Jesus told his friends a parable.
This morning, I’d like to tell you about friend I remember whenever I hear this parable. She was a woman who had a life-long struggle with money. Across the years, she shared her journey with me, and often said, “If my story can help someone else, please tell it.”
We’ll call her Sue. She was born the first child in a well-to-do Southern family. Her only sibling, a brother, was several years younger. As the children grew, so did the family’s wealth. Thus, unlike many women in her generation, she was sent to college. She attended a well-known women’s school, where she studied literature, languages and the arts. Her brother was also sent to college, in fact to a university known for producing fine businessmen. After school, her brother went into the family business. She got married, and her husband was invited into the family business. When her father died, his estate naturally settled on his surviving wife, but there were clear instructions about the future in his will. The business and the majority of the estate, when his widow died, would go to his son. A portion of his estate was designated to his daughter, but only under the management of her brother. Also, her father made it clear that she, the daughter, was entrusted with seeing that her mother received all appropriate and necessary care until she died.
When I first met Sue, she was a widow. She was a woman of means, having received funds from her husband’s estate as well as the funds which came to her regularly through her brother. She was well off by any standard, but she was not happy. She was her father’s oldest child, yet she had lived her whole life in her brother’s shadow. She felt that her own intelligence and capability had been ignored and even dismissed by her father, and later, by her brother, who, bless his heart, really could not understand why she had a problem.
The result of all this was that she really did not like money. She did not like to handle it, to plan with it, indeed, she did not even enjoy the ordinary shopping trips that most of us consider recreation. Sometimes she would say to me “I just wish I could get rid of it all.” But when she talked like that to her financial advisors, they persuaded her otherwise. Sometimes she would find something to do with her money – a student she could help through school, an artist whose works she could buy. Then she would be excited, and happier, for a time.
Toward the end of her life, she began to understand that she had encumbered her money with a lot of baggage. For her, money was a symbol of her relationship to her father, and what she perceived as his lack of love and concern. At the tender age of 82, she decided to take some courses at a nearby community, to learn about investment and money management for herself. With new tools at hand, she went back to her brother and her financial advisors with a plan, a plan that would set her money to doing things that she could watch prosper while she lived, and a plan that would continue sharing her funds after she died. Eventually, money became for her, a source of joy.
Shortly before her death, we had a conversation. She said, “I look back with some regret. I wasted a lot of time and energy over the years being focused on money. I thought money was my problem. I was wrong. It was not the money. It was the relationships. I hope I’ve taught my children and my friends to live differently. Money is not what matters. Love is what matters.”
The man who came to Jesus already knew the answer he wanted. He knew how he wanted the money divided. He wanted Jesus to use his authority as a teacher and rabbi, to put his brother in his place. As so often happens, Jesus did not answer the request in the expected way. He called the man “friend” and said that he, Jesus, cannot be required to be the judge in this matter. However, Jesus has heard something else beneath the man’s words. Jesus suggests that the man is motivated not by issues of justice, but by issues of greed.
It’s a very fine distinction, isn’t it? Nothing in the scriptures implies that the man is greedy. He is simply asking for a legal act – “Sir, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”
Perhaps the man would have agreed with my friend Sue who once said, “You know, it’s not about the money. It’s all about whose hands are holding the money.” For her as well, there was an issue of justice.
What’s really interesting about this story is that Jesus essentially dismisses the justice issue. He refuses to arbitrate, or to make peace in a feuding family. Instead, he tells a story about a successful, prudent wealthy businessman, whom Jesus calls a “fool.” It is hard to see how this man’s story connects with the younger man’s question, for the man in the parable did not inherit his wealth. He got it the old-fashioned way – by hard work.
Jesus is often concerned in matters of justice, but not in this particular scripture. Here, he is concerned with focus. The man who comes asking for help is focused on the inheritance he does not yet have, but wants to receive. The man in the parable is focused on the resources he already has and his plans to enlarge them. My friend Sue was focused on what she perceived as her father’s unjust treatment of her in relation to her brother.
It does remind me of the story we heard a couple of weeks ago – the one about Mary and Martha. Remember that Jesus came to visit the sisters, and Martha complained that she was doing all the heavy lifting, while Mary lay about, listening to the men talk. Jesus, in his reply says that Martha is “distracted by many things.”
Distraction! That’s the key to it all. There are those who here in today’s gospel a condemnation of wealth. But that is not in the text at all. Jesus does not condemn money or wealth or riches. Jesus does condemn covetousness. That strange word is a closer translation of the text which for us reads “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.” Covetousness is a particular kind of greed which means “wanting more of what you already have enough of.” Jesus’ parable teaches us that it is not the money that is wrong, but rather our focus that is off. When money fills my whole vision, when concern over money occupies all my waking hours, then I am cannot see truth. Money becomes a distraction, money becomes the very thing that keeps me from receiving that which money cannot buy – the kingdom of God.
Jesus came to love us into the kingdom. God’s gracious pleasure is to give us the kingdom. God wills that we should have enough – a cup full and running over. It is our own vision that looks in all the wrong places. We are the ones who think enough is not yet here. We are the ones who think supplies will run out and we will come up short. We are the ones afraid to be found lacking. It is our own sense of fulfillment that is at odds with God’s gift of plenty.
My friend made peace with her money because she moved it away from the center of her life. Keeping money out of the center became a spiritual discipline for her. She said it was hard to do until she began the intentional practice of gratitude. When she made her first prayer each morning and her last prayer at night a simple “thank you” she said her worry and anxiety fell away. She forgot to be concerned about how much her brother might have because she was so filled with joy at the reality of what she had been given.
Gratitude keeps us from idolatry. Gratitude saves us from the grasping meanness that is a trap for our souls. When we learn to be thankful for what we have, thankful for everything we have, then we will know that whatever we have is enough.
It is gratitude that helps us unpack the strange phrase at the end of today’s reading. Jesus says, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” What does it mean to be rich “toward God?” The word “toward” implies movement. It is the movement of offering, the movement we make at every eucharist, at every Great Thanksgiving, when we lift up the bread, the wine, and the money. At the 8 o’clock service we say “All things come from thee O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.” Our act of thanksgiving turns our resources from our own purposes toward God’s purposes.
The spiritual practice of gratitude allows us to hold things lightly. Money, wealth, possessions – all are given not so we will know security, but so we will find freedom. God gives us abundance not so we can store it up, but so we can know pleasure in giving it away.
It is a question of focus. Because this is a human issue, teachings on it run through many religions. Here is a Sufi saying that seems to sum things up nicely:
“If you put the world between you and God, the world becomes a spiritual obstacle; if you use the world to remember God, the world becomes your spiritual friend.”