Hosea 11:1-11   Psalm 107:1-9, 43    Brueggemann, “Giver of All Good Gifts”   Luke 12:13-21

You Can’t Take It With You

 Sherman Hesselgrave

There are some people who think of the Bible as a book that has all the answers. I long ago came to see the Bible as a book that helps us to consider the most important questions. I was curious to see how many actual questions there are in the Bible, and it is now very easy to discover. All you have to do is go to a Bible browser—I used Oremus, which uses the text of the New Revised Standard Version—and instead of searching for a word, I searched for question marks.  There are a total of 2,887 in the whole Bible, and 832 in the New Testament. Many are great questions, some posed by Jesus, some by those he encounters, and later on, by his disciples and the people they encounter. For instance:

• Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? (Mt 7:3)

• Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? (Mark 10:7)

• The [Samaritan] woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” (John 4:11)

• What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves? (Luke 9:25)

 

That last question from a few chapters earlier in Luke’s gospel anticipates today’s reading, which contains three more questions:

 

• [Jesus asks] Who appointed me to be your judge or your arbitrator?

• [The rich man with overflowing barns asks] What am I to do?

• [And Jesus again] This very night your life will be demanded of you; and this stockpile of yours—whose will it be then?

 

As we bring this ancient encounter into the midst of our circle and probe it for what it has to say to us today, we have observations and, perhaps, a few questions of our own.

 

It starts off with a younger brother, who has a beef with his elder brother, who, apparently, is not dividing up the family estate in the prescribed way, and he wants Jesus to intervene on his behalf. Jesus responds testily, who knows why?; perhaps, because anyone who has been following Jesus for any time at all would have probably heard stories about Jesus’ attitude towards earthly wealth and possessions and their power over us, so he needed to expeditiously disabuse this fellow of his misperceptions.

 

At any rate, Jesus uses the prompt to pivot and tell a memorable parable about a rich man who has had such a good harvest that his silos have run out of room. One thing one notices immediately is that the rich man’s conversation is not only entirely an interior conversation with himself, but there is really no regard for anyone else, although, admittedly, eating, drinking, and being merry might conceivably involve other people, but, as the parable makes it seem, primarily for the rich man’s own hedonistic satisfaction. Then, of course, because most parables have a twist at the end, or, in this instance, a firm yank on the choke chain: we have the notice that the rich man has an appointment with the grim reaper that very night. Jesus concludes with this summary: “That is how [it is] for those who store things up for themselves—but are not rich in what matters to God.”

 

So we, who might have an interest in being “rich in what matters to God,” may be thinking what does that entail?

 

What does it mean to be “rich in what matters to God?”  

When a lawyer came to Jesus, asking, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asked him “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And then commended the lawyer when he responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” This “summary of the law,” as it has come to be called, embraces all of the Ten Commandments in shorthand, including the individual commandments about honouring God, and how we are to treat our neighbours—for example, no murder, no adultery, no stealing, no coveting, no bearing false witness.

 

Jesus’ entire ministry was dedicated to spelling out what matters to God, from his first sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, to all the sayings in the Sermon on the Mount, to his disputations with the Scribes, Pharisees, and Saducees.  Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar? Show me a coin… Whose image is on it? Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s.  Or, let the one who is without sin cast the first stone at the woman caught in adultery. Or the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, who were all paid the same day’s wage, no matter what time they started work (a biblical example of income equality—though not everyone thought of it as fair).

 

Some of you may know the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song, “Alfie”:

What’s it all about, Alfie?

Is it just for the moment we live?

What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?

Are we meant to take more than we give

Or are we meant to be kind?

And if only fools are kind, Alfie,

Then I guess it’s wise to be cruel.

And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,

What will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,

I know there’s something much more,

Something even non-believers can believe in.

I believe in love, Alfie.

The song acknowledges the tension we live in in Post-Christendom: we may know or have a vague recollection of the ethical demands of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but so many of the messages we receive from the surrounding culture completely contradict them.

 

Steven Greenhouse, in a New York Times  [July 27, 2013] recently wrote a column entitled “Fighting Back Against Wretched Wages,” in which he writes about the Caterpillar company, which recently made news in Canada for closing plants:

Caterpillar has pioneered two-tier wage systems, in which workers hired after a certain date are consigned to a significantly lower wage scale than others, and it recently pressed its longer-term employees into accepting a six-year wage freeze. Many Caterpillar workers ask why the company insisted on a pay freeze when it reported repeated record profits — $5.7 billion last year, amounting to $45,000 per Caterpillar employee.

Caterpillar’s chief executive, Douglas Oberhelman (whose compensation has increased more than 80 percent over the last two years), says the freeze was vital to keep wages competitive with rival companies. “I always try to communicate to our people that we can never make enough money,” he recently told Bloomberg Businessweek. “We can never make enough profit.”

The Occupy Wall street movement has drawn attention to the ever increasing disparity of income in North American society.  A few years ago, two British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, wrote a book entitled, The Spirit Level, in which they posit that “societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are worse for everyone in them—including the well-off.” [Book cover]  By looking at data from dozens of countries, they correlated indices for a wide range of health and social problems—like Trust, Life expectancy, Infant Mortality, Obesity, Mental illness, Education scores, Teenage birth rate, Homicides, Imprisonment, and Social mobility—and demonstrated that countries where income inequality is the greatest tend to score worse than countries where income inequality is less. The authors and others set up The Equality Trust “to educate and campaign on the benefits of a more equal society.” It is a resource for continuing this provocative conversation. The book also includes a nearly 40-page chapter called Building the Future, which proposes some routes to greater equality and names corporate power as the “elephant in the living room.”

What can we do?

The rich man in today’s parable asked himself, “What can I do?”  He wasn’t asking what he could do to help heal the brokenness in the world beyond his ken, but how to hoard his largesse for his own future security.

 

It seems to me that one of the ways that we can become “rich in what matters to God” is to look at how we can be a part of healing the breach between rich and poor. We can use our individual political influence. We can look at our own financial resources and how we invest them in the spread of social justice, whether that is through a faith community or by supporting those who are directly engaged with taking on the various elephants in the living room, or other ways. We can consider using some of our volunteer time to work on this intentionally. We could read The Spirit Level, if we haven’t already. What is today’s gospel asking you to be or do in the coming week?

 

I close with these words of Walter Brueggemann from today’s second reading, “Giver of All Good Gifts” from his book Prayers for a Privileged People. It is the cure for the disease the rich man in today’s parable suffered from, and which we, too, may be familiar with in our own or our families’ lives:

 

“Stir us by your spirit beyond fearful accumulation

toward outrageous generosity.”