Changing the Subject

 Luke 12:13-21

My Dad’s mother, known as Grandma Dorothy, was a very unique person. On the one hand, she was incredibly loving to me and to all her other grandchildren. But on the other hand, she suffered from such serious and untreated depression, that she was incredibly difficult and demanding of her three sons—especially my father, the eldest son. Her boys could never do enough to please their mother. 

 But during the last few years of her life, Grandma Dorothy had a series of small strokes.  We saw two major changes as a result of those strokes. First, Grandma Dorothy forgot she was a smoker. One of those strokes knocked the addiction right out of her. Second, Grandma Dorothy became kind and gentle. Somehow, those little strokes altered her brain chemistry just enough to release her from the mental illness that had held her captive for so long. And as a result, we all enjoyed being around her and her sons could make some peace with their mother and their past.

During that time of peace, it soon became clear that it was time for hospice care. My father, the always-responsible eldest son, the Presbyterian minister, sat by her bedside.  I sat in the room and listened. “Mom,” he began, “we need to start talking with you about what you want to happen as you grow weaker, and as you move closer to the time of being taken back to God.”  Dad continued on for about five minutes, saying just the right things with gentleness and grace. And when he stopped talking, Grandma Dorothy looked at him in the eyes, grinned a bit, and said, “Boy, spaghetti sure sounds good right now!” Dad and I fell over laughing. It was so obvious that Grandma had absolutely no desire to talk about all of that death and dying stuff. It was too serious, too scary, too much reality. She didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t want to consider what he was saying. And so she asked about lunch.

 Jesus had the crowds gathered around him by the thousands.  And as they settled in, Jesus began to preach a very serious sermon on a very serious topic—fear. “Do not fear those who will kill the body,” he said.  “When you are brought before the authorities because of me, don’t worry about how to defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say…” As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Jesus is getting down to the basics of how to survive the middle-of-the night panics—the times when you wake up in the middle of the night and cannot go back to sleep for all of the fears that take turns sitting on your chest.[i]”

 Jesus was preaching a serious sermon.  And right then, right in the middle of all those people, right at the moment when Jesus was hitting his sermonic stride and the cadence of his voice was at a crescendo, and people were starting to respond with Amen’s and preach it, right in the middle of all that, a man interrupts: “Teacher,” he began, “tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” That man might as well have stated “Boy, spaghetti sure sounds good right now!”

 Jesus had been preaching about serious stuff—the purpose of life—the power of God—the probability of persecution-- and this guy interrupts him with a dispute over a family inheritance. Why?  Was it because all this serious faith talk was scaring the dickens out of him and he didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t listen for another minute? Was it because the more Jesus spoke about the cost of faith and the provisions of God, the more the man’s anxiety level rose?  So he mentally sprinted to what he thought would make him feel safer—getting his part of the inheritance. 

 Perhaps the man thought that if he could just put his hands on the stuff that was his, count the coins left for his future, trade the stocks in his IRA to earn higher returns, then he would not feel as scared, as broken, as shaky as he felt at that moment. Maybe he just needed to get his hands on that which he could touch, count, and trade. Perhaps he hoped that would calm him down. Perhaps he hoped that would fix what was broken. Perhaps those needs were why he interrupted Jesus.

 But regardless of why he asked the question, Luke helps us see that it was not the smartest move. Maybe Jesus laughed like Dad and I did after Grandma Dorothy’s response, but somehow, given all that follows in the story, I doubt that laughter was Jesus’ first reaction. “Friend,” Jesus responded, “I am not about to serve as the executor of your estate.” And then Jesus decided to launch into a teaching moment and told the crowd, man included, the parable of the rich fool.  You’ve already heard it read aloud, so I won’t retell it.  But I do want to point out a few things that catch my attention. 

 First, I think it is important that we notice that Jesus does not indicate in any way that the rich man did anything wrong in order to get richer. Unlike other parables about wealth, this man did not steal, or mistreat his workers, or do anything criminal in order to prosper. Jesus simply stated that the man’s land produced abundantly. The landowner seems to be in the clear.  So far, so good.

 But then, as Jesus continued, we immediately get the first sign of trouble. Scholar Kenneth Bailey points out that once this wealthy man had finally arrived, had finally “made it,” according to the rating system of our world, it was time for him to make a victory speech.  That would have been customary.  And a speech, of course, requires an audience.  So, it was time for the man to gather up his community, his family, his friends for his big moment. 

 But, according to the parable, who came?  Do we hear about any family?  No.  Okay then, what about friends.  Does he have any friends around who will join the party?  No?  Alright then.  At least we can get the servants and their families to come over.  They have already gone home and refuse?  Hmmm…  Well surely there are a few village elders down by the gate just sitting around who will come and listen.  Right?  No.  Fellow landowners?  No.  Anyone, anyone? 

 Where is the community for this guy?  According to the parable, his community is nowhere to be found.  No one else seems to be there.  The only person this man has to talk to is himself.  Which makes you kind of wonder if maybe, in his desire to grasp and hoard more and more and more stuff, that he had pushed away and let go of more and more relationships.   

 But his isolation is just one sign of trouble.  Did you hear what he said to himself?  I am not sure how you heard it, but it struck me as being just a bit self-absorbed.  As a matter of fact, if you go through his short speech and circle the words “I” and “my”, you discover that in his very short conversation with himself, he used the word “I” six times and the word “my” five times[ii]. “These are my crops, my barns, my grains, my goods, my, my, my.”

 And his radical narcissism and selfishness leads us to the third sign of trouble.  It appears that the man is suffering from serious biblical memory loss. From what he said, or rather, what he did not say, we can conclude that he no longer had any memory of the stories he grew up hearing—stories about God who brought his people out of the land of Egypt and told them to always leave the edges of the fields so the widows and orphans could glean for their survival. The landowner seemed to have no recollection of all those Scriptures that taught him whenever you have more than enough, it is past time to share with those barely hanging on.

 But probably the most telling of all, in the face of such abundant goodness, the man did not devote one single, solitary brain cell to the task of offering a word of gratitude to his God from whom all blessings come. There is absolutely no mention of thankfulness.  There is absolutely no mention of God.  All the man could say was I, I, I, and My, My, My. 

 But Jesus had some other things to say.  “Fool” Jesus quoted God as saying. “This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” It could indeed be that Jesus was saying “Fool, didn’t you know that you can’t take it with you? There are no pockets in a shroud. There is not a U-Haul behind a hearse.” That is certainly one way we can hear Jesus’ words.  That is probably how many of us have heard the parable preached before.

 But I want to offer another possibility, too.  A different possibility—a possibility some of us talked about in the bible study last Wednesday.  A professor helped me see that another, maybe even more accurate way to translate “this very night your life is being demanded of you” is to translate it, “This night, they are demanding your very life from you.” For the subject of the verb “demanded” is actually third person plural—an implied “they.[iii]” “This night, they are demanding your very life from you.” And so, if we make that translation decision, we must ask: who or what is the “they” of this sentence? It seemed to me and to the Sharing the Word group that in the context of the story, the answer is all the stuff the rich man had hoarded in his new barns. The “they” is all that stuff that he decided would be only for himself, for his life, for his delight, for his enjoyment.

 You could actually translate that verse as “Fool! This night they shall require your very life from you; now who owns whom?” 

 For don’t you just know that after he got all that stuff and stuck it in those bigger barns, he would find himself awake at night, worried that somebody might get in there and steal it? He would be by himself in the dark, no one else around, feeling the weight of the fear of losing it all sitting squarely on his chest, scared to death because he thought that all that stuff in those big barns was all he had left in the world. He thought all that stuff was the only thing that gave any meaning to his life anymore. Accumulating all that stuff had become his entire and small purpose for being.

In his relentless grasping for more and more stuff, he had let go of more and more relationships.  In his relentless grasping for more and more stuff, he had let go of the memories of his faith. In his relentless grasping for more and more stuff, he had let go of God’s call for justice and generosity.  In his relentless grasping for more and more stuff, he had even let go the basic knowledge that it all belonged to God first and he might want to say “thank you” every once in a while. And at some point, in his relentless grasping for more and more stuff, he had unknowingly even let go of his power of being the one who owned it so that now, all of that stuff actually owned him.

 “Fool! This night they shall require your life from you; now who owns whom?

So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.”

So it is with those who forget from whom all blessings flow.

So it is with those who forget that abundance is a gift intended by God to be shared.

So it is with those who base their security, their self-worth, their sense of purpose on how much stuff they can stick in bigger and better barns.

So it is with those who lose touch with the demands of their faith and the responsibility that comes with wealth.

“So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.”

Boy—spaghetti sure sounds good right now!