August 4, 2019 “Investment” – Luke 12:13-21

Luke 12:13-21
“Investment”
August 4, 2019 – Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

A Covenant estate planner used to say, “Where there’s a will… there are relatives. Where there’s no will… there are more relatives.” Some of us could tell a horror story or two about our own family or someone else’s where the scene is much like our text. Verse 13 of Luke 12 shows a man squabbling over an inheritance with his brother. He wanted Jesus to be his advocate, to arbitrate for the family and make sure justice was done.

The inheritance was probably land and a farming business. Old Testament and Jewish tradition laid great importance on keeping land in the family. Perhaps their father’s will directed the brothers to manage the property together, rather than dividing and diluting its worth. Or perhaps an older brother took it all for himself and cheated the younger one.

It was not uncommon for rabbis to play such a role. As respected and holy leaders, they offered advice and settled disputes. Jesus, if anyone, certainly was able to make such a decision. His wisdom would have brought the matter to a swift and absolutely fair conclusion. But He refused to get mixed up in it.

Jesus’ business is not our business. Sure, He could offer a fair solution. He might even have been able to make everyone happy. But His business is not our business. Jesus’ business is what business does to our hearts. So He used this occasion to warn about greed.

A great spiritual irony is that our current economic system is based in an attitude which Christians for almost two millennia regarded as sin. Greed is one of the famous “Seven Deadly Sins.” It’s constantly warned against in Scripture. I Timothy 6:10 says it is the root of all kinds of evil. In our reading from Colossians today, chapter 3, verse 5, greed is condemned in the same sentence along with sexual immorality. Yet over the last two hundred years, greed has been embraced, baptized and converted into a virtue by Americans. People like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos are cultural heroes.

It’s a subtle trap for followers of Jesus Christ. We start with a desire to use God’s gifts wisely, to steward them. Earning more, we give more. We care for our families. We’re productive members of society. Yet in the process it is easy to become greedy. As Jesus says here in verse 15, our desire for money and stuff makes us forget what life is about.

So Jesus told them, told us, a story to remind us of what life in relation to God means. It’s a parable about investment. The first century had no stock market. You invested in productive land. Harvest was your profit. A certain fellow had a good harvest, a fine profit. He woke up one morning and realized his corn was as high as an elephant’s eye. He didn’t have room to store it. As the business cliché goes, his problem was an opportunity. His crop was his retirement plan. Build a place to store it all, and he could live off it for many years.

Bring it up to date however you like. Make the man a professional with a great salary who invested in good stocks. Make him a single mother scrimping by so she can save a college nest egg for her children. Let him be a shrewd financier managing hedge funds or real estate speculation. Grain and barns back then, but it could be bio-tech or Google or gold coins. The point is he was committed to securing his financial future. As he says to himself in verse 19, “You have plenty of grain [call it stocks or property or bearer bonds or a pension plan, whatever] laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”

I’m no different from that man. Instead of big barns, I dream of a little house paid free and clear on a trout stream in Montana, with plenty of money to live on. Instead of “eat, drink and be merry,” for me it would be read, write and fish, probably not in that order. If I suddenly had the money to do it, I’d be very tempted. But Jesus warns me not to.

Jesus is not much interested in our financial security. He wasn’t interested in helping the man in the crowd settle the inheritance. He isn’t interested in helping you and I achieve a nice investment portfolio for a comfortable old age. I don’t think He is even interested in helping us “not be a burden on our families,” as so many of us put it today.

In verse 15 Jesus said, “one’s life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” His perspective is not ten or twenty years before you retire or twenty years after. His point of view is on whether you trust Him. He gives you eternity. He sees your years laid down beside centuries, your decades compared to millennia, your whole life on earth against the age of the universe. From that perspective, what you have now matters very little. What matters is what you will have forever.

God’s answer in verse 20 to the rich man’s building plan was to give him notice of his dying moment. In a way, it’s grace, a loving warning. This is the only parable in which God has an active speaking part. The man planned for a few years while teetering on the brink of eternity. He was like a tourist at the side of the Grand Canyon completely focused on getting a perfect snapshot of a cute squirrel, not realizing he’s about to back over the edge.

Death comes to every one of us. It can come by surprise and without preparation, as it did for 3 people when a cliff collapsed on a beach near San Diego last week; as it did for a woman paddleboarding on Long Island Friday; as it does on our own McKenzie River for someone almost every year and on our highways constantly. Jesus reminded us that death can catch us off guard. But we don’t have to be unprepared for it. The only real danger is being foolish like the rich man, as Jesus says in verse 21, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

It’s terribly hard, but there is a hidden blessing for those, like Lynn’s dear father, who see death coming soon. It’s an especially holy and gracious opportunity to avoid this rich man’s fate. We may prepare our souls for eternity. We may place our investments where they truly need to be. In the middle of our pain and grief, we receive a blessed motivation to be rich toward God. Anyone of us may receive that same blessing by being realistic about time on earth versus time in eternity.

So how do we do it? How do we become rich toward God? How do we make our investments where they will last? One afternoon our family noticed a full shopping bag sitting on the kitchen floor. We had been to the store in the morning and forgot to empty that sack of groceries. Unfortunately, we found one of the items in the bag was ice cream. It didn’t belong on the floor, but up in the freezer.

St. Augustine imagined coming to a friend’s home and finding fresh fruit kept in a damp cupboard near the ground. He asked whether we would not encourage our friend to place his fruit in a better place, some cabinet higher and more dry, where mold is less likely to grow. Likewise, he said, Jesus asked us to store the best fruit of our lives in a higher and better place than this world. Put our ice cream in the freezer. As we heard Paul say in Colossians 3:1, “Set your minds on things above, not on things that are on earth.” Next week in verses 33 and 34 of this chapter in Luke, we will hear Jesus tell us “Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.”

What Augustine says about the rich man in Jesus’ story is that, “He did not realize that the bellies of the poor were much safer storerooms than his barns… if he stowed it away in the bellies of the poor, it would of course be digested on earth, but in heaven it would be kept all the more safely.”[1]

We place our investments in the high, safe, secure vaults of heaven whenever we make our concerns the concerns of God. Whenever we do the work of Jesus Christ, to share His truth and demonstrate His love in a world that is hungry for both, we are building a portfolio for eternity.

I don’t really want to be like the preachers of my youth who were always asking, “What if you die tomorrow?” scaring the socks off a teenage boy. Death comes to us all and you know it. There’s no need to belabor that grim fact. Instead, I would like to commend and encourage you for how you personally invest in God and prepare for eternity. First, I honor your investment of time, just being here this morning. You could have been earning money for yourself or entertaining yourself or just taking care of yourself, but instead you chose to be here for God and for your brothers and sisters in Christ. God bless you for a good investment being made right this moment.

Along with being here, I commend you for every penny you placed in the offering today, investment in ministry, in mission, in the work of God both here in Eugene and in China, in Colombia, and in dozens of other places where God is banking your investment for an eternal future.

Hugely, I’d like to commend those of you who make very tangible, visible, and sacrificial investments in the stock of heaven. You serve in the nursery. You serve the poor, just like Augustine said, by housing and feeding them in our warming center. You will serve our visitors by bringing something you’ve made to give them or even more by inviting them to be here. You invest by volunteering at the hospital or at the Mission, by placing food or clothes in those barrels in the narthex, by inviting someone you don’t know well here at church to your home for dinner. You give and work in order to make a deposit in God’s eternal bank. God bless you. You get it. You get what Jesus was talking about here.

God bless what you are going to do and what you are considering right now. Kerry is arranging an opportunity to invest in middle school kids by doing some work at Kennedy Middle School. You can join in. Kim is talking with Egan Warming Center leadership and planning our participation starting in November. Members of your church council and others are praying about how to help a struggling young man and woman. We need a another Sunday School teacher for our beginners this fall.

There are other eternal investments, like daily prayer and reading your Bible. You can do those together in small groups when we start reading the Poetry books of Scripture as a church next month. There is offering your voice or instrumental musical talent in worship. There is fixing plumbing or killing ants or washing windows here in this building in which we sit, so the rest of us can focus better on God and eternity. Those are all precious, valuable, eternal investment in what really matters.

Jesus taught that if you try to save your life, save your time, or save your money, you will only lose it in the end. Give it away, life, time, or money, and you will find it. What does it profit you, He asked, if you gain the whole world, but lose your very soul? C. S. Lewis ended his book Mere Christianity with these words:

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Our Lord didn’t just say that sort of thing. He did it. He gave us the model when He died on the Cross, investing His own life in our eternal salvation. So instead of eating, drinking and enjoying ourselves like the rich man, we eat, drink and celebrate our Lord, enjoying His grace together here at His table, recalling what He did for us. We receive these gifts today as dividends on investment in heaven, knowing the greatest return is yet to come, at His eternal and everlasting feast of joy. May He bring us all to that Table.

Amen.

[1] Quoted in Arthur A Just, Jr., ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament III, Luke (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 208.