Dear Friends,

The Gospel reading this week is about someone asking Rabbi Jesus to make his brother divide the family inheritance. As is often the case, Jesus answers with a story. The essential message is “Beware.” Beware of greed, the lure of material abundance, the desire for more. Why? Because your very soul is at stake.

In the parable Jesus tells, the owner of a rich harvest has so much he wants to tear down his barns and build bigger ones. For himself. He is absorbed with his possessions and how to keep them. In retirement then he can, in his words, “take life easy – eat, drink and be merry.” But Jesus calls him a fool, says his life will be demanded that very night, and its sum will be that he was not “rich toward God.”

One of the interesting things about this story is how much the farmer thinks of himself: “I will do this,” “I will pull down,” “I will store,” “I will say,” “MY barns, MY grain, MY goods.”

Jesus is speaking to people who live and work on farms, or who are very familiar with farming. What would be astounding to them is that this guy thinks he’s the only one who’s done any work! In this pre-tractor society, it would have taken many workers to accomplish all this. And though he doesn’t legally owe them anything more than wages, you would think the landowner would feel a moral obligation to “profit share” with those who’ve made him so successful. He could just have easily announced, “You all have done such a great job this year that my barns can’t hold everything you’ve planted, cultivated, and harvested. Isn’t that amazing! Please come take what you can use so it doesn’t go to waste, and let’s give away the surplus to the hungry in our community.” He’d save money by not tearing down and rebuilding bigger.

Wouldn’t that be a holy celebration? Wouldn’t the farmer feel honored to be able to return something extra to those who’d made him successful? Isn’t that what it means to be “rich toward God?

As I’ve pondered this story, I have begun to take an honest look at the “bumper crops” in my own life that I have tended to hold tight rather than share with those who were instrumental in their existence: my education, my achievements, my family and friends, my home, my savings. My time. What would it mean for me to return something extra to those who helped me become who I am and possess what I have? How about you? What would it mean for you to be “rich toward God?”

Writer Melissa Sevier puts it this way: “The God who lives, the God who gives, the God who shares, is the God who desires our “riches,” not to deny us, but to liberate us from being owned by the things that don’t care about us. To be owned instead by an open heart that allows us to share what we have, and allows others to share with us. To be able to open our ears, our hands, our hearts, our very souls, to the hearts and voices of others, and by extension, to the heart and voice of God.”

In Christ,

Amelie+