O God, teach how to be rich towards you in all
things ☩ in the name
of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Last
Sunday, with the Lord’s Prayer as the Scriptural foundation, we considered the radicality
and challenge of praying “thy Kingdom come.” For the next several Sundays, the
Gospel texts will all have stories of Jesus speaking about the Kingdom through
parables that show us what living in the Kingdom of God is all about.
As I said last Sunday,
the Kingdom of God is not a place, so it’s not as simple as saying “We’ll get
to the Kingdom after we die.” Such a belief is anathema to and unsupported by
the New Testament. Instead, the Kingdom of God is a reality, not a geographical
location. The Kingdom is an event in which the love of God rules our hearts and
minds so that the abundant life promised to us by Jesus is realized. And because
the Kingdom is an event and not a place, it means that the Kingdom can and does
break into all aspects of our lives. In today’s text from Luke, the realm that
Jesus suggests that the Kingdom infiltrates is the economy.
A word on what the
economy is – it’s how we manage our commitments, our priorities, our values. The
word “economy” comes from two Greek words that mean “to manage” and “house;” so
the economy is about how we manage our household. A proper understanding of the
economy, at least in the Christian sense, goes far deeper than interest rates,
gross domestic products, and tax policy. If the house is the place where we
live, then the world is our house; and so the economy is about how we manage
the gift that God has given us in Creation. Biblical economics isn’t only about
financial markets, but also how we relate to the environment, how we care for
the poor, and how we spend our time and money. In other words, the economy is about
everything.
This fool, as Jesus names
him, in the parable misunderstands that all discussions about the economics of
the Kingdom begin and end with the language of gift. Our creation, our
existence, our lives are all gifts from God. None of us chose to be born. None
of us formed ourselves in our mother’s wombs. None of us became who we are
today in isolation. Life is a gift, which is why whether it be refugees,
fetuses, prisoners, gun control, or the dying, the Church insists on recognizing and
treating all of life as a sacred gift which we have a duty to respect and
protect. But this fool doesn’t recognize anything as a gift, as he’s a
narcissist.
Narcissus was a young man
in Greek mythology who was quite beautiful, and when he saw his own reflection
in a pond, fell in love with himself to the point that he had no hope of ever
loving anyone or anything as much as he loved himself. That’s an oversimplification
of the story, but the point is that a narcissist is someone who thinks nothing
is good enough for them because they are the epitome of Creation. That’s where
this fool mismanaged the blessing that God had given him.
The fool has only a few
speaking lines in this parable, but every single phrase includes the word “I.” He
has looked into the pond and seen not the grace of God, but his own reflection.
In addition to saying “I” all the time, he also says “my” when referring to
crops, barns, grain, goods, and even his own soul. He does not recognize that
these crops came from the earth, not from him. He does not realize that the blessings
of abundance given to him are for the life of the world, not for his own
hoarding. He does not see that his life is a gift from God. And isn’t it
interesting that he speaks to himself throughout the passage and never to
another person, which is probably because he’s run off everyone that ever got
close to him.
As I was spending time in
prayerful reflection and preparation for this sermon, I came across a sermon by
Martin Luther King on this text. His perspective is not one that I’d come up
with on my own, which is why it’s so important for us to engage diverse voices
as we read Scripture. He preached, “In a larger sense we’ve got to see this in
our world today. Our white brothers must see this; they haven’t seen it up to
now. The great problem facing our nation today in the area of race is that it
is the black man who to a large extent produced the wealth of this nation. And
the nation doesn’t have sense enough to share its wealth and its power with the
very people who made it so.”
Sometimes we all play the
part of the fool. We forget that profits don’t appear out of nowhere for the
benefit of shareholders. There are people attached to the economy and they aren’t
always the people who benefit from it. What this parable is helpful in doing is
that it disturbs the pond so that when we look into it we see the ripples of
interdependency and God’s grace instead of just seeing our own reflection.
Though I have a few
hundred favorite lines from our Prayer
Book, one of those favorites comes from a prayer in Compline – “Grant that
we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil.”
But we do forget this from time to time. Sometimes it’s simply that we’re
unaware because we don’t see the connections that exist, and sometimes it’s
because we convince ourselves that we are more important than we actually are.
Going back to King, he once wrote that “We are caught in an inescapable network
of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one
directly, affects all indirectly.” The fool in the parable couldn’t see
this. And so instead of embracing the abundant life being given to him, he
commodified it and lost the treasure.
Another way in which this
fool mismanaged the blessing from God is that he misunderstood the “when” of
the Kingdom. He was future-orientated. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with preparation
– I have retirement accounts, we have a savings account, we put away money each
month for our girls’ education and I don’t think any of those things are
incompatible with following Jesus. Notice that the fool already had an abundant
harvest, so much so that even all of his barns couldn’t hold it. And so his
plan is to tear down those barns and build news one and he only then does he
envision himself being able to “relax, eat, drink, and be merry.” For him, the
blessings of abundance are in the future instead of the present. But God
reminds him, and us, that the future is not promised to us, only the present.
How many of God’s
blessings are foolishly missed out on because we’re too busy preparing for the
future or worrying about the past? In his classic The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis has a demon say that the way to
lead humans away from God is to get us to live in the future. The demon says
this is because “The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity.
It is the most temporal part of time – for the Past is frozen and no longer
flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.”
A few chapters later in
Luke, a Pharisee comes up to Jesus and asks “When is the Kingdom of God coming?”
and Jesus answers by saying “The Kingdom of God is among you.” The Kingdom is
here, it is not on the way. Abundant life is not waiting for you in the future
after you finish your degree, or after you retire, or after the kids are out of
the house, or after you finish that project at work, or after you repaint the
kitchen, or after your candidate gets elected. No, the Kingdom of God is among
us. But the fool couldn’t see what was around him because he was focused on
getting somewhere other than where he already was.
If you spend time with
this text, you can probably find lots of ways in which this man earned that
title “fool,” but I’ll just point to one more. This fool didn’t know the word “enough.”
Sometimes enough really is enough. Sometimes we don’t give “good enough” the
credit it deserves. Our culture values being exceptional, being the best, being
the most, being the greatest. And that’s well and good to a point. There’s
nothing wrong with striving to be a good steward of what God has given us. The
problem begins when we start to keep score. If my neighbor’s barns are 80%
full, I need to be 90% full. If I have version 5 and they release version 6, I
better get it, otherwise, I’ll be behind. The problem is that we, like the
fool, misunderstand who gets to say that enough is enough.
There’s a great book that
was published back in April called Seculosity:
How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New
Religion and What to Do About It. The premise of the book is that though we’re
not in church as much as we, as a society, used to be, we’re just as much, if
not more, religious. We still pursue self-righteousness, we just look for it in
different places. So the way we eat, how we raise our kids, how we meditate,
how we dress have become the markers of our self-worth. And the problem is that
none of these ever add up to enough because there’s always some new superfood
that you really ought to be eating, there’s a new fitness craze that you really
need to know about, there’s another class that will advance your career. The
fool’s problem is that he treats enoughness as an achievement instead of a
gift.
The proclamation of the
Gospel is that you are enough and you didn’t do anything to earn it, it was a
gift from a gracious and loving God who wants nothing more than for you to
experience the abundant life intended for you. And not only are you already
enough, you will always be enough because there is an infinite and abundant
enoughness in Jesus Christ. There is no bottom to the pool of the waters of
Baptism; you can go deeper and deeper and always find a drink when you are
thirsty. And because of this, it means that we can share our enoughness with
those around us. It’s not a competition and we aren’t going to run out of mercy
or love.
In Israel, there are
three famous bodies of water. There is the Sea of Galilee which is full of fish
and supports the economy, there is the Jordan River with flows through that
Sea, and then there is the Dead Sea. The reason why the Dead Sea is called that
is that not much of anything lives in or around it and this is because while it
receives water from the Jordan, it has no outlet; it doesn’t flow to anything else.
So all of the minerals get trapped in the Dead Sea and it becomes toxic to
life. The Dead Sea has a valid excuse, it’s just a body of water. The fool
though has a choice but has decided that enough isn’t enough and ends up having
a dead life.
Later in this chapter in
Luke, Jesus says “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good
pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” The way to receive the Kingdom is as
a gift. The fool overlooks this gift because he is narcissistic in thinking
that everything comes from his hard work. The fool misses this blessing because
he’s focused on the future instead of now, and now is when the Kingdom happens.
And the fool mismanages this gift because he doesn’t know what enough is. The Kingdom
though is built on the economic principles that God is the source of all
things, that God is lavishing us with love at this very moment, and that God
has declared that you are enough. Only a fool would think otherwise.
