Don’t Be a Fool with the Fruit

Fruitfulness, Part 7:

June 2, 2024

Ordinary Time

Pastor Mike

Luke 12:13-21

This is the seventh segment in our preaching series on the biblical theme of fruitfulness. Most recently, we’ve been exploring some of the challenges we face in the fruit-bearing lives that we’re called to lead. So far, we’ve been dealing with the challenge of fear, but this parable of Jesus, unique to the Gospel of Luke, introduces a new challenge, the challenge of pride. Fear is very often at the root of pride; we puff ourselves up or take more than our fair share because we are afraid of not being enough or not having enough. Even so, Jesus brings pride into central focus in his story of the rich farmer, warning us against “many kinds of greed” (Luke 12:15).

We can be greedy with a lot or greedy with a little. Greed is possessiveness, which is a disposition of the heart. Greed is most concerned with getting – getting money, power, stuff. Perhaps it’s because I live with two toddlers, but I feel particularly tuned in to the linguistic expressions of greed. Do you know what greed’s favorite words are? I. Me. Mine.

During his ministry, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached on this parable frequently. In one sermon, given to a congregation in 1967 in Chicago, King said this: “Now if you read that parable in the Book of Luke, you will discover that this man utters about 60 words. And do you know that in 60 words he said ‘I’ and ‘my’ more than 15 times? This man was a fool because he said ‘I’ and ‘my’ so much until he lost the capacity to say ‘we’ are ‘our’.”[1]

One of the areas that the I, Me, and My most forcefully exert themselves is in the area of money. In the time of Jesus, a field thick with grain meant financial security. As Christians, how should we behave when we have more resources than we need – even when we are surprised by a sudden onrush of abundance – like this rich man whose fields produced a surplus crop?

I want to recognize that money-talk in church can make us uneasy. One reason for this is that Christian leaders have abused money in countless ways throughout the Church’s history, demanding more and more of it from the people in the pews in order to fund projects of the ego: armies, cathedrals, jumbo jets.

Another reason is that we are culturally conditioned to think of money-talk as taboo. Which is exactly what the powers and principalities of our age desire. If money is the driving force in our society, the determinative factor between who thrives and who flounders, between who has access and who is excluded, between those who can escape from trivialities and those who suffocate under “a relentless piling on a problems,”[2] then of course we’re conditioned not to talk about it. Widespread poverty is America’s most enduring evil, yet American Christians balk at asking moral questions about their money.

But we must also admit that we avoid money-talk in the Church because money, along with the things it can buy and the security that it seems to provide, exposes some of our most deep-seated selfishness, underneath of which lies a complex of anxiety and hurt. I’ve worked for this. I’ve earned this. Our attitudes and actions around money often reveal our patterns of sin, as well as our wounds.

Jesus talked about money and possessions all the time. He talked about money without embarrassment or apology. He consistently taught that worldly riches, and the desire to accumulate them, are the greatest obstacles to God’s kingdom and to fullness of life.

Being both materially wealthy and a faithful disciple is not impossible, but Jesus indicated on numerous occasions that it takes an incredible amount of spiritual maturity and moral discipline. Few can do it, in part because money provides an illusion of security, and under that illusion the heart lets its guard down, growing lax like the man in Jesus’ parable who says, O Soul, relax! Eat, drink, and be merry. You’ve got ample goods to please you for years to come.

The story goes that the fields of a rich farmer yielded an exceptionally fruitful crop. There was more to be harvested than the man was able to store. To him, this presented a problem. What was to be done with the excess? It’s worth pausing here to note that the man turns his unexpected bounty into a complicated problem. How easy it would have been to simply share what he couldn’t store for himself. But whenever we are confronted by a clear and obvious opportunity for economic justice, we usually overcomplicate it. As Matthew Desmon says provocatively in his new book on poverty, “Hungry people want bread. The rich convene a panel of experts. Complexity is the refuge of the powerful.”[3] In the case of the parable, the “expert” that the man consults is himself. He decides that the best course of action would be to demolish his barns and build bigger ones. “But just when he had resolved to do this” (Matt. 1:20, NRSV), God intrudes upon the man’s fantasy, his soliloquy, and calls him a fool – for this very night, God tell him, you will die.

The man doesn’t talk with anyone about his intentions to build these bigger barns. He doesn’t talk with his laborers about their capacity; he doesn’t ask his neighbors how their own fields have fared; he doesn’t turn to his congregation to see if there’s a need in the community that his excess could address. Most indicting of all, he does not welcome God into the conversation. Which is to say, the man does not pray.

This rich man from the parable mistook wealth, abundance, and fruitfulness as matters of individual concern and private decision making. He did not lay his situation as a creature before the will of the Creator. Dr. King was right, ‘I’ and ‘my’ dominate his words, and his only conversation partner is his own soul. But in a great irony, this soul, which the man treats as the only reality in all the world, is precisely what he loses when God comes calling.

Money is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Money has to be used for something; it has to represent something. The hard thing is that, as Christians, we don’t get to decide what the ends for our money are. God decides the ends, and God has revealed the shape of that decision in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus emptied himself of privilege to serve suffering humanity. Jesus drew together people from all walks of life and insisted that they forge a life in his Spirit where everyone would have enough daily bread to eat. Jesus sought the kingdom of God above all else, trusting that God knows and will provide for our needs.

The point I want to stress is that our decisions about money, especially when the harvest is extravagant, are not decisions to be made in the privacy of our own inner talk. That feels blasphemous to say in our society, yet it is the persistent position that that the Bible takes.

Perhaps you talk openly with your spouse about money, and you’re wondering if that’s enough. Sus and I certainly keep learning how to talk about money, since we were raised to approach it so differently. And it was messy before it got, well, less messy, requiring constant evolution for both of us.

If you can’t talk with your partner or spouse about money at all, or without it getting weird and contentious, that’s a problem. If you won’t allow your partner or spouse to have a say in how you earn or spend your resources, that’s a problem. If each person in the relationship thinks of money in “I” and “My” terms rather than in “We” and “Our” terms, that’s a problem.

The household can be a great practice facility for talking about money, and all the fears and habits and temptations that come with it. But even for the healthiest couple with lots of hard-won victories of communication behind them, money will still be an idol when God is not invited into the conversation. In addition to making money-talk taboo, our culture idolizes the family unit. When we do consider who our money and possessions and resources are for beyond ourselves, our imaginations often travel only as far as our bloodline. A marriage or committed partnership can amplify this tendency, rather than break it down.

In the Book of Acts, Luke records a story from the first days of the Christian Church about a couple named Ananias and Sapphira. They were early converts, and they made a half-hearted attempt at participating in the new economics of the Kingdom, selling a piece of property and bringing the proceeds to the apostles to be distributed in the community according to need. The scripture says that “with his wife’s full knowledge, [Ananias] kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet” (Acts 5:2). He told the apostles that he was giving everything, but in secret he’d conspired with Sapphira to keep a portion of the sale for themselves. Saint Peter caught them in their lie, and God struck both Ananias and Sapphira dead on the spot. When it comes to money, even the couple is not enough. God creates a new family in the Body of Christ, so the table must be big enough in include not only you and your household, but also your church, your community, your God.

The Apostle Paul used to drive people absolutely crazy. One of his grating habits was that he talked with churches about other churches finances. He knew how every congregation was fairing when it came to their material resources, and he insisted that wealthy churches had a duty to support struggling churches and that struggling churches had a right to ask for help from their more prosperous neighbors.

Paul spent years fundraising for the Christian community in Jerusalem which had suffered greatly because of famine and persecution. In his second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul says, “Give in proportion to what you have. Whatever you give is acceptable if you give it eagerly. And give according to what you have, not what you don’t have.  Of course, I don’t mean your giving should make life easy for others and hard for yourselves. I only mean that there should be some equality. Right now you have plenty and can help those who are in need. Later, they will have plenty and can share with you when you need it. In this way, things will be equal” (2 Cor. 8:11-14). Paul was always making the church treasurer open the books, and he pressed congregations to think of their resources as belonging to the whole Body of Christ.

Parables ask us to place ourselves inside the story. So, where do you find yourself today?

Are you the man planning to build bigger barns to fit the surplus crop? The call for you might be to awaken to the reality of God in your life, the God on whom you ultimately depend, the God who, when push comes to shove, will interrupt, intrude, and have the final word.

Or maybe you’re the man in the crowd who causes Jesus to tell the story. Maybe you’ve come to Jesus because you think he’ll help you “get yours” in this dog-eat-dog world. It’s good that you’ve come to him, but the call for you is to become like him, praying, “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36).

Are you one of the invisible ones unconsidered by the rich man of the parable and bypassed by the man from the crowd? Are you standing in need of the generosity of your brother with the fruitful fields? Are you caught in the cycle of building bigger and bigger barns for someone else? The call for you is to guard yourself from envy while continuing to forge the beloved, just, and joyful community to which Jesus call us.

Finally, maybe you are one of the twelve disciples, listening intently as Jesus tells this parable to the crowd. Perhaps you have been faithfully following him, obediently holding all that you have and all that you are before him. The call for you might be to take just one more step in expanding your table, one more step in widening your circle of belonging and accountability.

May all of us understand that fruitfulness has the potential to stir up our pride and our greed. May we seek to guard one another from that temptation. And may we encourage one another lift up our eyes and ask what might be possible if we would only look beyond our barns.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] “Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool,” Apple Music, track 1 on Martin Luther King Jr., The Sermons (Volume 2), SoundWorks USA, 2013.

[2] Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America (New York: Crown, 2024), 13.

[3] Matthew Desmond, Poverty, 44.