Sunday, October 18, 2015 | 8:00 a.m., 9:30 a.m., and 11:00 a.m.

Give. Grow. Become!

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 107:1–9
Luke 12:13–21

So override our anxieties about what we shall eat
   and what we shall drink
   and what we shall wear
   and where we shall live
   and what we will save
   and how we will spend
   and what we shall have
that in intentional and visible and public ways
we may live as befits your liberated partners.

Walter Brueggemann

“We read the Gospel as if we had no money, and we spend our money as if we know nothing of the Gospel.” That was Jesuit theologian John Haughey’s lament when he was asked to reflect on the relationship between our Christian faith and money (wealth issue of the Living Pulpit, April–June 2003, p. 14).

“We read the Gospel as if we had no money, and we spend our money as if we know nothing of the Gospel.” Here at Fourth Church, we are in the middle of a three-part sermon series in which we are specifically talking about this relationship between what we believe and trust about God and how that theology does or does not impact what we do with what we have. Another way to put it could be, What does what we do with what we have say or testify about who and whose we are?

If you were not here when this series began, this might feel unnerving. Even if you were here, it might still be a bit unnerving. It continues to feel that way for me, your preacher. I have told quite a few of you I’ve never done a sermon series on money and faith before. Talking about money from the pulpit has always made me nervous. Undoubtedly some of that nervousness is due to my sense of hypocrisy or shame over my own discipleship struggles with unclenching my fists, my family’s fists, in order to give away. It is something Greg and I are constantly working on.

And yet as we also mentioned two Sundays ago, we, as church, must talk about money, if for no other reason than Jesus talked frequently about money. Furthermore, throughout scripture we hear of God’s identification with the poor, those on the margins, the least of these. Since we will be in the Gospel of Luke today, let us look at this Gospel as an example.

The Gospel opens with Mary’s Magnificat—Mary’s song that celebrates God’s great reversal of the haves and the have-nots, and it just keeps going from there. A few other examples from Luke:

God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

Sell your possessions and give alms.

There are still more, but I’ll stop here. Plenty of verses in Luke’s Gospel concentrate on the divide between the poor and the wealthy, as well as on the general topic of money. Today’s passage is no exception.

Listen for God’s word for you: Luke 12:13–21, as translated by Union Presbyterian Seminary New Testament Professor John Carroll:

Someone from the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” But Jesus said to him, “Man, who appointed me judge or divider over you?” And he said to them, “Pay attention; guard yourself against all avarice (greed), because one’s life doesn’t consist in the abundance of possessions.” He told them a parable: “A wealthy man’s field flourished, so he thought to himself, ‘What will I do? For I don’t have a place to gather my crops.’ He said, ‘This is what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my barns and build larger ones, and I’ll gather all the grain and my goods there. I’ll say to myself, Self, you have many goods laid up for many years. Rest yourself, eat, drink, celebrate.’ God said to him, though, ‘Fool, they are going to demand your life from you this night. As for the things you’ve prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with the one who stores up treasure for oneself and is not rich in relation to God.”

This text is one of Jesus’ parables of extremes. He tells it in the context of being interrupted by a man’s desire for Jesus to settle a question of inheritance. Before that interruption, Jesus had been preaching about matters of consequence—the purpose of life, the power of God, the probability of persecution. But then the man from the crowd interjected his own question about a dispute over a family inheritance. And instead of ignoring him, Jesus, always the teacher, decided to use the moment to once again talk about wealth and the responsibilities that come with it.

Before launching into the parable, though, Jesus offered a bit of a teaser: “Pay attention! Guard yourself against all kind of greed; for one’s life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” Frankly, I think we could stay at this one verse for the rest of the sermon and still have plenty with which to wrestle. After all, Jesus’ teaser is not the message, the story, we are constantly getting outside the church walls, is it? The dominant narrative outside the church walls is that we do not have enough. We are not secure. We must get more and more and more.

I am sure many of us remember that old bumper sticker: “The one with the most toys wins.” While the bumper sticker is old, the sentiment behind it is still alive and kicking. Often, if someone is asked if they have enough money, they respond, I need just 10 percent more. It usually does not matter whether the person has $100 or $10,000,000 socked away. Many of us always seem to need just 10 percent more.

A couple of years ago, in 2013, UBS did a study that pointed to that conclusion. Researchers found that 40 percent of those with $5 million dollars of investable assets do not view themselves as rich. And 72 percent of those with $1 million to $5 million said they do not yet have enough to feel wealthy.

Do you hear the echoes of the dominant cultural narrative being reflected in that data—the story of scarcity and fear? Given the responses, the researchers asked people what they considered to be the definition of wealthy. The people polled said that you were only wealthy if you have no financial constraints on what you do (“UBS Investor Watch,” 3Q 2013). Now that seems like an odd definition of wealth—at least it seems that way to me.

Furthermore, that definition could cause us to wonder if any of those polled were people of faith. Their response, after all, begs the question—doesn’t it always matter what we do with wealth or with money? Should we, as Christians, ever reach a place where we feel no constraints on our finances? Or, to turn to the Jesuit theologian again, as people of faith, how should the ways we use and spend our money reflect the claims of the Gospel on our lives?

Let’s turn to the parable as our conversation partner. I am not going to retell it, but I do want to point out a few things. First, in this one, unlike in some of Jesus’ other parables about wealth, Jesus does not indicate the rich man did anything wrong to accumulate the wealth. There is no judgment on the fact that he is one of the haves. Apparently he did not steal, mistreat his workers, or do anything criminal to prosper. Rather, Jesus just states very matter-of-factly that the man’s land produced abundantly.

But after we conclude that, we do hear the first hint of trouble. Did you notice the man was talking to himself the entire time? He asks himself questions, and he answers his questions to himself, saying things like, “I’ll say to myself, Self you have many goods.” The whole thing is comical for a minute, but then it gets rather sad. Why is he the only one with whom he can talk? What happened to his family? Doesn’t he have any friends? Are there even any employees around? What has taken place in his life that has resulted in such isolation?

Might it have been that the landowner had so completely ingested the culture’s dominant narrative of acquisitiveness that his primary focus, his primary purpose in life, became the sole desire to get more and more and more? For the truth is that when one is constantly taking and taking and taking, buying and buying and buying, spending and spending and spending, at some point your hands either become clenched fists that no longer know how to open and give away or they just get so full of empty stuff that one is prevented from being able to hold on to anyone else or to those relationships. There’s simply no room left.

Perhaps something like that happened to the landowner. Clearly somewhere along the way he became the center of his universe, not just knocking God out of that place, but also pushing out any other human being who might have tried to stay in his orbit. We see that reality reflected when we go through his very short speech and count how many times he says “I” and “my.” The landowner uses those personal pronouns eleven times in three verses: These are my crops, my barns, my grain, my goods, my, my, my. In his speech, he does not mention any kind of responsibility for anyone else. He does not mention even considering when it is enough or what financial constraints could be healthy for his life, for his faith. He does not even give a nod to the counter-narrative of scripture. It makes you wonder if he had ever gone to synagogue and heard the Torah. If he had, he must not have paid much attention.

For if the biblical counter-narrative—God’s counter-testimony—had been the primary shaping story of his life, rather than the cultural narrative of acquisitiveness, then the landowner might have remembered all of the passages that talk about the responsibility that comes with abundance or wealth. For example, he would have known the instructions contained in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus about leaving the edges of the fields alone so that the poor and the widows could glean for their survival. And he would have also known that in Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Micah, Amos, the Psalms, etc., God charges the faithful time and time again to care for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. It is what we talked about in the beginning of our sermon: the Bible has a lot to say about money and the faithful use of it.

So had the landowner been steeped in the counter-narrative of scripture rather than in the dominant narrative of culture, he might have caught himself in the middle of all those first-person pronouns and stopped. Perhaps he would have finally remembered that what he had, what he owned, did not actually belong to him. It belonged to his Creator. He just had the honor and privilege of caring for it. Therefore, the landowner’s abundance did not mean it was time to build bigger barns in order to hoard it more effectively. Rather, his abundance meant it was past time to share and to give, to practice unclenching his fists and to open his hands to others. Had he remembered God’s counter-narrative of scripture, the landowner might have even seen his act of giving away as an act of resistance to culture, for by responsibly giving some of that abundance away, he could have publicly embodied his loyalty to the Living God.

But alas, none of that happened for him. Rather, he let culture’s narrative shape him, choosing to hoard it all for himself, and thereby publicly worshiping the lesser powers of scarcity and acquisitiveness that had clearly become his idols (Charles Campbell). Speaking plainly, his singular focus on all that stuff and his total pursuit of it made him forget who and whose he was. It’s no wonder why God renamed him “Fool.”

That is the conclusion that Martin Luther King Jr reached. Here’s how he preached it eight months before he was assassinated:

And so this man justly deserved his title. He was an eternal fool. He allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends for which he lived. . . . This man was a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on others. . . . This man was a fool because he said “I” and “my” so much until he lost the capacity to say “we” and “our.” He failed to realize that he couldn’t do anything by himself. This man talked like he could build the barns by himself, like he could till the soil by himself. And he failed to realize that wealth is always a result of the commonwealth. (Martin Luther King Jr., “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool,” Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute)

And so God renamed the landowner “Fool” and rightly so. “Fool,”God says, “they [perhaps meaning his big barns and all that stuff] they are going to demand your life from you this night. As for the things you’ve prepared, whose will they be?” Whose would they be? There was no one around him anymore. He had said “I” and “my” so much he had lost the capacity for “we” and “our.” So all that stuff he had spent a lifetime getting was just going to end up sitting and rotting and wasting away. All for nothing. No good to anyone. The idols of scarcity and acquisitiveness were shown once again to be completely empty—a lesson he would learn too late. It is sad, really. It kind of makes you wish he had taken more seriously the relationship between what he had and what he believed, what he did and whose he was. Makes you wish he had unclenched his fists to give. May we not be so foolish. Amen.