A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt,
Intentional Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
Maiden, North Carolina
Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 5, 2007

Scripture Lesson: Luke 12:13-21
_____________________________________________________________
Wasn’t it just a week ago today we heard Jesus say, “I tell you, ‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.’”? Well, here we are in Luke’s Gospel just one week later, and what do we find? A man approaches Jesus in a crowd and asks, seeks, and knocks, but what does Jesus do? He refuses to do what the man asked and sought for him to do. There seems to be a disconnect between what Jesus promised and what Jesus did. What’s going on here?

Well, let’s take a closer look. A voice from the crowd sounds out, “Teacher, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.” Now everyone in the crowd is likely well aware of the family situation which prompted the man to call out to Jesus in the first place. In small towns people know each other’s business, even the financial aspects of their business. Isn’t it so?
 
Furthermore, everyone in the crowd expects Jesus to do what he is asked: render a judgment and intervene with the man’s uncooperative brother. After all, Jesus was a compassionate man, responsive to human need and sensitive to matters of justice. What’s more, rabbis in Jesus’ day typically did these kinds of things. They were experts in the Law. People looked to rabbis, not only to pray and teach and lead religious services, but to render judgment on very practical matters like this, even as many people today expect of rabbis in the Jewish community.

In this particular case, the issue the man wanted Jesus to resolve had to do with inheritance rights, a difficult matter in families even to this day. The most likely scenario is this. A father had died leaving the farm as a unit to his two sons - land, of course, being the most precious commodity in the Middle East, particularly in Israel with all its deeply religious meanings. The father was simply following the old Israelite practice of maintaining family ownership of land. One of his sons, however, the one who cried out to Jesus for help, desired to have his share of the inheritance, his own, individual piece of the land, but for whatever reason, his brother refused to cooperate, refused to divide the farm. Obviously the relationship between the brothers had been ruptured by the one brother’s desire for independent possession of his half of the family farm. So the issue went to “court,” so to speak, or more accurately, it went to a respected rabbi for settlement.
 
Now, according to the Law (that is, the first five books of the Bible) in a situation like this, the land must be divided between the brothers. The only thing required for the division was for one of the brothers to request his fair share. The bottom line is, the man calling to Jesus from the crowd was well within his rights, and he had obviously done what was required by the Law, made the request for division to his brother. I want you to take note of this: the man in the crowd did not ask Jesus to negotiate a settlement with his brother. No, the time for negotiation had passed. He wanted Jesus to force his brother to do what was legally required of him. In other words, this is the man’s request, “Jesus, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”

So how did Jesus respond to this man’s asking, seeking, and knocking? Essentially he responded, “No, I won’t do it.” Apparently Jesus has absolutely no interest in becoming judge in this matter; he will not be a party to the outworking of greed. Literally, what Jesus said to him was, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?”

So you may be wondering, “Whatever happened to ‘every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, it will be opened’? Does it not apply to situations like this? Is the promise for “every one who asks” or just “some who ask”? The answer to these questions requires that we dig a bit deeper into what happened next.

Instead of taking the role of judge in this situation and requiring the recalcitrant brother to divide up the farm, Jesus responds by telling a story to the crowd, and you can be sure the man who asked Jesus for a judgment is listening closely.  It’s a story about a very successful farmer, one to whom might be given the “Israelite Farmer of the Year” award, but whom Jesus calls a fool.

It seems that this prudent, productive farmer manages the land in such a way that it produces bumper crops year after year. His land produces so plentifully that it causes him a major problem - storage. He has no place to store all that his land has yielded. He’s a rich man with a problem.

Now it’s important for us to notice how this successful farmer regards his riches. When we listen to his little speech to himself, we realize that he makes no connection between the abundance of his crops and God’s graciousness. There’s no acknowledgment that anyone other than himself has had a role in the phenomenal yield. Also in listening to him we realize that he has no sense that the abundance lays on him a responsibility to share with those who have little.

Listen to this successful farmer’s soliloquy, and pay particular attention the frequency with which he uses the words “I” and “my”: “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. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.”

At this point in the story God interrupts the man’s self-centered monologue. “God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”

Now what on earth does this story have to do with the man who asked for Jesus’ help with an inheritance problem?  The answer is clear. Jesus quickly saw that the man’s real problem was not a legal conflict with his brother. His deeper problem had to do with his flawed assumption that life does in fact consist of one’s possessions – so that the more stuff he has, the better quality of life he will have, and the more stuff he has, the more secure his life will be.

The story Jesus told makes the point very well. The farmer in the parable was a fool in God’s estimation. Now the word for “fool” in the original Greek is a very strong word, “aphron.” It means quite simply “stupid”! In other words, God called the successful farmer “stupid” – as if to say, “You may be smart and industrious, you may know how to plant and harvest efficiently, but how stupid you are to think that your life consists in your many possessions! How stupid you are to think that the more stuff you have, the better your life will be, and the more you can secure your future. You stupid! You think that if you get stuff piled high and deep enough, it will serve as a barrier against meaninglessness, misfortune, and death. What a damned fool you are!” That’s the meaning of the story. And that’s the man-in-the-crowd’s real problem. And this is what he needs to hear more than anything else.

As for what the story has to do with us, listen to Richard Bauckham’s attempt to connect Jesus’ story with our situation. He writes this:

It hardly needs to be said that contemporary Western society is in the grip of the rich fool’s delusion. That life consists in what we can get and keep and spend is probably the loudest of the confused voices of our mass culture, conveyed with seductive expertise in the advertising that forms our consciousness…Of course, we may soon discover that what we have acquired so far brings no real fulfillment in life, but the rich fool’s philosophy encourages us to think that therefore we need more: a constant supply of new material possessions that cannot satisfy, new and expensive ways to take it easy, eat, drink, and enjoy ourselves. In simple cultures it does not take long to discover that material things cannot satisfy, but in affluent cultures (like ours) with  their endless production of novelty and excitement, there are always other things we will soon be able to afford and to which we can attach our desires for fulfillment and security.

In other words, if you hunger for true fulfillment and security, as we all do, your deep hunger will not be satisfied by “building more barns” – that is, accumulating more stuff or growing your bank balance. This goes against the grain of what our society trains us to think, but Jesus is saying that this notion is foolish – stupid, in fact. The attempt to fulfill and secure our lives on the basis of our material possessions is bound to fail. These are the cold, hard facts of life.

Now, in our better moments we know the facts, don’t we (?), but living as we do in the most affluent society on earth, the most materialistic society in the history of the world, whether we be rich, poor, or somewhere in between, we often lose sight of the facts of life and thus forget that our lives do not consist in the abundance of our possessions, but in being, as Jesus said, “rich toward God.”

And, finally, what do we say about the fact that Jesus did not do what the man in the crowd asked of him – intervene with his brother, force him to divide the farm? This is an important issue for us because it has to do with prayer, has to do with our relationship with God, and has to do with our taking Jesus at his word: “everyone who asks receives, he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened”? 

Well, in truth, the man in question did receive an answer to his request of Jesus, which we might call a prayer. Jesus did respond to him, but responded according to his real need. Jesus’ response wasn’t what the man wanted – pressure to force his brother to divide the farm. No, Jesus’ answer to the man’s need was a story, a story that revealed the grand delusion by which he lived, a story that gave him an opportunity to change his perspective and find real life. And that’s often the way it is with our prayers – the Lord doesn’t necessarily respond by giving us what we want, but he does give us what we need to become more fully human.

Finally, we never hear from the unnamed man in the crowd again in the New Testament. Maybe he took Jesus’ story to heart and changed his perspective on life, began desiring to be rich toward God instead of laying up treasures for himself.  Or, maybe he wandered off in search of some other teacher who would tell him what he wanted to hear. We have no way of knowing which path he took.

But what we do know from this encounter and from the story Jesus told is that we have a Savior who will lead us into lives worth living, who will respond to our real needs, and who will tell us the truth, the facts of life. In short, we have a Savior who loves to teach and to save fools like us!
 
To Jesus Christ, who loves us
and freed us from our sins by his blood
and made us to be a kingdom,
priests of his God and Father,
to him be glory and dominion forever and ever!