Background: My August preaching weekend at Christ Church Easton gave me Luke 12:13-21, where Jesus tells the Parable of the Rich Fool, who wants to build bigger barns to store all his stuff. Following is the text of my sermon.
“Live Now What Matters Forever”
There is a lot going on in today’s Gospel reading that gets my mind and my heart churning.
Someone in the crowd says to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”
And Jesus’s answer may seem for our day and time like one of the most un-Jesus responses we can imagine:
“Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”
Some followers of Jesus today like to lift absolutely everything up for Jesus to help us to make our decisions, to settle our disputes.
But Jesus may say to us sometimes, “That sounds like ‘your problem.’ That sounds like something you guys are going to have to figure out for yourselves.”
Certainly, this nameless person from the crowd has his own self-interest in mind and wants to get the teacher he looks up to, to weigh in on his side, to tell his brother to give him some money and some land.
It may astonish us that in dealing with family matters, Jesus’s answer to us might be, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”
Not the answer we were hoping for.
One of the reasons Jesus doesn’t have an interest in answering this question or settling this dispute is that he sees it is leading the person, his brother, and the crowd in a bad direction. If this is the kind of question you really want to spend your time with Jesus going through, you’ve got a bigger problem.
Greed and hoarding possessions are not going to help you. And then Jesus does one of the most Jesus things he does when asked questions.
He says, “Let me tell you a story…”
I love that Jesus’s answer to some of the most vexing questions and profound problems when the crowds press him for answers is… “Let me tell you a story.”
Franciscan and author Richard Rohr says:
“The way Jesus usually answers questions is by telling a story. There is creative and healing power in a story. It doesn’t avoid the question, it goes to the root of the question… That’s the way the great masters of religion always taught—by simply telling stories and giving the soul room to grow and understand.”
If Jesus gives them an answer, they are done thinking about the matter. It doesn’t help them grow; it doesn’t help them understand the deeper currents that are underneath the question.
Jesus’s parables work on us. They stick with us. And their meanings move around for us.
Teacher of preachers Tom Long wrote a book on Jesus’s parables and the word he uses for parable is “riddle.” Long says:
“One of the best definitions of parable is: riddle. A parable is a riddle, there is some puzzle to be solved, some enigma to be plumbed. And the thing about Jesus’s parables, just when you think you’ve got it… a trap door opens and you fall down into a deeper level of mystery. By the way, I think insufficient attention is given to the fact that we serve a Jesus whose favorite method of teaching was not rule, law, spiritual truth, principle, but riddle… All this is to say, that parables, and particularly Jesus’s parables aren’t clear, cut and dry, and don’t lend themselves to a quick and easy interpretation, or they wouldn’t be doing their job.”
Jesus told them this story, this riddle:
The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, `What should I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ Then he said, `I’ve got an idea: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have plenty of goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’
But 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?’
If our most pressing question of Jesus is to solve our inheritance problems, to solve our financial problems, Jesus says, I’ve got a warning for you—you might be focusing on the wrong things. It’s not that money isn’t important, but it can cause us to lose focus on the biggest things in life… which includes the fact that we don’t know how much time we have in this life.
I absolutely love how Richard Rohr brings this parable and this reading to a point. He says:
“‘Live now what matters in eternity’ is Jesus’s message. Live on earth what’s happening in heaven… That’s the kingdom: live now what matters forever.”
LIVE NOW WHAT MATTERS FOREVER. There’s your bumper sticker or your t-shirt from today’s Gospel. There is something to tape to your mirror or above your coffeemaker, or somewhere you’ll see it every morning when you wake up.
There is a poet named Maggie Smith whose work I am a big fan of. She always seems to bring big issues and questions into the here-and-now in ways that stick with me. When she posts on social media, she’ll often use the heading “Life lately” and include a bunch of pictures and captions of what’s been going on with her.
“Life lately” for me has been Clinical and Pastoral Education—Rev. Kelsey and I have three weeks left out of our 16-week programthat is our last requirement to be ordained as priests. In my experience, seminary helps train your brain, CPE helps mold your heart.
Sitting with and opening myself up to strangers, and sometimes friends, who are in the hospital, softens my heart in ways that I couldn’t have predicted.
Last week at the Easton Hospital, I checked in on an older gentleman who was eating his lunch. I introduced myself as the chaplain for the day, and he said, “What denomination are you?” I said, “Episcopal.” He said, “Good, that’s the only good one!”
Over the next hour he told me his entire life story: father died when he was nine, military school, jobs he had, marriages, divorces, kids dying, mistakes he made, luck he has had, good times, bad times, and when he was wrapping things up he said, “Now you’ve heard my confession.”
Sometimes visits go that way. I get a sense of someone who is in the hospital, in some cases they are lonely, they are stuck in bed in a place they would rather not be and their main interaction is with medical staff who are responsible for a whole lot of people and don’t have time to address things like loneliness, anxiety, fear; they don’t have time to hear someone’s story; to come alongside them and be present with them for a few minutes, for an hour.
The time we spend together matters. A personsitting in the hospital can feel seen and heard and human, even if just for a little while.
LIVE NOW WHAT MATTERS FOREVER.
During the announcements, my friend Jack Anthony is going to tell you a story about Stephen Ministry. Stephen Ministry is a program that became a part of Christ Church in 2005 and that trains people to walk beside someone going through a difficult time in their lives. There are more than 100 people in our congregation over these last 20 years who have responded to a call in their hearts to learn to be more loving, more empathetic, more compassionate; to be better listeners, and to make themselves available for people who are hurting. Last year, my wife Holly went through the training and became a Stephen Minister. And the whole experience has blessed her in amazing ways. They are offering the next training this fall. Maybe it is something that speaks to you.
What I am learning in CPE and what you learn through becoming a Stephen Minister is very similar. How to listen. How to be present. What love looks like when the conditions aren’t perfect.
These are not skills or experience that apply only to visiting a hospital or spending time with a care receiver.
“Life lately.” I helped with a celebration of life on Friday for a man and family I have known since I was in elementary school. The man’s name was Ed Bishop, one of the kindest human beings I have ever met. People got up and told stories. A neighbor pointed out that even after almost 60 years married, Ed and his wife Wendy wouldn’t feed the birds without each other because they loved doing it together. The number of people there Friday who were in their late 50’s and showed up with their families who said that they learned what unconditional love and kindness were from being friends with the Bishops’ two sons and seeing these qualitieson full display from their parents. Ed Bishop lived now what matters forever and showed people what that looks like.
At the service, I got to catch up with a number of long-time friends who I hadn’t seen in quite a while. My daughters are 23 and 20 years old. Some of my friends have younger kids and I’ve heard a few times lately, “it must be nice to have your kids out from under, working, not needing you all the time.”
I look back at the years when the girls were under foot, and it takes a lot of time and energy to get through all of that. But I found that most of the problems that they had then, I could fix. I could do something about. Tie a shoe. Clean a cut and put a Band-Aid on it. Drive them to school. Decide who got to pick the movie they would watch.
The problems the girls have now, I can’t fix. I can’t solve for them. Heartbreak, relationships,loneliness, anxiety. Epilepsy. Seizures. These things above my pay grade.
You know what I have found that I can offer? Time. Presence. Love. I can be there. I can listen. I can come alongside them. We can do life together.
We can live now what matters forever.
Each of us has that chance every day. If Jesus had continued his parable, his story, and given us an alternative to building bigger barns, I’d bet it would be a story of showing love and care to people who need it. That’s the kingdom Jesus wants to help us build.
Wow! What an insight and blessing! I always say that “we must walk on this earth with our spiritual feet firmly planted in the garden of God’s promised eternity.” The fact that we are already living our promised eternity the moment we accepted Jesus as our Savior, our eternal live starts now as we “Walk In Worship” with His Holy Spirit now! This is why He has asked us to seek Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength since God is LOVE we learn to love in “Life Lately “! Amen and thank you for your great insight! You are a man after God’s own heart!
In His loving and firm grip,
John A. Silva
When we talk to our grown children and feel it is just talk to them. But maybe not then or even a few years later, the talk, the encouragement or suggestions has not quite sunk in. But I feel my sons are real men as they have learned to listen. Maybe even listening to live now what matters forever. Just a thought. You are truly a listener, and sometimes hear what’s between the lines. Thank you.