DIVIDING OUR INHERITANCE
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Eternal God, pour out your Spirit upon us, that we might be sensitive to your presence, attentive to your Word, and faithful always to your way. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, we pray. Amen. There was a news clip this week about a little monkey in the Jerusalem Zoo who is running around upright on her hind legs. The veterinarians at the Jerusalem Zoo can’t figure it out. They know she was ill for a while. Their best guess is that she suffered some brain damage, and that’s what is causing her to run around upright now. Doesn’t that make you wonder a little bit about the rest of us? The gospel lesson today involves two men; both of whom we might think have some brain damage because they are not thinking rightly. One is the man who asked Jesus the question from the crowd, and the other is the man to whom Jesus refers in his parable. Jesus is teaching a crowd of people. Out of that crowd one man shouts out, “Tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me!” Now obviously this is a younger brother in the family, because the eldest brother would be the one doing the dividing. Evidently the division has not gone according to this person’s liking. The principle of primogeniture goes back to the very beginnings of the Hebrew tradition. The practice was that the first-born son received a double portion of the father’s estate as compared to each of the other brothers. The reasoning was the eldest son automatically became the head of the household, and as such, would perhaps have additional responsibilities. For instance, if there were sisters who were unmarried, then the eldest brother would be responsible for their care and for providing for them. There is reasonable background for this whole tradition, but evidently in this family even that rule has not been carried through. The petitioner asks Jesus, whom he perceives to be a fair person, if he will be the arbitrator of this family problem. Most of us are familiar with situations such as this. There is a death in the family, there are “things” left over, and they need to be distributed. Sometimes ugliness raises its head at this point. Sometimes it is over a piece of furniture, or a set of dishes, or the silverware, or a particular house, or land, or a savings account. The rallying cry comes forth, “Divide up the inheritance. I want my share.” The sad element in this picture is that there is no grieving over the lost father. The family has already been divided by death, and all this petitioner can see is that things need to be divided even further. A part of the whole period and process of grieving, and one of the functions of a funeral, is to help us look at the life of the one who is departed and to celebrate that life, to celebrate the gifts of that life: the gift of relationship, the gift of talent, the gift of values, the gift of insight, the gift of passion, the gift of faith. These are the elements of our inheritance, not the things. At a time of death when we focus on the one who has gone, if we focus with appreciation for the gifts of their life, we multiply our inheritance as opposed to dividing it. That is what I want us to think about today. How is it we multiply our inheritance? If you will, take your bulletin and open it to where the sermon title is. Pull a pencil out of the pew pocket in front of you and strike out the word “Dividing” and write in the word, “Multiplying.” This petitioner wants things divided, but we want things multiplied. Jesus declines to arbitrate in this family fight. He won’t do it. However, he does share a warning, a warning that we need to hear today. His word is, “Guard against all kinds of greed.” Then he tells a parable about a miser who is totally self-absorbed. The miser is a farmer. He has been very successful. He’s collected a vast amount of grain, and he is worried about how he is going to store it. His solution is tear down his existing barns (notice it is a plural), and build larger ones. It’s not stated flat out in the passage, but we can hear it behind the lines, this person has not tithed his grain to the temple. He has not left grain in the field for the gleaners to receive when they go through, or the widows and the orphans, as was also the custom of his day. Rather he is focused on keeping. He thinks only of himself, not of feeding others, not even of feeding his family, only of keeping. He is called a “fool” in this parable, because he is completely oriented only on his own needs. He talks to himself. He plans for himself. He even congratulates himself. Then he dies. We could say he has bought the farm and sold his soul to the barn. If you have ever been to an estate sale or a farm sale, you know that there are certain principles that hold. The agent who is conducting a farm sale or an estate sale wants things to move. The worse thing that can happen to an agent is to have stuff left over at the end of the day that they have to cart away someplace else. Usually in those kinds of sales, things are priced extremely low. Unless, of course, there is a good antique, and then it will be priced high, because he knows people will bid up to whatever level is necessary to get it. Picture if you will a farm sale. Fran and Frank have deceased. Fran’s collection of figurines no longer has its luster. Why is that? They have lost their luster not because she isn’t there to dust them anymore, but because she is not there period. She is the one who gave value to those little pieces of porcelain by the way she cherished them, and told stories of collecting them. Also, Fran put away all those little children’s clothes. She neatly packed them in tissue in anticipation of that long-expected first grandchild. Now she has died, and those clothes look faded and out of style. And Frank, consider his hand tools. In his hands they worked wonders. Now they look like so much wood and rust. His drill press and band saw stand in the garage. They look like orphans without him present. What happens to all those things we spend all our lives collecting, polishing, and saving for? From Hummels to hobby cars, what are they worth when we are gone? What happens to them when we are gone? Who gets them? It seems like Jesus’ lesson in this parable is that we need to be generous in our lives, because if we are not, God will compel generosity when we go. Paul, in the passage from Colossians, helps us see a different kind of picture. Jesus in the parable has us focused in on things, on so much grain. Paul calls us to stand back. In fact, so far back that we are raised with Christ to the right hand of God, so that we have a picture of all things. The clue in this passage is in the close relationship between God and Christ. Paul is once again in this passage reminding us of something that he tells us time and time again. The true wealth of life is not in any kind of material possessions but in the abundance of relationships. Paul offers us another one of his lists in this passage. This one is a list of those things that saturate our lives, divert us from each other, and cause us to abuse each other. It is a list of negatives; one poison after another. One element is lying. Dostoyevsky, in his Brothers Karamazov, indicates that this is what happens when we lie: When we lie we lose self-respect. When we lose self-respect it becomes so painful that we need to anesthetize ourselves with coarse pleasures. When we resort to coarse pleasures, we enfeeble our own spirituality. One poison after another. Paul also lifts up to us one blessing after another. He says that when we seek truth, including truth about ourselves as to who we truly are, then we know God. When we know God, we are hidden in God. In Christ we reside at the right hand of God, and we know the blessings, the treasure of heaven. Wendell Berry, in his essay “The Two Economies,” contrasts a focus on an economy of energy or the industrial economy, and what he calls the economy of the Kingdom of God. He re-titles it partway through his book, “The Great Economy.” If we are operating only with a view for energy or industrial production or things, we will have a very limited view. If we have a view of the Kingdom of God, we see everything. We see all that God has created, and we see it all as good, and we see it all in its abundance, and all given for our use. Do we want to be narrowly focused, or do we want to be broadly focused? Do we want to view life as a part of a theology of abundance, or an economy of scarcity? Those are the options before us. If we insist on dividing our inheritance, we are focused on an economy of scarcity. But if we are willing to multiply our inheritance, then we are living by a theology of abundance. If we divide our inheritance, we are haggling once again, haggling over the detritus of the remains of a life. If we are willing to multiply our inheritance, then we are sharing, we are sharing the gifts of personality and principle, of humor and humanity, of insight and wisdom, that the deceased and those who have gone before us have bestowed upon our lives. Those things moth and rust do not corrupt. I read a portion of Robert Rohr’s book, Everything Belongs, again this week. It is a book that we are using in Church Council. It is a book that causes one to struggle. Rohr’s writing style is a bit disjointed at times. (That is probably an understatement, according to some of the Council members.) However, he does have us viewing things from a larger perspective. One of things that he talks about is his interchange with Filipino families. I personally have experienced this in our own congregation. I remember very well the first time I went to a Filipino family gathering. One of the adults said to one of the children there, “Go and greet the pastor.” I held out my hand to shake the child’s hand. That’s the way we greet in the Anglo culture. This child took my hand and touched it to his forehead. It is a sign of blessing. The child did not ask for the blessing. The child took the blessing. There is a great theology behind such an action. The theology is that God is such an abundant God, there are so many blessing in God, we can call them forth, even through each other. Our Filipino brothers and sisters live a theology of abundance, not an economy of scarcity. Like the little boy I wrote about in the Outlook this week, they know “there is more where that came from.” Meister Eckhardt, the medieval Dominican mystic, said, “God is closer to me than I am to myself.” All the mystics, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, all say the same thing, “God is an abundant lover.” God is a God of abundance and we can multiply our inheritance. Two-thirds of Jesus’ teachings are about love coming to us through forgiveness. A third of his parables are about forgiveness. Forgiveness has nothing to do with logic and nothing to do with accounting. In fact, it is the final breakdown of logic and accounting. Forgiveness, love given when it is not deserved, is a reflection of grace. It is an embodying of a theology of abundance, not an economy of scarcity. It multiplies our inheritance, not divides it. This past week the Cambridge physicist, Dr. Stephen Hawking, said he was wrong. Can you believe it? The greatest mind that is alive today admitting that he was mistaken. He said that his theory about black holes in the universe, which he had held in opposition to a number of other scholars for a number of years, was not correct. What a marvelous thing for the rest of us. My guess is not too many of us understood his theory, or even the opposition’s theory. But what does it mean when someone else says, “I am wrong”? It says their mind is still expanding, their mind is still growing, and their perception is larger than it was the week before. In that there is life. Mahatma Gandhi was once challenged by one of his own followers. The follower said, “You have no integrity. Last week you said one thing, this week you’ve said something else. How do you justify such vacillation?” Gandhi said very quietly, “It is simple, my son. I learned something since last week.” That’s a gift that multiplies our inheritance. It expands our universe. It draws us to see from the right hand of God, a vantage point where we can see more than we saw before. We can see that God is continuing to create, that our blessings are continuing to grow, and that our inheritance is multiplying. Some years ago, I think it was in 1995 or 1996, there was a picture carried in many of the newspapers across our land. It pictured an African-American woman covering the body of a tattooed biker. He was huddled on the ground and she was overtop of him. In the picture there was a blur of fists; it looked like she was beating upon him. The caption said that she was protecting him from an angry mob. The story went on to say that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and had been attending a rally. Somehow during a break he got separated from his group and was wandering down a street. Anti-Klan demonstrators surrounded him and with sticks began to beat him. This African-American woman put her body between the sticks and him. When he was driven to the ground, she threw herself overtop to receive the blows that were directed towards him. Don’t you wonder in a situation like that? Do you suppose he rethought his prejudice after that incident? And what happened to her? Do you suppose when she went back to her community, was she seen as a hero or as a traitor? I don’t know the answer to those questions. What I do know is that there was a group of people who clipped that picture out of the paper, studied the story, and read the scriptures, and found they were energized for new devotion to the Christian faith because of her witness being recorded in a newspaper. Their inheritance was multiplied by that story. Our inheritance is multiplied by the stories of our lives as well. The venerable rabbi Martin Buber said, “I don’t have a corner on all the truth, and you don’t have a corner on all the truth, but if you listen to me and I listen to you, if we listen very carefully, between us, perhaps we can discover more of the truth.” God says to us in so many ways, “There’s more where that came from, just let me know.” Multiply your inheritance. Thanks be to God. Note: I am indebted to Arvin Lucks, John Evans and Richard Rohr for ideas in this sermon. |