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I'm sorry, folks, but Jesus seems to be giving us nothing this summer but stewardship sermons, because again today we find ourselves with Jesus as he is making his way to Jerusalem and to his death on a Cross, when a man in the crowd challenges Jesus with an urgent request: "Master," the man says, "tell my brother to divide our inheritance and share it with me." But Jesus asks him, "My friend, who made me a judge or divider over you?" Then Jesus says to all of us traveling with him, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for life is not defined by the things you have, even when you have more than enough." Then Jesus adds this parable: "There once was a rich man who had a terrific harvest from his land. He thought to himself, 'What am I to do? I don't have enough room to store all my crops.' Then the man said, 'This is what I'll do! I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and I will store all my grain and goods in them. And I will say to myself, "Self, you have plenty of good things stored up for many years to come. You've got it made. Take things easy; eat, drink, and enjoy yourself. You've made quite a life for yourself."' But God said to him, 'Fool! This very night you will die. And this hoard of yours? Who will get it now?'" "That's what happens," Jesus tells us, "when you fill your barn with Self and not with God." Or, as other translations put it, "That's what happens when you have many possessions but are not rich towards God." I have a seminary friend named John who was a successful Chicago lawyer before he became a priest. He preached a sermon on this parable shortly after he was ordained, and he began the sermon by saying that earlier that week he had stumbled into an elegant little dinner party to which he had not been invited. The dinner he had been invited to - a party for people John had worked with as a lawyer before he went to seminary - turned out to have been the night before. Someone's mistake: theirs or mine, John says, or maybe, as it turned out, God's. Anyway, John had gone to the right place - an apartment high above Lake Shore Drive - but on the wrong night. Graciously, John was invited in anyway for a lemonade, which became a gin and tonic, which became an elegant little dinner party with a more exclusive guest list than the night before: Fortune 500 Chief Executive types from Texas, who travel around the world to each other's board meetings and golf clubs while their wives buy art and antiques. Nice folks, nice talk, John said, but all in all with a good many more zeros at the end of all the numbers they threw around than he was personally used to. Over dessert the host, who had retired from international finance into international charity, proposed a little game to draw out the guests, and perhaps, John said, to test him, the new priest, as well: What would each of us do if we were suddenly given twenty million dollars? That was the question. How would we spend it? To what cause would we give it? "It's an important thing to think about," said the host of the party. "It focuses your vision of life. It tells you what your values are." The ante was quickly raised to fifty million by a guest who probably already had twenty million, and who therefore needed something bigger to focus his vision. And the play about how they would use their windfalls continued until coffee was served. John began to think about the anomaly of it all. Here were men and women who had tremendous possessions, men and women with literally tens of millions of dollars and who, through their corporations and trusts and connections, controlled hundreds, even thousands of millions, and had the power that attends such control. And yet they needed to play a game "to focus their vision of life," to define their values! Odder still, to John, the game they chose to play that night was exactly the same game they had chosen to live - the game, as Jesus calls it in the parable he just told us, of judging and dividing the money and power of this world. "But, of course," John confesses, "I play it too, this game of 'judge and divide.' And so do you. We all play it. What other game, what other life, is there? How to spend our money, our energy, and our time? What else is important? This game of our lives is not made up of easy moves and obvious choices; the stakes are high: success or failure, right or wrong, prosperity or depression, war or peace, justice or inequity? "You would think, wouldn't you, that Jesus would have been more helpful to the man who came to him about dividing his brother's inheritance. You would think that a rabbi like Jesus - a teacher, a leader, the glorified Son of God - would have had an answer. Or at least a little rule for playing the game of life. Especially because, as a matter of fact, in that Jewish society of Jesus there actually was a rule - Deuteronomy 21:17 - which governed the apportionment of inheritances among brothers, just as there were rules for most other questions in life, and just as there were lots of lawyers and scribes and pharisees to interpret and apply the rules for people. "And lest we think this was just the Jewish approach to life, I would suggest that this man, with his concerns about 'judging and dividing' wealth, was very much like us in our anxiety about getting a fair deal and an equal opportunity. Jesus' society, with all its rules to assure fairness and justice, was much like ours, which graduates each year," my friend, the lawyer and priest, says, "about twice as many lawyers to administer the rules of fairness and justice as there are in all of Japan." And since fairness and justice are so important, you'd think, wouldn't you, that our Christian faith would have helped the new priest answer that party question about the fifty million dollars. After all, that's why the host had asked the question of my friend, the man in the collar. He wanted to find out the Church's answer, Christ's answer, to the question of "judge and divide," the question that's supposed to focus our vision of life. So why did Jesus refuse to help? Why did he even rebuke the man who came to him? "Man, who made me judge or divider over you?" he asked. Why, instead of giving a straight-forward answer from the Law he knew by heart, does Jesus proceed to tell us the parable of the rich fool whose soul was demanded of him that night, and then end it all with that strange suggestion that the real game of life is not the laying up or allocation of wealth and power at all, but the filling of one's barns with God instead of Self? Why did Jesus end it all with the suggestion that the real game of life is being "rich towards God"? What kind of an answer would that have been for the new priest to give his host, the international man of charity, who had graciously asked him to come on in to a dinner party he hadn't even been invited to? What kind of an answer is this "richness towards God" business to the practical questions of fairness and justice in life, and to the questions of stewardship, the questions you and I bring to Jesus? Questions like "How much should I keep for myself?" and "How much should I give to charity?" and "How much should I give to the church?" What's the rule, Jesus? That's what we want to know. You know, one of the things about life in the Church is the sharp contrast, even in this parish, between those who have a superfluity of luxury cars, European vacations, and important jobs and those who despair about next month's rent, or about losing a job or paying a hospital bill. And in the world around us, of course, the inequities are truly scandalous. You have to ask yourself, "Why can't Jesus bring justice to this disgraceful mix-up of possessions and needs? Why didn't God make his only Son "judge and divider" over us? What kind of real Good News can this "filling your barns with God instead of Self" and "richness towards God" line be for you and me here today? "The answer," John suggests - and it's not an easy answer to hear - "is that Christ's words about being rich towards God or about filling one's barn with God instead of Self are, in the end, the only Good News that really is good. Because it contains a transfigured vision of God and of Christ and of life and of stewardship, and of ourselves." "Far from being some sort of impractical piety, in the end 'richness towards God' is Good News because it's the only realistic way to live. And I stress that qualifier, 'in the end,' because that is exactly where the hitch comes in our usual 'judge and divide' approach to life. 'In the end' is death. To all of us, God says, 'Your soul is demanded of you.' And in death 'judge and divide' means absolutely nothing." "I have seen everything that is done under the sun," says the wise old preacher of Ecclesiastes, "and behold, it is all vanity and a striving after wind." And why should I fear "the wickedness of those who put their trust in their goods?" echoes the psalmist. "We can never ransom ourselves, or deliver to God the price of our life; for the ransom of our life is so great, that we should never have enough to pay it in order to live for ever and ever and never see the grave. Like the dull and the stupid, [the rich and the wise] perish as well, and leave their wealth to those who come after them. Their graves shall be their homes for ever.... But God will ransom my life; [it is God who] will snatch me from the grasp of death." (Psalm 49) "The Good News of Jesus begins precisely with this realistic-pessimistic bottom line of Ecclesiastes" and the psalmist, John continues, "with the wisdom of the ultimate failure of a 'judge and divide' approach to religion and life." Jesus will have nothing to do with our "judge and divide" kind of life, it seems, he will not even offer a religious rule, because "judge and divide" simply misses entirely the point Jesus has in mind. It's focus is not on the vision of life Jesus himself has seen in the Scriptures. "Judge and divide" simply fails the test of reality. Because "judge and divide" living is based upon competing claims, while the focus of Jesus is upon the most fundamental and realistic fact of life - the fact that we have no claim at all, because, from beginning to end, it is all gift, every blessed bit of it: every grain stored in the barns, every dollar in the bank, every breath on our lips. Jesus will not "judge and divide," because he knows it is not his to do so. From beginning to end, everything we have and everything we are comes ultimately from the gracious hand of God, a fact of life that "judge and divide" foolishly seeks to hide. So the only epitaph Jesus knows to give to one who puts his trust in "judge and divide" living is "Fool." "Judge and divide" provides an illusion of life for a time, but it is a life of anxiety and fear precisely because it is an illusion, while the realism of gratitude provides a life of peace for eternity. So instead of "judge and divide," instead of our anxious concern about money and status and other people's fairness towards us, Jesus starts with the Cross. With the Cross, that great symbol of the vanity of vanities, some would say, that great symbol of the ultimate unfairness, that ultimate poverty of man toward man. 'What a tragic waste! So much promise cut short,' says the worldly bishop in C. S. Lewis's tale, The Great Divorce. "But, of course, it isn't so," John reminds us. "The Cross was not the end but the beginning. Not a death in vain, but a sacrifice of self that revealed to that frightened band of followers the real meaning of a life of 'richness towards God.'" God "sweeps us away like a dream," Jesus knew with the psalmist. "We fade away suddenly like the grass. In the morning it is green and flourishes; in the evening it is dried up and withered.... The span of our life is seventy years, perhaps in strength even eighty; yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow, for they pass away quickly, and we are gone.... So teach us to number our days, O Lord, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom, and may rejoice and be glad all the days of our lives." (Psalm 90) "In his life as well as in his death," John concludes, "Jesus gave up all anxiety for 'judge and divide' living, gave up all anxiety for getting a fair deal and an equal opportunity as a man among men. [He] gave up all the fear and anxiety of 'judge and divide' living" in exchange for the realistic wisdom of grateful joy and gladness for all the days of his life given to him by God. And "If someone had come up to Jesus with a game about a fifty-million-dollar inheritance, if someone had come to him with a question about stewardship, Jesus' response would have been to tell the parable of the rich fool. 'Man,' he would have said, 'you can't focus your vision of life by playing "judge and divide." Your soul is required of you. Give it up and be rich towards God. Risk your life with me on the Cross.'" What Jesus knew, and what Jesus calls us to see, is the wisdom of the psalmist and the preacher in Ecclesiastes, the wisdom of seeing life as it is, the wisdom of reality - that we brought nothing into this world and that we have a claim on exactly nothing while we are in it, not even on the time of our departure: "You fool, this very night you must surrender your life." Or, as John Donne put it, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Here is another perspective on the same truth, a wise and positive offering made by a grateful contemporary poet named Jane Kenyon, whose years among us spanned only slightly more than half of seventy when she died in 1995: I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon, I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise. "So teach us, Lord, to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." Teach us the spiritual wisdom of arithmetic, so that we can know, with the psalmist and the old preacher, and with John Donne and Jane Kenyon, and with Jesus, that from beginning to end, it is all gift. Teach us that the beginning of wisdom and spiritual strength lies in our applying our hearts, not unto "judge and divide," but unto gratitude, which is to walk the road with Jesus, to live and die with Jesus, free to accept Your gift of life with thankfulness, free to live without fear, free to give as we have been given to, free to love as we have been loved, and free, in the end, even to die without fear, which is to be rich far beyond all barns or any fifty-million-dollar windfall. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |