In this morning’s text, Jesus tells a man a parable – a parable that one might describe as a wake-up call.  A man from the crowd asks Jesus to settle a dispute over a family inheritance, but Jesus refuses.  I think he does so because he doesn’t want to participate in satisfying the greed that likely prompted the question in the first place.  Instead of helping the man to get his share of the inheritance, he tries to help the man understand what is truly important in life.  As he so often does, Jesus tells a parable to make his point. 

The man in the parable finds that he has a problem: his harvest is too plentiful, and his barns are too small.  But when all is said and done, the issue isn’t really the size of the harvest… his abundance is only a problem because he insists on storing it all up for his own use.  It never occurs to the man that he might share his plentiful crop with those who are in need.  He simply can’t imagine anything better than maximizing his own use of the crop, and he wants to make sure that he’ll have that crop around for a good long while.  He’s so concerned with providing for himself that he’s willing to go the trouble and expense of tearing down his barns to build larger ones.  (I can’t help but be reminded of people buying bigger and bigger homes to be able to fit all the stuff that they’ve accumulated.)  The man is quite sure that the future is looking bright… he plans to eat, drink, and be merry.

It is at this moment in the parable that God speaks up.  God shatters the man’s expectations, calling him a fool.  The man’s life will be demanded that very night, God says.  The man has invested all that he has in his own future, and now that future is uncertain.  So it is, says the gospel, with those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.

Mark Twain once said that most people are bothered by the verses in the Bible that they don’t understand.  He, however, was more troubled by the verses he did understand.  Mark Twain, I think, was a wise man.  I presume that he meant that the verses that are very clear and straightforward are the most difficult because they’re often the hardest to exemplify in our own lives.  To my way of thinking, this parable falls into that category. 

In telling this parable, Jesus gives the man in the crowd a chance to re-examine his priorities and his commitments.  Luke doesn’t tell us what this man does after hearing Jesus’ parable.  In some ways, I wish we could know how his life turned out.  But I think that Luke is wise not to tell us.  By not telling us the ending, so to speak, Luke invites us to bring our own lives into the story.  Today’s gospel reading is an invitation to us, just as it was to the man who first heard this parable.  We, too, are given the chance to take a long, hard look at our lives… and we too are given the chance to change.

This parable asks us some difficult questions:

• Are we too preoccupied with our own economic security?
• Do we use our material resources only for our own good?
• Do we spend too much time worrying about the future, failing to ask what God would have us do here and now?

I can’t answer these questions for you; I can only help you to ask them.  But these are the sorts of questions that this parable demands that we ask of ourselves.  We don’t talk as often as we should about how God would have us manage our resources, and this parable can help us to do just that.

Walter Brueggemann once suggested that if you want to know about a person’s religious convictions, you don’t ask them what they believe.  Rather, you ask to see the records from their checking account.  Most of us bristle at the suggestion, as we often consider personal finances to be a very private matter.  But there is truth in Brueggemann’s words. 

It seems to me that this is one of those parables that can make some of us feel very defensive.  We offer up our various reasons for storing up treasures on earth: “But I need to save money for (you fill in the blank.)”  Or some of us are so concerned with making ends meet that this parable seems more like a cruel joke – how dare Jesus ask us not to worry about our future when we we’re not sure where next month’s rent is coming from?  But I think the parable goes deeper than that. 

The rich fool is told that, this night, his very life will be demanded of him.  The truth is, our lives are demanded of us every day.  It’s not that our lives are threatened every day, though maybe they are.  Every day, every hour, we have to give our lives to something.  As Bob Dylan sang, “you gotta serve somebody.”  We’re living in an illusion if we don’t think we’re constantly making that choice.  It’s here that the heart of the parable lies:  are you only serving yourself?  Or do you find a way to share what God has given you?   

Peter Rhea Jones has suggested that the rich fool in today’s parable is a ‘practical atheist.’  He may say that he believes in God, but when it comes to managing his life, dealing with possessions and planning for the future, he lives as though there were no God.  This parable forces us to name our own most basic commitments.  For those of us who do not want to be practical atheists, it raises the question: what difference should our faith in God make in the practical matters of life?

We may give a certain portion of our financial resources to the church, but how do we use the rest of our paychecks?  Does being a Christian inform how we spend money on food?  Clothing? Entertainment? Charities?  When is saving good, responsible stewardship… and when is it only self-serving?

We may think of certain activities as “Christian” – prayer, attending worship, committee work, Bible study (hopefully not in that order!).  But what about activities that aren’t typically understood as “religious” – parenting, yard work, laundry, watching TV, work, school, spending time with loved ones?  What does it mean to be a Christian in the midst of all these day-to-day activities?

The rich fool in the parable is a practical atheist, so he challenges us to consider the possibility that we all have a little bit of that practical atheist inside of us, as well.  I know I do.  But this parable also holds out another possibility… the possibility of being “rich toward God.”  It’s a rather striking phrase, isn’t it?  It’s one that we would all do well to ponder.
Before we can know what it means to be “rich toward God,” we have to know what sort of a God we’re talking about in the first place.  The Christian tradition teaches us that God is the source of all our living:  the places we call home, the people with whom we live and love and work and play, the source of the very air we breathe.  The idea of the Trinity can help us here – God has created all that exists, but God does not stop with creation.  God is also the one who redeems us from the worst that is in us, and God sustains us as we seek to become people of faith.  We – along with all the universe – are graciously forgiven, and deeply cared for.

It is one thing to believe in such a God – but it is another thing entirely to trust that we belong to God, to trust that God welcomes even us.  I think that being “rich toward God” means rooting our daily living in that sense of trust.  It means that the tasks we perform every day are guided first and foremost by the hope that God gives us… the hope that we are not alone, the hope that we don’t have to depend only upon ourselves, the hope that there is goodness in the world, the hope that God’s love and faithfulness make it possible for us to be loving and faithful people.

I suspect that most of us are a mixed bag when it comes to matters of faith.  There is a bit of the practical atheist in each of us, the proverbial scrooge who responds to God’s goodness with a stubborn “bah humbug.”  But I think that there are also ways in which we are each rich toward God as well.  The challenge for each of us is to discern which parts of our living fall into which category.  May God be with each of us as we struggle to repent from our practical atheism, and turn towards a way of living that allows us to grow rich toward God.