“How Much Is Enough?”

Luke 12:13-21

August 1, 2004

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

I do not want to ruin it for you. Telling the details of a story line in a book is like telling the story line of a movie. If you have not read the book or seen the movie, then my telling too much might spoil the suspense in it. But if you have not read John Grisham’s The Testament, I recommend it to you. It was one of the four books that I read while we were down in Gulf Shores, vacationing.

I will risk telling you just enough about the story line of this book. It is the story of a billionaire, Troy Phelan, who is near the end of his life. He has been wildly successful, building an empire worth somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven billion dollars. As the book begins, Troy is signing one of his last wills and testaments. At least his children think that he is. It is a testament that will leave all of them an equal share of his estate. His six, grown, children, watch what they think is the signing of his last will and testament, by way of a video image. Troy and his lawyers, along with psychologists (hired by his children to make sure that he is of sound mind and body) are on one floor of his office building and his children are scattered on other floors, watching the proceedings. Each of them, all of them, received a gift of five million dollars on the occasion of their twenty-first birthdays. All six of them have squandered the money and now the gift is a distant memory. Friends, wouldn’t you like the chance to squander five million dollars?

Now that their father is near death, his children gather to make sure that his mind is sound and that they are all included in equal fashion in his will. The truth is that most of them have already spent a good amount of the money, at least in their minds. So the psychologists deem that the billionaire’s mind is sound, then their father signs what they think is his last will and testament.

There is a twist. If you are a John Grisham fan, then you know that there is always a twist. When his children rise from their chairs and move toward the door, Troy reaches for three pieces of legal pad paper that are neatly folded in one of his pockets. The papers comprise a new will, one written by his own hand, without the aid of his lawyer. He quickly signs the bottom of it, hands it to his lawyer, and then dies. This new testament leaves his six grown children enough money to pay off their existing debts, but leaves the remainder of his estate, billions of dollars, to a daughter that the other six had no knowledge of. A daughter born to a woman that he never married. A young woman whose job and chosen vocation is that of a missionary to a tribe of Indians living in a Brazilian jungle. She is a woman who had been both to medical school and seminary. You can imagine the ends and outs of this story. You can imagine the legal maneuvering that the six made when the new will was read. That is one of the story lines of the book. But the more powerful one, it seems to me is what happened when one of the billionaire’s lawyers went to the jungle to find the beneficiary of this vast fortune. When he finds her, one of the first things that he discovers is that she has no interest in the money. His job is to get her to sign legal papers and convince her that she does, in fact, need and deserve the money. But instead of helping her with her needs, she ministers to him. She hears about his growing up years and his struggles with an addiction or two. She hears of his separation from his children and the sins of his past. He tries to convince her that the money could do a lot of good in her ministry, that it could purchase medicine, build a hospital, or fund a school. He tries to persuade her that if she does not take the money, it will go to her siblings who will waste it in a lifestyle that they have dreamed of for years. She listens and then tells her lawyer of her growing up years, not with her millionaire father, but with her minister step-father. Near the end of the dramatic scene she says this about her life, “...I surrendered my will to Christ many years ago, and I follow wherever he leads. You think I’m lonely - you’re wrong. He is with me every step of the way. He knows my thoughts, my needs, and He takes away my fears and worries. I am completely and perfectly at peace in this world.” I do not know about you, but to me, that sounds like what Jesus wants us all to have, when he says at the end of our scripture lesson for this morning that we need to be rich towards God.

It is another family dispute that is the occasion for our lesson this morning from Luke’s gospel. Jesus is teaching when a voice from the crowd calls out to him. It is the voice of a brother who sees in Jesus a fairness in spirit. He says this, “Lord, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” You will need to remember that in the days of Jesus, the standard practice was for the older son to receive twice the amount of the younger son. So the voice from the crowd has to be a younger son. The older one would have never made such a request. The younger one did not think that the splitting of the estate was fair. He did not believe that his brother deserved a double portion just because he was born first.

The ugly dispute is all too familiar, even today. Haggling over furniture, arguing over who gets mother’s silverware and china, quarreling over who gets the house and the land and the money left in the saving’s account. I hate to admit this to you, but when we moved my aunt from the duplex that she lived in for years, my mother asked her children to come and see if there was anything that we wanted. By the time I arrived, my brother had come and gone and gotten what he desired. I did not mean to. It was a reaction that just happened. When my mother told me what he had gotten, I rolled my eyes and a grimace appeared on my face. My dad noticed it, asked me what it was about, and I said, “Dad has a lot of our family’s furniture. I just want one piece of furniture as a piece of our heritage.” Saying that got me in trouble for a few weeks. I think that Jesus was smart to stay out of the family dispute. Instead of getting involved in it, Jesus asked the brother who set him up to be the mediator or a referee in their dispute. Then he spoke a powerful proverbial truth, “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 tells a story that had the potential of planting a seed in it’s hearers heart. It was the story of a man, a farmer, who, Luke tells us, was rich. With his wealth already before him, he had a great harvest year. His land produced abundantly, much more than even he could have anticipated. The soil, the sun, and the rain all came together for the perfect season and together they helped the crop to be plentiful. Now, if you read this parable closely, as I have, then it sounds like the farmer did not do anything special to help this to happen. He was not dishonest. He did not steal someone else’s harvest. He did not work the land and his slaves harder than usual, but still, the abundance came to him. He did not consult with anyone about how to produce such a crop and if he prayed for it, Luke does not mention it. Luke tells us that the only one he talked to was himself. He lived for himself, he talked to himself, he planned for himself, and he congratulated himself. I want you to notice the pronouns of this passage. They are these, I, I, my, I, I, my, I, my, my, I, my. As in, “What should I do? I have no where to store my crops. I will store my grain and my goods. I will say to my soul.”

Now, you would think that if he were a faithful person, when the crop came in, he would have paused, gotten down on his knees, or headed to the church to thank God for his blessings. He does not do that. If this thought crossed his mind, “Maybe I should tithe a tenth of this crop for my church” it is not recorded. What he does do is to plan on how he can keep it all. Jesus’ story tells us, among other things, that the man’s plan was to tear down his barns and build larger ones so that he could relax and perhaps retire. Did you notice that I said barns, as in more than one? The man already had two or three barns full of prosperity on his property. He is in the middle of working that plan when God speaks to him and says, “This day, your soul is required of you.” Which is another way of saying that he died while making these plans. And according to Jesus’ interpretation, which precedes his story, as it often does in Luke’s gospel, the message is about being greedy.

I can remember reading a book where two mentalities were presented to it’s readers. The first mentality was called a scarcity mentality. By this the author said that there are only so many things to go around. This mentality says that my value, your value, is found in our competition for the things in this world. So there is only so much honor and so much recognition and so much profit and so much power to go around, so we have to compete for it. You might even say this, there is only so much love to go around, so I had better be careful with how much I give away. In this mentality, there is only so much forgiveness to go around, so I had better be careful with how much forgiveness I offer. Because, if I forgive you, will there be enough when I need it.

That is one mentality. Here is the other, an abundance mentality. This mentality says the opposite. It says that there is plenty to go around, for you, for me, for everyone. So our task is to make sure that everyone has enough. There is enough love. There is enough forgiveness. There is enough money for everyone. And really, friends, isn’t this the world that we really live in? Isn’t this the world that God intends for all of us to live in? This God of ours threw up millions of stars up in the galaxies, not a couple of dozen. He spread billions of grains of sands on the seashore. This is the God who has said to us, powerfully in a scripture lesson, that he sent his son to us, to live with us, so that we could have life and have it abundantly! Friends, we believe in a God who gives us abundant grace, abounding love, abundant forgiveness, and an abundant life. We preach that. I preach that. We believe that. I believe that. But often we don’t live what we believe and preach. Instead we worry. In fact, the passage right after this one, has Jesus talking about worrying. The call on our life, always, is to look at our lives and see not what we don’t have, but all that we do have. And when there is abundance, even a little bit of it, to share that with those who need it the most.

Today is communion Sunday which means there’s a little less time than usual. But I cannot let you go home without hearing one more thing. With an exclamation point, it seems to me, Jesus says, that we are foolish when we do not concentrate on being rich towards God. What does that mean, really? I think that I know. I think that it means having a great relationship with God, where we move him from the sidelines of our lives to the very center of them so that when there are days of scarcity, as well as abundance; where there are days of sadness as well as joy; when there are days of disappointment as well as delight, we can turn to God and be richer than we could ever imagine. Or, as the young billionaire missionary put it, “He is with me every step of the way. He knows my thoughts, my needs, and He takes away my fears and worries. I am completely and perfectly at peace in this world.” Let us pray.

(Special thanks to John Grisham for his book, The Testament. Special thanks to Steven Covey, who presents the ideas of scarcity and abundant mentalities in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People).