It depends on how you hear it...

Today’s gospel will mean very different things to people who have jobs, homes, cars and food in plenty, compared with those whose lives have been devastated: 800,000 people in Haiti who have been living in refugee camps for many months; people in Christ Church New Zealand whose lives and livelihoods are gone; people in Libya facing momentous life changes.

Today’s gospel might be heard by the well-off audience as an admonishment to keep focused on the things that matter, rather than material wants. But to displaced, damaged people, the message is not so clear or easy.

Jesus is not saying that the basic necessities of human life don’t matter, nor is he saying that theses necessities will magically appear if we believe in him correctly. He is talking to people who have enough, it seems; otherwise his encouragement not to worry would simply be cruel. But what about those who truly don’t have enough? How can they hear good news in today’s gospel?

Though the message is going to be perceived differently by those who have enough and those who do not, the message is really the same: do not spend your time, energy, and heart fretting about this stuff. If you have enough, be thankful, and beware of making an idol of having what you want, rather than merely what you need. If you don’t have enough, it’s not because God doesn’t love you. Jesus is working to disconnect the link that was commonly made in his day: those who please God have plenty; those who have displeased God will suffer.

If only it were that easy. Of course, there are those in our culture who spout off after every natural disaster or act of violence, claiming that they know what specific sin is being punished. Even in these last few days a website published a view that the earthquake in New Zealand was God’s punishment for the NZ Government’s liberal attitude to sexuality.

It certainly would simplify matters to be able to draw a straight line between a list of do’s and don’ts and the corresponding benefits or punishments. For example, if you steal, there will be a tornado; if you welcome gay people, there will be an earthquake.

It seems that Jesus is encouraging his followers to look beyond that kind of straight-line thinking that attaches virtue to success and vice to failure. He is making a claim that God’s desire for us is that we all have enough, rather than using some complex calculus to determine precisely how blessed or cursed we will be. “No one can serve two masters,” he says. We have to decide what our priorities and values are, and if we’re going to follow Jesus, then those priorities and values are probably not best focused on ourselves. Jesus is saying, “Look beyond the boundaries of yourself.”

In this light, the situation in Haiti, Christ Church, or Tripoli doesn’t get magically better, nor does the person in desperate circumstances automatically understand this as good news. But it does sound like encouragement not to let dire straits reduce us all to complete selfishness. If we are sitting at the top of the comfort scale, we should not be worrying about getting more, but about how to share what we have. If we sit at the bottom of that scale, we should not regard that as permission to lie, cheat, and steal our way to comfort.

But more than a moral admonishment, this message claims God’s care for everything God has made: people, lilies, the birds, you and me. While we have ample evidence that God doesn’t prevent disaster, Jesus assures us that God is deeply concerned with the lives God has created. In other words, we are not alone, no matter how bad things seem. And no matter how good things seem, we didn’t get there on our own. No matter how bad things seem, God’s heart bleeds with ours.

The Sermon on the Mount, of which today’s gospel is part, is not only subversive to the values of the Roman empire, it’s a mandate for those who want to follow Jesus. There is a lot of bad stuff going on in the world; this was true in Jesus’ century, just as it’s true in ours. Jesus’ teaching in the face of all that is wrong with the world is consistent: have faith, and do something about the bad stuff by doing all the good stuff you can, for the values that underlie the Kingdom differ from those in life lived in the world as we know it.


Being good stewards of what we’re given is important work. But in light of Jesus’ message today, it seems that an additional criterion for good stewardship should be in place. The question must be asked, “How are we serving the kingdom of God?” Is the way we use our resources really revealing Kingdom values? Is there any connection between what we want and what God might be telling us to do and be?

What Jesus proclaims, to refugees in Haiti, those struggling in New Zealand, peaceful revolutionists across the world, and us comfortable people alike, is that the kingdom of God is at hand. Grace and mercy are available to all. For those of us who already have much, it may well be that God’s grace and mercy come through us on their way to those who are in the deepest need. What an awesome responsibility that is. And what an amazing joy – to be a conduit for the care and love of God for God’s people and God’s world. Even Solomon in all his glory didn’t shine as brightly as those who share and give and work for the kingdom of God. Will we shine or be lacklustre? Time to speak and act, putting worry to one side, and be co-workers with God, anchored in the values of the kingdom God is ushering in.

Lord God, we live in disturbing days:
across the world, prices rise, debts increase, banks collapse,
jobs are taken away, and fragile security is under threat.
Loving God, meet us in our fear and hear our prayer:
be a tower of strength amidst the shifting sands,
and a light in the darkness;
help us receive your gift of peace,
and fix our hearts where true joys are to be found,
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Parable of the Rich Fool

Shaun Attwood moved to America in 1991, initially visiting family just after finishing a business degree at Liverpool University. He came from small town Cheshire, and everything felt so big in comparison: the houses with swimming pools, the roads, the cars. He started working long hours as a commission-only stockbroker, earning nothing for the first few months. Over five years, his gross commission rose to more than $500,000 a year. He was the top broker in the office and had his own staff. Then he retired to trade his own capital online and earned even more. He moved to a million-dollar mountainside home complete with swimming pool and whirlpool bath. But he wanted more.

When he moved Shaun also took his love of the rave scene and drugs with him. His goal was to make enough money to bring Manchester's rave culture to Arizona. He threw raves across the desert region. He invested in club drugs. He went from being a normal lad from a working-class Cheshire town to living a Pulp Fiction lifestyle. The police knew about him and started a wire tap and eventually arrested him five months later. He was sentenced to nine and a half years in jail, of which He served almost six. In the 26 months while He was waiting to be sentenced, He went to the notoriously tough Maricopa County jail in Arizona. The gangs there had more control than the guards, and inmates were murdered. He says that this sequence of events over almost six years changed him as a person. He tells his story in schools and prison. He says of himself, as a stockbroker who threw raves and invested in club drugs, he landed himself in jail and deserved punishment. As horrendous as it was, I'm glad I went through the experience. Even though I'll always regret the effect it had on my family, how my world came crashing down, I don't resent what happened to me – if anything, I'm grateful for the new direction it has given me.

The teaching of Jesus in this morning’s Gospel doesn’t in some senses get more contemporary does it? For it is Shaun Attwood’s story, Nick Leeson’s story, but in many ways it is also my story as I long for a new Amazon Kindle e-reader or iPad or car or house or whatever it is.

This morning’s Gospel sits in a section where Jesus is journeying to Jerusalem and has been teaching about what it means to be a disciple. Jesus has just given us teaching about being faithful to God even in the face of persecution and then from the crowd is called out this facile question centred not on faith, but a family inheritance dispute.

Seeing the deeper issue (and Luke’s Jesus constantly warns against having too much and also God favouring the poor), Jesus warns then against all kinds of greed, and I start to feel uncomfortable. My problem is money. It's not that I don't have enough. It's just that I often think, and believe, and act like I don't have enough – enough money, enough time, enough stuff. More than that, I live in a culture that regularly tells me that I don't have enough. Television advertising and the internet all not only tell me that I'm insufficient, incomplete, and not quite right on my own, but they also promise me that if I only buy the product they're pushing – be it a tube of toothpaste, new laptop, or better car – then I'll be complete. Our culture unequivocally equates consumption with satisfaction, possessions with happiness, and material wealth with the good life.

And here's my problem: all too often I believe it. Don't get me wrong, I know it's not true. More than that, I know it's a downright lie. And I take as evidence not only the multiple biblical prescriptions warning about greed, but also all the studies that measure national happiness where the UK, one of the wealthiest countires in the world, ranks towards the bottom ten percent with regard to reported happiness. Further, in my own life I know that I have a lot more money and stuff now than I did ten years ago and yet in some ways I am no more happy than I was then. So I know that as a rule happiness doesn't make a person happy, and yet deep down I still secretly believe that I'll be the exception to that rule.



And then Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool and I feel scared. I identify with the rich guy. After all, he's not a cheat, or a thief, or even particularly greedy. He's just worked hard and made a lot of money, like most of us dream about. His mistake, in the end, doesn't have to do with the wealth; rather, he goes astray by believing that his wealth can secure his future, can make him independent – from others, from need, from God. And I catch myself dreaming that, too: "If I just had a little more in the bank, or if the this were paid off, or if the cash for the kids' university education was already saved,...everything would be okay." The allure of money is that it creates the illusion of independence. It promises us that we can transcend the everyday vulnerabilities and needs that remind us that we're mortal, created beings ultimately and always dependent on others and, most especially, on God.

The lip-smacking self-preoccupation of the rich man is what Jesus is ultimately warning against. He refers to himself eight times in two verses! 'What am I to do? I have not enough room to store my crops.' Then he said, 'This is what I will do: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and store all my grain and my goods in them, and I will say to my soul: "My soul, you...".' God has provided him with land that produces so much, and yet God is not forgotten, he doesn’t even feature on this guys horizon.

Friends this is not, as Luke’s Jesus would like it to be, a ‘give all of your money and possessions away and especially to the church, and then you will find God’ sort of sermon but it’s not. Having possessions is fine says Jesus as long as they don’t get in the way of discovering true riches in God.

We have pretty much bought into the cultural assumption that equates money with personal worth and yet Jesus says our to riches should be found in God. Instead of filling our lives with stuff that has no intrinsic value other than the value that we give it, God challenges us to fill our lives with things that have eternal value. It’s not the wealth that Jesus has a problem with, it’s the fact that accumulating it outwardly reduces inwardly the God shaped space within us and if that space is filled already - when we need to show or receive love, when we long for a sense of inner peace - it passes us by and does not even feature on our landscapes. How do we earn the richness of God? You can’t. We cannot earn his favour or presence or love. Thank God we can’t because he longs to give it free of charge to us. The richness he longs for us to have costs us nothing but cost Him everything. To receive those riches, to know that we are loved eternally, to know that we can be forgiven for the car crash that we so often make of our inner as well as outer lives - we just need to sincerely ask Him to give it to us. This isn’t God and possessions fighting it out in capitalist democracy because God might be out of a job, no, it’s the story of a God waits and who will gladly put us together again when the beautiful palace we make our lives to be all too often comes crashing down. Friends we need to be people who are rich in God. So don’t buy an iPad, buy some I-God time - in prayer and in hearing of his love in the stories in the scriptures and rediscovering His eternal love for each of us.