Beware of Fair

Well, thank you for this invitation to be with you today. It's a joy to come across to the island and spend a little time here in paradise with the rest of you.

A man comes to Jesus with more of a statement than a question, really. "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." It actually sounds like the kind of thing that happens in families—sounds like the kind of issue where we could use a little help from Jesus. People pray about this sort of thing. There's trouble with the will and the settlement of the estate, and one brother comes to invoke Jesus' help against his sibling.

Family life goes off the rails in matters just like these. One feels jilted by the other brother, believing he receives less than his share of what should be his. His own brother ripped him off. And so he brings his aggrieved sense of fairness to Jesus. He asks Jesus, really, to do probate work—pro bono gratis, for free.

I find all of this, based on my experience as a human being and a minister and a family member, pretty realistic. We don't get any background on the man in question. We really don't know what kind of person his brother is either. But we do know that these two brothers couldn't work out their differences on their own.

The man calls out from the crowd. He's pretty sure he's got a good case against his unfair brother to go public like this. Maybe he thinks he can get the crowd on his side—you know how that works. Aggrieved people do that sort of thing. You try to create a fellowship of the aggrieved.

I'm sure he's thought about what he didn't get for a while now. He's stewing in his own juice over this one. His sense of outrage over the offense that he has suffered gets him within hailing distance of Jesus, the rabbi who ought to know how laws of inheritance work. "If I can just get Jesus on my side," he thinks. I can imagine the tone of his voice calling out from the crowd: "Rabbi, tell my brother to give me..." He'd love to be able to say in an argument that Jesus is on his side.

This kind of request occurs only one other time in the Gospel of Luke—in the story of the sisters Mary and Martha. When Jesus comes to visit and Martha is laboring in the kitchen while Mary sits at Jesus' feet, Martha works away at hospitality while contemplative Mary does nothing. A voice calls out from the kitchen: Martha says, "Jesus, tell my sister to help me."

Again, it's about fairness, isn't it? "Jesus, I have a need for help. Jesus, Mary's just sitting there—tell my sister to come get in this kitchen and do her fair share of the work." Martha wants Jesus to fix an inequity. She feels aggrieved. She wants fairness—at least that's how she sees it. And Jesus has at his disposal the means to fix this, to square the circle. He's the one with power. "Jesus, tell my sister."

Let's put this into a formula that we all work from time to time: My perceived need + Jesus' incredible resources = My need met.

It's the same sort of thing with this shortchanged brother. He comes to Jesus to get a felt need met. He feels aggrieved. He's done a diagnosis of the situation, and what's lacking is fairness for him. He frames the matter in terms of his entitlements and equity. He's done the diagnosis: "Jesus, tell my brother."

The hope is that Jesus will answer his prayer, that Jesus will accept his read of the situation. Say, "Yes, how unfair! I can't believe that any God-fearing person could withhold from you what's due to you. And he's your brother! What a scoundrel. Yes, tell your brother to give you what he owes. Tell him he owes you big time. Better yet, show me where he is, this ripoff artist, and let me straighten him out."

Again, the equation: My perceived need + Jesus' resources = My need met.

I think one reason we study the Bible and come to church on Sunday is so that we can get answers to our questions, get our needs met. We come seeking help with our daily problems, and we want solutions to our dilemmas. We come knowing our problems. We come seeking Jesus' resources to meet our perceived needs.

Sometimes we've rehearsed this story very well, and we tell it to anyone who will listen. It can become the story of your life. Maybe it's why we pray. I know what I need, and calling out to God in Jesus' name, I ask God to give me what I have determined I need.

Like the man in the story, we know—or we think we know—just what ought to be done in our situation. And so we tell Jesus what to do.

But listen to the story. Listen to Jesus' response.

Jesus says, "Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?"

What kind of answer is that to a man aggrieved by his brother? It seems almost like Jesus adds insult to injury. In all of these middle chapters of Luke, if you read them carefully, Jesus is on a kind of judgmental riff. We might have thought that it was about time he got off that sort of discordant tune and gave us some pastoral, soothing balms. But he doesn't.

Jesus says, to paraphrase his words, "Stranger, what has your dispute with your brother got to do with me anyhow?" Jesus seems to hold this guy at arm's length. He refuses to get involved in the family feud. It's as if he doesn't accept this guy's read of his own life. Jesus rejects the rush to arbitration on his behalf.

There's no neat and tidy move from what this man thinks he needs to Jesus providing what he thinks he needs. And as so often happens with Jesus—try to read the gospels and find an example where someone asks Jesus a question and he gives a straight answer—Jesus seems to lack the ability to give a straight answer to a question.

Sometimes Jesus doesn't accept what we think we need.** He refuses our question and gives an answer that implies the question we should have asked. Sometimes Jesus knows our need better than we do, and that's why his answers sometimes miss the point of our questions. His answers go deeper than what we think we need.

Sometimes, don't we come to church thinking we can come here and be relieved of our trouble, and then Jesus introduces us to trouble worth having? I know it's frustrating.

Look at the story. The man thinks the problem is his brother's unfairness. Jesus says, "You know, I've never done probate before." And then he turns to the crowd and says, "Be aware of greed."

What a disconnect! Jesus just said, "Who made me a judge over you?" And then he judges—not the case between the man and his brother, but the man's preoccupation with fairness.

Why doesn't Jesus just answer his question? Jesus utters a warning instead: "Take heed. Beware of all kinds of covetousness—that is, greed."

The answer is right there in the story for why Jesus says this—one short line beginning with the word "for," which indicates a reason. What's the reason that we, like the man in the story, ought to take heed and beware of greed?

Here it is: "For life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."

Oh my. Now that is a countercultural statement in a world where one of our chief measures of success is growth in GDP. What we think we need is fairness—to get what's owed us. And what Jesus says is, "Be careful. I can smell greed if you begin to internalize the false and life-threatening belief that who we are is how much we have."

Way back at the beginning of the Bible, in the story of the first two brothers, Cain and Abel, Cain is jealous of the recognition his brother gets from God. He's so angry and jealous that he wants to kill his brother. And God says these words to Cain, a man offended by inequity: "Cain, sin is lurking at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it."

I think Jesus is doing the same sort of thing with an offended brother when it comes to his fair share. It starts off well enough, but sin lurks at the door. Its desire is for you.

What can begin with a quest for fairness, with enough preoccupation and repetition and crowd support and obsession and churning in the night, can become greed. That's when all your waking moments begin to revolve around what belongs to you and what's your right—recognition or property or reward. And we start exhibiting a human life that demonstrates the false belief that life is really about the abundance of possessions.

And man, that makes us competitive, makes us mean, makes us unable to work with each other. Think about that in our carnivorous world. This story isn't at a great distance from the world in which we live, with its tariffs and taxes and wars for resources and adversarial engagement.

Jesus says, "Take care. Be on your guard against every form of greed. Sin's lurking at the door. Life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."

As if that weren't enough, Jesus rounds this out with a story about an entrepreneur—that's what we'd call him. He's already rich. He's already blessed. His fields, due to good weather and good soil, produce bumper crops. Never has it been so good.

Well, what does this enterprising person do? When you've got more produce than you've got places to put it, you grow the business, right? And so he tears down his modest barns and builds bigger barns. Increased crops means increased capacity all the way around. Increase is what matters here.

And here's an interesting little addition if you read this story carefully: he builds bigger barns to store his crops, and he says "my goods." Here we have the first storage lockers—you know those spaces that people with large houses rent to store the stuff they don't have space for in their large houses.

He builds barns for grain and then for storage for the increased amount of stuff that is just part of increased affluence. More profit means you've got to have more stuff. And if you have more stuff, you have to have space to put the more stuff in.

As he's making his plans, he reasons to himself—note, he's talking to himself: "I will say to my soul, 'You have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink, and be merry.'"

Now, all of that seems quite reasonable. He's a man who got his wealth the old-fashioned way—he worked for it. He earned it. And yet Jesus says, "You fool! This night you go to God, and whose will your things be?"

The point is like the point of his speech to the crowd: our lust for fairness and affluence has a way of inducing self-satisfied greed if you're not careful. And there are clues in the story.

Notice that the man with abundance is the only guy in the story. Presumably, he didn't tear down the barns and build bigger ones all on his own. Presumably, he didn't harvest the crops in his spare time. But we don't get a word about his family, his friends, his employees. The words "I" and "my" pepper the story twelve times in four verses.

There's just something about success in matters of affluence that kind of closes the world down—it's a "look what I did all on my own" kind of story.

And what about God? Presumably the rich man doesn't control the weather patterns and soil conditions. Gratitude to God is missing from the story. He reasons like there is no God. He makes plans as though all of the future belongs to him.

And the saying that he repeats to himself—read it closely: "Eat, drink, and be merry." It's a familiar one. But notice what he leaves out: "for tomorrow we die." He lives and works and achieves as though he's going to live forever.

Nothing's wrong with eating and drinking and enjoying good things from God, but there's a horizon for that. This world's goods are not all there is.

Jesus says—and it's a kind of judgment—this man is a fool. A fool in the Bible is a very particular kind of person. In the Psalms it says, "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" A fool is a person who lives and works and spends and succeeds like there is no God. A fool is someone who lives the life of a practical atheist.

And this man is a fool. His success has induced amnesia with respect to God and even his neighbors. He stores up this world's goods and its accolades and its blessings, but he's an utter beggar when it comes to God. He gains the whole world and loses his own life.

I think, "Wow"—all of this because some jilted guy made a simple request of Jesus: "Jesus, could I get a little help from you, please, with my grasping brother? Could you just get him to give me my fair share?"

And then Jesus just launches into this long speech about greed and life being more than what we have and calling people fools.

It's always a bit of a shock to have a conversation with Jesus and to find out he's more than the answer to what I think I need. We sometimes actually believe in our culture, don't we, that life is about the abundance of possessions and upward mobility and getting our fair share.

But I think Jesus loves us too much to leave us to that untruth. Jesus knows what we really need. We need to be rich toward God.

And Jesus gave his life to make it so. He's the answer to the really deep questions.

St. Paul says this, and I read this in conclusion: "For you know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, that by his poverty you might become rich."

Thanks be to God. He knows what we really need, and he gives us what we really need: Jesus Christ.

Amen.