"There will never be enough money when you follow what is right" : Sermon for Sunday 4 August 2019

Sermon for Sunday 4 August 2019

Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem

The Rev. Carrie Ballenger

Luke 12:13-21

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

As you know, I just returned from a two-week trip to the US to visit family and friends, and while I did many fun things there—and ate plenty of things—I also spent a significant amount of time shopping. 

After all, I needed a new laptop. I wanted some clothes for the yoga classes I started recently. And I needed good walking shoes for the trip I’m taking in September, when I’ll be walking a portion of the Camino de Santiago through France. Of course, there are also the bars of soap I can’t find in Jerusalem, gifts for friends, and some random things that wouldn’t fit in my son’s suitcase. As I was packing it all up to come back home to Jerusalem, I looked at my overstuffed suitcases and thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of stuff. Do I really need all this stuff?”

The late comedian George Carlin had a very funny monologue about the stuff in our lives and the things we do to manage it. (thanks to Cynthia Briggs Kittredge for including this bit in her commentary this week)

Carlin said:

“You got your stuff with you? I’ll bet you do. Guys have stuff in their pockets; women have stuff in their purses. . . . Stuff is important. You gotta take care of your stuff. You gotta have a place for your stuff. That’s what life is all about, tryin’ to find a place for your stuff! That’s all your house is; a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you ­wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time.

A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down and see all the little piles of stuff. Everybody’s got his own little pile of stuff.”

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus tells a parable about a man whose pile of stuff was so abundant he decided to build a bigger cover for it all.

As it is written, the man with abundant crops “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.”

Now one lesson of this story is simply that life is about more than stuff. “You can’t take it with you”, it’s often said. This is not a bad lesson, and one we need to hear often. We could all buy less, use less, live with less.

But really, Jesus’ parable has a lot more to teach us.

On Friday morning, as I was working on this sermon, I received an email from our Lutheran benefit services saying “Carrie, it’s time to check your retirement account!” When I clicked on the link, it took me to a page with helpful information including a section called “How much is enough?” Now, I am grateful that our denomination takes good care of its pastors, providing us with health insurance and contributing to our retirement funds. But I had a good chuckle at the thought that they sent this email to every American Lutheran pastor this week, while we’re all working on sermons about the rich fool who put his trust in what was, essentially, his retirement account.

How much is enough, indeed? It’s not a bad thing to plan for the future, to make smart investment decisions, to save for college or retirement or a rainy day. Money is not the problem. Our stuff, in itself, is not sinful.

Jesus, after all, doesn’t say the man was a fool for having too much stuff, or even for building barns for his stuff. In the parable, God calls him a fool for putting his trust in his stuff, for thinking that his abundance made his life secure. He was a fool for completing his building project and then saying to himself, “Soul, now you can eat, drink and be merry.”

And this is really the point of Jesus’ parable: that our stuff, our money, our savings, our houses, our cars, all too often take the place of God in our lives. This is a parable about idolatry.

How much is enough? Is there ever enough? While it is good to have enough to pay for health care, for adequate housing, for healthy food—and these things do give the wealthy a better chance at living more days than those who live in poverty—the truth is that there is no amount of money that will ever guarantee tomorrow. You can’t ever save enough to ward off aging, or to protect against your children experiencing heartbreak. You can’t buy enough insurance to ensure you will never get sick and you’ll live forever.

Everything we have belongs to God…all our stuff. All our lives. And all our tomorrows. As it is written in Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it.”

For this reason, God said to the man, ‘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.”

So what does it mean to be rich toward God? It’s a strange phrase, isn’t it? It could mean sharing what we have been given with others. For sure, this is part of Jesus’ teachings—that the hungry will only be fed if we do the work of feeding them. That the sick will only be well if we heal them. In my house, I have a framed postcard of a well-known early-20^th century African-American midwife, who is quoted as saying,

“There will never be enough money when you follow

what is right.”

There will never be enough money when you follow what is right...

But we become rich toward God when we follow Jesus in giving our very selves away for the sake of others. 

It makes me recall the passage in Philippians chapter 2, where it is written:

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross.”

Looking around this room, I don’t see many truly wealthy people. Though I could be wrong! Like me, you probably don’t have tons of money or large barns of stuff. But what most of us do possess in abundance is privilege. I see a lot of education in this room. And American passports. I see white skin. And men. And people who have had the opportunity to see the world.

All of this, too, belongs to God. Yes even our gender. Our class. Our whiteness. Our fancy degrees we worked so hard to earn.

What do you suppose Jesus calls us to do with this kind of abundance? What would it mean to be “rich toward God” using the privilege we possess?

Waking up this morning to the news of yet another mass shooting in the United States, one of my first thoughts was: "How can I be involved in dismantling white supremacy and gun violence?" Walking to church past soldiers standing in guard stations at Damascus Gate, I wondered what else could I do to bring down the wall and end the occupation. And as I put on my clergy collar this morning, as usual I had some thoughts about how much more I could do to smash the patriarchy…

You see, the point of the parable, and of Jesus’ teaching, is not to feel bad about having stuff. We are not fools for possessing privilege. But we are fools if we, as disciples of Jesus, are not using whatever we have for the building up of God's kingdom. We are fools when we become what Martin Luther called incurvatus in se—turned in upon ourselves, staring at our navels, worried only about our own livelihoods, our own security, or our own joy.

But we become rich toward God when we are asking ourselves—when we are asking the Holy Spirit—what we can give of ourselves for the sake of the Gospel of love. We become rich toward God when we choose, instead of building bigger barns to protect our stuff, or higher walls to protect our own security, to build bridges to peace. To create just and equal communities. To protect the vulnerable. When we share, when we forgive, when we love others as we have been loved.

And then, we can say to our souls, “Soul, now you can eat and drink and be merry.” Not because we have some stuff, but because we know some stuff. We know who holds tomorrow—a loving God, whom we have come to know through the radical teaching and self-emptying work of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. 

May the peace of Christ which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.