A Sermon Based Upon Luke 12: 13-21
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
August 4th, 2013
"Watch out! Guard yourself against
all kinds of greed. After all, one's life isn't determined by one's
possessions, even when someone is very wealthy." (Luk 12:15 CEB) “
As I write this sermon, someone has just
one the powerball lottery jackpot of 490.5 Million dollars. Now, before you get the wrong idea, I didn’t
buy a single ticket. It’s not because I
couldn’t use the money. But I don’t buy
lottery tickets because the odds are against it. I’m
not a math major but my Father did show me how to count. The odds are much better that I would be
struck by lightning, or that lightning would strike in the same place, much
like that Tornado did which hit Moore, Oklahoma back in May. If you’re going to bet on something, bet on something
like that. The odds will be much more in
your favor.
But most of us, being honest, could use more
money. Or at least we think we would know how to use it. But again, studies that have been done on
lottery winners show otherwise. They
say that most people who win the lottery blow the money and end up worse off than
before. This reality is much the same
as what Jesus is speaking of in today’s Bible text from Luke. Jesus says that we should be careful when it
comes to ‘greed’ or ‘wealth’ because ‘one’s
life isn’t determined by one’s possessions, even when someone is very wealthy”
(Luke 12:15 CEB). Wouldn’t we all like
to gain enough wealth to prove Jesus wrong?
But I definitely wouldn’t bet on proving Jesus wrong. You could end up as big a fool as the farmer
in this story.
WEALTH
CAUSES MIXED UP PRIORITIES
At the very beginning of this story we
run straight into how dumb people can get with an encounter with a little
‘free’ money. You’ve see television
shows where money is thrown up into the air and everyone is scrambling to get a
piece of it. Throw out ‘free’ money and
everybody goes crazy. Much the same
thing is going on here. Somebody has
died and left money to the sons without giving details about how it should be
divided. The law said that when there
was no will, it all goes to the oldest son.
Evidently the oldest son didn’t think the younger sibling knew how to
handle the money, so he hasn’t shared the wealth. Now, when this younger sibling hears that
Jesus, a moral teacher has come to town, he seeks out Jesus with this request: “Tell
my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”
It is interesting what people will
bother Jesus with, but it is even more interesting what Jesus has no time for:
stupid people; people who will sacrifice their families, their relationships or
their lives for the sake of money and material wealth. They go after it all and end up losing
everything. Jesus has no time for stupid
people like this. He has no time to help
them deal with their intentional manipulation for their own advantage except to
warn about what ‘greed’ or ‘hunger for money’ can do to the soul. Wealth
can cause us to get all our priorities mixed up. It can turn our world upside down in the most
negative way. The hunger for wealth,
money or luxuries, can cause even normally sane, good, Christian people to lose
their way and get all their priorities mixed up. If you don’t believe it, just let somebody
dangle some ‘free’ money in front of you and see what happens next. It can happen to any of us.
Can you think of someone whose life has
been ruined by greed and ruthless gain?
Most all of us can, and the most notorious in our day is Bernie Madoff,
who made off with all kinds of money that belonged to other people so he could
build up his own wealth, even while he was lying about building up the wealth
of others. Bernie Madoff ruined his
life, his marriage, caused one of sons to commit suicide, and estranged himself
from his other son, and not only ruined his reputation and lost his freedom,
but he took down the retirement accounts and financial security of many others
in the process. This is what greed can
do to people. This is what greed is
doing to this great country as the rich get richer, the poor poorer, while the
middle class vanishes. This is part of
why many people hate America, just as many admire us. Some of those people who hate America are
crazy, but others of them have every right.
There are all kinds of greedy people in this country who have gotten
rich off of our freedoms and manipulate the goodness of our nation for their
own selfish advantage which now threatens the liberty and justice of us
all. “Watch out!” says Jesus.
Greed does crazy things to people.
It can cause us to get our priorities all mixed up. It can cause us to lose our liberties and
our sense of justice. In spite of what
Wall Street says, Greed is not good, because it gets everything all our values
mixed up and when that happens, it can destroy our lives and it can end up
destroying us.
Tony Campolo, a Baptist pastor and
professor from Philadelphia, remembers than in his childhood Halloween was
designated as Mischief night. On that
night, neighborhood businesses would brace themselves for all kinds of petty
“crimes” at the hands of youth. Windows
were soaped, air let out of tires, trees rolled with toilet paper. Any annoying mischief an adolescent mind could
think of was attempted. Tony and his
best friend devised a brilliant and creative plan. They decided to break into the basement of a
local five-and-dime. They were not going
to rob the place. Sunday School boys
would not do such a thing. They decided
to get into that five-and-dime and change, switch, or mix up the price tags on
things.
What do you think it was like the next
morning when people came into the store and found radios selling for .25 cents
and bobby pins priced at five dollars?
In our world today, could you think about a candy bar costing $5,000 but
a gold ring for only $.50. What about
the latest flat screen TV is selling for $1.99 and a can of soup sells for
$2,000. What about a gallon of gas costing as much as
a gallon of milk. Okay, we can all
imagine that, because in the real world of inflation, values do change. Back in 1987, while on a two-week mission
trip to Brazil, we watch as a zero was added to the brazilian dollar. Interestingly, that did make their money
worth more, it made it worth less. You
got up one morning and only costs you 1 dollar the day before, now would cost
you 10. It can happen. It does happen. It will happen. Even the book of Revelation pictured a
horrible time of changing price tags and inflation, when a living creature
cries out: “A
quart of wheat for a day's pay, and three quarts of barley for a day's pay (Rev 6:6 NRS). Anyone
who remembers buying at .25 cents a gallon and someone else pumping it for you,
and you will have to pump yourself at $3.50 a gallon. Yes, price
tags can be switched, and they can change right under our noses.
This happens not only in economics, but
it can happen in everything we value or, that is, no longer value. People used to value not having any major
debts, besides their home mortgage, but now the average person is $7,000. There was a time when people put
relationships first, valuing the small things, the things that you can’t buy or
sell as the most important. Some people’s cell phones outlast their marriages
today. And if you want to see how values
change, even among Church people, watch how many fill up a sports arena or
involve their children in sports, but the churches and children’s activities
are in decline even as we speak. People
will value a fad that appears on the Internet, on YouTube for instance, that is
only here today and is gone tomorrow, but they pay no attention or have little
time or respect for families, churches, or building community, which made their
lives possible to begin with. The price
tags have changed in today’s world, and as the Bible attests, ‘the root of all
kinds of evil’ is money, that is, ‘greed’.
WEALTH
CAN DEVALUE LIFE
Why is money or greed often at the
middle of all kinds of ‘evil’, mixing up our values about everything else?
Many years ago, when I was learning the
German language, I attended Goethe Institute in Iserlohn, in the western part
of Germany. It’s a very populated area
where the Rheine and Rhur rivers come together as they head toward the North
Sea. I was supposed to pick an
interesting topic and to interview people on the street. This would help me develop my language
skills. I stopped one elderly
lady. She looked nice. I asked her a question that was on my mine:
What did you think about Hitler? I
thought that would be an easy question.
The woman turned to me and said,
“I think he was a wonderful leader
and if he had won the war, the whole world would be better off!” I was shocked. I had to know more. “What do you mean, lady? How can you say that Hilter was good? She answered: “When Hilter was our leader everyone had a
house, a car, an education and a job. It
was the best time of my life. I wish he
was still alive. I wish things were now
like they were for us back then.
Perhaps the worst thing greed does to
people in general is that it causes us to devalue human life. All the way back to Esau in the Old
Testament, people have had this tendency to trade what they matters most for the
promise a better mess of pottage. This
is what that elderly lady was doing (I need to remind you that most Germans
don’t remember Hitler this way). This
is also what the young man who came to Jesus is about to do, as he risks the
relationship with his family over the issue of inheritance money. And this is also what the man is doing in
the story Jesus tells about a man who values bigger and better over what
matters most.
In this story Jesus tells is about a
successful farmer. He is already rich and
wealthy by most standards, but when an opportunity comes, he tries to get even
richer. Now most of us would not judge
this farmer harshly. He’s seems to be an
opportunist. He is doing what most
people do. He is taking a manageable
risk. He is trying to play the odds. He is a good businessman just trying to
improve his business. He is trying to
enlarge his port-folio and his farm, so what is wrong with that? Martin
Luther King Jr. posed the same kind of question in August, 1967, when he was
preaching on this parable before a crowd at Mt Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church
in Chicago. King preached about ‘why’
Jesus would call this man a fool. He went
on to ask his sermon ‘why Jesus would call anybody a fool?” That’s not the way we like to think about or
remember Jesus. But he did. Jesus named him a fool. (http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/why_jesus_called_a_man_a_fool/.)
In his sermon, King first gives us some surprising
reasons Jesus did not call this farmer a fool.
This farmer didn’t make his money dishonestly. Also, there is nothing that indicates that
Jesus called him a fool because he was rich or wealthy. Jesus warned about the danger of riches, but
he did never said having wealth was wrong.
It can be dangerous to your soul, but it’s not wrong. There is nothing wrong with having a house,
a car, nice clothes or a big bank account.
We need houses, cars, good clothes and some of us need a little bigger
bank account. We all know we need
physical stuff to exist. The problem in
this parable, says Dr. King, was not that he had money, but this man failed to distinguish
between what was necessary and what was not so necessary. This
man, says Dr. King, got the means mixed up with the end, and he made money and
wealth the ‘end’ or goal of his life, instead of the means to live, and it ended
up devaluing his life.
With this explanation, Dr. King went on
to tell a true story that had just happened. He preached:
“The other day in Atlanta, the wife of a certain man had an automobile
accident. He received a call that the accident had taken place on the
expressway. The first question he asked when he received the call: "How
much damage did it do to my Cadillac?" He never asked how his wife was
doing. He never asked whether anyone was
hurt. He only asked about his car. Now that man was a fool, not because he had
an automobile, but because he had allowed that automobile to become more
significant than another human being. He
wasn’t a fool because he had a Cadillac, he was a fool because he worshiped that
Cadillac. He allowed his car to become
more important than his wife or his God.
To keep the proper perspective on life,
and to keep the right priorities and values in our lives--the very life God has
given us as a gift, Scripture says that we must “seek first the kingdom of God,
and then all of those other things—clothes, houses, cars—will be added unto us.” But
the problem is all too many people fail to put first things first. They don’t keep a sharp line to distinguish between
the things of life and the reason for life.
When we get our priorities mixed up we will end up devaluing everything
that matters most in life. We will end
up not only devaluing others we should love the most, but we will end up
devaluing our own life.
WORTH LESS THAN NOTHING
Because the man in the parable got his
priorities mixed up, and because he put the values on the wrong things, this
man ended up with less than nothing. Ending
up with nothing is bad enough, but this man ended up with less than
nothing. We read that all his barns
were full. He built bigger barns and
filled all those up too. He even said to
himself he had all this ‘stored up’ many years to come. He said to himself, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years.” He had it made. He could relax, “eat, drink and be merry.”
But there was only one problem.
The day he got his barns all filled up and sit down to relax, was the
very day he died. That kind of thing
does happen. My neighbor growing up, Roy
Austin, worked hard all his life. He was
not a rich man. He just worked hard
every day. I went to visit his wife many
days, but Roy was never home. He was
always working. Then the day came when
day he retired. He planned to set down
and enjoy his retirement. One of the
first things I wanted to do was to go spend some time to get to know “uncle”
Roy (He wasn’t my uncle, but we call every neighbor we liked our ‘uncle’. I wanted to get to know Roy better, but the
very same week he sit down to rest, he rested in peace. Roy sat down and died.
The same kind of thing happened to the
man in Jesus story. He had worked hard
and spent years and years of his life building everything up, but now he was
going to die. God was coming for his
soul, the story goes. Now, he would have
to leave it all behind. What would it
matter? Who would get to enjoy all his
hard work? He had stored all this
‘stuff’ on earth, but was not ‘rich toward God’!
What do you think Jesus meant this: “He was not rich toward God?” Do you think it could mean something like
working all your life, spending all your time trying to get ahead, keep up with the Joneses or beat the next guy, maybe
becoming the wealthy person of means you’ve dreamed about, but then, God
forbid, the worst thing happens. You
time comes. Your number is up. You die.
You have a heart attack. You get killed in a car crash. A tornado another natural disaster and you
end up not only losing what you have accumulated for yourself, but you can also
loose the very things God wants you to have, now and forever.
This is the kind of thing that almost
happened to Bob Buford. He was a
successful business man. Business was
the how he spent all his time. He didn’t
have much time for family, friends, or God.
It was all about becoming the best and being a success. And he built a massive TV cable company. He was successful beyond his dreams. But it all came crashing down when his young
son accidently drowned in the Rio Grande river. This rocked Bob’s world hard. In fact, Bob says in his book “Halftime”, that it changed him from
being a person only focused on success and riches, to being a person focused on
significance and helping others. It took
the a terrible loss to teach Bob Buford how he should have been living all
along. He finally became the person who
stopped living like a fool, and started living like he had some sense.
This is why Jesus told this story to the
young man who wanted Jesus to help him get part of his brother’s
inheritance. Jesus would not be
manipulated to stoop and decide on such a short-sighted matter. Jesus did not come to be a ‘judge’ about who
gets to have money, but Jesus came to be the judge over what matters most---how
we keep our values and life in perspective, whether we are wealthy or
poor. Jesus told this man not to become
a ‘fool’ by worrying about all the wrong things. Let me tell you what you should worry about. For asking such a question: God calls you a fool!
Mark Trotter says that God may be
calling us a fool, and to help us, not to hurt us. Any of us could hear the voice of God
speaking to us right now. He may not
speak directly, but he will speak: maybe like a he spoke to me through that man
in Olklahoma who opened his door after the Tornado destroyed his home and
13,000 others, saying “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away!” Or maybe God speaks through the voice of your
banker, your teacher, or God will speak through the voice of a doctor who tells
you what you thought you would never, ever hear. Trotter
said God recently spoke to a man in Chicago.
The man was just twenty-nine years old. It was in the newspaper some
time ago. He was married, and had three kids. All three kids were under five
years of age. He is an attorney in Illinois. One day he woke up with a
headache. As the day went on, it got more painful. Then he had difficulty
seeing. Then he had difficulty walking. He went to the doctor. The doctor said,
"You have a brain tumor that will require special surgery right away. If
you survive the surgery, then there could be a critical time of recovery for
about a year. If you survive that, then each year after that you can be more
assured of a full recovery." He made it through the surgery. He made it
through that first year. Then he had this interview. A reporter asked him,
"Have you learned anything through this?" He said, "Your life is
on loan." (From a sermon by Mark
Trotter entitled, “A Fool and His Money” at www.sermons.com).
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