Luke 12:13-21

10 Pentecost / Proper 13 / Year C

5 August 2007

The Church of the Good Shepherd

Wareham, Massachusetts

Preached by the Rev. David Fredrickson

"'You fool! This very night your soul is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'"� So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."� (Luke 12:20b-21)

There is a story of a stingy old lawyer who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness who was determined to prove wrong the old familiar saying, "You can't take it with you."� After much thought and consideration, the shrewd old man finally figured out how to take at least some of his money with him when he died. He instructed his lovely wife to go to the bank and withdraw enough money to fill two pillow cases. He then directed her to take the bags of money to the attic and leave them directly above his bed. His plan: When he passed away, he would reach out and grab the bags on his way to heaven.

Several weeks after the funeral, the deceased lawyer's wife went up into the attic to clean and she came upon the two forgotten pillow cases stuffed with cash. “Oh that crazy old fool,� she exclaimed. "I knew he should have had me put that money in the basement."

All kidding aside, Jesus' encounter with the young man demanding a just division of the inheritance with his brother and the subsequent parable of the rich farmer is quite unnerving for most of us. The parable in particular challenges one of our most fundamental values, the value of self-sufficiency. In it, Jesus calls the rich farmer a fool, but is he really? Let's consider these facts: he appears to work hard, he is wise and forward thinking, planning for his future, and he saves his possessions instead of squandering them. If this is a fool than what are we, those of us who embody the Protestant Work Ethic and admire the American Dream and believe that it is available to everybody who works hard enough and plans well enough. What sort of values does this Jesus embody anyway? Well this is certainly one of the questions that Luke wants us to consider here.

You know, it is always a shock to realize that Jesus looks at things differently than we do. Yet the context here is very clear. Luke sets this parable in the midst of a set of sayings and parables about the peril of possessions.

Robert Wuthnow is a professor of the social sciences and the director of the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University. In the early 1990's, professor Wuthnow embarked on a significant research project that looked at the relationship between religious conviction and economic issues. Wuthnow wanted to understand how ordinary Americans think about faith, work and finances. In 1994 he published his findings in the book God and Mammon in America. The study demonstrates that while American religious values seem to be widespread and important to us, our religious convictions have little impact on material and economic matters. Wuthnow uses one word to describe what he found; "compartmentalization." According to Wuthnow, for most Americans, religious convictions and money matters belong to two distinct realms that rarely overlap. Prayer, scripture reading, religious values and convictions belong to the private world of religious devotion. Spirituality functions therapeutically, but has little power to address our daily lives, and our lifestyle choices. In Wuthnow's words, "We have domesticated [the spiritual realm], stripping the sacred of moral authority and allowing it to break through only occasionally and for good purposes, such as helping us out of a jam or salving our conscience when we succumb to the appeals of Madison Avenue."�ⁱ

Wuthnow also found that people who attend a weekly worship service are far less likely to talk about money matters to anybody than those who do not attend church at all. It also turns out that the clergy are the worst of all when it comes to talking about personal finances.ⁱⁱ

So what does all of this mean? What is this disconnect all about? What did Jesus mean when he said of the death of the rich farmer, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God?� There are a couple of things I would like to say in response to these questions.

First of all, as the joke about the stingy old lawyer and the parable of the rich farmer make so clear, nothing we possess actually belongs to us. There will come a time when death will separate each and every one of us from what we possess. So it makes little or no sense to accumulate beyond what we need.

. The lawyer’s wealth was made possible through the labor of others and the rich farmer’s bounty was provided by the land. Certainly they both worked hard, but by taking more than they needed, they created a disconnect between themselves and their maker and yes in the eyes of God, it made them fools. In so doing they ultimately denied to others what they needed. Instead of stuffing pillow cases with cash or building larger barns, both the lawyer and the rich farmer could have just as easily given away what they didn’t need to their neighbors in need, whoever that might have been.

For some reason we human beings have a real fear of insufficiency. You see this every time there is the threat of a storm and the grocery store shelves are emptied. And this raises yet another question, how much is sufficient? It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out that American culture has skewed the lines between wants and needs. The average American will have ten hours a day of media exposure through television, radio, internet and print. That gives Madison Avenue ten hours a day, everyday, to get inside the head of the average American and tell us that our wants are actually needs. It is a never-ending battle that we are called to engage in.

There is a group out there that seems to be fighting back. I read about them on the front page of last Sunday’s Boston Globe. The group is called the 50% league and every member is committed to giving away at least 50% of their income, business profits or net worth to charity. Not surprising, there are only about 90 members in this club and most of them are well off, but not all. According to the article, “Many are anonymous philanthropists, and not all of them have great wealth: Some are middle class, but have chosen to survive on less so they can give more. Above all, they aim to stand as role models, and to encourage people of all income levels to think deeply about their giving potential. “We want people to be able to find someone they can relate to and say, ‘This person is giving substantially more than I’ve ever dreamed of giving, so maybe I should work at what I can give,’ said Christopher Ellinger of Arlington.�

Fascinating stuff! From the very early pages of Genesis through the end of John’s Revelation, the Sacred Scriptures are clear; wealth is not something the people of God are to aspire to. We are indeed called to live simply so that others may simply live. This is what it means to be rich toward God; this is what it means to believe that God is sufficient to provide what we need. Please don’t hear this homily as a judgment coming from me. I struggle with this notion of sufficiency and being rich toward God as much or more than anybody. I invite all of us, however, into a deeper dialogue with God about how we might simplify our lives and how we might begin to give more of what we have away to those who have real need.

In Jesus Name; Amen.