[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table, where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice, and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast.
So we're glad you're here, and thanks for listening.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Hey, good morning.
How are you guys?
Just okay.
I know it's really hot. Earlier today, as we were kind of prepping for this morning, Molly was running around doing some stuff, and I was like, hey, do you need anything? What's going on? She was like, air conditioning.
All right. For those of you who don't know, my name is Jason. I'm one of the co lead ministers here as well, and this is our teaching time. Every week we get together after worship. Kids go after their teaching time. We have a bit of teaching in here, and we have been working through a series this summer on the parables of Jesus. We're almost done with that. We're about ready to wrap it up. Next week we'll be finished. And then in September, we're going to be embarking on a series on empathy. You might have noticed, but there's a fairly prominent, completely inexplicable movement of people who are insisting that empathy is a sin. So we thought that would be fun to talk about, like, you know, maybe like, reinforce the idea that empathy might not be a toxic thing. So we're going to be doing that in the fall. And actually, our fall podcast series, we do a podcast in the fall and the spring that highlights stories. We're very excited to bring some interviews and stories to you that helps demonstrate or illustrate how people are cultivating empathy. So that's coming up soon, but we're going to go ahead and wrap up our series on the parables of Jesus over the next two weeks.
And what I want to do is just invite you to consider how the parable that we read today might inform the way that you are in the world.
And here's what I mean by that. And I know this is not true of all of you, but a lot of us have come to a church like this partly because we came from an expression of religion or Christianity that was highly controlling.
And one of the things we learned in those high control environments is how to, like, decode the rules, right? Like, what are the rules? Both the written and unwritten rules, you know, the spoken and unspoken rules.
And we become experts at, like, you know, seeing between the lines, reading between the lines. And unfortunately, we bring that sort of skill of decoding to scripture. We're essentially taught in every passage to figure out what the rule here is. Like, what is it that I have to do to ensure that a loving God isn't going to incinerate me consciously for all eternity. Right.
And so I just want to say up front, like, try not to, to hear this parable that way.
Before we do that, though, would you just say a prayer with me? God, we thank you for today and for this time and this space that we have to gather, to connect with each other, to connect with you, to raise our voices, to pray, to sing, to greet each other, to affirm each other, but also to be challenged and changed in the process of that encounter. We ask today that you would continue that work of grace in us, that our hearts would be stretched and enlarged, that we would become people who have room and space for others. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
Okay. The beauty of being a preacher is that you get to be in charge for, you know, 35 or 50 minutes or so, which means that you get to decide what goes up on the screen first.
Apologies to the booth. I'm feeling the video before we get to that. So I want to share this video with you before we.
I'm sorry, I should have like, prepped better for this.
I want to set this up first by telling you that this is a video of my grandson. Spoiler alert. We just had a wedding a couple weeks ago. Many of you know that our middle daughter just got married. We're very excited. We had the wedding. The ceremony was here. The rehearsal was in our backyard. And our son in law, our new son in law is Turkish, and Turkish folks like to dance and party. And so our wedding reception was at our house in our backyard, DJed by CJ. CJ is also a DJ, by the way.
CJ the DJ. In fact, he DJed. And there was a lot of dancing. And Otis, our grandson, is a party animal. When we push play on this video, in just a second, look for the little like, you know, white shirted, blonde toe headed speck in the middle of the crowd being lifted up, because that's Otis. So go ahead.
And I showed Otis this video. I said, what are you doing here? He said, I'm dancing. I said, who are you dancing with? He said, my friends.
Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And this was just like a quick 10 second clip. He danced. This is not an exaggeration. He danced for hours before I took this clip. He Danced with crowds, he danced alone. He danced anytime there was music playing. He was dancing about 9 o' clock at night, which is past his bedtime. He went into the house because he was exhausted. He's not quite three years old yet. So we went into the house, he went down to our bedroom. We've turned on a laptop. He got a little bit of bluey time right on the bed. And we were like, he's out. But no, about 20 minutes later he came back out and that's when that video was taken.
He's so committed to dancing, so committed to partying that he was willing to take whatever break he needed, practice whatever self care was needed in order to like go back out and party for another, you know, hour or hour and a half.
I share that not because it has anything to do with my sermon, but because I'm a grandfather and I'm in charge of the screen.
Luke, chapter 12, verses 16 through 21 is Jesus parable that we're visiting today. It says this. Then he told them a parable. The land of a rich man produced abundantly.
And he thought to himself, what should I do for I have no place to store my crops? And then he said, I'll do this. I'll pull down my barns and build larger ones. And there I will store all my grain and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink, be merry.
And God said to him, you fool, this very night your life is being demanded of you.
And all the things that you have prepared, whose will they be?
So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.
Okay, so the reason we started by me saying, try not to look for like the rule here that keeps you out of hell.
Because it would be easy, I think, to hear this parable and think, oh my gosh, it means I can't save for retirement. Like, am I not allowed to be like, wise with my money? Am I not allowed to earn money and actually maybe stick a little aside to make sure that I'm going to be okay? I don't think that is what Jesus is saying here. Spoiler alert. Jesus had never heard of a 401K.
He didn't really know anything about compounding interest.
He probably would have thought that was a sin because it sounds a lot like usury.
That's just not how the world worked back then.
The gist of this story is this. Jesus is telling a story, by the way, in response to somebody who comes to him and says that they're having a family dispute. These people come to Jesus and say, hey, tell my brother to give me half the estate because he's just inherited the land and I think I deserve half of it. Jesus says, who am I to judge what you should do with your parents estate? But let me tell you this story.
Once there was a rich and wealthy man whose land produced an enormous crop. And he looked at all of those crops, he looked at all of the abundance that came to him in his life. And he thought, my barns aren't big enough. I'm going to have to tear them down and build bigger ones. So he does. He hoards everything in these much larger barns. And then plot twist.
God says, you fool, you're going to die this very night.
You've spent all of this time and all of this money building bigger storehouses so you can hoard all of this stuff. And guess what?
Somebody else is going to get it anyway.
All the effort that you just expended is useless. It's worthless. You should have done something else with it.
Now one of my favorite things about this parable, really all of the literature in the Bible, is that we oftentimes forget that this is crafted literature.
Like somebody wrote these stories. They were very intentional about them. Not just the content, but also the style.
And the style, like any good expression of poetry or folktales or myth, tells us something important about the meaning of the story.
And so starting in verse 17, when Jesus says, you know, he's describing the, this rich man whose land produced so abundantly, he says, and then he, being the rich man, he thought to himself, what should I do for I have no place to store my crops. And then he said, I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all of my grain and my goods. There is a repetition of I and my and mine in this story that should immediately clue you into what the problem here is.
My favorite part is that just as if, like, you know, there wasn't enough emphasis on the I and the my, he goes on to speak to himself, himself in the third person.
I said to myself, to my soul, right, you. He turns you into a personal pronoun, right?
In other words, this whole person's life is centered on what he can secure for himself.
He is really in essence, and I think that we all know that this is true, that he is in essence fearful.
He's worried about the future, he's worried about his security and that fear, that worry about whether or not. He's going to be okay tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and ten years from now. That deep fear about how the world works has led him to hoard as much as he possibly can in order to quiet those fears.
And surely he's saying to himself, this is what I have to do. This is the way of the world. This is how things go.
Now, any good Jewish person hearing this word, this parable in the ancient near east would recognize that the rich man in this parable has utterly failed at a central concern of ancient Judaism and contemporary Judaism, and that is righteousness.
The Jewish word for that is tzedakah.
Tzedakah. The notion of righteousness is that we are good, we're okay, we are squarely aligned with God, which is really just another way of saying that we are perfectly in sync or in tune with what is good and right and true.
You're righteous, you're okay.
And of course, the Jewish Bible is obsessed with this idea of righteousness, with being good and right and true to be aligned or in sync with the goodness of God. And so therefore, in the Hebrew Bible, we have all kinds of guidelines for how to be good and right and true, one of which is the duty to give.
And so any ancient Near Eastern Jewish person hearing this parable from a rabbi from Jesus would have thought, oh, it's conspicuously absent in this parable, the man's act of giving from his wealth.
We covered this, I don't know, a month or so ago, I talked about the Levitical practice of tithing.
And I shared with you that there was not one, but actually three different kinds of tithes directed in the Hebrew Bible. And the first is a text 10% tithe. That is, you take 10% of all of your abundance, all of your crops that come in, you immediately give that to the temple to make sure that this sort of central place of organizing society has the resources that it needs to do its work. That's 10% off the top. That's the first tithe. And then there's a second tithe. The second tithe is a tithe that changes from year to year. But the second tithe is either another 10% that you take and you give to the poor.
And when you do that, you're recognizing that the world that we live in creates poor people.
I don't know if you've noticed that.
I can't remember who it was that said this. Some sort of organizational theorist. It escapes me at the moment, but it's one of My favorite sayings, that your system is perfectly designed to achieve the outcomes that you're getting, right?
So when you look around and you see people sleeping on the street and you see families who are growing up in poverty, you see broken systems of justice, you see racialized systems of oppression. This is how the system works. It's perfectly designed to achieve the outcomes that we are getting.
In recognition of that, recognizing that we just predictably reliably produce oppression and poverty.
Living righteously in a world like that considers giving to the poor a duty.
It's an obligation.
And so the ancient Hebrew Bible considers that tithe to the poor an obligation. Now the good news is there's another second tithe that occurs on the other years in a seven year cycle. It's too complicated to get into here because, you know, I only have 55 minutes for my sermon.
Thank you for laughing. That was a joke.
The other tithe that alternates to be the second tithe is that 10% that you give in the other years. And you take that 10% and you go and you throw yourself a grand old party.
I don't know why, but I never heard that preached when I was growing up in a Southern Baptist church.
But that's a beautiful idea too. The idea that one of the ways that we recognize the goodness of the world that we live in is we literally dedicate 10% of our revenue, our wealth, our income to celebrating the goodness of life.
So this is the tithing system and this is how we sort of learn to live into righteousness and how that righteousness that Tzedakah teaches this duty to give. Well, anybody hearing this story in Jesus time would have recognized that this rich man didn't tithe, that this rich man didn't give 10% of his wealth. And in fact, the problem he's having is that his wealth is growing and getting bigger and bigger. And so he has to create these bigger barns.
Those bigger barns are a really powerful image for another thing that we see over and over again in the Hebrew Bible, and that is the virtue of emptiness, the virtue of lack, the virtue of taking what you have received and disabusing yourself of it.
This is a deeply disconcerting idea to 21st century Americans who are so obsessed with building bigger barns. But in Exodus chapter 16, where we have one of the most powerful narratives of emptiness, manna falls from heaven every single day. And every single day the manna falls from heaven and you have to consume all of it. You have to go out, you have to gather what your family needs for that day. And then you have to eat all of it. Because if you don't eat all of it, the next morning it's rotting and full of maggots.
This is. I don't know if you know this, but this is a powerful lesson in the dangers of wealth accumulation.
You get what you get, and if you hoard it and you try to hold onto it and you try to keep it for yourself, it rots.
And so do you.
We see it also in First Kings, chapter 17. This is the narrative of the widow and Elijah, the widow who is poor, and she has a limited amount of oil and flour. But Elijah is hungry, and he tells her, give me your oil and your flour. Make me some bread so I can eat. And she says, I only have so little. I'm a widow. We're starving. And he says, do it anyway. And so she does.
She empties her stores of oil and flour in order to make bread for Elijah. And the next day there's more.
And so she does it again. And the next day there's more. And so she does it again, and the next day there's more.
These kinds of narratives exist cross culturally in every single culture on the planet. It is essentially a narrative that teaches us the lesson that if we try to hold on to what we have, there won't be enough for everyone.
But if we give of what we have, somehow, some way, mysteriously, the world is faithful to bring us abundance.
Jesus says in Matthew, chapter six, don't store up treasures for yourself on earth where it rots and decays. He's intentionally drawing up upon this sort of image of manna in the desert. In Second Corinthians, chapter 8, Paul, in speaking about this exact same principle, he says to the churches in Corinth, listen, my intention is not that you would struggle. My intention is not that you would not have enough. When I'm asking you to give to the other churches who are poor, what I'm asking you to do is follow Jesus example, who became poor on purpose so that we could become rich.
I'm asking you to do the same.
Give of your abundance to your fellow church in Jerusalem who is struggling and suffering. And out of your poverty, they will become rich so that in turn, out of their future wealth, you will become wealthy too. This is the cycle of emptiness and filling.
I know it sounds a little like, you know, woo woo, like, you know, gifty, you know, like a Hallmark movie. You know, you give your stuff and something will come back to you. And there's a danger in Thinking that that can be controlled and manipulated. Because the whole point of it is we're not in control.
This man is not really in control of his time. He's not really in control of his life.
He's done his best to hoard everything he has to guarantee his future.
And yet the irony is he dies.
And so he should have just given it.
He has failed tzedakah, he has failed righteousness.
But Jesus doesn't call him unrighteousness in this parable, right? Jesus doesn't say, you know, God said to the man, oh, you unrighteous, wicked person. No, no, no. God says to him, you fool, you were foolish.
You failed to recognize something critically important. The relationship between righteousness and wisdom in the ancient Hebrew Bible is really interesting. If righteousness is living in the world that in a way that is aligned, is synced with what is good and right and true, then wisdom is the practical application of righteousness. It's knowing what to do in any given, because, you know, that's how the world works.
So when somebody is foolish, we say they fail to recognize how things actually work.
But when somebody's wise, we're essentially saying, oh, they saw things that were difficult to see. They really understood how things worked.
This to me is helpful because it helps me to recognize that what Jesus is essentially saying about the rich fool is that he thought he knew how the world really worked, but he didn't.
He thought he knew that the way to be in the world, the way to secure yourself, the way to be safe and taken care of, was to hoard what you get.
And what Jesus says through the character of God. And the parable is, no, no, no, he got it exactly wrong.
That's not how the world actually works.
And the clues to this are in the parable.
Right at the beginning, right at the outset of the parable, Jesus says he didn't say the man, through his cleverness, through his entrepreneurial genius, through the merit of his hard work, became wealthy. No, the parable says the land produced abundance.
What the man has essentially failed to see because he is so obsessed with securing his own well being, because he is so obsessed with making sure that he is okay, that he is self sufficient, that he is independent, that he has no need for anybody else. He has failed to recognize that he is dependent on the land, that he is rooted to this bit of creation that produces for him. Yeah, of course he has to work the land, he has to till the soil. He maybe needs to hire laborers to bring in the harvest. But every single One of them, the landowner, the laborers, the people who make the tools for tilling the soil. Every single one of them is dependent on the land.
We depend on the goodness of this thing that we are all connected to, whether we like it or not.
So he has failed in his effort to become independent. He has utterly failed to recognize that he is dependent.
And not just on the land, but on his community, on the people that he is connected to. Because if he understood that, if he understood that he was not only connected to the land which produces his wealth, then he would also understand that he is deeply connected to the others in his community.
Who themselves maybe don't have land that produces. Or whose land is failing to produce. Or for some set of circumstances that may be their fault or may not be their fault. They are struggling and poor and in impoverished. And in recognizing that instead of building bigger barns. He would be giving his wealth to those who need it.
Because he needs them, because they all need each other.
I think a rich fool has failed to recognize that, just like you and me, he lives in a world that is vastly connected through a kind of dependent web that involves every bit of material existence, every bit of biology, every bit of intelligence that exists in the world, every bit of emotion that exists in the world, every bit of social cohesion, every society, every expression of culture. There is this vast cosmic world that we live in. And all of it is deeply dependent and interdependent on each other for its very existence.
The theological word for that vast, cosmic, mysterious, utterly ineffable web of existence and goodness is God.
Man has failed to recognize that he is deeply dependent on all of it.
He just plays one part in the perpetual give and take, the receiving and the giving, the emptiness and the filling that keeps all of it working, that keeps all of it moving.
Because he's failed to recognize that he has stopped it.
He has hoarded goods in his great big barns. Which essentially amount to a giant cosmic blockage.
The flow of goodness and resources and love and material needs are constipated in this rich man.
That really is what happens when we take more than we need. And hoard what doesn't really belong to us because it belongs to the poor.
And so, knowing this, I think we have a choice.
And this is, I think, the point of the parable. The point of the parable is not what do I do? What do I not do here in order to, like, go to heaven or go to hell? I think the point of the parable is that there is a way of being in the world that connects us to every other being in the world.
And there is a way of being in the world that disconnects us.
It tears the fabric of that sort of social and biological and cultural cohesion apart. It does violence to it. And by doing that violence, it tears us apart from the source of goodness.
It is, I think, a kind of dance where we enter into the rhythm of existence in a way that moves and flows with God and God's goodness and God's love. And those are really big sort of metaphorical ways of just describing the flow of goodness and love from one to another, and our absolute willingness to dance with that rhythm, to be lifted up by our friends, to enjoy every bit of the goodness that this world has to offer us.
Jesus in the parable calls this way of being in the world, this way of being connected to that dance. He calls it being rich toward God instead of being rich toward yourself.
Everything that comes to you flows through you, to those who need it.
And in being in the world in that way, everything that you need comes to you and flows to you.
The bad news is you don't get to control it.
The good news is you don't have to control it.
You just exist within the divine eternal flow of passing good things through you to others so that they can do the same in return.
Now, call me crazy. I just think that this is maybe the most urgent thing in the world because most of Christianity in America right now seems to be actively engaged in building bigger barns, denying our connection to others, actively and intentionally invading neighborhoods in order to rip people and their families apart from the social fabric of that divine dance in a way that not only does violence to those people and to those neighborhoods, but sooner or later will tear our world apart.
And so I just think it's more important than ever that a group of people, any group of people, maybe this group of people, would take Jesus word seriously and live generously towards God, towards each other, and in that way that we would not sit this dance out, that we would celebrate.
Amen.
Would you pray with me?
God, we thank you so much for today and for these words and for this story and how it inspires us and challenges us, how it helps us to shine a light on how we are existing in the world, to ask whether or not we are joining with the celebration of your goodness and your love and the flow of your resources, or if we are disconnecting ourselves.
We ask God that you would be gracious with us because the truth is always more complicated. We always go back and forth between connection and disconnection, love and fear.
So our prayer today is that you would just give us a bit of courage to lean into the love, to lean into the interdependence of our connection to you and to each other, and to have the courage to do it in spite of our fear.
We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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