Sermon, Elliott May, August 3rd, 2025
Today we are talking about everyone’s favorite church topic: how to handle money and possessions. Aren’t you glad you came to church today?
In our gospel passage for the day, we read about the story of a man who comes to Jesus to ask for help settling a family dispute about an inheritance. In response, Jesus warns against greed and tells a parable about a man who stores up a lot of material wealth and in the end gets called a fool by God. Jesus seems to set up a dichotomy between those who ‘store up treasures for themselves’ vs. those who are rich toward God.
It’s a simple story but a striking one. Maybe to some, a challenging one, too. It’s ok if it is challenging; in fact, that’s a good thing- it means that we’re reading it the right way. Jesus is very clearly trying to challenge his listeners in the story.
After all, it doesn’t seem so bad to ask for help settling a dispute between siblings about the family inheritance, right? Fair is fair. If we heard about a friend of ours in the same situation, I’m sure we would feel sympathetic.
That’s why it’s important to say that the parable Jesus tells is not really an exchange about family dynamics, or dividing an inheritance. Jesus uses this exchange to make a universal point about how we relate to God, to one another, and to our stuff- money, possessions, all of our resources.
The story told by Jesus in this passage is often called the parable of the rich fool. We need to be clear about why the man gets called a fool. It’s not because he is saving some resources for the future. In other places in the gospels, Jesus occasionally talks about the need to be a good steward of that which you have been given. So I don’t think Jesus objects in principle to be careful with what we have been given, or storing some of what we have for the future.
But if that’s not it, what is going on in this passage?
In Jesus’s time, there was a very forthrightly theological dimension to property laws. The Hebrew people understood the land to be given as a gift from God- you may remember the stories in Exodus about Moses leading the people out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land. They spent a generation wandering in the wilderness before settling in Canaan, where intricate property laws were introduced. And as those laws get introduced throughout the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, one thing that gets emphasized over and over is that all the land they occupied belonged exclusively to God. It did not belong to Israel even after they occupied it, Leviticus 25 quotes God as saying that ‘land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in MY land.’ This is one of the central principles of the faith as expressed in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament- the world is God’s, and all that the people receive comes as pure gift from God.
The point of saying this frequently in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is so that the people come to understand that the land is to be used to ensure the welfare of ALL the people- God is constantly reminding the people of the need to provide for the poor, setting up specific rules and practices for the care of widows and orphans, and eventually, even resetting property boundaries after a certain number of years so that no one builds up such generational wealth that it causes extreme stratification between members of the same society, what is called the Jubilee.
Again and again, as God sets forth the law, the people are reminded that they are a people; a community, not just a collection of individuals, but a collective whole who worship the same God, who rise and fall together, who are meant to live together in mutual concern and flourishing. Leviticus 25:35-28 makes it clear, ‘If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you. Do not take any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend at interest or sell food at a profit. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God.”
We have to remember too that at this time, the people live in a land-based, agricultural economy- much of their wealth depended year to year on things outside of their control, like good weather for the production of crops, and the health of livestock.
So- because the world belongs to God, because all of the resources the people have has come as a direct gift from God, the people are not to use the resources that they have received from God to profit at the expense of others.
This fact gives us a different perspective on the parable we are looking at. when we look at when we turn attention back to the passage of the day, we need to view it with that perspective, which Jesus’s listeners would have had, one that is conditioned, formed by values of the Law of God given in the Old Testament. As an introduction to the parable, Jesus tells the person who approached him about splitting the inheritance to be on guard against greed. The word for greed here translates literally as “much-having.” Be on your guard against “much-having,” the having of a lot and the wanting of more, the seeking to possess a whole of anything- money, power, influence, or anything else, because Jesus knows that there will never be enough to quench the thirst.
In the parable Jesus tells, the man lives on land that produces abundantly. The English translation doesn’t give us the feel of what Jesus says- in the Greek, the word used for ‘abundantly’ comes from the same root as the word euphoria. Jesus is saying the man is sitting on land that is gushing forth produce. And that’s what happens in the story- things are going so well for the man that he doesn’t have room for all of the crops. But instead of turning his attention to the needs of his neighbor or even just thanking God for such abundant provision, the man focuses on building bigger barns so he can store all that his land is producing.
The man is not called a fool because he tries to save for the future. He’s a fool because God blessed him abundantly and instead of turning his attention outward toward his neighbor, he turned his attention to hoarding his stuff and prioritizing his own comfort- “I will say to my soul, you have goods laid up for many years- relax, eat, drink, be merry.”
These words, “relax, eat, drink, be merry,” are reproduced almost exactly from the book of Ecclesiastes, which says, “there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat and drink and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.” But Jesus is rejecting that mindset- Jesus is saying, wait a minute, there’s a larger horizon here, a larger meaning in life than just enjoying yourself today and storing up wealth for tomorrow.
There is a way to see these sorts of messages from Jesus as being scold-y, finger wagging- as though Jesus is saying, ‘you have to be miserable.’ But Jesus says elsewhere in the book of John, “I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” Jesus also finds time to enjoy himself in the gospels; in fact people are sometimes scandalized by seeing him have dinner parties with disreputable people, or eating and drinking with his followers at times that he’s not supposed to.
So “Don’t ever allow yourself any comfort, don’t be selfish” is the wrong way to read it. Following Jesus is not fundamentally about refraining from certain stuff or even on the flip side, making sure to do the right stuff in order that God will love you. Christianity is a way of life in which you invest yourself, your resources, your highest aspirations in something bigger than yourself, the divine reality who happens to love you and all those whom you love- and that’s how you find true pleasure and true security. Not just by avoiding the right stuff, and not by building up enough wealth to insulate yourself against disaster. You can’t do it, it won’t work. And even if we could, it wouldn’t satisfy. There will always, always be the hunger for more. And so Jesus’s invitation in this passage is to transcend the most fundamental temptation of human life, which is to try and earn security or love or influence through wealth or accomplishments. The paradigm Jesus offers is one in which the divine love of God is at the center of reality, in which all that we have, all that we are, is an unmerited gift from a lavish God, who gives and gives and invites us to do the same, secure in the knowledge that God’s love will never leave us.
Jesus offers this parable as a mirror. May we be bold enough to look into it.
