Sermons:
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Reasons to Share
a sermon based on Luke 12:13-21
Rev. Randy L Quinn
I don’t know about you, but this text makes me wince a little. Maybe
more than a little.
I wince because I can remember when everything I owned fit inside my
1979 Oldsmobile Starfire, a two door hatchback. I could fold down the
back seat and put every single thing I owned inside that car. By the
time I moved to Kansas in 1985, just six years later, I needed a small
U-Haul truck towing that same car to carry all of my possessions. And
each time I’ve moved since then I’ve seen the size of the truck
increase. Our personal belongings – not counting what we carried in our
cars and trailer – weighed over 6 tons when we moved here last month.
Over the course of the past 25 years I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff. My
personal library alone includes over 800 different books. They wouldn’t
fit inside that Oldsmobile Starfire – even if it could hold the weight!
And then there is our crčche collection. We own so many that the only
times we’ve had them all out at one time has been in church fellowship
halls, spread out over several different tables!
“A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions,”
Jesus says (Lk 12:15). There is no doubt I have a lot of possessions.
And that makes me wince.
And while there is a tendency in all of us to rationalize and make
excuses for what we own, I honestly don’t think the focus of this
passage is on the possessions of the man, but rather on his own
self-identification with them.
I mean, think about the context in which this story is told.
Someone comes to Jesus and wants him to help resolve an inheritance
issue. Apparently, the estate his parents left was more important to him
than the relationship he had with his brother – and that may have been
true for his brother, too. Clearly the material possessions their
parents left had more impact on them than their love had.
Jesus refuses to take sides. He knows that both sons have turned their
focus on the things in their lives rather than the people in their
lives.
It wasn’t because there was so much of an inheritance to share; it was
their desire to have a larger share than they needed that caused Jesus
to tell the story of the farmer who wanted to hoard his bumper crop.
It really didn’t matter how much or how little their parents were
leaving them, their possessions had begun to possess them.
Like the brother who asked Jesus to intervene in his family dilemma, the
man in the parable had crossed the line between owning things and
allowing things to own him. Jesus is suggesting that the brothers who
were dividing their parents’ estate were allowing the possessions to
determine how they lived and how they interacted with one another rather
than their lives determining what possessions they had and how they were
to be used and distributed. Like the man in the parable, they were
allowing their possessions – or their lack of them – to measure their
worth.
The temptation we all face is to measure our lives by the stuff we own –
by the size of our home or the balance in our retirement fund. Some of
us measure worth by the number of acres surrounding our homes while
others measure it by how many pairs of shoes are in our closets. Some
use jewelry and some use cars. But the temptation is real, no matter how
much or how little we own.
That’s true in part because the society in which we live tends to
measure our worth in financial terms, not spiritual or emotional terms.
There are annual lists of who the richest people in the world are,
measured in billions of dollars, but there are few reports of who are
the wisest people in the world or the most loving people in the world or
even the most generous people in the world.
A common American fantasy begins with the question, “What would you do
if you won the lottery?” Rarely do we ask the question, “How do you want
people to remember you after you die?”
And that makes me wince, too.
I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that the parable Jesus tells seems
to be an extended illustration of a text in what we call the Apocrypha.
It may not be familiar to us, but I suspect those who heard Jesus speak
would have recognized the background of his story from the book of
Sirach:
Good things and bad, life and death, poverty and wealth, come from the
Lord. The Lord’s gift remains with the devout, and his favor brings
lasting success. One becomes rich through diligence and self-denial, and
the reward allotted to him is this: when he says, “I have found rest and
now I shall feast on my goods!” he does not know how long it will be
until he leaves them to others and dies (Sir 11:14-17).
The point of the passage in Sirach, especially when read in its larger
context, seems to be that we need to trust God to provide for us, not
our own hard work – although trusting in God may also involve hard work
on our part. [continue]
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