8th Sunday after Pentecost

Sermon: 8th Sunday after Pentecost

Texts: Luke 12:13-21, Colossians 3:1-11

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I don’t know how many of you have seen the film Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. In the film we see the meteoric rise of the man Charles Foster Kane, who came to become very wealthy. In the film we see his mansion Xanadu, the accumulation of wealth and the symbol of power are evident. Yet, by the end of Kane’s life, what we see is an empty palace, echoes bouncing off the manifold possessions, no one to enjoy them, and at his death, everything is then burned, turned to ash. Is this not the lesson Jesus is trying to communicate to us today, about how foolish it is to accumulate wealth and possessions, especially when it is in detriment to living with God and neighbor. “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity” says Ecclesiastes.

When we listen to a gospel like today’s, we must wonder where our allegiances lie as Christians. Conventional worldly thinking would like to convince us that in everything we can have our pie and eat it too; that you can have your Xanadu, and expect goodness to sprout from exploitation. The Enemy wants to convince Christians that they can worship God and be greedy (which we heard from Paul, is akin to idolatry, one of the principal roots of sin in the Scriptures); that we can be rich and forget the poor; that we can call ourselves good and reject the stranger; The enemy wants us to believe that we can enjoy our lives, reap the blessings of the Gospel, and in the same breath feel content about ignoring the neighbor in need. Jesus has some stark words for us: “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’” Meaning: The hour of action is now, and all that we have accumulated, if God came knocking for our life this night, what purpose did they serve? Were the least of these fed and clothed, or did we ignore their cry? Did we render to God what belongs to God, that love that we owe to another created in the image of God, or did we walk the way of apathy? A difficult demand.

It has been a tragic irony of the history of Christianity, that at the heart of our faith there is a poor and beaten Christ, yet we have convinced ourselves that wealth for it’s own sake is more worthy of our attention than the Christ we say we serve. From this text it is clear, God does not care about becoming rich in wealth, on the contrary, seeking to become rich is repulsive 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.”. The pursuit of wealth for it’s own sake has a religious dimension to it, so much so that money becomes a god to the pursuer. As Paul said, greed is idolatry, it puts wealth in the place of God. Meaning that instead of following that commandment of God: You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, and with all your strength and all of your soul and your neighbor as yourself, gets perverted to You shall love money and power with all your strength and all of your heart and all of your soul, and yourself you shall put above everybody else.

The pursuit of wealth distracts from the real important things in this life, and it ultimately distracts you from true worship of God, for one already has a god named Money. I’ll never forget the following response by the theologian Stanley Hauerwas to the question of why the American church is asleep, numb and disconnected from the crisis around us: “Money! A rich society has a way of hiding it’s sins that is deeply tranquilizing”. Many American churches unfortunately have fallen to this deeply tranquilized state, they have adopted the posture of the foolish rich man in Jesus’ parable, having secured their power and wealth, they think they can just enjoy pleasure and believe that God has no further demand upon their life.

I’d like to bring up some statistics so we know what kind of state we are in: according to the Poor People’s Campaign, a Christian movement seeking to end poverty in the United States, with roots in the advocacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, states that here in Massachusetts, between 2018-2020, 2.3 million Massachusettsans were poor or low-income, accounting for 34% of the state’s population. These numbers have the potential to increase with everything that is going on. It would be a mistake for us Christians to think that our way of life is not concerned with this situation. Jesus very much is talking about our individual and collective responsibility in the face of God’s incoming Kingdom. When God knocks at our door, what does it matter that we have wealth, if no one of God’s little ones will benefit from it. We live in one of the most prosperous societies to ever walk the earth, we have some of the richest individuals to have ever lived, and yet, millions unnecessarily still go hungry, millions still struggle, millions cannot live a life of dignity. Why is this so? I do not want to stand in judgement here for this societal ill, I’m also a sinner in need of grace, but as a preacher of the Gospel of Christ, who knows of God’s unceasing care for the least of these, who is aware of God’s unrelenting love for the sinner, who knows God is battling out solutions in the heart of human beings, our hearts, I must ask the question: knowing that God reaches out to us with His grace, knowing that he soon knocks at our door in the night, knowing that He shows us the face of Jesus and His Word as the Way, the Truth and the Life, then what is Christ’s demand over our lives? How does He want to be known among us?

Paul clearly points it out in the letter to the Colossians, he says this little phrase that I like, “When Christ who is your life”. As the baptized, our true life is Jesus, looking at things through Him. So what happens when Christ is your life? Those things that disturb our hearts are quieted: anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive language. We start to see people not according to the prejudices of old, according to old divisions and hatred, not as objects to be exploited by our self-interest, but now we know that every human being is created with the image of God, and we are trying to make that image shine. Christ is all in all, which means God’s love is seeking to shine through all of us no matter where we come from, to be universal siblings to all. The church then becomes the launching ground for this expansive Christ-presence, where humanity can actually encounter the generosity of God, who in Christ is ready to tear down the barns and feed the hungry, who is ready to come down from the richness of Heaven and stand and uplift suffering humanity. God does not silo; out of His abundance He shares unreservedly.

So just as our Post Communion prayer says: Christ calls us to give ourselves away as bread for the hungry, as He gives Himself to us. Being rich towards God is in the giving away, not the hoarding in. What a beautiful gift is the worship of our God! Our security has transferred from our self-sufficiency to the ever loving hands of God and the community He brings together. Our salvation lies in a God that gives it all for us. In the same way, our true life, that is Christ, is in the giving away, in the hope that love will be all in all. And in that miraculous hope the church says “let it be so!”. Let us thus pray: