4 August 2013

“Ya never know …”
Luke 12:13-21
OT 18C
4 August 2013


It was one of the popular comics of the 1970’s … George Carlin, Steve Martin, I’m not sure which … maybe, both of them … who wondered aloud, what if, before we die, everyone got some kind of warning … like at the end of a football game, a two-minute warning coming before “the end.” The point of their stories, their wonderings was, what would you do in those last minutes of your life if you had such a warning?
My favorite was, that you’d get the warning, and make sure to be in line at one of those traveling faith healer shows … having everything so carefully timed that when the fraud put his hands on you and commanded you to “be healed,” you would drop over dead.
The truth is, of course, that except in extraordinary circumstances, we don’t get a ten minute warning, a two minute warning, or any kind of a warning. The end comes when it will come. Sometimes as a surprise or a shock, like in a traffic accident or sudden catastrophic health event like a heart attack. But even when there’s an illness and perhaps long suffering, and it’s certain, the time of when that death will take place is still elusive. Doctors, nurses, no one wants to say for sure, “it will happen in two days … or four hours.” The end is unpredictable … you just never know.
In our gospel reading today, it’s a totally different situation … no one is “left hanging” waiting for the end to occur. It’s already happened, and someone in the crowd of people following Jesus around wants him to help smooth out some family difficulties surrounding … the stuff, the inheritance, what’s left after (here, in this situation, probably the father of two sons) has died. “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me,” one asks Jesus.
Again, words about an inheritance. It makes us remember the reading from a couple of weeks ago, the story of the Good Samaritan, when the lawyer asked Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Well, nothing, of course, is the answer to that question; to get an inheritance, the only thing that’s required to happen is that someone would die, and then they leave something to you as a gift. Eternal life comes as gift to us through Jesus’ death alone, not because of what we do … so the question really answers itself.
But here today, someone’s in a pickle because someone else – his brother, we assume, is messing around with the distribution of the products of the inheritance. Dad died, fairness dictates an even distribution of what’s left … but one brother’s being selfish and not giving the other his due. Or perhaps dad specified in his will that one brother, possibly the oldest, was to receive all the inheritance, and the other was not … that was the usual way of things in Jewish tradition, after all.
To Jesus, though, the person asking the question is missing the whole point. He doesn’t take the bait to become “judge and arbitrator;” rather, Jesus uses the occasion to make a pronouncement:

Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

And then …
And then, Jesus tells a story.
And at first, the story and its moral seem grossly unfair. A rich man has a good year with his crops. Such a good year, that he doesn’t know what to do with the surplus of grain his land has produced. Then he gets an idea: Ah! I’ll build me some bigger barns! That’s it! Then I’ll be set for life … I can take an early retirement, live off my investments, my pension plan … “relax, eat, drink, be merry.”
It sounds right and good and like everything that our investment counselors and pension planners tell us to do. Be prudent, build your nest egg up early, and then enjoy the fruits of your labors.
Except …
Except there’s that one little thing … ya never know … when something is going to change your plans.
The rich man sounds like a smart man too, because his hard work paid off for him, but to God, he is a fool.

You fool! This night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?

The problem with the rich man’s plans, is that they were all centered around … him. Listen again to what he wants to do.

I will do this … I will pull down my barns and build larger ones … I will store my grain and my goods … and I will say to my soul … soul, you have ample good laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.

There’s nothing wrong with the stuff … the wealth, the surplus of grain, the blessings of a good harvest. It’s just how the rich man chooses to use them, that’s so wrong. The stuff tempts him to laziness, to comfortableness … providing for his own needs rather than driving him to use his riches in service to his neighbors.
Maybe they didn’t have as good a harvest. Maybe they have barns which are falling apart, and nowhere to store their grain. Our friend the rich man could have helped them. But he chooses himself first. And so … ya never know … and now the rich man’s stuff would be divided up, maybe between his children, maybe between complete strangers.
To the Lord, nothing is ours … it is, in the words of the old hymn, “a trust, O Lord, from thee.” All that we have and all that we are comes from God … and we are to share it … we are “blessed to be a blessing.” Not building up bigger barns … but building up better relationships of love and service with our neighbors … who, as we remember from that story of the Good Samaritan once again, are all people, everywhere in the world, not just those who look like us or speak like us or vote like us or live like us.
It’s one of the happy coincidences of the lectionary that this reading comes as it does this summer, at least for us. Much of our time the past couple months has centered around stuff … the stuff Kathleen and I have been entrusted with … and packing it into boxes, getting ready to move it; moving it; and then, unpacking again. But we’ve also had to get rid of a lot of stuff, to lighten our load before we moved. Furniture and parents’ things and books and as Kathleen calls it “crappity crap” has found its way to new homes. It’s amazing how much stuff one can accumulate … but it’s also been amazing to see how much we could “lighten our load” in a relatively short period of time. We “travel lighter” now.
“Traveling light” in matters of faith is also a good model for us as people of God to follow. The church, as we sing in one of our Bible School songs, “is not a building … it is the people living out their lives … called, enlightened, sanctified for the work of Jesus Christ.” Church isn’t meant to be just a building … no matter how nice and pretty it is … that people can point to and say, “There is the church;” but instead, the church is Christ’s body, in the world, people receiving his forgiveness and grace and then immediately going out and serving others, so people can point to us and say, “there is the church, who they are, what they’re doing.” Church is a verb, a movement, a movement that is meant to be out in the world, traveling light, not loaded down, worried about stuff.
Since our inheritance … the inheritance of what really matters … forgiveness, faith, and salvation from sin, death and the devil … is already guaranteed by the death and resurrection of Jesus … why do we need to be about building up more and larger barns? Should we not, instead, be about “traveling light,” using what we have to serve others in Jesus’ name?
Nine years ago this month I took a call to serve among you … a call which began and still continues with these words … promises I and every ordained pastor make to God and God’s people …

… to preach and teach the Word of God in accordance with the Holy Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions … to speak for justice in behalf of the poor and oppressed … to equip us for witness and service; and guide us in proclaiming God’s love through word and deed.

It’s the preaching and teaching of that Word that often gets pastors in trouble. We’re to “comfort the afflicted,” and that’s the easy part of this job. But the Word of Jesus also “afflicts the comfortable,” and as Americans, as Pacific Northwesterners, as Nativity Lutherans, we need to be reminded by that Word that the tremendous blessings we’ve received are a call from God to service and sharing … not to be storing it up for ourselves … but using what we have and who we are as called and sent disciples of Jesus in service to and for others.
Not just because … ya never know … being motivated by fear of our end … but precisely because we do know … we already know about our end … we are saved, we are given the inheritance of eternal life … and so we are set free, let loose for service to our community and our world that so desperately needs to see and feel God’s love in Jesus Christ in tangible terms … as we’ve put it into words through the Spirit-led discover of our Story Matters text:

• “Nativity has been through times when there was no wine. Now there is much wine … much to celebrate … Jesus has turned our water into wine … so now it is time to share it with our community.”

And so we are called on to be part of that wine-blessing into our community:
• As the ARISE homeless shelter needs people to provide meals;
• As the Center of Hope shelter in Renton opens and strives to serve the homeless women and children of our community;
• As our Kids’ Church program continues to need leaders and assistants for Sunday mornings, to ensure its success;
• As our Renton Food Pantry, overwhelmed by the need in our community, needs food and more important, financial donations to help feed the hungry of our area …
• And those are but a few of the ways we’re being called on to “share our wine,” to “empty our barns” in Jesus’ name.

May God continue to nudge and cajole and, sometimes, plain old plant a foot firmly in our backsides, sending us out as servants of that Word … blessed to be a blessing to others … may our barns remain small … and our service great … until the day of Jesus Christ.
Amen.