A Little to a Lot

John 6:1-15; Luke 12:13-21

A Little to a Lot

A little can be a lot. I find what Jesus did here with this feeding to be quite wonderful.  There’s this great multitude of people out in the middle of nowhere looking for Jesus because of all the healing he was doing throughout Galilee.  The day is coming to an end.  The people need to eat.  So, in a scene reminiscent of the Israelites wondering in the desert Wilderness after God brought them forth from slavery in Egypt, Jesus fed them in a way that would leave no doubt that in Jesus the Lord God of Israel was among them.

The crowd was actually bigger than 5,000.  That was just counting the men.  Many scholars will say add at least one woman and one child per man and estimate that the crowd was over 15,000.  That’s almost the whole city of Owen Sound.  Jesus feed them with five barley loaves and two fish.

I think that possibly the real miracle here was that he got some kid to share his food.  I’ve got two kids and I know how they are with sharing.  It’s a hard lesson for them.  When we go to McDonald’s they both will want fries.  I’d like to save a little money and let them share a small fry because they never eat them all.  But, they each have to have their own and getting them to share food is more of a fight than the two dollars are worth.  This nameless boy shared his food.  And, those loaves and fish were probably his family’s dinner that he was responsible for.  He probably would have gotten in trouble for having given it to Jesus and his disciples had Jesus not feed everybody with it. 

We adults have a problem with sharing as well particularly in our culture with its economy that’s driven by the institutionalized coveting we call private ownership.  We each have to have our own – our own land, houses, cars, stuff.  If everybody has their own, who needs to share. 

Moreover, we like building bigger barns and keeping it all to ourselves.  Whether we want to admit it or not, we are like the rich fool.  Jesus was quick to point out that the rich fool didn’t earn his wealth.  It was the land, the fruitfulness of the land that produced his wealth.  He had little to do with it.  Yet, the fool built himself bigger barns to keep the abundance of the land that he should have shared with everyone who helped to work the fields.  And, then he has the audacity to speak to his soul as if he is God.  In the Bible the soul is the totality of our embodied being that is supposed to be in relationship to God.  This rich fool as if he is a god to himself builds his big barn to hoard the abundance of the land that he has no right to and says to his soul, “Relax.  Eat, drink, and be merry.”  God got him.  That night he died.  God called his life, his soul to account.  What good was his earthly hoarding? 

God himself called the man a fool.  In Greek, the word is aphron, which is the type of fool who is foolish for not living up to his potential.  The potential here is the Kingdom of God value of sharing one’s abundance with those who for whatever reason have need.  This rich fool spent his life in pursuit of comfort and achieved it through wrongful hoarding.  He could have in fairness distributed the excess that the land produced to those who actually worked the land for him and been rich according to Heaven, but he didn’t.  He built a bigger barn and hoarded it and God was not impressed.  To be intentionally redundant, God called him a fool.

In the world today we call this foolishness saving for retirement.  I could rant on about that, but that’s not a funny rant when you are a senior who is on a fixed income that really is not enough.  You give to your church and other causes and the giving comes at a cost.  It’s a sacrifice.  All the while there are those who have amassed substantial to massive fortunes of the “abundance” of the blood, sweat, and tears of the hard work of others.  Yet, they give little to nothing and what they do give really costs them nothing.  There is foolishness in our economic system just look at the bizarre world of the American election.  This foolishness keeps us from living up to our potential of being a truly fair and just society where there is no poverty.  We’ve a whole culture of individuals fixated on the foolish pursuit of someday being able to like God by being able to say to our own souls, “Relax.  Eat, drink, and be merry.”

In King Jesus’ kingdom a little boy’s little bit feeds a lot.  In the kingdom of the world everybody’s pursuit of a lot requires that there be a percentage of people not having even a little.  There is something wrong here.

You may remember the Ethiopian famine back in the 1980’s.  There was a drought and people started to starve.  The harsh truth was that there was enough food being produced in Ethiopia to feed the people, but the people who were growing the food could get more for it by selling it on the world market than dealing locally with it and so people starved because of localized drought.  So it is in the world today.  There is enough food at present to go around.  The reason there are people starving today is greed.

Well, enough of those global economics, what about us?  Fall is here.  The harvest is in.  Hopefully the crops are sold and the bills are paid.  God has been good to us.  We are thankful.  What do we do now?  Build bigger barns?  I doubt that.  I suspect there are probably more than a few farmers in the area wondering if they should go ahead and sell.  Economics for the family farmer are largely not fair.  The big farm operations that deal at the global rather than the local level with their “lot” of what the land produces seem to hover like vultures over the “little” of the family farmer. 

Coming back to Jesus and his feeding of the multitudes, I see the family farmer being a lot like the little boy with five loaves and two fish.  So I’m perplexed and I ponder.  How does the little of the family farmer become the “lot” that feeds the multitudes when multinational farming corporations that deal globally are circling?

Well, I could go all hippie on you and talk about how the family farmer has the potential to keep things local.  If we listen to the economics guru’s who have  a mind to the future of the human species and the planet we live on rather than the bottom line, they tell us that local based economies are the most healthy, fair, just, and sustainable way for us to go forward as a species.  Considering Ethiopia in the 1980’s, they are likely right.  But, it requires a local economy being willing to buy local and that is not an easy and affordable switch for most people to make.  

It is amazing how something as simple and basic to life as food can be so complicated.  But, maybe we Christians shouldn’t give in so easily to the way things are in the world of “Big Corporate Food.”  When we go to the grocery store we have a choice when it comes to produce and usually to meat to buy Ontario.  We just have to read the label.  If it’s not local, then it’s “Big Food” who is making the profit and not an Ontario farmer.  There’s Kingdom of God value in buying honest, local food rather than cheap, mass produced food.  Let us remember and support and be thankful for our local farmers.  What seems to be “a little” in the world of “Big Food” when kept local is a lot.  Amen.

The Delusion of Greed

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

          There is nothing like a good estate dispute to show a family’s true colors.  I think you all know what I’m talking about.  It is a strong family that is not destroyed by the greed bogey that arises whenever a will is read.  Certainly, we can understand Jesus’ apparent reluctance to get involved in this man’s case and then more or less calling the man greedy with the parable he told.  But…unfortunately for you folks you are going to have to settle in and listen while I tell you that this passage isn’t about a petty will dispute, but rather it is a passage that can and will cut right to the core of our beliefs about wealth and why we accumulate it.   

          The first thing I need to point out about this passage is that the man wasn’t coming to Jesus to get him involved in a petty will dispute.  He came asking Jesus to get his brother to be fair to him according to Kingdom of God values rather than what the law said was fair.  We all know about how people can use the law to their own advantage even when it is in conflict with any standard of morality.  This becomes particularly evident at tax time.  There are tax laws that benefit the wealthy simply because they are wealthy while people who really need a break are taxed at a disadvantage. 

          This man came to Jesus to ask him to make a judgment.  In that day people came to Rabbi’s and wise men to ask them to make judgments in disputes.  But, in this case I can’t help but believe that this man was one of Jesus’ followers and he was asking Jesus to enact his Kingdom of God rights for him.  One of the first things that Jesus had to say about himself in Luke’s Gospel was "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."  He was coming to Jesus the Messiah and asking him to do what Jesus the Messiah had said he had come to do.

          The “year of the Lord’s favour” is otherwise known as the year of Jubilee.  In ancient Israel every forty-nine years the land was supposed to be redistributed equally among the people according to the original family allotments decreed in the Book of Exodus.  Jubilee was the only way this man could get possession of land that in all moral fairness was his but this man’s brother was withholding this man’s share from him and using the Law to his own benefit to do it.  Dt. 21:15-17 states that the firstborn son to man who has two wives can get a double portion of the inheritance.  In a family with only two sons this double portion would be the whole thing.  So, this man needed a year of Jubilee to get his inheritance.

          In response to the man’s request Jesus sets out to show him that life is not found in wealth of possessions but in being rich towards God.  Jesus asks the man, “Who appointed me judge or arbitrator over you?”  Well, if Jesus is the Messiah, then the obvious answer to that question is, “God did”.  That being the case we must ask ourselves; “Would God want his Messiah to arbitrate an estate dispute tainted by greed or would God want his Messiah to make a judgment about human greed and how we look at wealth and possessions?

          In the parable that follows Jesus demonstrates that when wealth and possessions are one’s life’s pursuit rather than knowing God and seeking to do his will, we are without a doubt putting ourselves in the place of God.  This man in his desire to have his share of the family inheritance, though he had right to it, was in fact sinning the sin of playing God.  This becomes obvious when you notice his request of Jesus was not a request, but a command.  He said, “Teacher, tell my brother.”  “Command my brother.”  This man was telling, not asking.  So, Jesus, the Teacher, helps him to see the error of his ways with a parable about a rich fool who considered himself to be a god unto himself.

          The first place the rich fool’s false godhood shows up is his relationship to the land.  He had a great land perhaps maybe even a kingdom and that particular year the land brought forth a really good crop.  Though the land is the producer, the rich fool calls them his own.  This sounds very much like us and our belief that we are entitled to the private ownership of land and that what my land produces belongs to me and I can do what I want with my land.  When we take this attitude of ownership over the means of our sustenance and well-being, we put ourselves in the place of God. 

          We as Christians must take to heart that all that we have is not our own, but rather is entrusted to us by God.  We who say we trust and are faithful to God the Father Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth and to Jesus Christ his Son must be very wary of how we buy into this culture of greed.  We are simply servants entrusted with a great estate, God’s estate.  When by God’s grace that estate produces generously, we cannot consider the surplus to be our own and tuck it away somewhere so that if we don’t use it we can pass it on to whomever we choose. 

          Consider the rich fool.  For him to be “rich toward God” he should have shared the surplus with the people of the land.  Yet, this rich fool never considers that maybe God had a use for that surplus somewhere on “God’s estate”.  There are at least two instances where Jesus tells a rich man to go sell what he has and give it to the poor and then fall in line and follow him.  But, the rich man is unable to do it due to his love of wealth and the false securities it provides him.

          The next thing this rich man does is speak to his soul and direct it to be happy as if his soul were his own.  What’s the “soul”?  The “soul” in the Bible is not this immortal blip of energy that departs us when we die.  That’s Greek paganism.  The “soul” is the entirety of our existence as relational persons created by God to be in relationship with him, with others, and the Creation.  At death the soul ceases to exist unless God in his free choice by grace chooses to keep it alive until the resurrection.  

          In the Bible, an immortal soul living forever in heaven is not our end.  Resurrection into a new creation is.  Our existence as persons, our soul, is a gift from God.  We do not tell ourselves how to be fulfilled.  We do not kickback on a delusion off self-determinism, that devil of “I did it my way” that plaques our culture, we do not kickback on this delusion and tell ourselves at the level of our very existence, “relax, eat, drink, and be merry.  I myself have made it so that you have nothing to worry about.” 

          Like that rich fool, we could die tonight and be called before the God who gave us life and commanded to give account for how we have lived it.  We do not go before God and say, “I was your faithful servant.  I did it my way.  Look at my wealth.”  That is ludicrous.  The right answer to give would be, “I did it your way.  I was as good a steward of your estate as I could be.  Look at how I shared and distributed your wealth to those who needed it.”  Yet, only Jesus can give that answer and he gives it on our behalf and it is he who shares his inheritance with us “lucky bums” as Karl Barth said.

          Our culture is so screwed up in its ingrained, indeed inbred, belief that being faithful to God means being good, working hard, and growing wealthy.  In fact, we are twisted enough to believe that if we are good and hard working enough in our own endeavers, God will bless us with wealth.  Our souls, our lives are not our own.  We belong to God to serve him and not ourselves.

          The Apostle Paul tells in Colossians.  If we belong to Christ Jesus, if we are indwelt by the Spirit of God, then we are to set our hearts and minds on things above where Christ Jesus’ reign is in effect; the reign of compassion, of justice, of kindness, of faithfulness, of humility, of patience, of self control; a reign that is discovered in the community of faith, in prayer and Bible reading and study, and in obedience and faithfulness.  We who are made alive in Christ are dead to this world and its ever-pervading greed.  Beware of greed.  It has very subtle cunning, deceiving, and powerful ways.  It’s an addiction.  Our existence is not found in possessions but in the life-giving Holy Spirit of God.  Our calling is not to be good, successful people who grow wealthy.  Our work is to put to death all our forms of idolatry, especially greed which is the desire to posses and call things, even other people, my own. 
           Put on the new self, the “new you” that God himself is renewing by the working of the Holy Spirit in and among us to be more in the image of Christ Jesus.  The Holy Spirit leads us into a relationship with Jesus.  By getting to know Jesus and sharing in his love for the Father and the Father’s love for him and us the Holy Spirit changes us.  We grow in the image of Christ as we love and serve one another, as we worship and pray alone and with one another, as we read and study the Bible alone and with one another.  Without these works of faith we do not know whom we are trying to be faithful to nor how we are to be faithful.  We simply persist in the delusion trying to act like God.  Be set on things above.  It is there we will find life.  We have died and our life is hidden with Christ in God.  Go find it.  Amen.