Sermon on Luke 12:13-21
Pastor Jennifer Garcia
We can draw some pretty bleak conclusions from our readings today.
Maybe all is vanity. Maybe there’s no point in working for anything,
because someone else will benefit from it after we die.
Maybe our very life will be asked of us tonight, and we won’t get to
enjoy the fruits of our labor.
But I don’t think that’s what those readings are actually about. Our
reading from Colossians actually sums up the point of our readings well:
“Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are
on earth.”
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t enjoy things here on earth. God
created this world and called it good. God made food taste good and
made us with eyes that can appreciate beautiful things. God gave us skin
that’s sensitive to the softness of a blanket. We can appreciate good
things in this life. The Bible often uses strong either/or language that can
cause us to draw the conclusion that everything earthly and physical is
bad and everything spiritual is good. But I like to imagine God enjoying
watching us appreciate the world God created. It seems ungrateful to
shun the pleasures God created for us.
We just get into trouble when we focus on physical comforts and
enjoyment at the cost of ignoring our relationships with God and each
other.
The Teacher in Ecclesiastes was throwing his hands up in the air, giving
up on everything he had worked for because he couldn’t be certain of his
legacy. He seems to have found no joy or meaning in his work and still
felt despair at the idea of not knowing whether those who came after him
would care about his work and make good decisions. He was focused
inward, obsessed both with the drudgery of his work and the uncertainty
of its future.
Then, the opening of our Gospel reading shows someone approaching
Jesus to settle a disagreement with his brother over their inheritance.
And then Jesus starts telling this story about a man who’s also focused
inward, obsessed with storing up.
Jesus doesn’t say he got his wealth by mistreating his workers. The
problem instead seems to be that he doesn’t mention them at all, nor any
family, nor any other person. His inner monologue is full of the words
“I” and “my.” He, unlike the Teacher in Ecclesiastes, doesn’t seem to be
worried about what will happen to his stuff later. He just wants to enjoy
himself but doesn’t seem to have any concern for relationships with
other people. By extension, the brother who approached Jesus seems to
be putting his concern for possessions over his relationship with his
family.
Now, I don’t know what the situation was, but I do know that
inheritance and arguments over money and heirlooms can rip families
apart. I’m not saying it’s never justified to disagree about these things,
but they’re often symptoms of deeper hurts. We can let stuff become
symbolic of our relationships and fight over that instead of having more
vulnerable conversations about what our family means to us.
Whether your family is biological, chosen, or a mixture of both,
relationships are worth far more than stuff. That’s what the Teacher and
the rich man were missing. They were focused on themselves and their
stuff instead of human connection.
That’s what our readings point us to: what’s most important in life.
People don’t get to the end of their lives and wish they had more stuff. If
their death was brought on by poverty, then yes, wishing they had
enough resources to prevent a life cut short is understandable, but that’s
not what Jesus is talking about here.
He’s talking about priorities and pointing out how lonely even the
enviable position of prosperity can be if one doesn’t share it with loved
ones and neighbors and the community.
In our individualistic culture, it’s easy to fall into that loneliness. We can
pay for delivery services instead of asking a favor from a neighbor or
even interacting with a cashier at a store. Algorithms curate the people
and ideas we interact with online.
There are deep-seated cultural scripts that tell us that it’s shameful for an
individual to be poor instead of shameful for a society to let them be
impoverished, which keeps us from asking for help. Add on biases
against people of color, immigrants, gender non-conforming people,
people in larger bodies, people with disabilities, and so on, and our self-
worth gets capped by how closely or not we embody the “cultural ideal.”
Anything else becomes shameful.
And so, we isolate ourselves for fear of what’s different or for fear of
being different. We build bigger barns, numb ourselves with eating,
drinking, and being merry, gripe about the dreariness of our jobs, and
worry about who will get hired to take our place someday. We stay in
our safe silos and forget the richness of community just outside our
doors.
The 2004 movie Crash explores racial relations in LA through several
intertwining storylines revolving around a car accident. One of the
storylines involves a district attorney and his wife, Jean, played by
Sandra Bullock.
At one point, Jean falls down the stairs in her house. She can’t get any of
her so-called friends to help her. A friend of ten years even refuses to
end her massage early to come to her aid. It’s Maria, Jean’s cleaning
person, who takes her to the emergency room. When they get back to the
house, Jean pulls Maria in for a long hug. “Do you want to hear
something funny?” Jean whispers to Maria. “You’re the best friend I’ve
got.”
Jean’s life had gotten turned inward. She hung out with people like her:
upper-middle-class white people who called each other to complain
about their gardeners but who would never actually lift a finger to help
each other. She learned the value of relationships—genuine,
compassionate ones—the hard way.
The movie plays hard into the “poor little rich white lady” trope, but it
doesn’t take much to become isolated like that. It’s a gradual thing. It’s
harder to get to know our neighbors than it once was. We get updates on
people’s lives through social media posts instead of picking up the
phone or meeting for coffee. We can afford to run to the store instead of
borrowing a cup of sugar and building mutuality. We easily become rich
in dollars and poor in relationships.
We face the same challenges as the characters in our readings.
What do we want our legacies to be?
What will happen to our possessions after we die?
What work can we do that will live on after us?
What really matters? Who really matters to us?
How can we expand our circles and deepen our relationships so that
instead of turning inward toward vanity and loneliness, we turn outward
with a spirit of joy and generosity?
Relationships are hard work and can be painful. They require
vulnerability and difficult conversations. But they’re what’s worth
having in this life. Relationships with each other and God are what
Beloved Community is made of. Embrace God’s immense and
unchanging love for you and use it to love those around you. Your life
will be richer for it