The Things We Keep

Sermon for Sunday, September 20

Luke 12:13-21

Coming to Jesus

We all have visions for the future: hopes and dreams and aspirations. It is a wonderful thing for us as Christians that we can bring those dreams and aspirations to Jesus in prayer. We might come to Jesus asking for protection or prosperity, or we might come to Jesus asking for justice or retribution. We always need to remember, though, that we can only ask Jesus for what we think is right; we can’t tell Jesus what to do.

The “Parable of the Rich Fool,” as it is often called, comes to us in the context of an inheritance dispute. A man comes to Jesus and interrupts him to get his brother to give him his part of the inheritance. He doesn’t ask Jesus to mediate his family conflict: he comes to Jesus with the resolution he wants already in hand. We can assume this younger brother has considered the case from his own perspective long and hard, and he believes himself to be the innocent victim of his brother. In Jewish law and custom at the time, the estate of a dead man was divided between his sons, with the eldest son receiving a double portion and all the other sons getting a single portion. Daughters got... well, nothing. We don’t know the intricacies of this particular situation, but perhaps the eldest brother wanted to keep the farm together and work with his brothers, or perhaps he was dragging his feet in the distribution, or perhaps he was a villain and was just trying to cheat his brother out of his inheritance. Or maybe the eldest and the rest of the family were caught up in grief and the younger brother was trying to rush the process along. 

We just don’t know what this family situation was, because Jesus takes issue with something far more fundamental to the encounter. The younger brother’s command to Jesus reveals something of his character. He’s trying to use Jesus’s power and authority to achieve his own ends, his own particular vision of the good. What is good in this situation? For the younger brother, it is the money he will get from his share of the inheritance. For the older brother, perhaps it is keeping the farm together. For Jesus, it is keeping the family together. The younger brother wants to use Jesus’s moral and biblical authority to force his brother to do what he wanted. Jesus asks him, “Who set me as a judge over you, a divider between you and your brother?” If the young man gets what he wants (the division of the estate), he will also get with it the division of his family. The things we want to keep determine the things we lose. So it’s important that we examine our priorities when we get to wanting, to fighting, to complaining.

The Greatest Good

Jesus jumps from admonishing the younger brother to teaching the crowd and the disciples based on his interruption. He says, “Watch out for all kinds of greed, because the good life isn’t found in how much you have.” Psychologists have shown in many studies that once you get beyond a few thousand dollars above the poverty level, making more money doesn’t make you happier. We all think we know what greed is: Mark Twain wrote in his “Revised Catechism,” a piece where he criticized American covetousness with his signature cynicism, “What is the chief end of man?—to get rich. In what way?— dishonestly if he can, honestly if he must.” More recently, Hollywood’s depiction of a capitalist investor, Gordon Gecko, said “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” One commentator sums up greed as “the desire to have more, to get whatever one can, to acquire without reference to one’s specific needs or the situation of others.” That’s a good, broad definition, and all of us here know that greed is bad. But do we know what all kinds of greed look like?

When we talk about greed, we usually think of someone who takes from someone else. That’s called avarice. It’s somebody who is willing to exploit someone else in order to make more for themselves. But that’s not the situation with the younger brother that comes to Jesus or the rich man in the parable. The younger brother represents a more subtle form of greed. He’s the kind of person who is obsessed with what he sees as his fair share. He doesn’t want too much, just what he has coming to him, and he bases this off of a comparison to what his brother has. The rich man shows us a form of greed that is still more subtle. In fact, commentators often point out that what Jesus calls greed in this parable, what God calls foolish, in our culture we often would describe as wisdom and responsibility.

Let’s look at the story: a rich farmer has a good year. His land produces a lot of grain, and he wonders what he should do. It’s amazing how quickly a blessing can turn into a problem to be solved, as he realizes he has more bales than he has barn. The man devises a strategy: he will tear down his barns and build new ones. He names one of his new barns “401k” and the other “Stock Portfolio.” He will hold onto his grain until the prices get high; there will be a lean year coming and folks will be hungry and willing to pay. He should be able to live off of the abundance of this year for many years to come, while the younger farmers waste their good year on new pickup trucks, snakeskin boots, and belt buckles.

It’s all well and good to set aside what you need for the future. But where this fellow goes wrong is his absolute concern for himself. He uses the words “I” and “my” nine  times in verses 17 and 18: “What am I going to do, because I have no place to store my crops! I will do this: I’m gonna tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and that’s where I’ll store my grain and my goods.” To emphasize this, Jesus has the rich man literally say these things to himself. Nobody else enters into his calculations. And it never occurs to himself that as he stores up ample goods for many years, he might only have a few hours left to enjoy them.

Greed is, at its core, shortsightedness. It’s comes from an inability to see how what’s good for me might be bad for someone else. We want the bad guys to be villains, who twirl their mustaches and don’t care about the people they hurt. And that happens, but more often we do harm when we simply can’t see what we are doing. Our money or our possessions or our wants or our needs simply blind us to the needs of others. We can’t see what we can’t see, and so the invitation is for us to trust the vision of One who can.

Trusting His Vision

This passage sits between two commands to the disciples not to worry. The first is about being asked to give an account of your faith. The second is about being concerned for your bank account. In the middle is this interruption by a man who is worried about what he has. The younger brother is worried about getting his fair share from his brother. The rich man in the parable is worried about what to do now that he has too much. Worry breeds greed, and it comes from our uncertainty and inability to trust. So Jesus offers the cure.

Jesus says the cure to worry and greed is to trust the Father who knows what we need. Ravens and lilies don’t worry and clutch at things. They just fly and bloom and get what they need. There is a temptation to sentimentalize and spiritualized Jesus’s teaching here. In contrast to the man who invested in the barns, Jesus says we should store our treasures in heaven. Usually, we interpret that as caring more about heavenly things than earthly things; so you can have whatever as long as you don’t care too much about it. But Jesus makes it pretty clear that to invest in the kingdom means to invest in the bellies of the poor: “Sell your possessions, and give alms. . . For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” How much of your treasure is in the hands of the last, the least, and the lost? Capital One says “What’s in Your Wallet?” Jesus asks us “where is your barn?” Where do you store what is precious for you?

What’s In Your Barn?

Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the last line of today’s reading, after the man dies and leaves his estate behind for his children to squabble over, is “That’s what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God.” How do you fill your barn with God? I’ll tell you one way.

I can’t tell you the number of sermons I’ve heard my dad preach on this story, and he always tells the same story. My dad wasn’t raised in a particularly religious home. His family would have said they were Christians, but they didn’t go to church and he hadn’t ever given his life to Jesus until he went to high school. How it happened is that he became friends with a bunch of Mennonite guys who lived close by, and they invited him to Mr. Zehr’s barn once a week to play basketball. The Zehrs had put a basketball goal up in their loft so that the boys could play when there wasn’t any hay. My dad liked playing with them, but every week on the way home the boy giving him a ride would say, “Shelton, how about I pick you up to go to church on Sunday?” For a long time dad said no, but one night he agreed. As he went to church, Mr. Zehr taught the youth boys Sunday School class. One week he taught this story, and my dad found it ironic that the man with the biggest barn he’d ever seen would teach a lesson about the folly of bigger barns. But what separates Mr. Zehr from the fool in the parable is that at least one night a week, that barn was full of boys, basketball, and God. Without that gift, my dad’s life, and mine, would have been very different. What’s in your barn? Is there room for God?