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August
8, 2004 (Jimmie Johnson) Luke 12:13-21 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.” --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ministers, like school teachers, social workers, and policemen, get nervous when called in to settle a family dispute. And I bet you don’t like it either when your phone rings and it is your mom saying, “Tell your father to straighten up, or I am going to leave him.” Your adult child calls, and his first words are, “Dad, your other son, my brother, is acting like a jerk. I need you to tell him to back off.” Most of us know that getting tri-angled into a family squabble is a no-win situation. One day Jesus got a call: “Jesus, I need you to come over here now and straighten my brother out.” An un-named man comes to Jesus asking him to settle an inheritance squabble. Jesus shows no interest at all in what the man is asking. Jesus looks right past him to tell you and me and all the Christians who have gone before us and who will come after us a story about another man. It’s a story about a very successful man who was a great provider but a failure as a father, a story about a man with big plans and a bad ticker, a man whose grown children clearly have no sense of what is important and what is not when it comes to life and death. Whether we have children or not, it is a story to the church crowd about being Christian in a material culture gone haywire with bigger is better. The brother could have called Jesus on the phone and said, “My dad died. Can you help me?” Instead, the request is: “Jesus, tell my brother to give me my share of Dad’s money.” Do you think when Jesus tells the parable of the builder of bigger barns that in a strange way Jesus is teaching us something about parenting and discipleship? Is Jesus telling us something about wisdom and foolishness when it comes to building a successful life in the midst of a consumer culture? Is he telling us to think long and hard about what we intend to leave our children? All this man wanted from Jesus after his dad’s death was more of his dad’s stuff. This tells me a lot about the way this deceased man was a father. He didn’t leave his children anything relating to character, values, or morals, or a hunger for mystery and questions. The brother who came to Jesus didn’t say anything about how he and his brother will always remember their father’s faith and love, how their dad taught them to ask really big questions about the purpose of life. No, this sibling only wanted Jesus to help him get more of his old man’s stuff. There is nothing about God or what is important in life, nothing about perspective or a sense of proportion. There is just the desire for more stuff. What you are going to leave your children? Jesus tells a story about a hugely successful man on whose grave stone is carved the words: “Here lies a fool.” He could have left his children the gift of gratitude, the wisdom of seeing each day as a gift. He could have left his children the love of God and neighbor. He could have left his children the love of family and friends. He could have left his children a sense of finding life’s larger purposes. He could have left them so much. All he left them was everything but what is really important. He left them a whole bunch of stuff and a couple of weeks in court to fight over his will. Jesus brushes off the un-named sibling and doesn’t even acknowledge the brother is there. He talks to us instead about someone who built and built and accumulated and acquired and on his tombstone they carved: “Here lies a fool.” A fool is simply someone who doesn’t know what is important in life until it is too late. Fools are born and die every day. What does it tell us about us when so many of us are working ourselves to death or right out of a marriage or out of a family? What does it tell us about our nation when the hottest shows on television this fall are expected to be shows hosted by the likes of Donald Trump and Mark Cuban, both shows about becoming millionaires? I think Jesus is talking to our culture this morning. But I also believe Jesus’ words about bigger and bigger leading to foolishness are applicable to what Christian parents are teaching their children about church as well. What are we teaching our children about church membership if we teach them that somehow mega-churches are the better measurement of God’s presence in a congregation? What are we teaching our children about church membership if we teach them that you approach church membership as you do any shopping trip? Are we teaching our children to think of church not as the place and people to serve God but the place where you get your needs met? I think there are a lot of churches that are passing on to their children the idea that church consists of being like a club where the bigger the facilities and the more indulging the programming, the better the church. Someday in this culture, mark my words, there will be a lot of lifeless huge church buildings that have a sign stuck on their closed doors: “Here was a church of egotistical fools with even a bigger fool for a pastor.” They could have passed on abundant life and instead failed to teach their children about proportion and perspective and when enough is enough. They could have passed on to their children how church is a place where we learn to love God and people and about sacrifice, a counter-cultural value, rather than church being a place where we go to be entertained or spiritually pampered and indulged. But you and I didn’t come here to ask about how to get more stuff or be a more successful church institution, did we? We came here to listen to the Jesus story raise questions about who is my neighbor, am I my brother or sister’s keeper, questions about what to do with our lives for a purpose other than ourselves, questions that cause serious self-examination with the courageous willingness to change our thinking, our feelings and our behavior. Good for us! I thought questions like that brought us here. We are different from the un-named brother squabbling over an inheritance, and we are different, too, from the builder of bigger barns, the one called a fool. You and I are different, aren’t we? They aren’t going to write “Here lies a fool” on our tombstone, are they? Someday they are not going to stick a sign on the front of our church saying: “They were a foolish bunch with greater fools for pastors.” No, they are not going to do any such thing, are they? The strange thing about being a fool is you never know it until it is too late. Wow, Jesus can be a hard case! What time is it in your life? Too late or almost too late? Everything rides on your answer. And, don’t kid yourself. You know the answer. |
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