Deuteronomy 24:19-22
Luke 12:13-21, 32-34
Many years ago, a simple creed started making the rounds, popping up on posters in doctors’ offices and in schools, and even I dare say, in some places of business. For the pre-internet era, it spread through pop culture at breakneck pace. That creed was written by Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Fulghum, and it was called “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Remember that? You remember. I don’t remember where I was when I first saw it, but I do remember that it made an impression. It was catchy. Perhaps a little too catchy, but its simple admonitions, reminding us of the earliest moral code we teach our children, resonated across the spectrum of a cynical adult world. Let me remind you how it begins.
“All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.
These are the things I learned:
• [First] Share everything.”
And there are a number of other items on the list, and then, the second to the last line of the creed reads:
• “Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.”
It’s too bad that the rich man in Jesus’ parable didn’t have the benefit of Robert Fulghum’s insight. It might have saved him a whole lot of trouble.
Pity the poor rich man. He had everything he needed to live an abundant, blessed life—everything that is, except one thing—the wisdom to know how to live and what to do with all of his blessings. In fact his deficits in this area were so huge that he becomes an archetypal symbol of human folly for Jesus and his disciples. Where did he go wrong? Let’s revisit the beginning of the parable as we hear it in the gospel of Luke:
“The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’”
Hmmm…the rich man finds himself in quite a dilemma! His land has produced so much wealth that he literally doesn’t know what to do with it—as things stand, he is not equipped to deal with this much abundance. He’s in a pickle! There he is, standing on his land, surrounded by all his possessions, like the Grinch standing in front of his cave, pinched by his grinchy, frozen little heart, looking down on Whoville, and cogitating. “Hmmm, what should I do?” I can imagine that when Jesus told this story, he might have paused here, letting the suspense build, because the rest of the story pivots on this question. If he had been a different man, he might have thought, “why, I could share some of my unexpected wealth with that nephew of mine, whose crops were hit by blight this year and whose young wife died two months ago, leaving him alone with five mouths to feed.”
Or he might have thought, “well, perhaps I could create a community food bank with my extra crops, and invite the day laborers who have no land to come and get fresh vegetables and grain for their families, and I could create a seed bank and share the seeds with needy farmers around here.” Or at the very least, he might have thought, “I know, I’ll throw a harvest festival and invite all my friends and my family in for a big celebration! It’ll be a great banquet, and we’ll give thanks to God together for this incredible abundance he’s bestowed upon me.”
But no, not this man. None of these options occurred to him. This man, who was either very unimaginative, or very greedy, or very alienated, or perhaps all of the above, thought only of himself. As Jesus tells the story, “Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” And so the die is cast which leads to the verdict, the judgment which becomes the moral of the story. “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?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
Professor Fred Craddock, in his commentary on Luke, remarks:
“The parable calls covetousness folly. It could also have said it was a violation of the law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets. Even so, it seems to have been a widespread problem in the [early] church. This craving to hoard not only puts goods in the place of God…but is an act of total disregard for the needs of others.”
Craddock notes that the farmer has not done anything criminal to earn his wealth; he is simply the beneficiary of the bounty of the earth. He writes:
“Sun, soil, and rain join to make him wealthy. He is careful and conservative. If he is not unjust, what is he? He is a fool, says the parable. He lives completely for himself, he talks to himself, he plans for himself, he congratulates himself. His sudden death proves him to have lived as a fool.”
The great Protestant reformer Martin Luther had a name for this kind of sin. He called it se incurvatus in se, Latin for “self turned in upon self.” It is the “human proclivity to do everything for the promotion of self, out of concern for self, and using resources claimed as one’s own rather than as gifts of God.”
And that brings us to today. Today, when we find ourselves, as a society, beset by a veritable plague of fools, as we watch the financial underpinnings of our society threaten to collapse under the weight of decades of unchecked greed, and as we continue to hear alarming news of damage to our earth’s climate and its very capacity to sustain life due to human overuse of the earth’s resources. And the even greater folly is that so few people realize the connections between the two. Today, we come in to this sanctuary from a world which seems shaken by titanic forces beyond our control. Many of us are worried. Many of us are angry. And yet, there is hope. There is hope because there is another way to live; it is the way that Jesus came to teach us; it is the way of the prophets of ancient Israel; the way of all the great sages; and yes, it’s so simple that kindergartners can grasp it. In fact, they often are more adept at it than adults are, because we forget.
We forget that the way of wisdom is the way of compassion, justice, and sharing. We forget that it is the quality of our love for one another, rather than the quantity of our assets, that makes us rich. We forget that all that the Lord requires of us is to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God.
So it’s fortunate that our young people are around to remind us that there is another way. And so I want to thank the youth from the confirmation class of 2008 for choosing as their mission project an initiative that would demonstrate for us in the simplest and most concrete way the connections between God’s call to be good stewards of the earth and God’s command to love our neighbor as ourselves. The organic garden that they helped to create, and that many of you nurtured and harvested, embodies the concept of eco-justice much more profoundly than any sermon I could preach. Turning an unused plot of land on our property into a harvest of organic, healthy food for low-income people in our community is more than charity; it’s an act of ecological justice—partnering with God and with the earth to steward earth’s resources wisely, so that earth’s bounty is shared, human needs are met, and the integrity of creation is not violated.
Rock Spring Church decided long ago that service and sharing are at the heart of our community’s character. The Mission Fair hosted by our Stewardship Board today will introduce you to many of the organizations that we serve through our benevolences and through volunteering. With our organic garden and the other eco-justice initiatives that are greening our church, we are finding a whole new horizon opening before us. Our Mission Fair, and our organic garden, are a parable of wisdom for those who have ears to hear. They remind us that “where our treasure is, there our heart will be also.” May your heart, unlike the rich fool’s, be a storehouse of compassion, rich toward God, and turned toward others. Amen.