|
United Church of Paducah
4600 Buckner Lane
Paducah, KY 42001
(270) 442-3722
Worship Times
Sunday Service: 10:00a
Refreshments &
Fellowship: 11:15a
Christian Education
For All Ages:
11:20a - Noon
Nursery Services Provided Handicap Accessible
All Are Welcome!
A Congregation Of The
 |
From August 5, 2007
Bigger and Bigger
Luke 12:13-21
A wealthy farmer's harvest is unbelievably
bountiful. Since money is no object, he tears down the barns
that were more than adequate last year and erects new ones
big enough to contain his unexpected abundance.
With his grain now safely stored away and his future more
than secure, the man kicks back by the pool, sips a mai tai,
and savors his new-found liberation. He's set for life.
Or so he thinks...
********************* Sometimes we go looking
for abundance. Sometimes it finds us.
There was a Welch's grape juice factory in the town where my
mother grew up. One snowy day, she and her playmate found
themselves back behind that factory. There they stumbled
upon mounds of snow onto which grape juice had been
splashed.
It was, to their young eyes anyway, snow cone heaven.
They knew exactly what to do. They raced to my mother's
house, found her sled, and hurried back to the Welch's
factory, hoping against hope that their grape-tinged bounty
had gone undisturbed. When they returned with the sled, they
worked quickly. They heaped the fruity snow onto it and
high-tailed it home. Then they dug a deep hole in the snow,
filled it with their find, and then carefully covered it
over with a thick layer of freshly fallen snow. All that was
left to do was to wait for summer and the delight of an
endless supply of snow cones.
As a child, I found the story wildly funny. Only later,
though, when I could comprehend the Depression's effect on
my mother and her family, did I appreciate the story's
poignancy.
There is no shame in taking hold of what comes our way. Nor
is there anything wrong with planning ahead, in saving for a
rainy day - or, in my mother's case, a summer day.
Doing what we can now to prepare for tomorrow is part of
good stewardship, if we approach this effort from a place of
non-anxiousness.
As we think together about our reading from Luke, we need to
exercise caution. We could easily read into this parable
permission to be suspicious about or judgmental towards
people of means.
To understand Jesus' parable, we have to remember what
prompted it.
The parable of rich fool is Jesus' skillful response to two
quarreling brothers, guys who are caught in a vicious tug of
war over their family inheritance. "Justice needs to be done
here, Jesus," one of them shouts, expecting the man from
Galilee to step in and resolve their sibling dispute. Who
knows how much it was, the inheritance. Maybe it was a small
fortune but it could just have well been a piddling amount.
We all know grown children who have ended up fighting over
rags and not riches.
Instead of allowing himself to get caught up in a family
feud, Jesus, ever wise, knows that the matter goes deeper
than who should get what.
What lies at the heart of this fight over the inheritance
isn't justice so much as it is perspective, a way of seeing
the truth, seeing what is important.
Now, if he had wanted, Jesus could have given the brothers a
long lecture about seeing with the eyes of the heart rather
than the eyes of the pocketbook or social convention. As you
well know, Jesus wasn't big on lifeless monologues or dusty
explanations. Instead, he trusted the power of stories to
carry meaning from the head to the heart.
So today we hear Jesus doing what he did so often and so
well. Jesus tells a story. A story aimed at helping those
two feuding brothers enter into something bigger, something
that - outwardly anyway--had nothing to do with brothers or
inheritances. A story Jesus hoped would take them - and us - to
the heart of the matter, where we are invited to see that
there are things more valuable than things.
Now, if Jesus had been in the back of my dad's pickup that
day we were coming home from the lake, he could've told you
a different story. But since he wasn't, I'll tell it for
him.
One lazy summer day, my father took my brother and me to the
lake; two brothers from down the street, Danny and Bryan,
came along. Riding home in the back of the truck, we laughed
as we stuck our hands in the rushing air, letting them dip
and rise like fish swimming upstream.
Without reason, my father slowed down to a complete stop,
leaned out the window, and yelled to Danny to leap out onto
the grassy roadside and scoop up something that looked
suspiciously like money.
Danny did and sure enough it was money. We were awestruck,
all of us. A dollar was a lot of dinero then. To us kids
that dollar was a miracle; it was manna from heaven. There
was simply no way to explain how it had gotten there or how
my father had managed to see it as he drove along. All we
knew was that this was really, really cool, this money.
Danny trotted the dollar over to my father, climbed back
into the truck, and we started back down the road. But no
sooner than we got going, we stopped again.
This time Danny jumped out before my father even had a
chance to say anything. He raced right to it, the second
dollar, snatched it up and came prancing back to the truck.
"Look what I found! Look what I found!" Danny sang out,
waving that dollar bill, taunting us with it even. "It's
mine, all mine!"
"I'll take that," said my father appearing out of nowhere
and the dollar disappeared into his denim pocket. The four
of us--Danny, Bryan, Robert, and me - rode home in stony
silence.
When we finally pulled into the driveway, Dad came around
the back of the truck. "Kids, that money wasn't just for the
one who found it; it was for all of you. Let's all go home
and think about what we learned today."
********************
Jesus' parable is not a story meant to single out and
disparage the uber-rich. It is not about the Bill Gates of
this world or the family that owns Wal-Mart. It's not about
Rupert Murdock or big-bucks CEOs whose corporations' profits
outrank the economies of some third-world nations.
It is, I'm obliged to confess, a story about us. It is a
parable about what happens to you and me when we forget,
when we fail to make a connection between the giver and the
gift, and between ourselves and others, as well.
Rich or poor, well-off or struggling to make ends meet, we
are all part of something bigger than ourselves. Something
bigger than ourselves that gifts us with life, abundance,
and all manner of good. None of which we can earn or take
credit for.
The problem with the rich fool wasn't that he had too much
grain in too many barns but that he was starved to death
spiritually in the midst of God's boundless abundance. He
sought sustenance and security where none was to be found.
(Rev. Dr. Frank Hegedus)
The rich fool looked out over his plenty and completely
overlooked its source. He was the recipient of incredible
wealth, not its creator. He patted himself on the back for
his prosperity rather than falling to his knees in humble
gratitude.
He looked out over his fields, the rich fool did, and never
looked further. Never looked past the fence line to his
sisters and brothers beyond it. Think how rich he could've
been, in a different way, had he opened the gates to his
fields and shared a portion of all that God had so
generously shared with him.
All of this he forgot, the rich man did. And so do we,
whether we travel by private jet or by broken-down burro.
What did he forget? What do you and I forget? That our
lamps, each and every one of them, have been lit from
another lamp. (Rumi).
We forget, all of us. We are here for something bigger than
ourselves. What is that something? It's not a barn, not a
high-yield harvest, not an inheritance waiting to be
divided.
We are here for something bigger than ourselves because
something far bigger than you and I planted us on this good
earth.
Planted us here so that by what we say and what we do we
might make others rich. Rich in spirit. Rich in community.
Rich in lives of meaning and purpose.
By the grace of God, may this richness grow so great that,
like those barns, we just can't contain it.
Amen.
© Rev. Karen Winkel
United Church of Paducah (UCC) |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie
Allen
Check the Announcements and
Calendar pages to
keep up to date on current church news and events.
Please join us for a special viewing of
Paper Clips
on May 4th at 12 noon.
|
