foundation when he dies. The foundation is doing magnificent things with its earnings, including eliminating malaria for millions of people throughout the world, feeding the hungry, educating the ignorant, and giving hope to those who thought their lives would always be hopeless. “The things you have prepared, whose will they be?” For the Gateses and for Warren Buffett, they will be distributed to hosts of people around the world.
The parable of the rich fool is about two subjects: 1) How do we perceive whatever amount of wealth we have, and 2) Do we understand it to be something which ultimately comes to us from God, and therefore we are to be the stewards, not the owners, of it? Our wealth is not our wealth, at least not according to Jesus. All of it, indeed everything on earth, belongs to God, and we are deputized by God to take care of what He has created for us. But remember, this parable was told in response to a man who asked Jesus equitably to divide an estate which the man and his brother had inherited, presumably from their father. As so often was the case, Jesus deliberately did not answer his question, but forced him to think about other questions.
Most of the people in all five of the churches where I have served as a pastor, including myself, are wealthier than 90 to 95% of everyone currently residing on this planet. That is true of nearly all of us who are here this morning. I am opposed, and I think Jesus was opposed, to valuing financial wealth more than other kinds of wealth that everyone has: relationships, community, the community of saints, literature, music, art, the mind, the heart, and life itself.
Lately a song from an old Walt Disney movie has entered my head, and I haven’t managed to dislodge it for several days. It’s a song sung by Johnny Appleseed, and Johnny sings, “O the Lord is good to me/ And so I thank the Lord/ for giving me the things I need/ the sun, and the rain, and the apple seed/ The Lord is good to me.”
Jesus goes on to explain one more feature of his parable. God spoke to the rich farmer, and He said, “This night your soul is required of you, and these things you have accumulated, whose will they be?” One day we shall die. Then we shall go to be with God. But who will have what we have acquired? Not us! None of us will have any of it. Others may benefit from it, but are they benefitting from it now? Do we see ourselves as stewards of “our” assets, and thus we realize they are not really ours, or do we see ourselves as owners, and everything we have is ours to have? The Spanish have a magnificently maudlin proverb: “There are no pockets in a shroud.”
Most of the folks Jesus preached to in his ministry were dirt poor. Last week I was sent an email which explained the origin of that expression, of which I was not aware. Back in the old days, really poor people did not have any kind of proper flooring in their homes. Instead they had dirt floors. That’s what it meant to be “dirt poor.” Most of the Galilean peasants to whom Jesus usually spoke were dirt poor. So, having told a parable to a man who presumably was fairly wealthy for that time, afterwards Jesus explained its meaning in greater detail to his disciples, who also were probably peasants with few assets of any kind. Besides, Jesus made it his business to clarify to those closest to him what others might not fully understand. Perhaps he was anticipating Gospels being written, and he wanted the writers of those Gospels to get it right.
There’s an interesting sidelight to what Jesus next said, however. Luke 12:22-34, where Jesus speaks to the disciples, is almost a verbatim rendering of what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:25-33. In Luke Jesus says it to the twelve, but in Matthew he said it to the large crowd of Galilean peasant farmers and merchants who came to hear him speak on the side of a mountain above the Sea of Galilee.
In the Gospels, context is the environment out of which the teachings of Jesus spring. What Jesus said and where he said it was determined by who might have asked him what, and where. Somehow Luke was aware of what Jesus had said in a particular context, and Luke said that the verses following the parable of the rich farmer and his barns were an added explanation by Jesus for low-income disciples for why they shouldn’t be overly concerned about having enough money to live on. Not so, said Matthew; it was part of a random collection of lots of sayings about lots of subjects which Jesus preached to scores or hundreds of people in the Sermon on the Mount.
God gives everybody enough, Jesus seems to be saying, but “enough” isn’t enough for some people, especially people who may have much more than enough. That’s why wealth is more of a burden than a blessing to some folks. They have no comprehension of the obligation they have to use their wealth wisely. Instead, they just hang on to it, and it keeps growing and growing, but to no avail to themselves or anyone else. That’s why this is known as “The Parable of the Rich Fool.” In American vernacular, the man had oodles of dollars, but he had no sense for what to do with his vast wealth.
William Wordsworth expressed it so well in his poem:
The world is too much with us;
Late and soon, getting and spending,
We lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
We have given our hearts away –
A sordid boon!
The 24th Psalm declares, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (24:1). God created us to be the primary keepers of the earth. Nonetheless, we are meant to be keeping it for His sake, not ours. All that we have is His. The next time you study a bank statement or a dividend report, remember that.