“A Mismanaged Miracle”
Hosea 11:1-11 Luke 12:13-21
10th Sunday after Pentecost August 1, 2010
First Congregational UCC/Reverend Deb Davis
Imagine this morning … that you have just started a new jigsaw puzzle … it’s all laid out on your table.
But without you knowing it … someone put the wrong lid on the puzzle box. You keep trying to use the picture from the wrong lid as a guide to putting the pieces together.
But obviously … you don’t have much luck. Because the wrong picture is implanted in your imagination … you discover that some of the colors on the pieces don’t seem to belong … some shapes don’t fit.
You assume they must have been included by mistake … and so you push those pieces to the side, or maybe let them drop off the table edge altogether.
You keep searching for other colors and shapes that you see in the picture on the lid … but they just don’t seem to be included in your box of pieces.
What do you do? You begin to push more and more of these pieces aside that don’t fit. Maybe you take out some scissors and colored markers and “adjust” some of the pieces that remian. You do your best to conform the pieces in the box to the picture on the lid you have been given.
At this point … you become so frustrated and disillusioned that you throw the whole puzzle away … you give up on jigsaw puzzles altogether.
Or … you continue to assume that the lid is right … and that the pieces are all wrong.
Or you finally realize … that the problem isn’t with the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle at all … they actually do fit together. Rather the problem is with the picture on the lid.
The author Brian MacLaren tells this story in his book … Everything Must Change … and he applies it to the Christian faith we have been given. His point is that too much of the time … the institutional church has promoted the picture on the lid … at the expense of the real puzzle.
And if we look around today … he seems to be correct.
Just two weeks ago … the Vatican issued a statement for the Roman Catholic Church – which after a public outcry was softened - that said the ordination of women is as “grim a crime” as the Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse scandal.
Meanwhile … the world-wide Anglican Church continues to threaten a schism with the Episcopal Church in the United States over its continued installation of bishops who are homosexual.
And then there are all the arguments and fights that continue in many churches … over who is welcome at the Communion Table … over what style of music will be allowed … and even, in one Chicago-area church I read about recently … over the color of the carpet in the parlor.
And here’s the problem with all of that. Jesus never developed a doctrine on carpet color or style of music … but he was pretty clear that everyone … even those labeled as sinners by the religious hierarchy of his day … were invited to eat at his table.
Likewise … Jesus never said a word about the ordination of women or anyone else … although he did tell that Samaritan woman he met at the well … to go back to her village and proclaim the Good News.
Neither did Jesus ever mention homosexuality … not one word … but the disciple Peter declared on that day of Pentecost … that the Holy Spirit fell on all who were present.
What Jesus actually did spend much of his time talking about … was the dangers of money … of greed … … about the evil that results from the unequal distribution of God’s abundance … a practice he saw all around him in first century Palestine.
Jesus talked about … what he’s talking about this morning in Luke’s Gospel. And he wasn’t alone in talking about money. The Hebrew Bible prophets before him talked a lot about money as well. In fact there are over a thousand references in the Bible to the dangers of wealth … … if you were to cut out all the references to money … there would be a great deal of your Bible missing.
Because there is no more fundamental obligation in Jewish law … or in Christian ethics … than the obligation to share life’s abundance.
As one of the ancient fathers of the church said hundreds of years ago: “The rich have all the storage they need … in the mouths of the needy.”
Those jigsaw puzzle pieces … that true core of Jesus’ teaching … the core of the prophets’ teaching … are about how hard it is to know the living God … if we are busy building bigger barns.
And yet the picture on the jigsaw puzzle lid … the picture we have most often been given by the church … focuses instead … on somebody being in and somebody else being out.
The institutional church – with very few exceptions - has turned away from the true work Jesus calls us to … that of leveling the table so we can build community.
In our text from Luke’s Gospel this morning, Jesus gives us a parable about barns … in response to a question about inheritance.
He tells the story of a rich fool … who tears down his small barns so bigger barns can be built – bigger and bigger barns – so he can store his surplus and horde his abundance. He is a great accumulator … who imagines that his vast possessiveness … adds to his well-being.
Now please note - Jesus does not call this man in the parable evil. The man hasn’t done anything illegal. Instead he has done very well for himself. He’s had a hugely successful harvest. This is the American Dream. This is lawful profit. He has done a phenomenal job of taking care of himself.
Jesus calls him only a fool ... a person lacking in judgment and prudence and wisdom … one who lacks the simple, basic understanding that when we have a surplus … God wants us to share.
This text is alarmingly contemporary … because this parable carries with it an indictment of 21st century America … just like it carried with it an indictment against the occupying Roman Empire and the religious leaders who colluded with it … in Jesus’ own day.
Because we live in a nation of tax laws, and credit arrangement and advertising … all of which seek to make greed a virture.
In yesterday’s Journal Gazette there was an Op-Ed piece that quoted a recent Federal Reserve report that said American corporations are today sitting on a record $1.8 trillion in cash … yet they still refuse to hire layed-off employees … at the same time that the largest number of Americans are chronically unemployed since the 1930s … … losing their homes … their savings … their futures.
This is a very hard text for us to hear this morning … but here it is anyway … it’s the teaching that makes up most of that jigsaw puzzle … but amazing we gloss right over it … because the church for centuries has glossed right over it … giving us instead the picture on the lid.
Like the Old Testament prophets he read, Jesus doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to wealth and its distribution. Those who pile up possessions – who believe that those same possessions are what will lead them to abundant life - he calls fools.
“Beware of all kinds of greed,” Jesus says. “Beware of wanting more of what you already have enough of.”
Jesus spent his time here … on this issue … on money and greed and the misuse of possessions … and in the process he exposes those who in their hearts think of themselves as his followes … but who, the author Brian MacLaren argues, “wear the hypocrite’s mask.”
There is one thing Jesus talks about more than money … and that is the kingdom of God. Of course the two are connected … because Jesus made it clear that God’s kingdom comes near in a loving community … in every act of forgiveness and compassion and generosity … our God comes near.
Recall with me that last week’s text was Jesus teaching us the Lord’s Prayer … and remember how Jesus told us to use words like “we” and “our” and “us” when we pray … taught us to pray with and for each other … to live in community.
Compare Jesus’ language last week … to the langauge of the rich fool this week. Notice throughout this parable what the man is saying … notice the pronouns in this short text: “What shall I do?” … “I have no place to store.” “This is what I’ll do.” “I will tear down.” “I will store all my grain .. all my goods.” “I’ll say to myself.”
The fool lives for himself, he talks to himself, he plans for himself, he congratulates himself. This man thinks he has arrived – but there’s no one there to see it. He speaks to no one else throughout this text. Not another person appears. Only God appears, calling him a fool and saying that on this very night he will be dead … and then who will get his surplus?
This man could have made other choices … he mismanages the miracle God has given him. He misses the miracle of God’s abundant harvest – he misses the opportunity to bring God’s kingdom near.
Our scriptures today assure us that the only real treasure … the only thing able to satisfy our deep and profound hunger … is to be held like an infant against God’s cheek. To come to the understanding that we are loved unconditionally by the living God. And that it is this understanding of being loved that allows us to truly love others in deep relationship … that wakes us up to a different reality.
God provides the rich fool – and us – with chance after chance to get back into right relations with others. The miracle of the parable was how the great harvest could have been used to improve relationships, to level the table between the rich and poor, to build true community … but the rich fool made a different choice.
We, too, know how difficult that choice is.
So perhaps we should pray with the poet Wendel Berry this morning: “I know that I have life only inso far as I have love. I have no love expect for thee. Help me, please, to carry this candle against the wind. Amen.
