Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Luke 12:13-21

You have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.

For some strange reason, I heard the person in the parable as someone just about to retire. He seemed less self-centered and more relieved. He’d arrived. His work was done.  After the goodbye reception, after all those good wishes, so many that he needed a bigger bin in his heart to hold them all, he climbed into bed.  He glanced at his phone before setting it on the charger, this time with no alarm set for the morning. He looked at the ap that showed in one place what was in all those bins. So satisfying!

Finally, he could relax and do the things he had set aside for so long: eating and drinking that wasn’t just for energy to keep going or with clients for sale. “Soul, now, I’ll eat right to forestall that Type Two Diabetes that doctor saw coming on the horizon.” As he drifted off, did he smile at the thought of taking the grandkids for ice cream, or sending a message to his best friend in fourth grade, who he recently discovered on Facebook? That night his mind began relaxing into the possibilities. It overflowed the confines of his family, and he wondered why it had seemed foolish to be generous before he was sure he had every future possibility handled. Maybe he had been wrong to wait.

Nonetheless, tomorrow would be a new day He could be that guy who drop a hundred-dollar bill in the tip jar at Caribou or shock the church council president by offering to pay the full cost of repairing that broken elevator. Maybe he’ll even go the class on birding. Become like his other retired friends, who, in the middle of a conversation in the bank parking lot, stop, turn their head, and say, “Did you hear that? I’m pretty sure that was yellow-breasted tufted warbler? You don’t hear those very often.” Maybe his whole life could take flight.

He was free to stop being productive and could just be, be himself, maybe finally discover who that self really is. It felt like the night before Christmas morning. And it wasn’t the pile of gifts but the prospect of a new life being born. He just might be born anew himself.

“That’s it,” he thought. “Make merry.” He remembered an old teacher telling him that the word itself meant being captured by something so completely that time passes without notice. Joy, celebration, mirth, warmth, goodness, love—all the right things piling up miraculously. No wonder Charles Dickens associated the word merry with Christmas, with the dawning presence of God. Tomorrow shall be my dancing day, Day One of a new creation, he thought.

 ²⁰ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.”

Of course, the parable is typically read as a morality lesson to avoid the pitfalls of wealth and greed. You can’t take it with you. What a waste. Be rich toward God; not just rich. Go in peace. You could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Thanks be to God.

It is true, however, that when we go home, life will be demanded of us. And we’re afraid. We’re afraid of what’s coming next. We’re afraid of losing what’s important to us. We’re afraid there isn’t enough. We’re stuck. We know that we are vulnerable. We know deep down that because we live in a body that bleeds, we can get hurt or be hungry. We have bodies that are never able in every way; they die.

That’s a bad feeling, and we can hardly stand it, so our anxiety has been interjected to the system. We’ve built the kind of barns that deny that reality, hide it, and create myths to support it. This condition, that dread that is deep within, can be eliminated with a growth strategy that combines stuff, status, and power over other bodies. The bottomless pit of need can be filled. The acceptance and love that you yearn for can be yours if you have two of the twelve things that “Food and Wine” magazine says you should have in your kitchen, or you find the perfect soul mate, or get a degree from a prestigious college, or a career that culminates in the that mythic retirement of travel, golf, birding, puzzle-making, and grandchildren who are more delightful than your own children ever were.

The grease that fuels this entire economic, political, and social endeavor that runs silently in the background is fear. There isn’t enough and others are ultimately a threat to your own security because they want some, too. It used to be unacceptable to call people losers. Now, the ability to name the losers proves that you’re the winner, and that’s finally the goal: to win, to close your eyes at night with the terror of vulnerability effectively banished because you have the biggest barn.

Of course, this way of framing the human story carries its own built-in, living hell. Since we’re all competitors and threats to one another, you can’t relax, eat and drink in a merry kind of way. The neighbor across the street just had materials delivered to build an even bigger barn, or another group of global neighbors could be designing weapons to blow up your barns.

That foundational myth in our culture is so deep that we don’t have to wait for someone else to tell us we’re losers. We do it ourselves because we’re quirky, or a little slower, or didn’t get the best grades, or weigh more than the movie star that was asked to starve for six months to get the part, or it wasn’t possible to have a job that allowed for savings or were born with wrong skin color.

In that world, which Jesus captures so succinctly with this little parable, everyone is a loser. And the demand is fearsome. There’s no way to ever be enough because the boundary is always moving ahead of you. When that story is the foundation, there’s really two choices. You can build a barn of denial or a barn of despair, and neither will ever be big enough.

The author of Ecclesiastes calls that vanity. If life is nothing more than striving, chasing, accumulating, succeeding, earning, growing, proving yourself over and over again, having to stay one step ahead all the time, the winner every single time, what a waste. Even if you are the one who wins, your entire legacy will end up like the question that starts the whole reading. Who gets the inheritance?

That question, an encounter with the barn-building world, which Jesus refuses to enter. It gives him another opportunity to witness to a another option, which he is carrying in his body. A third way, another source.

It still sounds foolish to the world we live in. Being rich is marked by trusting God’s goodness, God’s provision, embracing vulnerability, not as an evil thing but as a the place where connection with one another and community can be built. Qualities of love, kindness, sacrifice and generosity are the fuel. Because God is good, less can be more, particularly for another. There’s enough if we share. In the reign of God, acceptance and welcome are assumed. The cross is the metric for success, the symbol that there is no greater love than this, than oneself out for the sake of others. This is the very nature of God.

Jesus had richness toward God. His body was the barn, overflowing with miraculous abundance, grace taking its place in history, the firstborn of the dead, the map that shows how it all ends, the voice that will not judge through vanity’s wisdom, but through the folly of the cross.

What if God’s words in the parable, “You fool,” aren’t judgment that the man wasted his whole life, but the joyful announcement that it’s not too late to live, to embrace the foolishness of vulnerability and to join one another in opening the barn doors to feed the world, to trust that the deeper story of creative, merciful love is more true than any big, beautiful barn.

What if being merry isn’t being self-indulgent or wasteful but an act of resistance, a way of stepping out of the rat race. Instead of being shaped by anxiety. Life flows from joy and gratitude. It embraces simplicity. The system needs you to be anxious so you keep buying and pilling up possessions, to trust the algorithms as the Bible.

We may never get out of this system until we die, but neither can we get out of the system of death and resurrection that funds and holds the universe. There moments again and again where we can resist fear and choose life. There are multiple opportunities to embrace them and practice this new, third, joyful way. Likely, it will feel a bit foolish. It always does. Joyful now? Seriously, with all that’s going on? Yes. Let them see you sweat? Really?

The good news is that in Christ, we realize that the demand that comes in the night isn’t judgment but grace. Or it’s the kind of wake-up call that moves us out of doldrums into engagement. Tomorrow is always a new day. Today, Sunday, is Day One of a new creation, the eighth day, when all starts again.

Breathe. Exhale. Relax your body. This is prayer, and we desperately need it. Then, from that place, practice the new way. Whenever the anxiety starts rising up within you, breathe. Relax. Pray. We’ll practice today. The invitation, an almost urgent demand, will call you to come to the table. Come to this table, eat, drink. Practice the world of abundance. There’s always enough. As we go, be merry.

Not to name any names, but, even if you have to retire and let down an entire community that relied on you, go ahead. And, seriously, it will be alright. It always has been, is at this very moment, and will be. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.