Weed Out The Greed

 

Text: Luke 12:13-21

Focus: greed

Function: to help people have a proper attitude about money.

¹³Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” ¹⁴But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” ¹⁵And 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.” ¹⁶Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. ¹⁷And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ ¹⁸Then 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. ¹⁹And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ ²⁰But 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?’ ²¹So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

I interviewed at a Church and they said to me during the interview: “We don’t want a pastor who will tell us what we want to hear, we need a pastor who will tell us what we need to hear. We need a Pastor who is not afraid to step on our toes.”

And I did that rather well and it was accepted by the congregation, unless I preached passages like this one that deal with our relationship to our wealth and greed.

So, I beg your grace this morning as I try to be true to the teaching of Jesus and how we should apply them to our lives.

The story, we read, starts out with a man interrupting Jesus during a sermon and asks Jesus to set things straight financially between him and his brother.

The man feels cheated by his brother and since he believes that there is something Divine about Jesus, he begs Jesus for justice, just as we would beg God for justice.

We read last week that sometimes it takes persistence in our requests for justice and we should not give up praying.

And Jesus’ answer to him could be taken like this: God is not as worried about your future as you are. God provides circumstances in life to let us have opportunities to trust God our ourselves for our future.

What Jesus actually said was that it wasn’t His place to be that judge between people. And that begs a question, if it isn’t God’s place to judge between people, then where is the justice that God promises?

Was God condoning the unjust actions, if indeed it was unjust, of the elder brother by God’s inaction? And does that mean that we do that same thing? Forgiveness is a sacrifice of obedience to God.

And the question leads Jesus to a teaching moment about wealth and greed.

So, after telling the man that His mission is not to solve the financial and personal problems between siblings, he redirects the entire audience to ponder their own relationship to wealth.

He is telling this, mind you, to a crowd of people, most of them are living in crushing poverty.

He speaks of the woes of the rich and tells us not to be jealous of them, or to compare our worth to them.

Jesus makes it clear in the parable that it is God who has given the rich man his increase, not the rich man’s cleverness or ingenuity. He may have worked hard, but God did it. God has given to him the increase and it is implied that since God has been generous to him, he should be generous to others.

Brian McLaren once pointed out in a sermon that this man, by building bigger barns and hoarding the wealth for himself was breaking Jewish tradition.

If you remember the song “If I Were a Rich Man” from the Fiddler on the Roof, you would hear Tyvye dream of being able to sit at the city gate, in with the elders, contributing to the welfare of the community.

The rich man should have shared the blessings that God has given him. But he like us, was living the American dream and struck it rich.

Jesus is not condemning riches, Jesus is condemning hoarding riches.

This man had every “Right” to build bigger barns and dole it out to himself year after year and accumulate wealth. We, as Capitalists, would say that the man has a God given right to accumulate wealth. We know that the bible even suggests wise investing in several places so that we can prepare for the future. There is nothing wrong with having a retirement account.

But the passage is warning us about our relationship to our own money.

And from the perspective of the Kingdom of God, Jesus calls him a fool.

He was rich in material things and sorely lacking in the spiritual realm. And that was proven by the way he hoarded his wealth.

Our culture, what the Bible calls the culture of the world around us, or “The World,” is a value system that is contrary to the value system of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The value system of the Kingdom of heaven is for us to be generous today and trust God for the future. Rest in the promise from the Lord’s prayer that God will indeed give to us our daily bread.

I see the biggest problem of the rich fool as him not having faith to trust in God.

And riches can do that to us.

I confess that while I was writing this sermon, I stopped and went out to my car to check my Mega Millions 1.025 Billion dollar prize ticket. I didn’t win.

I am not trying to be greedy, but I have to tell you that winning would panic me because I am afraid that I would get rich and forget God.

The rich man didn’t think he needed God anymore. And therefore, he refused to be generous with his grain, or even sell it at market value. Instead, he hoarded it, therefore driving up the price and bringing harm to his community.

But we have to understand that it was not the accumulation of wealth in the first place that was this man’s sin. The wealth, remember, was the work of God.

It is what he did with the wealth that was wrong and caused God to label him as a fool.

He placed his trust in his wealth instead of in God.

And God showed him the error of his ways.

All that he planned to do with his wealth was taken away because he did not trust God with it.

Look at this part of the Sermon on the Mount from The Message. It is Matthew 6:24, 30-34:

²⁴“You can’t worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can’t worship God and Money both.

^30-33“If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.

³⁴“Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.

Seek first the kingdom of God and God’s justice and all the necessary components of our lives will be given to us.

The answer, God shows us, is to live by faith daily in the provision of God.