Luke 12:13-21
Proper 13/Year C
Someone in the
crowd shouts out a request: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family
inheritance with me.” Not the type of
thing one should broach in a public setting, it may just be the oddest and most
awkward thing anyone ever asks of Jesus.
For his part, Jesus’ reaction is swift and visceral: “Who appointed me
to be a judge over you?”
And then he turns
to those gathered and says, “Be on guard against all kinds of greed. There is so much more to life than having a
lot of stuff.” To underscore his point,
Jesus then tells a parable about a rich man.
Turns out, the person
Jesus describes is the epitome of the American dream. His business thrives. He is able to upscale his living arrangements
while at the same time saving enough for his retirement. To borrow the language from last Sunday’s
collect, he has mastered things temporal.
All well and good, but in the process he has disregarded the things
eternal.
Evidence of this is
found in the phrases “he thought to himself,” “I will do this,” “I will do
that,” “I will say to my soul…” His life
is a monologue. No other voice is
considered. No other perspective is
pondered. He is not concerned with what his
family might need. He does not contemplate
how he might be of benefit to the wider community. And most certainly, he never asks what God
might be calling him to do.
This
week I came across a painting of today’s parable by James B. Janknegt. You can see it in your bulletin. The rich man, balding and slightly
overweight, is alone in his house feasting on a meal when death comes
calling. In the tiny house next door, a
family of eight sits around a table with few provisions, but they are happy. Framing the scene, the artist depicts the
rich man’s house when it was the size of his neighbors, shows it being
bulldozed, and then rebuilt as a two-story mansion, compete with a living room
and master bedroom. Also in the frame are
renderings of the rich man’s many possessions; things like household
appliances, a cellphone, a laptop, and a treadmill. If you look closely in the living room, you
will see a piece of artwork. It is a statue
of a person who, tellingly, does not have a heart. Notice in the frame’s bottom left-hand corner
the rich man’s house is for sale. He has
died and all his possessions will soon belong to someone else.
Mastering the
temporal while losing the eternal. Jesus
puts it this way: “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves
but are not rich toward God.” If only
someone in the audience had asked a follow-up question: “How does one go about
becoming rich toward God?”
That you are here
this morning tells me neither the Chinese rocket part falling from the sky landed
on you nor did you win the Mega Lottery drawing over the weekend. Even if you didn’t buy a ticket, my guess is
you spent at least a little bit of time fantasizing about what you would do if
you won all that much money. I know I
did. The occasional daydream about money
is one thing, obsessing about it is another.
Kathleen Vohs holds
a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and has a specific interest in the psychological
effects of money. It began for her when she
noticed subtle changes in herself once she was out a grad school and earning a
living. For example, she stopped asking
friends for rides to the airport and began to take a taxi. “It was really weird,” she told a reporter. [Having money] “ends up changing the way you
live your life in ways that are not totally expected. You don’t make a ton of money, you’re not on
yachts or other things, but you start making different choices.” She summed up the changes in her life in this
way, “I became more independent and less interdependent.”
Through various experiments involving thousands of
subjects, Vohs has concluded people with money on their minds are
self-sufficient, self-focused, and anything but selfless. She states, “In all of our experiments,
people who are focused of money are really good at pursuing goals, but they’re
not that interpersonally kind or warm. They’re kind of standoffish, keeping in their
own head, not interested in being friends with anyone.” It is not that they are completely antisocial,
actively pushing people away. She says
they are “siloed”, insolated. “What you
get,” she says, “are highly motivated people who are not very socially
sensitive.”
Vohs points out she is not talking about wealthy people
per se, but about those who are chasing wealth to the near exclusion of everything
else in life. Some wealthy people, she
notes, don’t think about money much at all.
They may have money – and lots of it – but it is not their focus. Sure, it enriches their lives, but it is not
what makes them rich. They would be just
as content sitting in Janknegt’s home with the table of eight as in a mansion. On the other hand, Vohs says there are people
of low or modest means who are impoverished, not because of what they lack, but
because of their incessant, relentless focus on getting ahead. Money, and making it, is all they have on
their mind.
Vohs’ research serves to highlight Jesus’ exquisite
understanding of human nature. His
character in today’s parable exhibits all of what Vohs has learned through her
work. He is rich in things, but not
enriched. In a world crafted by God to
be a dialogue – with one another and with the Divine – his life, as I said, is
a monologue.
There is an ancient saying which holds this: “Everything
you have seen, every flower, every bird, every rock will pass away and turn to
dust, but that you have seen them will not pass away.” Something in this holds a partial clue of what
it means to be “rich toward God.”
It bids us to ponder two questions. First, what do you see… truly see? And second, what blinds you… occupies your
vision to the exclusion of everything else?
Or, it may be you are not blinded, but wrestling with distraction. It might be greed. It may be something else. The rich man never saw anything other than
his possessions. Far be it for me to
suggest a better ending to any of Jesus’ parables, but I humbly offer this: After
death comes to him, the rich man says to himself, “Well, I never
saw this coming!”
What do you see?
