Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · August 1, 2010
Litany of Praise
From Psalm 107
O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever.
We have gathered in from the east and from the west, from the north and from
the south.
He satisfies the thirsty, and the hungry he fills with good things.
He turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen. Amen.
Pastoral Prayer
Jacob Thorne
God of the Universe, God of Our Creation, we give thanks for the opportunity to be here in worship with one another today. It is a gift to be simple; it is a gift to be free.
This morning, we ask you to still our thoughts, to clear our minds, to remind us once again what really matters in life. Help us cherish the small moments that can never be purchased: youth on a mission trip, time spent with family, the laughter of friends and loved ones, the beauty of sunsets, summer vacations, the hum of the cicadas in the evening, the refreshing rain that nourishes our soil and our lives, and the sacredness of a community gathering together to worship you.
This morning, we pray that you will draw us closer to your everlasting, ever-present Spirit. We ask that you will root our hearts in your healing presence, for you are the One whose grace saves us. You are the one who lives us life. You are the one who frees us to live, to dare, to fall, and to rise again, all with the knowledge and the confidence that we are yours, and your love knows no end.
Hear us now as we say together the prayer your Son taught us…
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, forever. Amen.
New Testament Lesson
Luke 12:13-21
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” 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.” Then he told them a parable: “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.’ 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?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
Message
Bigger Barns
Tim Carson
This parable of Jesus is the perfect example of a story that works well in one time and place and not so well in another time and place. It’s also true to say that it may be heard by some levels of society more clearly than others might hear it.
While it may have spoken to Luke’s audience, and indeed resonates with Jesus’ own deep suspicion of wealth and those who have it, the parable doesn’t play so easily with us, or at least many of us. Jesus was preoccupied with this issue as he was a peasant speaking to other peasants in the presence of conspicuous wealth, and often times, oppression. So, that doesn’t surprise us. The problem is for us, as we listen to it. Affluent 21st century American capitalists hear the story about a man who did well, prospered, expanded, and then sat back to enjoy it as the way things should be. And so? Your point? Of course invest, grow your assets, develop your infrastructure, and then eat, drink, and be merry. What else? Why in the world would Jesus use this as a negative example?
Imagine, if you will, a dark green lake, and the sun is shining in such a way that the reflection off the surface almost blinds you. On the top of the lake is a lone fisherman, sitting in his boat, watching his bobber move to and fro. Beneath the surface, on the other hand, is a scuba diver, and he is swimming down where it is dark and quiet, where fish and creatures dart in and out. If you can, imagine these two at once, as though half of your camera lens is above water line and half is below it. So there they are, the fisherman and the scuba diver. Do you see them? If you can, I want to tell you that is how Jesus’ parable can go.
Jesus’ parable can take us in two directions, either above water or beneath, depending on how it is presented. Depending on how it is introduced and presented, we will either be in the boat with the fisherman or swimming beneath with the diver. Follow me and I’ll show you how.
Luke has presented this parable in such a way that we are on top with the fisherman. It is presented as a cautionary tale, a moral warning, about greed. That is a topic not unusual to either Jesus or Luke. And Luke deems it of great importance when it comes to the life of discipleship in his community.
Luke first introduces it with a small narrative about a man asking Jesus to arbitrate a dispute about inheritance. That would not be an unusual role for a rabbi, to interpret the religious law for his people. Jesus refuses that role, however, and instead redirects people to the larger warning about greed. And then we hear the parable: A rich man does so well that all he can think about is building bigger barns to hold it all and secure his comfortable future. Just as he sits back and opens a cold one, his lounger falls off the edge the porch and he falls off the edge of the cliff, and it’s bye-bye. “Fool,” says the parable, “your soul is required of you this very night.” In other words, you think you have security but you don’t. And not only that you’ve been so preoccupied with your own wealth that you’ve become very, very poor when it comes to God.
That’s the moral tale, almost like something you could read in one of Aesop’s Fables. Look what happens to King Midas when everything he touches turns to gold, but he loses what is most precious to him. Be warned! These are perilous waters!
So that’s the message up with the fisherman on the surface. That’s one place the parable could take us. It has to do with making moral decisions in the real world. Up on top, we discover that life doesn’t consist in its possessions. To be happy and secure all by myself while others suffer is, in the end, a lonely and unfulfilling business. We only live a few years in this life. Do we really think it is the possessions we amass that makes us wealthy people?
Two recent news features place this all in graphic relief. One of the wildly successful “robber barons” of the last century was William Clark, the tycoon of the copper industry. His was the classic “rags to riches” story, except that he was as ruthless at could be on the way to the top. His eventual industry desecrated the lands where his mines and manufacturing operated. And, unlike other super-wealthy people who became philanthropists, like the Rockefellers, for instance, he pretty much kept it all. Most of his estate was left to his daughter, Huguette. Evidently, they had Huguenot backgrounds, and they named their daughter Huguette. Don’t do that to a daughter!
As Huguette proceeded through her years after her father’s death, she acquired more and more estates and manor homes, in which she didn’t live. They were filled with her many possessions, which she stored in them, but the staff of these mansions rarely if ever saw her there. Some homes were purchased, and she never slept a night in them. And yet she accumulated one after the other, filling them with treasures. Her Park Avenue town house in New York takes up the entire eighth floor and is valued at $33 million.
Huguette has no children of her own. Like her father before her, she has never really engaged in serious philanthropy. She is 104 years old and in the hospital. When the knock comes at midnight, when her life is required of her, to whom will her possessions go? No one knows who will receive the estate. Well, for certain, not her. She is not walking away with one thing.
Well, let me tell you the other recent story, one that comes from China. Once there was a poor boy from the Hunan province. His name was Yu Pengnian. He was a street hawker, a rickshaw driver, who even spent a couple of years in prison during the Cultural Revolution. He found a job as a janitor and so impressed those around him that he moved up in the firm. A few friends pooled their money and bought one property and then another and another, always selling them at greater prices. This continued in Hong Kong until his wealth exceeded what one could imagine.
Mr. Yu is now 88 years old. Some years ago, he did something remarkable – he started finding ways to give it all away. To date he has given over $1.3 billion to charity. His children will not receive inheritance. As he said, “If my children are competent, they don’t need my money. If they’re not, leaving them a lot of money is only doing them harm.” That reminds me of Warren Buffett’s approach – leaving family only enough to help, not enough to harm.
Speaking of his philanthropy, Mr. Yu has said, “Everybody has a different view of money. Some do good things with it; some rich people do nothing with it…My goal is to be a leader, a pioneer who encourages rich people to do something charitable.” So much of his impetus to philanthropy is grounded in his own humble beginnings and experience of poverty. He has given extensively to hospitals and education.
This immediate past April Mr. Yu donated $500 million to support student scholarships, aid earthquake relief, and pay for cataract operations for the indigent. “This will be my last donation,” he announced. “I have nothing more to give away.” Except for enough money to provide for day-to-day living, he gave it all away.
Huguette Clark, the reclusive billionairess who bought so many properties that she couldn’t live in them all and kept it all to herself, and Mr. Yu, who travelled from rags to riches so that he could give it all away to others. This is the parable Luke is casting to the fisherman up on top, there where moral caution is shared and moral virtue discussed. Your life does not subsist in possessions alone. Your business is compassion and the common good. Wealth should be seen as a blessing, something to be shared, not hoarded. How much do you really need to be happy, anyway? Can you even find happiness through what you own? What is the source of happiness?
Now if you look over the side of the boat, you can see the air bubbles of the diver below, and if we will drop our line and follow it down to where he is, we will discover another side of the parable, the side that is swimming under the moral truths up above.
Back in 1954, way back in the year of my birth, an Egyptian farmer accidentally unearthed a sealed pot that held a treasure trove of ancient papyrus scrolls. He had no idea that he had just made the most significant discovery for biblical studies since the Dead Sea Scrolls. And that collection included the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of the sayings of Jesus. Now, remember, in the early centuries, there was no New Testament. They just had free-floating sayings of Jesus that moved among the disparate communities on the Mediterranean rim in Asia Minor. There was no one church. There were congregations of churches scattered about. So, the “Thomas Christians, down in the northern part of Egypt, had this body of sayings of Jesus. Here is the remarkable thing: many of them parallel sayings of Jesus in our Canonical Gospels in whole or in part. And there is in the Gospel of Thomas the same parable as Luke’s before us this morning. The parable we are reading this morning, was found in that jug.
The difference is that Thomas gives us just the parable without Luke’s narrative around it. The text is as it might have been just floating around Christian communities as a freestanding parable. In Thomas, there is also a rich person, but this person is just contemplating how he might invest so as to fill his storehouses “so that I may lack nothing.” Just as he was thinking these things, he died. “Anyone here with two ears had better listen!”
That’s it, in its great simplicity, and I like it. The focus falls in a different place, and that has to do with how much we think we have to have to feel secure, all the while knowing death is around the corner. Not only that, the knowledge of our fleeting nature would cause us to break through the illusion of trying to create perfect security for ourselves. How much do we need, really? And more importantly, what do we need?
Now that we are down below with the diver, looking at the parable from another direction, I want to invite you to think about our barn-building activities differently.
Let me suggest that barn-building, on a deeper level, represents the work of our ego; winning, gathering power, building the tower of status toward the skies. All of the kind of shenanigans we witness during a political campaign season. (Lord, deliver us. Let it be over. I can’t get my clicker to turn the volume down fast enough. Surely, we are better than that. Aren’t we? Surely, we are better than all that nonsense.) For each person this barn-building, and the things we store in the barns, might look different.
Some barns may hold the tokens of some worldly success. Others might reflect the goals or achievements that others have provided us, told us that we should do to fulfill someone else’s dream. And so we pursue this, giving our time and effort to making it real and solid. We believe that if we just build these structures there will come a time of satisfaction in which we may take our ease. But what we discover is something else.
If the barns represent a kind of self we are creating in the world, it is possible to build these structures out of a false self and not a true one. It is actually possible to live a life that is not one’s own, but rather one that reflects the way of others, or of the culture at large, or of influential persons. But then one day we awaken and say, “This is not me. I have been building a false structure based on a false self. I don’t have to do this thing any longer. Indeed, to continue to do so will destroy me.”
When we build barns based on ego, appearance, or conformity, they will never fulfill, and we will never present our best selves to others – our children, our family, friends, work associates – because the self being presented is not a true one. In fact, like Huguette Clark, we will never be able to build enough houses filled with enough things to satisfy.
How much is enough? There is never enough if we are building an illusion, with a false self. But if we build out of our true self, our real self, the self God created us to be, there is always enough. As Paul said of God in the midst of his suffering, “My grace is sufficient for you.” You have everything you need. “My cup runneth over. Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” I have enough. If we live out of God’s real grace and out of a true self.
And so in an instant, or a growing number of instants, because I think conversions continue to happen all our life long, our life is required of us. Which life? Our real life, our real self. And sometimes we do feel like a fool for giving so much to the wrong thing, the false thing. When that awareness comes, a real kind of death takes place in us, the death of the false self, the death of an illusion, the death of what we were not meant to be. There is such a close relationship between death and birth that when the false self begins to give way, it is also and at once the pangs of birth we experience, too.
So you see, if we are interpreting this parable up on the surface with the fisherman it teaches us one thing, and is helpful in a certain way. We are reminded that you can’t take it with you, that the mark of a compassionate life is not acquisition, but generosity, and that it is more important to distribute wealth for the good of all than to hoard it for the benefit of a few.
But if we are down below the surface with the diver, there is another message, equally true, and that is it is a blessed moment when our life is required of us, that the new birth comes when the false self fails and gives way, making room for what we were meant to be and what God means to create in us. And if we feel like a fool at that moment, well, so be it. Better a fool who woke up than the walking dead who have the wrong barns filled with the wrong stuff.
Those who have ears, let them hear!
Benediction
And now, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
