Text: Luke 12:13-21Revised Standard Version (RSV)
The Parable of the Rich Fool
13 One of the multitude said to him, “Teacher, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.” 14 But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” 15 And he said to them, “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” 16 And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully; 17 and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ 18 And 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; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”
In the Name of God: The Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
The old saying is absolutely true: You can’t take it with you.
Many years ago, on June 15th, 1957, in fact, the Associated Press carried this story over its wire services:
“Three weeks ago a frail little widow was found starving in her dreary fire-charred Staten Island flat. Today, it was learned she was worth half a million dollars, $275,000 of it in bills hoarded in her bedroom closet….Her wealth apparently had gone untouched while she lived on 15-cent hot dogs and saved boxes and wrappings for her pot-bellied stove.”[1]
It strikes me that that widow could have been a descendent of the farmer in today’s parable.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said the following when preaching on this same parable:
King said: “There is nothing in that parable to indicate that this man was dishonest and that he made his money through conniving and exploitative methods.” That’s not why Jesus called him a fool. This man was a fine, upstanding citizen who made his way honestly in the world. He was, in fact, probably just the kind of man we want our sons to become and our daughters to marry.
But then King said this: “The other day in Atlanta, the wife of a man had an automobile accident. He received a call that the accident had taken place on the expressway. The first question he asked when he received the call: ‘How much damage did it do to my Cadillac?’ He never asked how his wife was doing. Now that man was a fool, because he had allowed an automobile to become more significant than a person. He wasn’t a fool because he had a Cadillac, he was a fool because he worshiped his Cadillac. He allowed his automobile to become more important than God.” (from Rev. Danny Bradford’s sermon, “Rich Toward God”)
The farmer is a fool not because he is wealthy or because he saves for the future, but because he appears to live only for himself, and because he believes that he can secure his life completely on his own.
Let’s look again at what the farmer says: “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?” “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’” (12:17-19).
Do you detect a note of arrogance here? There’s nobody else in his conversation. It’s as if he’s the only person in the world. He expresses no gratitude toward God for his abundance, not a word of thanks or appreciation to his workers who have toiled under the hot sun, day after day, to sow the seed, and weed, and winnow, and harvest. He takes God and all the world for granted. He never sees beyond himself. It’s all about him.
And that, my friends, is the real message of today’s parable. The point Jesus makes is not that it’s automatically bad to have wealth or possessions. What’s bad is that we so often allow them to own us rather than the reverse. This farmer’s possessions had come to define him, to own him, and worst of all, to isolate him. He’s left literally talking to himself, because there’s no one else around. So when he eats drinks and is merry, it’s likely that he does it all by himself. There’s no one there to celebrate with him, to be happy with him, no one with whom he can share his good fortune. He’s very much like Scrooge, holed up in a big, dark, cold, empty house with only a bowl of porridge in his lap to keep him warm. How sad. How tragically sad.
In the end, he discovers that all of his work will be for nothing – his life is going to end that very night, and everything that he has spent his life accumulating will turn to dust.
So, you see, this parable really isn’t about possessions or wealth per se. I see this parable as being about community and gratitude.
First, gratitude. Nothing about this farmer, not his words, not his lifestyle, not his attitude, showed the slightest recognition of gratitude. In his world, there was no room for it. He had the idea that he was the creator of his own good fortune – it was his doing, and no one else’s. If he thought of God at all, it probably was in the context of hoping that God would just leave him alone. His soul wound up as shriveled as a prune. He couldn’t have been a happy man.
Gratitude to others, and especially gratitude to God, gives us a deep sense of happiness. I remember moments of happiness when I was little – the feeling of happiness was like a balloon that floated up from my stomach and made me smile – it really did feel like that. Even today, I have moments where I feel that balloon – and I appreciate them when they happen, I remember them, and thank those who have made those moments possible. You folks are responsible for quite a few balloons, I can tell you!
In contrast to the farmer in today’s Gospel lesson, listen to a story of Honi the traveler, a character all Jewish children are told about –
One day Honi met an old man planting tiny fruit trees. He asked the old man, “When will the trees bear fruit?”
“Probably years after I am dead,” the old man replied.
Honi said, “Then why plant them, then, if you’ll never eat their fruit?”
The old man replied, “I didn’t find a world without trees when I was born, so I plant them for others, as they did for me.”
Gratitude. It never goes out of style.
Secondly, this parable is also about community. It might seem odd to say this, since this farmer had no one but himself and was apparently part of no community at all.
But that’s exactly the point. He had cut himself off from any and all relationships. His deliberate choice condemned him to a life of loneliness and isolation. He never realized that his barns of grain had become his owners rather than his possessions. Living in community with others had become an impossibility for him, and sadly, he didn’t even realize it.
This is a warning for us. Our culture has always been one which celebrates the “rugged individualist.” To Thomas Jefferson, the freest man on earth was the man who owned and worked his own land, supplied for himself whatever he needed, and was beholden to no one else. That attitude runs like a red thread throughout American history; it’s reflected in popular culture, for example, in Westerns which feature the taciturn cowboy/hero, who asks nothing of anyone else, defeats the bad guy in the black hat, and then rides off – alone – into the sunset (Westerns are still with us, by the way, only now the heroes drive cars instead of riding horses, and often carry badges).
Yet, as John Donne wrote so many centuries ago, “no man is an island.” We are all interdependent. There’s no such thing as a totally self-sufficient person, and there never was. Even that proud, narcissistic farmer had workers to reap his harvest, bring in his grain, and build his barns. He had a ready-made community right under his nose, and he refused to even acknowledge it, much less be part of it.
As Christians, too, we have to be wary of the snare of false individualism. Somewhere along the line, I got a big dose of that myself. I try to be as self-sufficient as I can. I have a hard time relying on others. I would always “rather do it myself.” I always want to be the person who helps, rather than the person who is helped. And this has at times caused me a great deal of both internal as well as external turmoil and discomfort.
Because the fact is that Christianity, even more than our society, is a religion of community. This has been true since the earliest days, when followers of The Way met together – often in secret – in homes, in meadows, in desert caves, and in catacombs to worship and break bread with each other. Jesus himself said, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20, KJV). It’s only in community, as Prof. David Lose says, that we find “sustenance and comfort and help and hope”[2]; it’s only in a community like St. John’s where Christians can band together to do the work Jesus gives us to do, and find the strength with and through each other to do it.
You can be a Christian individual, but you can’t be an individual Christian. No matter how many times you talk to God out there in the woods, or see God in the sunrise, eventually, sooner or later, you have to come back into the fold, you have to quench your thirst at the well of the Water of Life. It’s here – not out there – where we most directly experience life with God, and we do it with others. You can’t go it alone. You have to show up. You have to be counted.
When we let a false sense of security keep us home and lull us into thinking that our isolation is actually “peace, perfect peace,” and that nothing is required of us, we delude ourselves. We become exactly the same kind of fool that the farmer was.
This last Saturday would have been my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. I was asked to lead a little memorial service for my Dad, and I came across the following poem, which I wound up not using. But it’s appropriate for us today, I think, when we ponder for ourselves whether we’re going to follow the example of the farmer or the example of Jesus as to how we are going to lead our lives. It goes like this:
Not how did he die, but how did he live?
Not what did he gain, but what did he give?
These are the units to measure the worth
Of a man as a man, regardless of birth.
Not what was his church, nor what was his creed –
But had he befriended those really in need?
Was he ever ready, with word of good cheer,
To bring back a smile, to banish a tear?
Not what did the sketch in the newspaper say,
But how many were sorry when he passed away.
- Author unknown
Sisters and Brothers: LET US NOT BE FOOLS!
In the Name of God: The Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Quoted in Link, Mark, S.J., Jesus: A Contemporary Walk with Jesus, Allen, TX, Resources for Christian Living, 1997, p. 366
[2] http://www.davidlose.net/2016/07/pentecost-11-c-from-isolation-to-community/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+davidlose%2FIsqE+%28…In+the+Meantime%29