Monday, September 28, 2009

Sermon: "Against the Grain"


LUKE 12
:16-21
And He spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.

But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

There is a similar passage in the Apochryphal book of SIRACH 11:14-19 (NRSV) :

Good things and bad, life and death, poverty and wealth, come from the Lord. Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge of the law come from the Lord; affection and the ways of good works come from Him. Error and darkness were created with sinners; evil grows old with those who take pride in malice. The Lord’s gift remains with the devout, and His favor brings lasting success. One becomes rich through diligence and self-denial, and the reward allotted to him is this: when he says, “I have found rest, and now I shall feast on my goods!” he does not know how long it will be until he leaves them to others and dies.
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Wealth is an ambiguous thing. Its meaning changes from age to age and from culture to culture. What was considered to be wealth in Bible days isn't necessarily what we would strive for now. If it was, every joke about three guys abandoned on a desert island and finding a magic lamp would have them wishing for spices, bolts of cloth, and herds of she-asses. Most of us don't want a herd of she-asses in our driveway. The neighbors aren't impressed by that sort of thing. Bolts of cloth and earthen jars filled with nard won't win a girl's heart anymore.

Consider the Bible's financial assessment of our old friend Job:

Job 1:2 And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. 3His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east.

There's no mention of a portfolio, a pool, a PT Cruiser, or any of the things our society today equates with richness. So let's say that wealth is an abundance of what you value, and values change.

The fellow in today's reading was a well-to-do farmer. We're not told what he grew, but it was probably grain. And he had such a good crop that he didn't even have room in his barns ~ that's barns plural ~ more than one barn ~ to hold it all. For one brief, fleeting moment, he seems to be at a loss as to what to do with all this "stuff." Now, it's not like he's the nouveau riche, or like he's some poor sharecropper who's never had nothin'. He's already rich at the beginning of the parable. He's used to having a lot, but now he's really got a lot. His solution? More barns! He decides he'll tear down his old barns and build bigger and better barns to hold all this richness he's acquired, and kick back and relax.

"Eat, drink, and be merry," he says to himself. That's from a Latin saying attributed to Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Ede, bibe, lude, post mortem nulla voluptas -- Eat, drink, play, after death there is no enjoyment. That's the equivalent of saying, "In Heaven there is no beer, that's why we drink it here."

Wouldn't you think this stuff would be perishable? Aren't these barns full of grain going to end up full of weevils and rats? He doesn't seem to be concerned about that.

If this fellow was around today, he'd be diagnosed as having OCD ~ Obsessive/Compulsive Disorder. There's nothing to suggest that he actually would have been content once his new barns were built. No, he'd need more. More and bigger harvests, more and bigger barns, more land ~ the eating, drinking and merry-making would take on larger proportions, too.

At no time does the farmer seem to consider doing anything charitable with this surplus. His focus is on how to keep it ~ every last bit of it ~ for himself. In fact, there is absolutely nobody else anywhere in this parable ~ no friends, no relatives, no neighbors, nobody. That is, until verse 20 when God calls him "thou fool." The only other place in the Gospels where this term is used in Matthew 5:22, where Jesus tells us not to say it. "Thou fool" comes from a word I can't pronounce and means "to be APOSTATE." Apostasy is the act of rebelling against, forsaking, abandoning, or falling away from God, and it was such a serious crime that if you accused somebody of it falsely you would suffer the punishment of the damned. So it was a word you didn't want to use lightly. But God used it. God was angry.

This fellow is trying to satisfy his own soul. There's a lot wrong with that scenario. For starters, our souls aren't really ours. Our souls belong to God. Secondly, the soul can't be placated with stuff. Billy Graham says your soul is so big that it has a hole in it that only God can fill. If that's the case, then trying to fill that hole with stuff is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a shovel and pail ~ or with grain. Grain runs through your fingers, and takes flight with the wind.

Our stuff is a lot like that. It's hard to hold on to. Any visit to a yard sale will tell you that today's hot new item is tomorrow's junk. I once heard a vaguely hypothetical anecdote about a man with enormous wealth who talked the Grim Reaper into letting him take a suitcase full of gold with him. When the man got to the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter inspected his luggage, and upon discovering it was full of gold he looked at the man quizzically and said, "You brought pavement?"

When the farmer's hour arrived, God said unto him, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?" He's not going to be able to take it with him, but he hadn't thought about that because he didn't believe he was going anywhere. His motto was, "after death there is no pleasure" -- the motto of the ancient atheists and Epicureans.

But he was mistaken, and the God from whom he had separated himself was calling him into accountability and he had nothing to show but his empty, selfish heart.

And all that grain.

His zealously guarded treasure, his richness, is now useless to him. "Whose shall those things be?" God asks him. When it comes to having friends and loved ones, the farmer is in direst poverty.

Perhaps the government will claim his goods. Or maybe before his body is even cold the poor folks from the surrounding area will swoop down on his farm and fill their empty sacks with grain for the infants and the elderly and the infirm and all the little people he was too mean to give a thought to.

Or maybe it will just blow away.

You've heard the old adage, "money can't buy happiness." No, but you can be miserable in a better part of town.

We all carry emotional baggage around with us everywhere we go. And we carry it into new clothes, new cars, new homes, new jobs, new relationships, new cities, new churches, new denominations, and new barns.

Every anxiety, every flaw, every bad habit, every heartache, every regret, every disappointment, every fear, every phobia, every grudge and every sad memory ~ every wrong thing we've ever felt, done, or experienced ~ these things follow us like our own shadow. And try as we may, we can't make them go away.

But Jesus will take them off our hands; He will take them off our shoulders and off our minds. All we have to do is ask. If we give Him our heart, He will make it like new. Then will we be truly free. And then will we be truly rich.

Matthew 6:19: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.