Good
morning! Grace and peace unto you from
God our Judge and Jesus Christ the arbiter and enforcer of our faith…boy, that
really doesn’t sound too nice does it? I
mean, in a sense it is true. God does
judge, and our experience of Jesus at the end of history will be quite a bit
different than the way we encountered him at the first. Wise Christians are slow to invoke this
aspect of God, especially in worship, and I think they do so for a very good
reason. While it is easy to get caught
up in the American trend of self-righteousness, to paint causes and people as
all either all good or all evil, specifically our own causes as all good and
everybody else’s as all evil, the fact is we as mature people of faith realize that
to call up images of the divine courtroom demanding judgment often does little
more than put ourselves at the very top of docket. This is why “Judge not, lest ye be judged”
has been a mantra of the Church since its very foundations, because as
Christians we know that God will bring justice about, in fact he will get right
on their case just as soon as He is done with ours.
Our gospel lesson today begins with such
a legal dispute. A family has been split
apart over a matter of inheritance and a random man in the crowd seeks Jesus’
aid. He is not asking Jesus for help to
be reconciled to his brother, however, nor is he not coming to Jesus out of a
place of suffering and needing a grievous wrong to be righted; he merely sees
an opportunity, he wants to use Jesus to get the outcome he wants, namely the
outcome that nets himself more stuff.
I must admit, I feel I know this situation
all too well, and I know it for several reasons. As someone with his law degree I could tell
you horror stories of families that tore each other apart as they greedily sought
to gain money through the law, I could tell you all the twists and weaves the
courts have had to do specifically with wills and estates. I could tell you how well developed
Inheritance Law is because of all the people, Christian people, willing to sue
their brothers and sisters in court instead of peaceably and justly negotiating
at home. I know this situation well not
only because of my legal training, but I also know it well because as a human
being with a family I have lived it every single day of my life.
I’ll be honest, I’ve been a pastor of
this congregation for almost a year now, and it absolutely has been one of the
greatest honors and joys of my life. But
when I hear you speak warmly of family, of brothers and sisters who visit, of fond
memories of cousins, uncles who helped to cover up misdeeds and aunts who for
all the world are simultaneously best friends and wise women, I’m at something
of a disconnect. I don’t know what any
of that is like. My brother doesn’t talk
to me. My aunts prayed for my father’s
death and they called me Satan’s spawn behind my back because I was raised
Lutheran. And my own parents, well, we
are so estranged I doubt if I will even hear of their passing. We are a family split apart, and it is because
at the end of the day they have learned to value possessing things and currying influence more than they value their own children.
Every event that happened in our
family for as far back as I can remember was used as a kind of emotional debt,
an opportunity to jockey for position from within the family and gain some
financial benefit. One daughter needed
help one time and all the others made sure their parents never forgot it. “You helped daughter x with their house
payment, why can’t you cosign on my car loan?
You cosigned daughter y’s car loan, why won’t you help us buy land?” And on, and on, and on for generations. If you were to walk into my grandmother’s
house today and if you would check under the vases, under the base of her
magnificent doll collection, you would find stickers with her daughter’s names
on them. Her children went into their
home and laid claim to their mother’s and father’s things while they were still
living. I wish I was joking. That’s how far greed took them and that is
exactly the place greed will take all of you if you give in to it.
And this attitude of greed, this
desiring of things over the relationships that we have is absolutely the focus
of our gospel lesson. This random man
that earlier in the gospel Luke tells us was in a crowd of thousands, all of
whom bustling to hear Jesus’ teaching. This
man is there before the promised King, his long awaited Messiah and Emmanuel,
God with us, but he is not there for wisdom, he is not there to be healed of
some infirmity or to be set free from that which binds him, spiritual or
otherwise. No, he follows this crowd
because he sees dollar signs, an opportunity to get what he wants out of a
current dispute, and that’s about it.
And what does Jesus do? Does he listen
to the man’s circumstances, does he inquire what the dispute is about? No, Jesus calls him out and makes his passion
for things an example to the entire crowd.
Jesus says the forboding words, “Man, who appointed me judge and arbiter
over you.” Now some have interpreted this passage to mean that Jesus does not
believe himself an earthly judge over earthly matters, but the fact remains
that theology is nowhere to be found in Luke or any other gospel. The reality is, ladies and gentlemen, this
far into Luke it would be blazingly obvious who appointed Jesus judge and
arbiter over the man in question, and that Judge looks upon such attitudes most
poorly. What could be read as Jesus saying, “I was not appointed your judge,
why are you involving me,” is instead, “You know who appointed me Judge over
you, and you know the Father looks grievously on people with such wicked
thoughts as yours.”
It is here that Jesus then cries out
to the crowd, “Watch
out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an
abundance of possessions.” And to drive the point home he tells them a parable:
“The ground of a
certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What
shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
“Then he said, ‘This
is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I
will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain
laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ’
“But God said to him,
‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will
get what you have prepared for yourself?’
“This is how it will
be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”
In a culture that considered the
wealthy blessed by God, this parable is more than enough to give them pause as
it should us. After all, what is the
American dream BUT to build bigger barns so we may eat drink and be merry? That a rich man would be so judged would have
been astonishing, and today we as Americans pay this parable little heed because
otherwise we would realize just how much we have in common with this doomed man. Now does God want us miserable? Does God want us to suffer, to be perpetually
on the verge of starvation, and derive only misery out of this life that we
have been given? Of course He
doesn’t! God’s problem is not that we
enjoy the bounties this life, His problem is that we continuously need to enjoy
it to other people’s detriment. Nowhere,
does the rich man of the parable consider those less fortunate than him,
nowhere does he even consider the state of his own family, for the doomed man it
is all about him and what he wants.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I ask you, does
10,000 dollars seem like a lot of money?
A person earning $7.25 an hour will spend 80 times that in their working
career. Very likely, every single one of
us in this hall has already spent that amount of money or close to it in bills
and the year’s only barely half over. Is
it really that much, then? If you were
offered a mansion to live in, would you take it? Could you afford to upkeep it? Could you pay the property taxes and fix all
the things that could go wrong on the property, or would it simply rot in your
keeping? Is greed worth it? Is it worth sacrificing family over? Is it worth severing your relationship with
God?
My friends, I am going to point out something to you that is extremely
sobering. You know my children. My children love you. You have spent time with them, you’ve talked
with them, engaged them, and help them grow.
You’ve granted them opportunities to serve, to befriend you and to
befriend your own children. You as a
congregation have more memories and know my children better than all the rest
of my family combined, and you see them for about an hour once a week. My family is missing out on one of the best
parts of life - getting to know the next generation, and for what? A bigger barn?
A life of greed has
consequences, ladies and gentlemen, both in this life and the next; but don’t
think for a moment that we are somehow guiltless because others are more
obvious about it. How many families go
unclothed despite our own full closets?
How many children sleep on our streets tonight, guarded over by pimps
and drug dealers, and if you are familiar at all with the twin cities, then you
know that is no small number. How many
of our most vulnerable must endure this because we have found it cheaper simply
not to look?
Ladies and gentlemen, what was the last thing you prayed for?
Did you pray to talk to your Father, to
cast your worries and your cares on Him, or was it to ask for things? A job you wanted, perhaps? A good deal on a car? That’s if you prayed to God at all, of
course. And when it came to giving to
charity or buying something stupid and selfish for the week, who among us would
dare stand up in this house and lie, saying we chose charity even part of time?
I say this again, because it is
important, God does not want us to be miserable. God does not expect us to starve ourselves or
live lives perpetually on the verge of despair.
But God does expect us to be responsible with what we are given, and to
not exclude the people who need our help the most. We don’t have to be the doomed man in the
parable, we don’t have to be the fool in the crowd of thousands, wasting a
chance to meet God in a futile attempt to get more things. We can value people. We can stand firm in faith, knowing that God
will indeed provide our daily bread. We
can live a life apart from fear, apart from greed and a misbegotten sense of
self, we can live the best sort of life.
But we cannot continue to value Convenience and Comfort, Ego and
Estates, over the needs of the human
family and still pretend that we are the Body of Christ.
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