13Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.’ 14But he said to him, ‘Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?’ 15And he said to them, ‘Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.’ 16Then he told them a parable: ‘The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17And he thought to himself, “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?” 18Then 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. 19And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” 20But 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?” 21So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.’
Every once in a while I check on my barns. Pension portfolios, bank records, and the like. Sometimes I go to the store and buy things to fill up the barn I call my home. Food items, clothes, little things to go on the walls or on the shelves, entertainment sets for the living room and the like.
And then there are the barns in my office here. Columns of books reaching up to the ceiling. And if that is not enough, columns of files on my computer of various items.
But there are cracks in the barns. There are cracks at my home, small ones, where leaks make their way into the home during the thunderous storms that frequently hit the St. Louis area. There are cracks here—so many cracks, it’s difficult to know how to fill them all.
And there are cracks for my own resources. Only now in my more graying days do I sometimes ask why is the stock market going down so much? And at least the early indicators are that people have bought homes too big to finance, or have created so much debt in their lives that they can’t keep up on their payments. Part of their own cracks in their own barns.
Then there are the cracks we heard this week. Tragic cracks. Less than a month ago, I was with a group of theologians heading over the bridge to Minneapolis. We were on our way to a picnic. Who would have thought that a month later the cracks, which even the Minnesota Department of Transportation is acknowledging, would give way, and people and their vehicles would be sent into the ravine of the Mississippi River. Cracks in our infrastructure.
In fact, I hope we begin to see that this parable is not about some rich young ruler, not about some snotty, stuck up Pharisee in some distant past, but about us, with all our cracks in all our barns.
And how we so much also ignore those cracks and keep on trekking as if the cracks did not exist. Perhaps you have seen the commercial where the two inspectors are walking on a pathway past a dam and notice a trickle of water in a small, pea-sized hole. The inspectors look at each other, and then the one inspector takes out the wad of gum he is chewing in his mouth, puts it in the hole and things the problem is fixed. As they walk away, the water and gum comes spewing out. The crack is back, and with a vengeance.
All our barns have cracks. And yet we cling to the barns and all their belongings. We store up more and more. My dad once said, “You can’t take it with you.” But there is the story of a man who tried. He had the hair-brained idea that he could take his money with him when he went to heaven. So he took two large cases and stuffed them full of cash and placed them in the attic above the place where he slept, so that when he died, his soul would pass through the attic and he would grasp the two sacks of cash on the way. Well, he did die. And he died in his bed as he thought. And one day, when his widow was cleaning up all the belongings, she came upon the two sacks of cash in the attic. She took them to the bank and placed them upon the counter, and said, “That darn fool, he should have placed the bags in the basement.”
How much stuff do we need for our cracking barns? How much stuff is enough in this stuff-craved culture? Foreigners, when they look upon Americans, will not buy our bottled water. It’s not because the water is a marketed product that they abhor. It’s because when they see most Americans, they see a bunch of obese people who walk around with bottled waters in their hands. And they’ve come to the belief that bottled water makes people fat. How much we may want to say, “Oh, they’re being foolish.” But who are the real fools?
Twenty years ago, a classic movie named Wall Street came out. Michael Douglas won an Academy Award for his role as Gordon Gekko, the ruthless tycoon who was most famous for his “Greed is good” speech, which reads like a creed on greed. Where did greed get him? A date with federal authorities, the loss of his fortune, and time in prison. The film was intended as a satire on America in the 80s that had placed too much emphasis on selfish greed. Yet have we learned the lesson? Or are we still fools?
It is for fools like you and me that Jesus the Christ came. Our foolishness would find its public display with him on the cross. Here was a man, stripped of his clothes, his frail and beaten body dead, and yet we can look upon him and say, there is all the riches of the world. How it is that God sent his Son to redeem, to buy back, a world of fools. Why? Why would God waste God’s divine providence on such foolish and selfish people like us? Certainly not to leave us in our foolishness and selfish ways. No, but to redeem us from the judgment of doom to which our greed and all our cracked barns are leading us, even when we are so foolish as not to see. To give us instead a treasure that cannot be taken from us: grace. No matter if all is lost, grace is there.
And faith begins to trust, begins to confess a different creed than the creed of greed. It confesses a creed that trusts that God is our Father who cares for us, who has provided us everything, and really everything belongs to this loving Father. And even though we are accountable to the point that we cannot repay this gracious God for all of God’s gracious gifts, he sends his Son to buy us back in all our lostness; his Son who calls us “friend” even when we don’t deserve the label of friend. This Son who takes in fools like us to make us fools for Christ. And then this Son sends us the Holy Spirit to keep us in the treasured grace of the gospel. It is the creed of the Seed, the Son of the living God.
A farming couple, Ed and Edna, had collected many things in their family farm and even in the family barn. One of their most prized collections were the four-hundred Hummels that they had bought and placed in various cabinets around their home. Yet after they had died and their belongings were put up for an estate sale, the auctioneer could not get any bids on their prized Hummels. The auctioneer looked at the daughter, the daughter looked at him, and the parable came to life. “These Hummels, whose will they be?”
But the God who is in Himmel, in heaven, and who welcomes us through the arms of Jesus, there is the treasure beyond all worldly things.