"Be On Your Guard"

In the best of circumstances it would have been a grueling journey. Newark, New Jersey to Bangkok, Thailand with six stops in between.

But it wasn’t the best of circumstances. At every stop there were lengthy and unexplained delays, and the 30-hour trip turned into a 50-odd hour marathon.

Finally, I arrived at Bangkok at 3 a.m., well over a day later than scheduled, with no one to meet me at the airport. All I wanted to do was get my luggage, hail a taxi, go to the hotel and go to bed.

I went to the baggage claim. Suitcase after suitcase spun around the carousel. I waited. Backpacks, duffel bags, boxes whizzed by. I waited some more.

Fellow travelers claimed their bags and vanished and still I stood, waiting for my luggage to appear.

This wasn’t just a small suitcase of clothes for a week’s vacation that I was waiting on. I had come to Thailand to work in a refugee camp.

I was planning to stay a year and I had a year’s worth of clothing packed in those bags. And not just clothing – there were books, tapes, pictures from home, all carefully chosen.

Everything I needed for the next year was in those bags. Where were they?

Finally, I gave up and went to file a lost luggage claim. Don’t worry, the clerk said, after I woke him up. Call us tomorrow and we will have your bags.

I was too exhausted to even be upset. I went to the hotel, washed out the clothing I had worn for the past 50 hours – the only clothes I had – and went to sleep. As soon as I woke up, I called the airport.

“I’m calling about my luggage,” I said. “Can you bring it to the hotel?”

“Oh yes,” the clerk said. “Your luggage. I think we can find it in three weeks.”

I slammed down the phone and went into a major meltdown of self pity.

“Why is this happening to me?” I asked myself. “This isn’t fair. Now what am I going to do?”

In the middle of my meltdown I had a moment of sudden clarity. In a few days I would be working with refugees from Cambodia and Laos. They had abandoned everything they owned to escape to Thailand to live behind the barbed wire fences of a refugee camp.

Most of them had either left family members behind – or worse, had family who died in the conflict or trying to escape. Many of them had stepped on land mines and lost arms or legs in their flight to freedom.

The irony overwhelmed me. I was coming to work with refugees and I was crying over lost luggage.I had the money in my purse to go out and replace everything I needed. If I wanted to, I could get on the next plane and go home.

My perspective suddenly changed.

That moment for me was very much like the moment in the gospel story we heard today. I could hear Jesus say to me what he says to the man who is fighting with his brother over the family inheritance.

“Take care!” Jesus warns. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

And then, as he so often does, Jesus tells a story. A rich man has many fields that produce an abundance of crops, such an abundance that he has no place to put them all.

The rich man wonders what to do with all his wealth. He doesn’t have to think long before he comes up with a solution to his problem.

“This is what I’ll do,” he says to himself. “I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grains and my goods.”

When that is done, the rich man is sure he will have no more financial worries. “I will say to my soul,” he says, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, and be merry.”

Who here today is not a bit envious of this man? Wouldn’t we all like have in our barns – or our savings accounts, pension plans, and stock portfolios – ample goods laid up for many years?

Wouldn’t we all like to know that our financial futures are secure, that we can retire and relax, that we can eat, drink and be merry today, knowing that there is enough for all our tomorrows?

The rich man certainly seems to be in an enviable position. That is why it is such a shock when we hear God’s sharp retort to him.

“You fool!” God says. “This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

These words make me very uncomfortable. Standing here preaching on them makes me even more so.

It would be so much easier to preach on this reading back in the refugee camp, or in the inner city, or an area devastated by natural disasterss.

It would be so much easier to preach on these words back in the days when I could pack everything I owned in the back of my two-seater car.

These words make me uncomfortable because I can so easily identify with this man who God calls a fool. Like him, like perhaps all of us, I worry about storing up financial security for the future.

I can easily come to the rich man’s defense. He apparently made his wealth honestly. There is no indication he mistreated or cheated anyone as he amassed his fortune.

Nothing suggests that he is evil. Why then does God have such pointed words for him?

Perhaps the rich man’s problem is that he is totally preoccupied with his possessions. Perhaps his problem is not so much the size of his harvest, but his insistence on gathering it all up, storing it for only his own use.

There seems to be no thought of sharing his harvest with people in need, no thought that the abundance of his fields could be a blessing for the whole community, no looking beyond himself.

The rich man may also be making the mistake of believing that he can find security is his self-sufficiency. Maybe he doesn’t offer thanks to God for the abundance of his harvest because he believes the abundance is of his own making.

Maybe he is a man who does not believe he needs help from anyone. He can make it on his own. He may believe that old adage “God helps those who help themselves,” – words that are not found anywhere in scripture.

Oh, he may protest that he has always believed in God. But when it comes to managing his life, dealing with his possessions, planning for the future – he seems to be living as though there were no need of family, or friends, or God.

He becomes a “fool” because he thinks he is in total control of his life – the master of his own universe.

The story of the foolish rich man makes all of us confront difficult questions.

How much is enough? What is the purpose of wealth? What does our faith have to do with our economic lives? Do we live as if there were no need of anyone else, including God? Do we need to be masters of our own lives?

Jesus does not give any easy answers to these questions.

Instead, he warns us to be constantly on guard against greed and power; reminds us that all life is a gift from God, not something we earn; warns us against the presumption that any amount of power and affluence can secure the future.

The purpose of this story is not necessarily to make us feel guilty, but to challenge us to examine our lives and our attitudes toward our possessions and our illusions of security.

Is there poverty in our abundance? Is there weakness in our power? Are we who are wise in the eyes of the world fools in the eyes of God?

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Readings

Ecclesiastes 1:2,12-14; 2:18-23

Colossians 3:1-11

If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry.) On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things–anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

Luke 12:13-21

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

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