A stingy old man, who was really attached to his money, was diagnosed with a
terminal illness. Knowing that someday soon he was going to die, he
decided that he would prove wrong the saying, “You can’t take it with you.”
After
much thought, he congratulated himself on figuring out just how to leave this
earth with at least some of his wealth intact and by his side when he passed on
from this life. That was when he asked his wife to go to the bank
and get enough cash to fill two pillowcases.
When
she got home, he said “Put these bags of money in the attic, directly above my
bed.” You see, he figured that when he passed away, he would reach
down and grab the moneybags on his way to heaven. And so, with all that planning done and the
pillowcases filled with cash and strategically placed, a couple of months later
he died a happy man.
Several
weeks after the funeral, however, his widow was up in the attic and came upon
the two pillowcases filled with cash.
“That
old fool,” she said, shaking her head. “I knew he should have had me put
the money in the basement.”
Money,
money, money: It is foremost in our minds even if we do not want to admit it –
or talk about it – and certainly not talk about it here in church where we
intuitively know that we will be told something we really do not want to
hear. It’s that Jesus piping up and
breaking into our little self-created realities again!
Money,
money, money: It is foremost in our
minds. After all, there are bills to
pay, the oil industry to keep in business, vacations to take. If we are like Imelda Marcus, there are shoes
to buy. If we are like multi-billionaire
John D. Rockefeller, there is the obsession of getting one more dollar than we
already have.
Money,
money, money: This parable that we just read is about money. It is about the possessions that mean so much
to us that we would build a bigger barn to store them if we could. It is about money, about our priorities when
it comes to the possessions that our money will buy, and it is about greed.
You
know, Jesus talked a lot about money and wealth throughout the Gospels. He told parables about a treasure hidden in a
field, pearls of great price, a lost coin, and a widow who had nothing much to
give but chose to give it all anyway. Jesus preached about sums of
money that were loaned to three servants, a prodigal son who squandered his
inherited money, and even two men who were forgiven their debts, one great and
one small.
In
fact, according to Lutheran pastor James Wright, “of the 40 some parables of
Jesus recorded in the Bible, just under half of them refer to proper use of
money and riches. You can see that Jesus really did have much to say about
money” – and not always things we want to hear.
The
parable we just read, commonly referred to as the one about the Rich Young
Fool, is about as audacious and pronounced in its warning as any of Jesus’
stories are. Our rabbi pulls no punches
but takes on full force the subjects of money, possessions, and, in the end,
greed. He issues a stark warning to
those who would spend their time building wealth rather than community,
uttering the kind of wisdom he would have found right in the Book of
Ecclesiastes: “Whoever loves money never
has money enough; whoever loves wealth
is never satisfied with his income.”
It
all begins with a whining voice in the crowd.
“Teacher, order my brother to give me (what I think is) my fair share of
the family inheritance.”
Now, that actually was a really
inappropriate way to begin a conversation with Jesus. You see, according to Canadian writer Nathan
Colquhoun, “a rabbi in this time did not make these kinds of decisions on how
stuff got divided. In fact, Jewish laws already had very specific laws about
how things were to be divided; it was somebody else’s decision….
(You) see, an inheritance in this time
was all about land. A father would die and then the land would be given to his
sons…..Here we have these sons disputing over who gets what…
(However), the one brother is not
asking Jesus to make a decision about who gets what piece of land; this brother
obviously has already made up his mind on what is rightfully his. He goes so
far as to tell Jesus to tell his brother to do what he wants, (thereby trying
to) use Jesus’ authority to coerce his brother to go along with his pre-made
decision.”
Now, from our modern day perspective,
we might be tempted to give the whining brother the benefit of the doubt. After all, perhaps he got the short end of
the stick and only wants to see justice done.
However, Jesus sees the situation
differently. He realizes that
possession of land is irrelevant to the new age that was to come – and that was
his main concern. Oh, I suppose he could
have simply said, “Share with your brother,” but Jesus chose a different tact
and told a story that was bound to humiliate the young man but, in doing so,
sets forth boldly for all of us a lesson about possessions, priorities, and the
skewing of those that inevitably ends in greed.
The Message translation tells it this
way – with a few comments of my own interjected: The farm of a certain rich man produced a
terrific crop. He had more grain and
goods than he could possibly use himself.
It was a bumper crop like no other.
And so this man talked to himself:
‘What can I do? My barn isn’t big enough for this harvest.’ He seemed to have no inclination to share his
abundance. Remember in the Old Testament
Book of Genesis when Joseph’s family came to him in Egypt, fleeing from the
famine in Canaan?
Joseph
took them in and allowed them to settle down and farm the fertile Nile River
valley because that was national policy.
It was how things were done. You
stored grain, but you stored it to share – even with outsiders – in times of
famine. But not here. Not now.
Not so with this Rich Young Fool.
Instead the young man in our story said
to himself, ‘Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger
ones. Then I’ll gather in all my grain and goods, and I’ll say to myself, Self,
you’ve done well! You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it easy and have
the time of your life!’
But before he had even the first
clapboard ripped off the side of the old barn, God showed up and said, ‘Fool!
Tonight you die. And your barnful of goods—who gets it?’
“That’s what happens when you fill your
barn with Self and not with God,” Jesus smartly finished up. In other words, you really cannot take it
with you – whether you leave it in the attic or the basement.
Now, please understand right from the
start that Jesus is not against money.
As Lutheran pastor Elisabeth Johnson reminds us, “The rich farmer is a
fool not because he is wealthy or because he saves for the future.” The issue is not that God does not want us to
save for a nest egg or retirement or to put our kids through college. It is not that God does not want us to enjoy
life with the money and possessions we have been blessed to acquire. Heaven knows that Jesus ate, drank, and even
had his share of merriment.
But the issue is that when we succumb
to the same thought process as the Rich Agriculturalist, our priorities, like
his, become skewed, and we too end up as the fool. Elisabeth Johnson goes on to say, “Like the
rich farmer, we are tempted to think that having large amounts of money and
possessions stored up will make us secure. Sooner or later, however, we learn
that no amount of wealth or property can secure our lives. No amount of wealth
can protect us from a genetically inherited disease, for instance, or from a
tragic accident. No amount of wealth can keep our relationships healthy and our
families from falling apart.”
When affluence and possessions become
the foundation of our security rather than a strong relationship with God and
with our neighbors, then we and the Rich Young Fool are one and the same. Jesus is telling us in no uncertain terms
that the happiness we seek, the peace that passes all understanding, will not
be found in the things we own or in the money we stash away.
As Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor
once wisely preached in a sermon when she was talking about the relative
happiness she got from buying a new set of cookware: “When I wake up in
the middle of the night and cannot go back to sleep for all of the fears that
are taking turns sitting on my chest, it never occurs to me to get up and bring
my 13" frying pan” into bed with me.
In one sense, it is really all about
our God-given instinct for security. When
our possessions become the anchor for that peace of mind, we cannot help but
want more – and more – and more. If some
extra cash can make us felt a bit secure, then more will surely make us more
secure and even more will make us even more secure – and in the end it leads
only to a perversion of that coveted blessed assurance of security. It ends
with greed, that haunting feeling of never having enough to really be secure. And we are fools if we think that such a
cycle will not go on forever – greedily eating away until our very souls are
consumed.
It is that corruption of the
relationship between possessions and priorities that Jesus is warning us about
so openly in this parable. And, as with
all his stories, he dares us to ask:
What about us? How do we know if this
corruption is happening to us? Are we
fools too?
One way to answer that question is by
simply looking again at the parable – and this time noticing that the Rich
Young Fool was having his conversation with himself. Every sentence begins with “I”. The conversation is all about him: Egocentrism in the extreme.
He was all alone. He does not even have
anyone to have a serious conversation with – so isolated is he from the needs
of friends, family, his community. All
he sees clearly are his own ever-expanding need for security and having enough.
Clutching at our own possessions,
fearful of sharing them, isolates us one from another. When we are consumed by our own presumption
of need and fear of scarcity, we do not hear clearly the cries of the
hungry. We do not see the needs of those
around us.
However, as Nathan Colquhoun remarks,
“There is this underlying assumption, a biblical assumption that wealth is not
for individuals. It is not so we can get bigger homes, get more stuff, treat
our kids even better and secure our futures. Any wealth that we have acquired
is for the community. In the same way, when a community is in need, or when
someone in our community is in need, and we have, we are obligated to give to
them. If we don’t, that is fine, but just don’t pretend you are in community.” Surely then, it is a matter of establishing our
priorities when it comes to wealth, possessions, caring for the human community
around us, and determining how much is enough we need to feel secure.
If that is so, then this parable of the
Rich Young Fool has huge implications for us in the Christian Church, for us in
this church that we lovingly call our faith community. It has huge implications for how we do
ministry here in the midst of a $9000.00 deficit.
Now, do not get me wrong, I am not
going to tell you to tithe. I am not going
to tell you to give more to this community you call your spiritual home than
you already do. But I challenge you to
reflect on this parable of the Rich Young Fool and all that it says to us about
possessions and priorities.
Let me end with a little story about a
Buddhist master who sat in meditation on the riverbank when a disciple bent
down and placed two enormous pearls at his feet, a token of reverence and
devotion. The master opened his eyes, lifted up one of the pearls, and held it
so carelessly that it slipped out of his hand and rolled down the bank into the
river.
The horrified disciple plunged
headfirst in after it . . . he dived in again and again till late evening, but
he had no luck in finding it. Finally, all wet and exhausted, he roused the
master from his meditation [and the disciple said]: “You saw where it fell.
Show me the spot so I can get it back for you.” The master lifted the
other pearl, threw it into the river, and said, “Right there!
How much do you need to feel secure? How big do your barns need to be? Jesus is telling us in this parable that
those are the questions we need to answer.
You see, it is only when we answer
those questions that we can begin to talk about financing the ministries of
this church. And so I challenge each one
of you who loves this church and calls it your spiritual home, I challenge you
to intentionally affirm what your priorities are, intentionally commit to
budget in order to realize those priorities, and intentionally decide where in your
plan the ministries of this church lie.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church
www.rvccme.org
