A Barnful of God

Sermon

My pastor friend Nanette says, “As Christians we are confronted with making our Christian faith relevant to how we live our lives. Our faith is not just concerned with saving our individual souls. Our Christian tradition is concerned with making us better persons and calling us to moral behavior, calling us to discern the right thing and do the right thing, calling us to work toward the commonwealth of God, the kingdom of God that Jesus talks about.”

And so in today’s parable we have a moral teaching that can be summed up in a few short sentences. “Don’t be greedy. You can’t take it with you.”

As one preacher commented on this text, why did Jesus need to tell the crowd—and us—that? Isn’t it obvious?

The second line, yes. Death finds us all, and if indeed there is an afterlife (and I hope there is) then none of the stuff we’ve accumulated in our span of years will come with us.

But the immorality of greed seems to be forgotten by some. Certainly by the man in the parable. His foolishness was not that he had a bumper crop. Rather, his foolishness was rooted in the lack of love for neighbor and God with regards to his bumper crop.

It’s safe to assume that the man of the parable followed the same Jewish laws as the crowd that Jesus speaks to. Therefore, the man would know the Ten Commandments and all the laws in Leviticus. He would remember that his ancestors believed in not harvesting the corners of the field so that the poor could glean them and thus have something to eat. He would remember the abiding concern for the widow and orphan, for those who had no means of security.

He would remember, perhaps, the words God speaks to Job, reminding him that God, and not Job, created all that is and is responsible for feast and famine alike.

But no, the man does not act on those moral traditions. Instead, it’s all about him—my crops, my harvest, my bounty, my barns, my life.

Remember that Jesus tells the parable in response to the question from a guy in the crowd. Again, we can assume that this guy follows the Jewish faith. He might even remember Psalm 133, which says, “How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!” But evidently getting his fair share of the inheritance is more important than getting along with his brother.

And Jesus will have none of it, and I find that interesting. “Who made me the judge between you and your brother?” It’s like the weary parent who, upon hearing yet another plea for intervention in a fight between two siblings, says, “Figure it out yourselves.”

I think what is at the heart of all of this—greed, sibling disagreement, Jesus as judge, selfishness, remembering the laws we’ve been taught from birth—I think at the heart of all of this is the nature of our relationship with God and our relationships with each other. Because I believe that our relationships with each other say a whole lot about our relationship with God.

How do we people of the Christian faith live moral lives? How would Jesus have us live?

There’s a story that’s been in and out of the news for the past few months that may have relevance in all of this. You may have read the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, is building a three-masted schooner that will cost him pocket change, only $500 million. The problem is in order to move the boat from its building site to the sea, a historic bridge in Rotterdam would need to be dismantled and rebuilt. The company building the ship would take care of all the costs, but still…

The people of Rotterdam are up in arms about the whole thing. And it’s a matter of principle for them, folks who are steeped in the traditions of John Calvin, who espoused a morality that includes conscientiousness, frugality, and self-discipline. As one Rotterdam resident said, “What can you buy if you have unlimited cash? Can you bend every rule? Can you take apart monuments?” (The New York Times, “The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht,” July 30, 2022.)

I see Jesus easily including this yacht fiasco in his parable. I think about what else could be done with $500 million, or the billions of dollars spent on political campaigns, or the hundred bucks or so a month that I spend at Starbucks.

What do we do with what we have? How do we acknowledge that every blessing we receive, be it in the form of kindness, money, generosity, or forgiveness, is meant to be shared?

Let me tell you a different story. Last weekend Gregg and I attended a fundraiser for an organization called African Road (africanroad.org), which works with small programs in six countries in east Africa to empower people to have better lives. We’re not talking building bigger barns. We’re talking about having the means to provide at least two meals a day.

One of the guests at the event was a woman named Consoler Wilbert, who runs one of the programs African Road supports. She was the victim of modern-day slavery. An orphan, she was taken in by a relative as a young child and forced to work without pay and without any sort of freedom. Years later she was able to escape and promised that she would do whatever she could to help other girls in the same situation. And so she started the program simply called “New Hope for Girls.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRw5eLb3oOM)

To date, she and her husband have taken in 58 girls who were victims of human trafficking, child marriage, and gender-based violence. They have brought them into their small home—their house. These girls go to school. They have food to eat. They are loved. I do not know if the woman who started this is Christian; I think she is. And I think her generosity is exactly what Jesus calls us to.

The story of New Hope for Girls is a beautiful one and easy to tell because you and I don’t have a part in creating the harm that these girls have suffered. It is the story of pain and healing on the other side of the globe. Jesus would want us to look at this parable a little closer to home.

Knowing the morals that our faith teaches us and living by them are two different things. We know we are called to be generous, to think of others as much or more than we think of ourselves. We know we are to give credit where it’s due, to acknowledge that there is very little we accomplish all by ourselves.

Living out our faith is a choice we face every single day. Back in the ’90s, there was a pithy saying with jewelry to match it: what would Jesus do? Or a better way to think of it: what would Jesus have us do? If we say we follow Jesus, then we have to get up off our duffs and move, respond, act in love and generosity.

So on this hot summer morning, in this very warm sanctuary, let me ask you to consider a few things.

In the midst of this heatwave, what does generosity to neighbor look like? Maybe inviting someone to stay in your air-conditioned home if theirs is not. Or passing out bottles of cold water to those living on the streets. Or bringing popsicles to the splash pads in our parks.

When you have a success, what does acknowledgment of others look like? There’s a reason people who win Academy Awards thank their mothers and their agents and their high school drama teachers. What have you achieved lately, and who helped you to get there? Might you write them a note thanking them?

And when you die, what will you have to show for your life? I don’t know if that’s how the afterlife works, if God judges each of us one at a time. But whatever happens to us after we take our last breath, what is the legacy we leave? Is it a legacy of stuff, of collectibles that our heirs will have to deal with? Or is it a legacy of love and grace?

Of course Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an extraordinary sermon on this very text, delivered in Detroit in 1961 as part of a Lenten sermon series. Allow me to give him the last word.

“…all life is interrelated. We are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in the world, no man can be totally rich, even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from Mayo Clinic. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way the world is made.” (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/man-who-was-fool-sermon-delivered-detroit-council-churches-noon-lenten#🙂

So may each of us live fully in this commonwealth of God. Amen.