Giver And Gift

Giver and Gift

Luke 12:13-21
August 5, 2007
Rev. Kevin J McLemore

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family
inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator
over you?” 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.” Then he told
them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to
himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 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. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many
years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 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?’
So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

Last summer Douglas and I went to visit his parents in West Texas in the smallish town
of Brownfield, Texas, a town of about 8,000 residents. Douglas’ parents are quite the
entrepreneurs in town, and after decades of struggling financially, they’ve built a
sizable nest egg on various small businesses they’ve run, including various rental
properties they’ve bought for a steal. While we were there, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson
showed us one of their latest ventures—a storage unit facility they erected on a piece
of property next to a moderately traveled road right near their home. The units are
large enough to store a car or a boat, and of course, they’re large enough for a lot of
that accumulated stuff you and I might purchased over the years, but is getting in the
way of the new stuff we’ve just recently bought, and of course, that old stuff is stuff we’
re not quite sure we want to give away just yet, just in case, you know…Before they
built this storage facility, I suspect they read about the incredible boom in new storage
facilities being built in this country and being the good capitalists they are, they wanted
to cash in on the problem of having too much stuff and not enough room to store all
that accumulated stuff—and yet not being able to let any of it go. In fact, the United
States has ten times the amount of self-storage space per person as the United
Kingdom or Australia!

I know some of us actually have working barns in this congregation, but the closest
some of us are ever going to owning a barn is by renting a storage unit from some folks
like Douglas’ parents. These storage units have become our barns, so to speak, the
places where we store what we have accumulated in t his world. In our passage today,
Jesus is asked to be judge and jury for two men who fighting over the assets in their
father’s barn, his 401K of the first century. I suspect it is the younger brother who is
doing the asking, since if he was the older brother during that time period, he would
have received an automatic double portion of the younger brother’s inheritance—and if
you’re a daughter, you could only hope that you had no brothers because that was the
only way you were going to get to inherit anything from your father’s wealth. Centuries
earlier, Moses had done some parsing up of property for some of the early Israelites,
so there was some precedent for this request. And there were some people in his day
and time were comparing him to the great founder of Israel, but Jesus will have not of
it—he does now want to be someone’s probate judge. Instead, he uses that request to
judge this man’s soul, to look within him to find out where that request for more—more
land, more money, more barns, more savings—where that request for more was
coming from.

Jesus tells us a story to get to root of it all, one of those famous parables we are so
familiar with, because Jesus knows we live our lives within stories, human stories, and
not within doctrines or dogma, or even interesting well-laid out teachings: we are
people immersed in life, in a story we’re living right at this very moment. And so to
answer this man’s question, a question that comes out of this man’s life, Jesus begins
to tell the story of another man’s life—a rich man whose harvest was great, so great in
fact that he didn’t have enough storage units—huh, barns—to store all of it, so he
decided to build himself more barns, ones he didn’t have to rent, so that he could take
that good fortune he had been given from the land and sock it away for a rainy day. He’
s so satisfied with himself that the inner monologue continues, and he says, essentially
to himself: “Self, you’ve done well! You’ve got it made and can now retire. Take it easy
and have the time of your life!” (The Message). Jesus, in this passage, warns this
young man who wants more barns, and even more stuff so that he will have to build
MORE barns. Jesus looks into his soul and cuts to the heart of it—“this isn’t about
fairness between you and your brother or having enough food for you and your family,”
Jesus seems to be saying, “this is about not being able to be content with what you
have and your desire for more.”

Now, leaving behind this latter point that Jesus makes with this story, I want us to sit with
something for a second, something that seems to set up a tension for us in the 21st
century. Every time I go to my local bank around here, and every time I get something
from insurance agent, or something from my UCC pension plan, and almost every time I
watch television, for that matter, people are telling me to do the opposite of what Jesus
seems to be saying in this passage. I am being told to save, to invest, to put as much
as possible in my barn as I can, because you never know what the future is going to
hold, especially with social security, and, and I am being told I deserve a very
comfortable retirement, where I can do the things I’ve always wanted to do, etc, etc. I
mean, to be frank, this rich young fool, as the guy in the parable is commonly called, is
not so stupid, really, right? I mean, he’s doing the things that we are constantly being
told we should do to secure our future, and to live the kind of life we want at 65 or
beyond. And it would be too easy, really, to discount this parable as being about other
people, really rich people, who don’t share their wealth, because, for that matter, we
are the rich people in this world—remember that fact about having ten times the
storage of nations right behind in terms of wealth? I mean, I could list out all the facts
and figures about how even the poorest among us are wealthy compared to so many of
people in the rest of the world, but most of us have heard it before…like it or not, folks,
this parable really is about us, us, who are living in a culture in which we are told that
what we have is never, never enough.

No, this rich young fool…well, he may be a fool, but while he’s got his barns, he remain
a rich young fool, and perhaps its also true that he prepared for a future that never
came, but I suspect most everyone in our culture would praise him for being so
responsible with his money—at least he didn’t spend through his good fortune by the
time he was 45! But we are told that the way of Jesus is not this man’s way, this
pragmatic path taken by a man gifted by so great a personal windfall is not the way that
Christ would have us to deal with the wealth we have been given—and, we are that
wealthy man, whatever our particular incomes or net worth, because of where we live
and how we live in this country. And so Christ turns his gaze to us, and calls us fools
for listening to our financial planners, and he reminds that nothing is ever certain, even
the best laid retirement plans, and that if we think we can prepare for what not cannot
be prepared for by attending to our 401K rather than our souls, we will have gotten his
message all wrong. The gaze must first start inward, towards our souls, just as that
young man did, with his funny little inner monologue, but what happened to that foolish
man is that the gaze, the inward soul searching ended right there, right on himself. Its
interesting that the parable before is full of first person pronouns—“I” occurs six times
in this passage and possessive pronoun “my” occurs five times. The rich young fool
looks in, but he stops right there, and his gaze never leaves himself, or the things that
will secure HIS future, HIS retirement, HIS life. He stumbles upon a great wealth, or, let’
s even be generous, he works hard and earns what he's got in those barn, and his first
instinct is to continues his gaze upon himself and his family and his life.

Now, I do think Christ wants us to look within, that he wants us to look at our souls, to
search our spirits for the reasons why our personal storage units are so full, why
having more than one barn is so attractive to us, why enough is never enough. But the
way of Jesus is not to stop looking within—it’s about turning that gaze outward towards
those whose barns are half empty, or those whose barns are completely empty.   I said
last week that God gives us what we need in this world, not always what we want, but if
God does give us more than what we need, emotionally, spiritually, financially, we can
be sure of this: we are being asked to give it away to those whose barns are empty. I
can tell you another thing for sure, as well: if we are given more than we really need in
this world, we are not being called by God to build ourselves more barns—instead, we
are being asked to help fill up a someone else’s barn that is not quite full, or, even to
help build one for someone who does not have one. Indeed, we are fools if we think
God has been generous with us so that we can keep that generosity hold up in our own
barns. No, we are blessed so we can bless others; we are loved so we can love others;
we are forgiven so we can forgive others; we are given to so we can give to others.

The gaze inward towards our soul eventually must come around to see the other souls
whom we’ve been call to love, to forgive, to bless, and to be generous with. There is
that wonderful Chinese story about those who meet at a great banquet table in the
world to come, and before them was an incredible feast, but they were given chopsticks
that were so long that they could not get the food to their mouths. In danger of starving
and being seemingly taunted by the food in front of them, finally someone realized that
these long chopsticks could be used to feed others across the table, other souls at the
banquet called life. It seems as if this ancient Chinese story has the same vision of
what Christ thinks the kingdom of God will be like when it is finally and fully realized—a
place where the real measure our wealth is how much our soul be worth if we lost all
that stuff in our barns, all the money and security to which we so often cling to. Christ
calls us to a different way, a better portion, as Jesus called Martha a few weeks ago, a
way that looks inward and then outward so that we can bless the world with the wealth
we’ve been given, with the goodness lavished upon us, and even with the God who
walks beside us, always beside us, calling us to trust the One who gives, and not the
gift itself, and so we are asked to tear down those spare barns we’ve been building,
thinking they would make us safe, and to be more generous with what was always,
ultimately, a gift from God. Amen.