Something or Someone

This is a sermon that I preached at St. Paul's in New Orleans on August 5, 2007. The text for the day was Luke 12:13-21. In the sermon I talk about two possible interpretations of the parable that Jesus tells the crowd. I got the idea from R. Alan Culpepper's commentary on Luke in the Interpreter's Bible, referenced on Crossmarks. Curious about the original language translation, but being a rather pitiful Greek scholar myself, I started poking around for a free, on-line biblical Greek translation tool. What I found was The Resurgence Greek Project, an excellent resource for all wanna-be translators. It features mouse-over parsing and possible word translations, as well as links to lexicon entries and word frequency in the Bible. A huge help!



Two friends of mine were discussing a difficult situation. One said to the other, “I wish Jesus was here. I’d just ask him what I should do.” The other replied, “A whole lot of good that would do you. He wouldn’t answer your question. He’d just tell you a parable.

Such is the case in today’s gospel reading. A man in the crowd asks Jesus to resolve a dispute between his brother and him and, true to form, instead of resolving the dispute, Jesus tells him a story. But, what seems to be one story at first glance is actually two, a pair of parables, if you will, whose meanings are intertwined. The problem is that you can’t read one English translation and preserve both of the stories. In order to get the whole story we have to look at the text in two different ways, so stick with me.

Both stories start out with the same introduction. A rich man has what seems to be an enviable problem: He has too great a harvest to fit in his barns. After pondering his predicament for a moment, he comes up with a solution. He says to himself, “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones…And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” Now we get to the part where the stories differ. We heard the first story from Fr. Hood when he read us the Gospel just a few minutes ago. God says to the rich man, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” End story number one.

This version of events teaches us something that we heard in the other readings for today. In the end, the material possessions of the rich man don’t have any value. He will die and be unable to take his earthly treasures to the other side of the grave with him. Someone else will inherit and use the possessions that he prepared. Because of the fleeting nature of life, the rich man should have spent his time on earth becoming rich toward God instead of rich with things. This is a valuable lesson, to be sure, but there is more to the story.

Let’s rewind the tape and hear the end of the passage in a different way. The rich man says, “…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 goods are demanding your soul from you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

This ending to the story is similar to the first, but provides a second intensifying lesson. In the first version, the possessions that the rich man had treasured up did not matter, since he would be unable to take them with him when he died. In the second version of the story, however, the possessions of the rich man matter a great deal, both in his life on earth and in the life to come.

The rich man put all of his trust in earthly things: the harvest, his goods, and his lands. Through this material abundance he thought he had found a sense of rest and peace for his soul. The irony of the situation is that his soul has no use for possessions. Instead of giving him the rest and security he sought, the rich man’s possessions took control of his life and his soul. He was so worried about having enough stuff that he couldn’t relax or be merry until he had goods laid up for many years. By the time that he had accumulated enough possessions to satisfy himself, they had gained an inordinate sway in his life. The things that he thought he owned wound up owning him instead.

Unfortunately, the problem of being overly concerned with material possessions is not one that we left behind in ancient Palestine. Those of us in this country have a particular habit of accumulating more than we need. Storing up our possessions has become a big business, a business that grosses over twenty two billion dollar a year. We have moved beyond building newer, bigger barns and on to self storage. The Self Storage Association represents over 51,000 storage facilities in the United States. These companies control more than 2.2 billion rentable square feet of space, an area larger than the city of New Orleans. By taking advantage of the services that these facilities offer, we can say to our soul, “Soul, all of the stuff that won’t fit in the house has been laid up behind double pad locks at the storage center. You can rest easy, knowing that if you need your old collection of eight track tapes they’ll be right there waiting for you.”

The problem is that, no matter how much stuff we pile up, or how much money we make, things aren’t what we need for our souls. Many of the people of this community here at St. Paul’s, as well as others around New Orleans, experienced this first hand in the aftermath of the hurricanes. The possessions that people gripped so tightly were pulled out of grasping hands by rising waters and raging winds. Afterwards, however, something curious happened. Some people came back and started trying to pick up the pieces. Why? If our lives are simply an accumulation of material things, why return to this place at this time, where so many things have been taken away, where the threat still looms that they might be taken away again? What nourishes peoples’ souls and gives them the strength to rebuild their lives?

I’ve asked this question to quite a few people over the course of the summer, and I’ve been surprised by the recurring themes I’ve discovered. People have told me that they have strength to rebuild because they know that God will be with them during the process. They are able to rebuild the things that are a part of their lives because God has already started rebuilding the parts of their lives that matter most.

What the people I talked to discovered is that when the path that we’re walking reaches one of those dark, desolate stretches we find out that those eight track tapes in storage, or the new car, or the old money aren’t what we really need. We find out that we don’t need something, we need someone. We need someone that will stand by us in our times of trial. We need someone that will stand up for us when we are facing our greatest fears. We need someone that will stand firm when everything around us has been shaken into disarray. In short: We need a Savior.

God, in His infinite love for us, has given us a Savior in the person of Jesus Christ, someone who is able to satisfy our souls. While other things are passing away, Jesus is everlasting. While other things promise to distract us from our lives, Jesus offers us a life worth living. While other things are demanding our souls from us, Jesus is reaching out to embrace the image of God imprinted at the core of our being.

Experiencing and returning the love of the divine is what I think being rich towards God truly means. What could be more valuable, what could be more treasured than knowing that you love and are loved by the one that made you, that knit together your inmost parts, that hides you under the shadow of His wings? This richness towards God, this divine love, is the core of the Gospel story. God’s desire for a relationship with us, you and me, broken and sin-stained as we are, is greater than anything on earth. God’s love is more earth-shaking than any storm or flood, or disaster, more valuable than the finest gold, greater than Death itself. Christ is all and in all, and that, my brothers and sisters, is all that we need.