Storing up!
When we hear that parable that Jesus told, we immediately think of silos and cornfields and harvest and grain. And that’s exactly the metaphor Jesus uses to describe “storing up” to the man in the crowd who approached him about help to get his deserved portion of inheritance.
But it’s too easy merely to say, don’t put your security into money but into God.
“Be on guard against all kinds of greed!” warned Jesus. “This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have planned for yourself!”
But wait ---the “who will get” changes the impact of that question. Doesn’t it?
For “storing up” is more than about shoring up your life and security with money. It’s about the breaking down of relationships. It’s about the harm of hatred and division. It’s about the perils of going your own way and relying only on your own plan. It’s the result of “me first” in a “me exclusive culture.” It’s all about wanting for ourselves what we perceive as “fair” and “just” and “our share.”
Except our sense of justice is usually a bit skewed.
For Jesus, there is something much more important at stake in this man’s question than money. It’s the relationship with his brother.
“Who will get” what you have planned for yourself if you have broken your relationship with your brother over this issue of inheritance?
Talk to anyone who has ever served as a chaplain or caregiver in a hospital or hospice. They will tell you that those facing imminent death or terminal disease will testify to the same two things. Every one. The two things? 1) The only important thing at that point in life were their relationships. 2) They deeply mourned and wanted mended any relationships they felt had been broken.
Not one of them mourned the loss of their career, or their home, or their success, or even their health at that point. Only their relationships.
Most of us are not farmers, storing up grain. But in our lives, we store up all kinds of things!
We can store up resentments. We can store up anger. We can store up hatred. We can store up hurts, whether real or imagined. We can store up emotional pain. We can store up our ghosts from the past. We can store up guilt. We can store up envy. We can store up jealousy. And we can store up shame.
All of these separate us not only from others, but from our relationship with God.
We all build silos of emotional grievances and silt that can clog us up emotionally and stop up connections between us and those we love.
The only way to free that kind of blockage of the heart and impacted trust is an infusion of love that can purge all our stoppages. The good news is that Jesus is the ultimate heart doctor. Jesus is the cardiologist of love. And Jesus’ justice begins with love.
Not one of us truly wants to receive what we are due. Anyone here want to stand before God and say, “Okay, it’s my turn. Give me justice.”
Of course not. We want God to inflict that kind of “justice” upon others! Sure we do! But when it comes to ourselves, no, trust me, we don’t want for ourselves, what we are due. We don’t want our “just desserts.”
We want more than anything the grace and mercy of God! Amen?
Kyrie Eleison. “Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.”
For God’s justice is love-soaked and mercy-cloaked.
That’s what Solomon knew in the story we heard today, isn’t it? Two women arguing over the “ownership” of a child. But when the wise King decides to cut the child in two, the one who loved revealed herself as the true mother of the child –the one who loved enough to give up what was due and to value instead the life of the child over what she wanted and deserved.
The end to division is love.
Love is not fair. That’s why it’s love.
Love is not self-gaining or self-serving, but self-sacrificial. Love does not keep score. Love is not audited.
Love dreams a dream of unity, a dream of promise, a dream of hope that supercedes anything we can store up for ourselves by our own hands.
Love is a lullaby that comforts us through times of division and gives us hope for a different, even a dream-like future.
In the civil-war torn US South, division had become all too real. Some were torn between family and duty. Some between friends and country. Still others torn between living in shame or enlisting to certain death. But the most poignant stories of the civil war south come through in African American songs. “Spirituals” we call them.
One of the lesser-known favorites is actually a lullaby. It’s a haunting melody, partly because of the notes, partly because of the lyrics. Let me play it for you now.
"All the Pretty Little Horses"
The song, it’s said, was written to comfort a child (but more perhaps to comfort its mother) in a time of the terrible war-torn south, but also in a slavery ridden south. For during that time, many African American women were forced to leave their own children alone, to sacrifice their welfare, meanwhile they tended to those of their masters or employers. And they were forced to store up their pain, their sorrow, and their loss, while hoping for a better day. While the song is heart-breaking, and you can hear the agony of the mother and the loneliness of her abandoned child, still the song, like many spirituals do, contains a promise –“When you wake, you will have all the pretty little horses.”
This is a mother’s dream for her child –a better life in a better kind of place, where life is beautiful and he or she is free.
This lullaby is not so different from the vision of John that we call the great Revelation! The world of the early church may have seemed war-torn, violent, and exceedingly hard, but a new heaven and earth would be coming where everyone would eat and drink for free! What a vision! What a dream! A dream where silos and resentments end and love reigns.
Where anger and resentment, evil and envy are defeated, God’s people will live in beauty and hope in unity with God and feasting at His heavenly table.
We all need a lullaby like that, don’t we?
What is our dream today in the Church?
Today, our world feels to many as if it has splintered into a thousand fragments. Relationships have been broken over politics, religion, or simple disagreements.
And boy have we stored up resentments, right? It feels often that the world has stored up resentments about us too. We live in a state of perpetual “separation.” And the cracks in our façade are beginning to crumble.
How do we love a world that has silos on every corner? How do we tear down our own silos, and free ourselves to love when we are trembling in fear of stepping outside our walls? How do we rebuild those relationships that we know God wants us to rebuild?
Often, as the Church, I think we don’t know what to do about it. We feel dissociated sometimes from our culture, don’t we? We feel sometimes I think that we are neglecting God’s children, but we don’t know how to care for them in a world that rejects us.
But I believe, God has a dream for the Church. God has a continued dream for God’s Church in this world, and we need to be ready to receive it. That dream is a dream of love and reconciliation. And that kind of love always starts with Jesus.
This is what Jesus tells us in this parable today. Focus your eyes on God. Restore that relationship, and all the others will follow. For life is all about relationships. Not storing up money, or resentments, or fear, or hesitancy, but shoring up relationships.
Who are the broken relationships in your life? Where are the broken relationships within your church? Within your community? Within your world?
I invite you now to take a moment to pray. Pray for Jesus to restore your relationship with Him. Pray that He guide you in restoring the broken relationships in your life. Pray that Jesus break down the walls you have built between you and those you love. Pray that He tear all of our silos down, in our lives and in the church, allowing love to flow out of this church like a fountain of living water. Pray that all walls between this church and its communities be dissolved in a sea of love. Pray that God’s dream of unity for the church be realized through the power and presence of the One and only Living God and His only Son Jesus. Pray that love prevail. Pray that the power of the Holy Spirit wear down our resistance and quell our fears. Pray that the love of God that passes all understanding, might be realized in you.
Amen.
[Optional Ending]:
Let’s say, I have here ten 100 dollar bills, or $1000.
[If you can do this visually, with real money, it will be ideal. The image of you standing there waving $1000 in your hands will be powerful. Get someone in the congregation to loan you the cash for a few hours.]
What if I say to you…..I have need of some people to help me tomorrow to do some work here at the church. And I’ll give each of you who shows up these 10 $100 bills. The day will go like this. You get here by 8, and I’ll have some bagels and donuts with coffee to start off with. Then we’ll do some paperwork for a few hours, and one of you will take some Starbucks orders and we’ll take a Starbucks break mid-morning. Before lunch, we’ll spend some more time doing some research and filling out some paperwork. You can have an hour and a half for lunch. Then we’ll spend the rest of the afternoon finishing up the research and paperwork, and I’ll have you done by 5pm. So that’s the deal. How many of you would like to spend the day working on paperwork for $1000? Let’s see the hands go up if you’re interested?
- That’s great. Oh, wait a minute. I forgot to mention one thing. I forgot to tell you that the day I have described, where you get paid the 10 $100 bills, would be your last day on earth. Your life would be over at the end of that day.
Now, how many of you would be interested in those 10 $100 bills? No takers? It’s no surprise.
Who would sell the last day of their life for a measly $1000? If you know it’s going to be the last day of your life, you want to spend it doing something other than storing up money on earth. But wait a minute! How do you know tomorrow is NOT going to be the last day of your life? Each one of us will have a last day of life, and no one knows when that will be. How do you know it isn’t tomorrow? And if every day could be your last day, why would you sell it so cheaply to store up the currency of earth when you could be shoring up your soul with the currency of heaven? And what coinage is that?
It’s the coinage of love. It’s the coinage of connection. It’s the coinage of relationships.
It is, after all, all about relationships—with God, with yourself, with each other, and with creation.
Based on the Story Lectionary
Major Text
King Solomon and Love’s Justice (1 Kings 3:16-28)
Jesus’ Parable of the Rich Fool and Warnings to His Disciples and Others as Told by Luke (12)
Minor Text
Abraham and God Discuss Sodom and Gomorrah’s Lack of Loyal People (Genesis 18)
Stay Loyal and True to the Lord Your God (Deuteronomy 8)
Psalm 24: Receive the Blessings of the Lord
Psalm 62: Those Who Set Their Hearts on God Will Be Rewarded
Proverbs 23: The Deceptiveness of Wealth and Sin
The Lord of Abundance Will Judge Those Who Have Turned Away and Bless Those Who are Loyal (Malachi 3)
God’s Warning to Jerusalem Sister of Sodom Who Does Not Care for its Poor (Ezekiel 16)
The Warning of Material Corruption and the Bid to Save Many for God (James 5)
Paul Calls Disciples to Live in the Spirit and Not of the Law (Galatians 5)
The Bid to Focus on God and Not on Material Wealth (1 Timothy 6)
Image Exegesis: Wealth, Sin, Loyalty, and Diamonds in the Rough
The image of the silo is important in this story. A silo separates and hides away. It protects but also sanctions away. It is a symbol of control and ownership. The Church sometimes can become a silo, in which the idea of “ownership” supercedes the reality that the Church belongs to God and is open and available to all people.
Once we ascribe to an “ownership” model, we lose sight quickly of our mission to the world. Wealth can feed that idea of ownership. When we pour money into the church, we can expect also to “own” a piece of it. It’s very hard for us to give without expectation of return on investment.
But that’s exactly what God calls us to do. We are called to a Church not based in the concept of ownership but in the concept of trusteeship. And we are to “hand out” that sustenance and food of the Gospel to all people who will hear it and receive it. The “food” of Jesus is not ours to hoard away but is a gift we must share.
For God, relationships are paramount. I like to think in the choice of the lullaby, All the Pretty Horses, this week, that one day our world can live a dream of unity –with “dapples and greys, pintos, and bays” all living together in the great “field” of God under the shining Light of the Son.
Our world right now needs more dreamers. Healers and dreamers. Everyone wants to be a prophet. But it takes courage to heal and to dream God’s dream for the world….and to follow that dream to fruition.