Especially in Luke, Jesus says hard things about the rich.

"Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. (Lk 6:24)

None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. (Lk 14:33)

You cannot serve God and wealth. (Lk 16:13)

So it shouldn’t surprise us that this rich guy is in trouble.

Especially when we hear double jeopardy! He’s rich and he has land – big land – the Greek word indicates not just a farm plot but a whole neighborhood of them. Enough land, actually, so that when it’s a really good year for crops, he gets so much extra that he doesn’t have anyplace to put the surplus! We assume he had room for the yield he expected. He’s clearly good at this and he’d have a plan. But his crops are so much bigger than he expected that he can’t possibly stuff them into his current barns. So, does he build a new one for the extra? You know, good credit, farm equity loan, a corn crib here, a grain silo there …

Wait. We have to back up for a minute. Stop and consider the people listening to Jesus’ story. For them everything is fine so far. There are farmers in Palestine. They have barns. Jesus simply says this farmer’s crop is really large one year. No hints that the guy is acting unjustly in any way. Nothing to imply that this isn’t any old landowner who has a really, really good year.

If this crowd is in the know about their faith tradition, stories about “more than enough” are coming to their minds. I can imagine that picking those minds at this moment would extract at least these two stories:

Ah – this is like Joseph in Egypt. He dreamed about seven years of plenty. Amazing crops – way more than anybody needed – for seven years. Joseph did what this guy did – built bigger and better barns and stored it up for the future. Joseph was rich too.

And there was the time the Israelites were being fed in the desert – everybody knew to gather enough manna for the day – all you needed, no more. On the day before the Sabbath, however, you knew to gather two days worth – there was twice as much on the ground that day!

OK – so far so good.

Back to the rich man. Does he go for the farm equity loan and do an add-on? Oh no. He plans to pull down all his barns and build larger ones. Bye bye “well to do” - hello big time. The MacMansion of barns! “Hmmm…I’ll store all my grain and all my “stuff.” And I’ll say to myself, “Self – look at you! You have enough stuff to last you a whole lifetime! You are now retired! Sit back, put your feet up. Eat, drink, travel, have a good time. Your working days are over!” (and you’re still young!)

And that’s when the crowd knows nothing good can come out of the story for this rich man. This is all wrong.

That story about Joseph in Egypt? He got a huge harvest alright. And he built barns and store houses and saved it all up. But not for himself! For the people! Joseph saved up the crops for when they would need them in a time of famine. It was for everyone. It would even be offered to foreigners!

And during that time when the Israelites were being fed in the desert – there was twice as much on the day before the Sabbath because you didn’t gather food on the Sabbath. You saved it for the day you needed it, the day you knew there would be none.

This is all wrong! You don’t take a bountiful harvest and stick it in your own barns for your own use so you can sit back and do nothing but have a good time! You use the surplus for the good of everybody! Where do you think the surplus came from in the first place? Duh! God!

Joseph believed God was providing the seven years of plenty so that when the seven-year famine came everyone would live through it, even the foreigners coming down to Egypt from Israel. Wait. Especially the foreigners coming down from Israel!

The Israelites believed God was providing twice as much manna on the day before the Sabbath so they would be free to worship on the Sabbath – so everybody could rest and take stock of their lives, and remember that they would go hungry if it wasn’t for the bountiful harvest of the day before.

All good. All God.

So the crowd wasn’t one bit surprised when they heard the ending. This guy deserves a smack down. “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” Or in another translation, “And this hoard of yours, whose will it be then?”

As language goes these days, “Fool” may not be particularly scathing to our ears. But in its day it carried a whopper of a punch. Psalm 14:1 says: “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is no one who does good.”

What a person is cannot be confused with what a person has. Jesus has given out clues to the disciples all along in Luke: “What does it profit them if they gain the whole world (all the stuff you can imagine!), but lose or forfeit themselves?” (9:25) Their souls. Their very lives. And Luke’s lead-in to this parable is offered so you can’t miss that it’s not about being rich, it’s about greed, and that greed is a really nasty thing to combat. “Take care!” Jesus says. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them this parable.

Greed is really idolatry. “Stuff” takes the place of God. We like to think stuff gives us security. Getting more when we already have enough simply confirms our idolatry, not our security. Why does Jesus’ warning matter? And it is surely that – a stern warning to be careful because it’s so easy to start down this “stuff” road. Why does Jesus’ warning matter? Because possessions, things, stuff can get in the way of living the Christian life; even cause one to deny Jesus. It’s no coincidence that what precedes this story in chapter 12 is all about fearing not people who can kill your body, but fearing eternal punishment, Jesus says, (in not quite those genteel terms). Followed up by strict admonitions about denying one’s faith! Ephesians follows suit (5:5) with crystal clear confirmation. “No one who is greedy has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.”

The rich man had a choice. Having enough and to spare already, he chose to use this generous gift of God, this surplus way beyond even his imagining, for himself, totally disregarding his community and God. The needs of others played no part in his plan. His life did indeed consist in the abundance of his possessions.

But wealth implies social responsibility. In the parable, God asks, “And the things you have prepared, whose will they be now? Why, for whom they were originally intended! The community.
They were God’s gift to the rich man, to be used for all God’s people.
Now someone else has an opportunity to use them for that purpose.
Will the people who get it, “get it”?

Zell Kravinsky got it. ¹

His story appeared in an article in The New York Times Magazine in December of last year called, “What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You.”

A few years ago, when [Kravinsky] was in his mid-40s, [he] gave almost all of his $45 million dollar real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger….

[Kravinsky] says that the chances of dying as a result of donating a kidney are about 1 in 4,000. For him this implies that to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one’s own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a ratio Kravinsky considers “obscene.”

What marks Kravinsky from the rest of us is that he takes the equal value of all human life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of rhetoric. He acknowledges that some people think he is crazy, and even his wife says she believes that he goes too far. One of her arguments against the kidney donation was that one of their children may one day need a kidney, and Zell could be the only compatible donor. …But that does not, in Kravinsky’s view, justify our placing a value on the lives of our children that is thousands of times greater than the value we place on the lives of the children of strangers. … Nevertheless, to appease his wife, he recently went back into real estate, made some money and bought the family a larger home. But he still remains committed to giving away as much as possible, subject only to keeping his domestic life reasonably tranquil.

A friend of mine got it.

She is a member of this congregation, a lawyer who, while employed at a law firm in New Jersey, was seen working at every fund raising event for Nassau’s school project in Guatemala. She sold her house and left her job about two years ago.
“ I am still living and working in Jakarta, Indonesia,” she wrote to me yesterday, “spending lots of time working on democracy and governance programs here. … I get to work with lots of women looking to run for elected office, which has been a challenge, but still fun.”
And in the same email,
“ What kinds of projects is Fredy Estrada up to in Parramos, Guatemala?”
Because she funds “special projects” in Guatemala every single year.

Lest by now any of us have stopped listening because we would never consider ourselves rich by any standard, we mustn’t forget: The poor widow got it. ²

Jesus doesn’t condemn the rich who make their offerings. He simply points out that they have contributed out of their abundance. Neither, however, does he rush to give the widow her money back because she’s too poor to give it! The widow “has put in more than all of them,” Jesus says, for “she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.”

In Jesus’ story, the rich man dies in his sleep. No crash/bam/apocalyptic/world shattering ending that puts everything right or ends it all.
The community buries him and goes on. What was intended for them is now theirs.
The harvest – God’s good gifts - still must be managed.

An article in the upcoming issue of the Presbyterian Women’s Horizons magazine, states the challenge, ³
Given the overwhelmingly consumerist cultures in which many of us live, trying to live kingdom ideals when it comes to money and things is not only difficult, but profoundly countercultural. It is not supported or condoned by the mainstream; on the contrary, it is considered suspicious, idealistic and na ïve.

The kingdom of God exists, after all, in the deeds of a loving, gift managing, community.

That’s where we come in….

and how we go out.

     

¹ “What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You,” Peter Singer, The New York Times Magazine, December 17, 2006.
²Luke 21:1-14
³From “The Sabbath Promise” by Michaela Bruzzese, Horizons Magazine, Sept/Oct issue, 2007.

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