This morning we’re going to have a pop
quiz. Question one: How many times does Jesus teach about sex in
the Bible? And the answer is … zero. Well, he does say that thing about a man
looking at a woman with lust in his heart having already committed
adultery. And he condemns divorce except on grounds of adultery, but
overall, he’s silent on the subject of sex. But a lot of modern Christians obsess about
sex . . . questions of Christian morality have been largely reduced in this
country to who’s sleeping with whom, or what’s sleeping with what.
Look at a recent, major controversy in the
Presbyterian church, and in the Episcopal and Methodist and Lutheran churches .
. . it was all about sex, all about “chastity in singleness and fidelity in
marriage,” but we all know who it was aimed at, don’t we? So here’s question number two: How many times
does Jesus preach against homosexuality in Scripture? Zero,
of course . . . it was a topic that wasn’t even on his radar screen. How you doing? Have you gotten the answers right so
far? Only one more question . . . How
many times does Jesus preach about money
in the Scripture? Take your time . . . anybody
know the Jeopardy theme? . . . Oh, sorry, you’re time is up. And the answer is . . . I don’t know! It depends on how you count. But various scholars say that between forty
and seventy percent of Jesus’ teaching is about money, depending on how you
count. Forty to seventy percent!
And we Presbyterians get riled up if the preacher talks about it more
than once a year!
And the question is . . . why? Why do American Christians spend so much time
on questions of personal morality when Christ spends so little – as in close to
zero? If we are faithfully preaching
Christ’s message, why aren’t we preaching forty to seventy percent of the time
about money? Well, one of the reasons
is preachers learn early on not to do that, ‘cause folks don’t like it . . .
some will just up and leave the church over it and find one that makes them
feel good about themselves all the time rather than nagging them for spare
change.
Well.
Today is one of those passages,
one of those money passages, and it’s
embedded in a larger section of teaching on being prepared for the end times –
or for the end of an individual’s time
on earth, anyway – and Jesus had just got finished telling them: “Are not five
sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God's sight
. . . Don’t be afraid; you’re of more value than many sparrows.” Don’t worry so much, he’s saying . . . God’ll
take care of you, just like the sparrows . . . and don’t worry about what to
say in the synagogues, when you are brought before the chief magistrates,
either . . . trust in the Holy Spirit, and she’ll teach you what to say.
And into the middle of this, some guy from
the crowd interrupts: “Teacher,” he says, “tell my brother to divide the family
inheritance with me.” Seems this guy
thought that Jesus was like an old time Israelite judge, who sat in the gates
and settled dispute, that he could arbitrate quarrels over who gets grandma’s
silver flatware or uncle Chuck’s big-screen TV.
But Jesus reacts strongly: “Friend, who set me to be a judge or
arbitrator over you?” He didn’t want any
part of their squabbles over money, he wasn’t going to take this guy’s side . .
.
But even though we should know better , we
seem always to try to get God to take our side, or claim that God is already on our side . . . whether it’s
theological, as in who ordains who, or monetary, or even military: many is the national leader who has justified
going to war at least in part because
God was on their side. But notice what
Jesus says here: “Who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” I’m not taking sides, here, and with that
statement, he provides a theological background for the entire passage: it was
commonly thought that success in life – abundant crops, many cattle, wealth –
were due to the favor of God . . . but Jesus says he’s not going to take sides here . . . and that implies God’s own
self, because looking at Jesus, after all, was like looking at God.
“Take care,” he says, “Be on your guard against
all kinds of greed,” and he pictures greed as a ravening beast, that will
pounce on us unawares, and take over if we don’t watch out. But there’s not just one greed, there are all
kinds of greed, lurking out there in the tall-grass, waiting to seduce us, to
take us in . . . it skulks around the market stalls, around the department
stores, with their glittering displays . . . it lurks in the TV commercials,
where glittering people sell glittering things, implying buy this and you’ll be
just like me . . . and it waits for the young man who asked him to step into
his family squabble, and he tells him “Your life does not consist in the
abundance of possessions.”
And he launches into a parable, an illustration of his saying: “The land of
a rich man produced abundantly” and the first thing we should notice is that
there’s no hint of scandal . . . we don’t hear that the man worked his servants
to the bone, that he cheated the poor out of their wages, or that he got his
wealth by anything other than hard work, and we all know what hard work farming
can be, but this year the crops
produce abundantly, God has blessed the man over-the-top, and he wonders what
to do? “What shall I do,” he says, “I
have no place to store my crops? Then he says “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build
larger ones, and there I will store all my savings – oops, I mean grain – and I will say to my soul: ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for your retirement;
relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” And the first thing we should notice is that
there’s an awful lot of I’s and my’s hereabouts . . . I have no place for my grain, what shall I
do? Here’s what I will do . . . I will
tear down my old barns, I will big
bigger ones, to store my grains and my goods . . . I, I, I, my, my, my . . .
he’s a self-made man, it’s his stuff,
and he can do anything he wants with it . . . and is it beginning to be a
little more clear why we don’t preach these passages so much?
But God pulls him up short, doesn’t he,
and he calls him a fool – a fool! –
saying this very night your life is being demanded of you – and interestingly, in
the original Greek, it's a little ambiguous as to who it is doing the
demanding. Is it God or is it his stuff?
– and those things you’ve prepared, whose will they be! And we know that this is the mother of all
rhetorical questions, isn’t it? Because
the guy just got finished claiming everything for himself, all the fruits of
his labor are his – remember, he
worked hard for his money, he didn’t
cheat anybody, he came by it honestly – and of course, just by the very fact
that his life can be taken away in the blink of an eye, indicates that it’s not really his after all, and if his life
isn’t his, then all the stuff he’s given his life for isn’t his either . . . and here he’s depended on himself for everything, and in the end,
it’s not his anyway, but God’s.
And when he was trying to figure out what
to do with all his surplus food, did he even once think about, oh, maybe giving
it to somebody who’s hungry? Did he think about giving it to the widows
and orphans, the poor peasants who stalked the landscape of first-century
Palestine? Did he think about spreading
it around to those who didn’t have such a good year, who weren’t going to make
it through the coming winter? No. He told his soul “Soul, now we’re all set. The barn is full, the grain is all in, and
the 401k is producing tax-free income for many years to come. Now we can relax. Now we can eat, drink and be merry.” But God calls him a fool, because he’s going to die this very night, and so it is with
those who save up treasures for themselves instead of being rich toward God,
instead of doing the work of God.
Do we get
it now, why we don’t preach about money as much as Jesus did? Can we see it now? Jesus’ teaching about money is scary, it’s revolutionary, it makes us wince, because many of us can see ourselves in the rich fool, I know I can
. . . we think we’ve done it all ourselves, we’ve worked hard all our lives,
scrimping and saving, and now our futures are set, we can sit back and relax
and eat and drink and be merry. We
persist in thinking that it’s all up to us, our whole economy is based on it, rugged individuality,
pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps. But
we are fools if we think that it’s
true. What we have is not ours, all the
glittering stuff, all the bright-and-shiny baubles of our consumer lives are
not our own. Even our souls are not our own, they are God’s,
and they will be demanded of us.
And it’s true at higher levels as well . .
. some congregations store up treasure for the future, they build fine
buildings and fat endowment funds to get them through lean times, and they do
it rather than spend it on mission and ministry in the world. And if they do spend it on ministry, it's with the expectation that they'll get something out of it, like new
members, more people through the door. They
read the words of Jesus – consider the lilies of the field – but they don’t
really hear them, they don’t really
take them to heart, that if you trust in God, God will provide.
And at the national level, our country
uses much more than its share of God’s creation, it behaves as if God favored
it, that it somehow deserves to use
25% of all the oil in the world, when it’s only got 5% of the population. It seems to believe that it can project its
power to take what it wants, in the Middle East and elsewhere, that it can
store up God’s treasure for its own use at the expense of developing
nations. But God doesn’t play favorites,
God doesn’t take sides in disputes over who gets what . . . because it all
belongs to God in the end, all of it, the whole kit and kaboodle.
You remember the Frank Capra movie “Mr.
Deeds Goes to Town?” Where Gary Cooper inherits a boatload of money, goes to
New York City, and discovers that having millions of dollars isn’t all it’s
cracked up to be; he has all kinds of problems, the media hounds him, shady
charities hound him, unscrupulous lawyers hound him, and he only finds peace of
mind when he starts giving it all away to the thousands of desperate folks
ravaged by the Great Depression. Or as
Jesus might say, until he starts being rich toward God.
But the most interesting part is what happens to him when he starts doing
God’s work . . . he gets locked up in the looney bin, and taken to court for
mental competency. Now everything turns
out OK – this is, after all, a Frank Capra movie – but it’s very clear that to
the folks who run things in New York City, Mr. Deeds’ using his money to do
God’s work, instead of for himself, is threatening, and they persecute him for
it.
Try it.
Go out of those doors back there, set up a little booth, and start
giving money away. Pretty soon somebody
will complain (all those undesirables in the neighborhood, you understand), and
some local official will ask if you have a permit,
and before you know it, you’ll be shut down.
The world is threatened by the
work of God.
Well.
One of my preaching professor always said leave ‘em with the good news
in the end, go out on a positive note, and I was always an obedient student,
and so where is it? Where is the good
news here? Well, it’s obvious where it
is for the less fortunate – the good news is that God expects those who have to give it to those who have not. God expects folks like the rich fool to be
“rich toward God,” to use what they have to further God’s kingdom on
earth. And that’s good news for the
poor, for the disenfranchised, for those who are not us.
But what about for the rest of us? What about those of us who live relatively
comfortably, who have been taught since time immemorial to save for the future,
to work hard, that it’s all up to us?
The good news is precisely that it isn’t
all up to us. It’s implicit in our
passage, but explicit in many other places in the Gospel. The good news is that we are all under the
loving care of the gracious Divine, that our lives are held close to God’s
heart, that we are all cradled in the palm of God’s hand. And brothers and sisters, isn’t that enough
good news for us all? Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment