Self-Storage Sermon

^{Luke 12: 13-21}

Jill Boyd

¹³ Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." ¹⁴ But he said to him, "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" ¹⁵ 

And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." ¹⁶ Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. ¹⁷ And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' ¹⁸ Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹ And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' ²⁰ But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' ²¹ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."

Relax, eat, drink, and be merry!  I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty good to me right now!  This has been a very busy summer, and I sometimes find myself fantasizing about the good life, which for me at this time of year includes spending time with my family at Lake Michigan doing, well…eating, drinking, relaxing, and being merry!  When I first read this passage, I understood the rich fool’s desire to enjoy some of the fruits of his labor.  I assumed he had worked hard for it, and I know a little bit about what hard work is like. 

I grew up on a farm, and there were always chores to do.  Animals needed to be fed, stalls needed to be mucked out, fences needed to be repaired, and straw and hay needed to be baled – the so-called endless days of summer also included an endless list of tasks.  Inside the house, summer days like this one were spent canning and freezing produce from my mom’s amazing garden.  One of my jobs was to assemble and line the containers into which freshly picked berries, new corn cut from the cob, peas, beans, and other goodies would be measured.  I also arranged perfectly straight rows of clean, clear jars which my mom and grandma filled with colorful concoctions like stewed tomatoes, corn relish, homemade pickles, and pickled beets.  One year, my mom even made homemade grape juice that was used by our church for communion – that was pretty special!  When everything was cooled, closed, and sealed up properly, we would transport the food to the basement in laundry baskets, and store it in big freezers or lined on shelves that took up an entire wall in a dark, cool part of the basement.  We had another freezer that was full of meat, because my folks bought beef by the cow and pork by the pig.  By the end of summer, we had a lot of food stored up, and it helped feed our family, as well as hired hands and others who shared meals with us, for the entire winter – and let me tell you – Michigan winters are long.

This kind of preserving abundance is also biblical.  Remember Joseph in the OT book of Genesis?  His story shows us the wisdom in storing up for harsher times.  Egypt’s Pharaoh had had a couple of disturbing dreams in which seven lean cows rose out of the river and devoured seven fat cows, and then seven withered ears of grain devoured seven fat ears.  Joseph was called to interpret the dreams and he foretold that seven years of abundance would be followed by seven years of famine.  So he advised Pharaoh to store surplus food during the abundant years in order to prepare for when the lean years arrived.  Pharaoh took his advice, and when the famine came, the grain that had been stored fed not only Egypt, but “all the world” because the famine was that severe.  Joseph’s story makes it clear that storing up for the future can be beneficial, so when we get to Jesus’ parable of the rich fool in our passage today, I wonder what is the problem.  Isn’t he just doing what we all know is practical and that the Bible says is wise?

For me, the answer came when I went back to read the passage again.  Let’s do that now, only this time, listen to how I read it differently:  "The land of a rich man produced abundantly.  And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”  Did you hear it?  In all of the gospels, not one of Jesus’ other parables has as many “I, me, or my” words in it.  They show up eleven times in the three verses I just read, and they’re even more frequent in the original language of Greek!  The rich man isn’t foolish simply because he wants to build bigger barns; he is foolish because he is only thinking of himself, and he believes all the surplus he has accumulated is what will secure his future.

That gave me pause, and I wondered if there is anyone like that in our world today?  So, I did a brief search on the internet to see if I could find a story of a lottery winner who had lost all of his or her earnings.  I was hoping for one, and it turns out there are dozens.  Denise Rossi won $1.3 million in the California lotto, didn't tell her husband, and divorced him immediately.  Two years later, he received a letter accidentally postmarked to him that revealed that his ex-wife had won the lottery.  He took her to court for not disclosing the money in the divorce proceedings, and the judge awarded all of it to him because of her deceit.

Ibi Roncaiolo and her physician husband, Joseph, had been having marital problems – she was a heavy drinker and high spender, and their son had the impression they didn’t even like each other.  When Ibi won $5 million in the Canadian lottery, she burned through it quickly and her husband got suspicious.  When he looked into their finances and learned what she had done, he injected her with two lethal shots of anesthetics and killed her.

One more…

Bud Post won a $16.2 million jackpot in the Pennsylvania state lottery.  An ex-girlfriend sued him for a share of winnings and won, his brother hired a hit man to try to kill him to inherit some his winnings, and other relatives constantly harassed him for money.  Within one year, Post was $1 million in debt and filed for bankruptcy.  He lived on food stamps and a $450 month stipend until his death.

Jesus’ admonition echoed through my mind as I read through these and other stories.  “Take care!” he warned.  “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."  Don’t live like the rich fools who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.  That was Jesus’ answer to the man’s question in the crowd.  He wasn’t about to get into the middle of a family dispute about money.  He had come, as one pastor puts it: to bring people to God, not property to people (Leon Morris, p.232).  And that is what I believe this passage invites us to reflect on today:  how do we avoid the pitfalls of living like fools, and what does it mean to live a life that is rich toward God?  This passage doesn’t provide answers to those questions, but there are other sections of Luke’s gospel – and the biblical witness as a whole – where those answers can be found.

The parable of “the good Samaritan” teaches us that living a life that is rich toward God involves sharing our resources with others when they are in need.  Jesus’ visit to the home of Mary and Martha reveals that living a life that is rich toward God means listening as intently as Mary does to what Jesus has to say.  Living a life that is rich toward God means modeling our prayer life after Jesus by praying in solitude as well as in community; and sometimes, living a life that is rich toward God means recognizing and letting go of those things that distract us from the kind of life God intends for us to have.  This is not an easy thing to do, and I know from my own experience how unsettling it can be.

As many of you know, a few years ago, my husband, David, and I were living here in West County.  He’d been working at the same company for more than 20 years and had a steady income that allowed us to enjoy many of life’s extras.  We lived in what we considered to be a modest home, and it was filled with comfortable furnishings, and – as my brother-in-law, Michael, likes to call them – dustables!  That’s a nice way of saying: we had a lot of stuff!  When we discerned our calls to ministry and decided to move to Austin to attend seminary, David quit his job and we sold our house and disposed of many of our possessions.  Some of our friends and family viewed what we did as selfless, but that’s not how I experienced it.  It was hard to let go of some of the things that had been meaningful to us, and to walk away from a lifestyle in which I had felt secure.  I’ve missed some of the “little things” we’ve gone without the past few years, and there have been times when I’ve wrestled and argued and whined at God.  But there have been many more times when I’ve listened, and when it comes right down to it, I wouldn’t trade any of what I’ve experienced the past few years for what I’ve learned about myself and about God.

This summer, while David and I are here doing our CPE, we are living in someone else’s house; I’m driving someone else’s car, and many of my meals are prepared and provided by others, including at the hospital, where my lunch is provided free of charge every day.  Even the tuition for our summer internships was paid by someone else because it is covered by the scholarships we were awarded that were funded by the estate of a woman we never even met. 

Now, I’m not suggesting that any of you go out and metaphorically sell your barns and their contents to move to a strange land like Texas, but I am telling you that when we keep God and God’s intentions as our primary focus, we can find ourselves in some pretty amazing places.  The same God who so fearfully and wonderfully created each and every one of us continues to care and provide for us throughout the course of our lives.  That’s hard to believe sometimes, like when the checkbook balance is steadily going down, or we’re lying in a hospital bed, or coping with some other of life’s many challenges.  But the example of the rich man reminds us to hold fast to God’s promise that what we experience in this life is not all there is.  We can live like the rich fool, holding fast to our stuff, or we can choose to live a life that acknowledges God’s kingdom on earth as well that which is promised to come.

This is summertime, and even in the midst of our challenges, for many of us it is still a time of abundance.  In that way, we are not unlike the rich man, but we can learn from his mistake.  We can recognize God as the source of our abundance and attempt to live our lives in ways that reflect that understanding.   When we choose to serve God and one another instead of ourselves and our stuff, it is then that we can realize how truly rich we really are.  The “good life” of being able to eat, drink, and be merry may beckon to us all, but perhaps an even better life beckons as well. 

To God be the glory.  Amen.

 This was delivered by Jill Boyd on July 21, 2013.  To listen to an audio file, Click here.