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Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Luke 12
13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
14 Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” 15 Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
16 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. 17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
18 “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’
20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
21 “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”


Hands up if you would describe yourself as frugal.
Now, hands up if you would describe yourself as cheap.
Hands up if someone near you thinks they are frugal and are actually cheap.

Some people, of course, have no choice when it comes to cheap versus frugal—they’re just trying to survive. But for those who have the means to choose between cheap and frugal, there are tell-tale signs:

If your date suggests you share an entrée, they might be cheap.
If you shop at what some call the VV Boutique, frugal.
If your travel companion books three trains to get to your destination, and by doing so saves 66% over the over-priced and air-conditioned option, even if the trip takes three times longer and eventually results in taking seven trains over the course of seven hours, he’s frugal. Misguided and likely to remain in the doghouse for some time, but definitely frugal. Not cheap.

It’s an odd thing to preach on wealth and possessions outside of Stewardship Month or Stewardship Week, or the fleeting time we tend to give to the topic. But the lectionary of readings is a discipline, and Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost suggests in the strongest terms that we look at wealth and possessions today.

But before we look at Luke 12 and the Parable of the Rich Fool, I would like to share some wisdom from John Wesley. Wesley famously said we should “gain all we can, save all we can, and give all we can.” These are, essentially, his three rules of stewardship, and his eventual death without debt or savings demonstrates the extend to which he practiced what he preached. Searching his lodging after his death, friends only found loose change.

The context of his three rules was not poverty, as we might expect, but abundance. But it didn’t begin that way. John was the son of a vicar, in one of the poorer parishes in England. He and his eight siblings suffered together, and even witnessed their father being taken away to debtor’s prison.[1]

Despite this experience, John followed God’s call into ministry. He soon became a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, a very different path from is father’s. There, for the first time, he had means. He enjoyed this reversal of fortune and began to spend his income on the finer things, including furnishings, tobacco and (brace yourself) brandy.

Historian Charles White describes what happened next:

He had just finished paying for some pictures for his room when one of the chambermaids came to his door. It was a cold winter day, and he noticed that she had nothing to protect her except a thin linen gown. He reached into his pocket to give her some money to buy a coat but found he had too little left. Immediately the thought struck him that the Lord was not pleased with the way he had spent his money. He asked himself, Will thy Master say, "Well done, good and faithful steward"? Thou hast adorned thy walls with the money which might have screened this poor creature from the cold! O justice! O mercy! Are not these pictures the blood of this poor maid?

Wesley was transformed. He adopted a frugal lifestyle that included giving whatever excess he had each year to the poor. In the first year, he spend 28 of the 30 pounds he made, and gave the rest away. The following year his income doubled, but he continued to live on 28 pounds, giving away more than what he lived on. Even when when his income rose to the princely sum of 1,400 pounds, he continued to live on 30. It is estimated he gave away 30,000 pounds in his lifetime.

Charles White provides the lesson: Wesley “believed that with increasing income, what should rise is not the Christian's standard of living but the standard of giving.”

So now back to the rich fool. No, not the rich fool that is in the news these days, but the rich fool of Jesus’ parable.

The prompt comes, as usual, from someone in the crowd: “Teacher,” a man says, “tell my brother to divide an inheritance with me.” Jesus resists the invitation to intervene, but he will share a parable:

An abundant harvest leads a man to tear down his barns and build new barns, big enough to contain his new-found wealth. Reflecting on his wealth, he says to himself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

Parables that include the phrase “eat, drink and be merry” seldom end well. And here is what happens next:

“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’”

And of course, only the fictional rich fool knows the answer to that question. But it is very likely that the answer may have something to do with the fighting brothers that prompted the parable. Nothing brings out conflict like big barns filled with grain and inheritance. This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?

The Wesleyan answer is one answer, but few of us can aspire to the sanctity of a John Wesley. For most of us, it is unlikely that we will willfully leave behind loose change and nothing more. It does, however, cause me to wonder at the faith of this man who gives us perhaps the greatest example of applied theology. Wesley truly heeded the message “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”

For the rest of us, for those fortunate enough to live with enough, we can take Wesley three rules and apply them as best we can. We can certainly gain all we can, recognizing with John Wesley that there is no end to the good that money can do when properly shared. Much of Matthew 25 needs money: food for the hungry, shelter to share, clothing, medicine, and the rest.

Gaining all we can, we can then save all we can. This is not saving like the rich fool, building bigger barns, but saving by being frugal. And this has it’s own reward. Wesley believed that by saving we resisted wasting money on things we do not need, by also resisted a surplus of desire, and the attending dissatisfaction that comes with having some and wanting more.

Earning all we can, then saving all we can, we can then give all we can. And for Wesley, a tithe was just the beginning. A five or ten percent tithe was chump change for the stewardship superman called John Wesley. Again, he is the unattainable example, but we can’t help but marvel at the way he gave. And then we can do our best.

Back to our parable for a moment, there is a pattern in scripture that I should note, and that’s the over-zealous scribe. Sometimes, just sometimes, a parable will have a bit of a lesson tacked on the end, and the whole thing seems a little too neat. Jesus tended to leave things hanging, and didn’t explain himself at the end. So we are left the last words and the jury is out. After describing this man’s imminent departure from his life, the parable concludes with “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

Again, it’s all too neat, and so I will leave it to you to decide if this is an over-zealous script, but he does give us a gift in the form of an idea that’s really a question: Are you rich toward God?

Are you rich toward those God loves? The hungry, the thirsty, those without shelter, the under-clothed like Wesley’s maid, the sick, and those in prison?

May God strengthen us to follow where John Wesley and so many others lead: gaining, saving and giving for the glory of God. Amen.

[1]Charles Edward White, Leadership Journal, Winter 1987.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 4:27 AM