Rich Toward God
Or, IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY

Sunday, August 1st, 2004
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Luke 12:13-21 (crf Matthew 6:19)

13Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." 14 But he said to him, "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" 15 And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." 16 Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' 18 Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' 20 But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' 21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."

I’m a science fiction buff. The first book I read that made a lasting impression on me was ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’, by Robert Heinlein. I was probably in the 10th grade when I read it. It was one of those two-inch thick paperbacks that was crammed full of witty dialogue, vast scenarios of world-altering events, and a narrator that kept you interested in the story and kept you turning the pages until the wee hours of the morning, when I should have been asleep.

It is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, the sole survivor of the first manned expedition to Mars, he is raised by Martians, and is returned to Earth by the second manned expedition to Mars. To make a very long story short - and my apologies to those who might want a more extensive synopsis here - what stuck with me from the story for these last 24 years is this: Smith ends up becoming a Messianic figure, based on his otherworldly outlook on life on Earth.

Heinlein himself never intended the book to be anything other than a satirical look at life and human conceits – marriage, love, and, in his view at least, religion. While I was saddened by the fact that Heinlein was an Atheist, his thought process reflected in his writing always had an appeal to me – there is a strictness to it, and bare-bones essentialness to his outlook on life – born from the belief that there ISN’T anything else besides the here and now, that was in a way refreshing, and more than a little challenging to an 8th grader who was in the very early stages of discovering what it meant to have faith and to live by that faith.

A couple of nights ago I tuned into the Science Fiction Channel and watched an episode of Stargate Atlantis. One scene caught my attention. In the story, several people are confronted with the possibility that they will die in exactly 38 minutes. One of the people is from an alien culture, and when HER fellow citizens hear of what is happening, they prepare to hold a ceremony with the woman through the communication system – through which they can still talk to each other, to mark the event of her death – before it happens. The commanding officer, who is from earth, nixes the idea completely, saying that “humans don’t welcome death; we do everything we can to stave it off.” The point of the group that was coming for the ceremony was that it was as unusual an event for THEM as it is for US to know the time and place of our death – the difference was that they had developed a ritual to mark the occasion, an intentional preparation for passing from this life into the next.

As some of you know from Wednesday night and an email update I sent out Friday, my Aunt Kate, who served with her husband Uncle Bill Carter as missionaries to Chile for … close to 40 years, underwent triple bypass surgery after having suffered a mild heart attack LAST week.

The update I got on her condition on Friday evening was from a fellow MK who is now serving with HER husband as a missionary to Chile herself. MaryJo spoke to Aunt Kate Thursday evening, and in her words,

“She actually told me that she was getting excited thinking that this might be her last day and she'd go see Jesus, her Mother, Bill and friends! But she was just waiting to see what the Lord wanted to do.”

The parable of the Rich Fool is one of the old ones, in my memory, probably because as a child, we had a Bible story book that told this parable, along with the parable of the man who built his house on the rock and the one who built his house on the sand, I saw the same book series still for sale at the Cokesbury bookstore in Richmond a few weeks ago, and almost picked the whole set up. The illustrations in the pages had the vibrancy and color and boldness that attracts the eye of the young, and the illustration I remember most from this story was the one of the man sleeping in a room on top of his granaries. Through the window the night sky is a deep indigo color – blue almost going to purple. Below the picture is the caption –

'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'

That has always stayed with me. For years I took it to mean to literally seek to stay away from wealth. At times that’s been easy, at others, not so much. I think we all go through phases where we can do without and are ok with it, and at others … well, it’s more of a challenge.

An example: I bought my little black Mazda in February of 1990, after my previous car, a 1980 Nissan 510, gave up the ghost somewhere on the Western Kentucky Parkway, with Jimmy my brother, trying to come back from visiting in Paducah. At the time, economics dictated much of the transaction, but I was also going through a ‘support voluntary simplicity’ phase. I didn’t want an automatic transmission, I would have liked a radio, but it was not a deal breaker, and for some reason I was going through an anti-Freon phase, and was ok with the fact that the car had no air conditioning. Those first few months after I bought the car I felt really good driving down the road, in silence, with no distractions from the primary task at hand – getting from point A to point B. I would pull up next to some loaded-with features sedan and smirk at the waste and wasteful use of energy that it represented. Remember, I bought the car in February.

Then summer hit. Summer in Louisville is like summer here, only worse. Where I was working and most of my driving meant I spent a lot of time in stop and go traffic. I quickly began to search through automotive catalogues and started pricing Air conditioners and how much it would cost to install it.

Its funny how principles can so quickly become … overwhelmed by the basic human ability to rationalize just about anything we want, but may not necessarily need. I grew up without air conditioning, but I also grew up in a country where summers did not come with 98% humidity, but with 20%, if that.

Back to the text: It was common practice in first-century Palestine for a teacher, as Jesus is addressed in the beginning of the passage, to serve not only as instructor, but also to serve as community leader and to resolve legal and other disputes among the people of the town in which they lived. There was nothing unusual about the request from the man in the crowd for Jesus to settle the issue he has with his brother regarding their inheritance.

It does strike me as odd, initially, at least, to hear Jesus answer: "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" My initial reaction to Jesus’ statement is “who BETTER to serve as judge? Isn’t that what Jesus came to DO??

But what Jesus was doing, once again, was cutting to the heart of the matter – he saw the root of the question and addressed IT, instead of letting the whole point get lost by answering the superficial question. The root of the dispute was greed, and in addressing THAT issue, Jesus not only answered the brothers’ question, but also the question of everyone in the surrounding audience. We can so easily write off a question if the face-value issues don’t fit our profile – “I’m not in that business”, “I wouldn’t DO business with someone like that anyway,” or “I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that” … they’re all ways we can squeeze out of the need to actually stop and think for ourselves – what’s the underlying issue here? And with questions like that, we can usually find where we intersect with others on many, many different levels.

Let’s turn to the last verse in the text. At the conclusion of the parable, after Jesus reveals that the rich fool will die and his worldly goods will do him no good. The question he poses is “whose will they be?”

The final admonition to the Rich Fool echoes and reinforces Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew, chapter 6, verse 19:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Jesus is asking his listeners what is most important in life. We know, I trust, that the point of the parable is that wealth is not what is most important. Security of any kind on this plane of existence is ultimately shaky at best, and therefore not secure by definition. We’ve been reminded of that in our own community. I’m sure Dale Clark had plans for lunch on Wednesday, and probably was looking forward to the weekend with his family.

So what does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

This afternoon we will be gathering and observing the baptism of our sister Jackie Stevens. She made her public profession of faith several months ago, but had expressed the desire to be baptized in the river. That time has now come. As a form of obedience, a step of faith, and as a public statement, baptism is a powerfully symbolic gesture. Through it, Jackie is staking her claim – not on what this world can give her, but on what she can give to God. In going down into the ‘waters of baptism’, the affirmation of faith – from the earliest 1st century Christians, is ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’. That is a loaded statement. The believer is saying by that that though it may not look like it now, and I may not always ACT like it, but Jesus Christ is Lord – no qualifiers – Lord of my life, my thoughts, my actions, my reactions, and Lord of my possessions, whether I have any or not. Ultimately, it is a statement that will last for eternity.

Jesus is Lord.

Let’s pray.