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 crèche 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.

In God’s economy, what matters most is not how much we earn or how much we have but rather how much we give and why we give. For only those who give money away are truly in control of their wealth. And only those who recognize God as the source of all they own give back with thanksgiving.

Over the years, I have heard several people who grew up in the depression tell me that they were poor but didn’t know they were poor until much later. I think the reason they didn’t know they were poor was because they still found a way to give – whether it was offering a cold drink to a passing stranger or a chicken dinner for the parson. Those who live below the poverty line but still find a way to give never feel poor, while those who have six-figure salaries but can’t part with a dime are always struggling as if they were in poverty.

Years ago, I knew a man who had a seat on the Chicago Commodities Exchange. He engaged in what I later learned to call “day trading.” He would buy and sell futures, buying low and selling high and making a considerable income for he and his family.

When he went on vacation, he told me, he always sold everything he had. At first I thought it was so he could enjoy his time with his family without worrying about the market fluctuations, but as he explained his reasons more fully it became clear that he was actually afraid he’d lose money while he was gone. Money was his real love and passion, not his family.

Like King Midas, his focus was on his wealth. The only joy he found in life was in watching the bottom line. Meanwhile he was losing out on the love of his wife and children.

The man in the parable Jesus tells is only concerned with himself. He speaks to himself. He plans for his own future. He congratulates himself. He never consults with his wife or his children or his broker or his barber. He never offers a prayer of thanksgiving or asks God for wisdom.

Unlike Joseph, who stored grain in years of abundance to provide for the nation in years of famine, this man stores grain only for his own enjoyment. He is a fool, Jesus says, because he thinks he is in control of his possessions when in fact his possessions are in control of him!

The irony of wealth is that when we become less possessive of what we have, our possessions lose their control over us. And when we are in control of our possessions we become more generous because we realize the truth that we actually own nothing – we are merely stewards of what God has given to us.

As we were unloading the moving van, I kept saying, “We’ve got a lot of stuff!” I said it so often Ronda got tired of hearing it.

But the truth is we do have a lot of stuff. Most of you do, too.

This passage reminds us that there are things more important than our “stuff.” And when we forget that, we’re as guilty as the man who asked Jesus to help sort out his parents’ estate and the farmer who began to store up his bumper crop.

But when we remember that all we have really is a gift from God, and that we are merely being asked to be faithful stewards of the things we have, then we are able to express our thanks by being generous and sharing what God has given to us.

God is good. God’s wealth is beyond measure. And God’s bounty has been shared with us.

Let’s not forget what a privilege it is to share God’s abundance so others may experience that wealth along with us.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.