Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 1, 2010
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Year C: Ecclesiastes 1:12-14; 2:18-23*; Colossians 3:12-17*; Psalm 49:1-11;
Luke 12:13-21


A couple of weeks ago, as I was heading out to the gym, just after six o’clock in the morning, as I walked by the apartment building west of the church rectory, I realized a young man, who was maybe twenty-five years old, dressed for work in something like an investment bank, had reached in and stolen one of the Wall Street Journals delivered for the residents before the doorman had gotten them inside. I turned around and called after him, but he was hurrying down the block by then. It really annoyed me, saddened me. I had never seen anyone steal newspaper. And I began to wonder what kind of life a twenty-five year-old who steals a morning paper would have.

Last week, I saw a different young man – maybe seventeen, maybe nineteen – jump a turnstile at the end my block with such ease that I immediately sensed he had done it many times. I have heard for years that this kind of thing happens, but in the eleven years I’ve lived on West 47^th Street, I’d never seen it. And I began to wonder what kind of life that kid would have, too – and to wonder whether a police officer would treat the young banker differently than he would the kid.

In today’s gospel lesson, there’s a rich man, who can only think of how he can keep his riches to himself. In this parable, God speaks, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”[1] For the record, this is the only parable I can think of where Jesus gives God himself a speaking role. It’s a very serious parable. God says, “This night your soul is required of you.” One can wonder, too, why and how any human being becomes a person who puts his or her trust in his riches – and many, perhaps most of us, do.

I am aware that in recent years I have become far more interested as a preacher in the particular theology of each of the gospels than I had been before. A lot of my thinking about Luke this year began with Candlemas and its gospel, Luke’s account of the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple.[2]

Luke famously messes up the details of the ceremonies.[3] They’re not important to him. When he’s writing about 80 AD, Jerusalem and its temple are in ruins. But the Good News of Christ has already taken root in Rome and is spreading throughout the world that he knows. Ceremonial details and questions of inheritance of Jesus’ native land do not interest him. Unlike Matthew, Luke has left Jewish ceremonies and laws in the past.

Love of money, however, is a crucial question for the emerging Christian community. The subject comes up all in all of the gospels and directly in four other books of the New Testament.[4] Jesus cares about what people love, especially if they love themselves more than those in need, love their money more than God, more than eternal life.

The theme of the rich and their relationship to the poor is as ancient as the biblical tradition itself.[5]  For us, 2000 years after Jesus, his words and teaching about money are as familiar as anything we know about him.

Luke follows today’s gospel passage with material more often quoted in the very beginning of Matthew’s gospel in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.[6] Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat, nor about your body, what you shall put on . . . For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing[7] . . . Consider the lilies, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.[8] all the nations of the world seek these things; and your Father knows that you need them. . . . Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things shall be yours as well.[9]

It’s never been easy for Christians in any age to separate themselves from their love of self, their love of their money. Luke was pretty good at preaching about it. Not only do we have the rich fool, the lilies, and the widow who gives away two copper coins[10] – all she has – in his gospel, Luke alone gives us the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and ties it to specifically to the central Christian message.[11] In that parable, the rich man, in torment, asks Abraham to send someone to warn his brothers of their fate if they do not repent and change their lives. Abraham responds, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead.”[12]

I grew up in a tradition, Southern Baptist, where tithing – giving 10 percent of your income away – was the norm. It’s so normative for me that I don’t think about it very much. Most people give little away to others. And the statistics from the IRS are clear, the less one has, the more one is likely to give. It’s something I don’t understand.

The late English theologian and bishop John Taylor begins his book The Christlike God by observing how stuck most people are in their relationship with God, mostly because they have stopped “thinking” about God – thinking in the sense of learning, reflecting, growing.[13] God slips away, in a way that math doesn’t. God then becomes unreal in many different ways.

Our gospels serve the purpose of bringing us into the presence of God’s Word. They work for us, I think, much as they did for those early communities who first heard them. Among many things, they help us grow in our understanding of God and our relationship to him and to each other.[14] They invite us to have confidence in God and not in the things that are passing away. God said, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”[15]

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
 

Copyright © 2010 The Society of the Free Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, New York. 

All rights reserved.