Oh, our sense of outraged justice, against us.  How come they can, but not me?  Why do they have, but not me?  Why is it always so perfect for them, and not for me?  It’s not fair!  If I can’t be happy, then nobody should be.  “Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me’” (12:13).  Make him give me what I got coming to me.  People can get so exercised about those who seem to have more.  Resentment seems to come so much more easily, naturally, than compassion.  No one envies those who have less.  “Oh, why can’t I have nothing?”  Said no one.

It’s amazing how much time we expend on things: thinking about them, planning to get them, shopping for them, trying them on, trying them out, feeling so happy about them and then so dissatisfied when we see a better one someone else has that we should have gotten instead.  Homes and garages crammed with stuff, as though we were insulating ourselves as with a heavy, durable barricade.  Then the flood comes, or the fire.

Anyone here likely to turn down $5000, or $2000, or even one?  How long would it last?  Or what choices, what changes, would we make, to make it last?  We are admirable consumers.  Well, society raises us to be.  It’s not really about buying just what we need; it’s about buying—being able to buy—what we . . . want.  We want many things, but only one is necessary.  Who does God raise us to be?  What does God ask us to want?  What does God tell us we need?  And how may we ever find out?

We’ve each gotten a raw deal at some point.  God does not give us a raw deal.  Okay, so why did I get cancer?  Okay, so why am I out of work?  Okay, so why can I barely afford to live, anymore?  Kind of a raw deal, pastor.  How are any of these struggles unique?  But it was me these things happened to, me, don’t you see?  Where is God’s compassion and love for me?  I came across a clip from a film.  I don’t even know the title, but the content blew me away.  A priest—why is it always a Catholic?  The collar?  He is sitting in the witness chair in a courtroom; he’s asked why bad things happen to good people, as if maybe God were on trial—this criminally negligent God.  Well, I won’t get into the question of “good people”: read Job, if you’d like more on that topic; I’ll just say the matter is not as clear cut as it may seem.

Does God want us to suffer?  That’s not a stupid question.  It’s heartfelt, even heartbroken.  We ought to know the answer, but we find it difficult to explain it to others: it’s always others to whom we must give our faith account.  They’re the ones who are hurt, angry, bitter.  Anyway, the priest, hearing the question, sits there a moment—it feels like he’s waiting, listening for the still, small voice.  He then begins: “I asked for strength; and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.  I asked for wisdom; and God gave me problems to solve.  I asked for courage; and God gave me dangers to overcome.  I asked for love; and God gave me troubled people to help.  My prayers,” he says, “were answered.”

Strength, wisdom, courage, love—these are available.  God does not want us to suffer; He answers prayer, and He knows that we’ve inherited a world of suffering.  He knows we’ve also each made our contributions to that world of suffering.  He means to help us get through it, by His prayer-answering help.  We call that grace.  Strength, wisdom, courage, love, grace—to what shall we apply these gifts?  These blessings do no one any earthly good if they are not actively applied to life, and not merely our own.  Our own life is inconceivable without the lives of many others.  We receive, and we can give, also.  Sometimes we tell ourselves we have nothing to give, but this is not true, because we have all of us received from God who gives abundantly.  If all we have has been given to us, it might be wise to ask what we’re supposed to do with it: what does God ask us to do with what we have been given?  “[L]ife does not consist in an abundance of possessions” (12:15).  Sitting surrounded by your stuff, feeling kind of good about it all, isn’t really what God has in mind.

“And he told them this parable: ‘The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest” (12:16).  Jesus speaks of harvests, beloved, as we know: the good harvest, God harvests.  Most of us aren’t so close to agriculture, crops, even around here, but we know about harvests.  Beloved, with God, it is always harvest season; God will give us a heart for harvest, if we ask Him.  The ground is the Lord’s; the blessing is the Lord’s.  So, as the man, the rich man, considers this bumper crop, where do his thoughts turn?  “He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do?  I have no place to store my crops’” (12:17).  His crops.  His property, his labor, his water, his fertilizer, his seed.  His bumper crop.  He’s got a problem on his hands, alright, but it isn’t the problem he’s thinking about.

Crop storage can be a problem, unless you have more than enough space.  But the underlying problem here is not a storage problem but a distribution problem, not a getting but a giving problem, a grace problem.  As he surveys the surplus, it doesn’t seem to occur to the man, the rich, blessed man, that there might be other things one might do with this surplus: good things, blessed things, God-honoring things.  God has not told the man to sacrifice everything, sell everything, put his last two pennies in the offering box.  The man is rich, blessed.  There is a surplus, from the Lord.  Why does God give it?

“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do.  I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain” (12:18).  Well, it’s all his, so why shouldn’t he do what he wants with it?  If he wants to tear down the present structures and build larger to hold this once-in-a-lifetime harvest, who’s going to tell him he might want to rethink that?  Whose counsel, if any, shall the man heed?  Beloved, I don’t know very much about crops and storing them, but I do know we have huge elevators in the area, mostly for cotton, it seems.  And I know, from my time in Illinois—corn and soy country—that the elevators there required huge fans blowing.

The big concern with storing a grain crop—this landowner contemplating his bumper crop is thinking about how to store all the grain, the commodity—the big concern with grain isn’t pests so much as moisture.  Keep the air circulating!  Well, they had no electricity in those days.  Spoilage was inevitable.  How long would those hundreds of bushels keep in his new, larger storehouses?  Wouldn’t it be wiser, obviously wiser, to find some way to get the grain off your hands, get something for it before it all became loss, a catastrophic loss?  Why does God give abundance?  We’ve known shortage, lack!  Maybe not like people in Madagascar or Guatemala, but we’ve known lean times.  So, when abundance comes, what then?

“And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years.  Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry”’ (12:19).  That was the message of Ecclesiastes: oh, sure, you can knock yourself out, trying to get it all figured out and stewing over all your woes and the unknowns—all that is beyond your control forever.  But why?  Just enjoy the good things you have been given.  And give thanks.  Not bad, so far as it goes.  But a party of one isn’t much fun.  This rich farmer seems to have picked up on the eat, drink, and be merry part, the relax and celebrate yourself part.  But as for the giving thanks part?  Where’s that?  If we’re given bounty beloved, remember: it has been given.  If we’re given abundance, what shall we do with it?  If I have more than I need, what shall I do with it?  Store it all up, for a rainy day?  Such days come, we know.  My grandmother, the manager of the family finances, lived by the rule pay yourself first.  That is good advice.  But once necessities have been seen to, and some has been set aside, what shall I do with what remains?  Give thanks.  How?  As the Spirit guides.  That takes prayer, beloved, and time with God’s Word, time together as the congregation, time spent looking, thinking, and feeling as the Spirit guides, time listening to Jesus and hearing what others near us are saying.  If the eyes of our heart have room for only ourselves, or just our little inner circle, we’re missing the bigger picture.

“But God said to him, ‘You fool!  This very night your life will be demanded from you.  Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” (12:20).  That was also one of the many things that drove the writer of Ecclesiastes to moan, many times, that it was all meaningless.  We store up in expectation of a future that doesn’t come for us as we had envisioned, planned, dreamed of.  Time to give his account.  A pastor mentor of mine was always tickled by this verse: it spoke to him, summed up the key, for him.  When we are each required to give our account, and we shall be, what account will we be able to give?  Shall we make excuses, rationalize, protest?  But, Lord, I deserved it!  It was mine!  Why should anybody else have any?  It’s not fair!  We can’t take it with us.

Hoarding is the behavior of the deeply insecure.  Giving is the behavior of those who are secure, anchored, who know all is from the Lord who shall supply all our need.  Our need is real and continual but in fact does not require very much to be met: the time not to let ourselves go to ruin is now.  Be good to yourself, certainly—God’s way.  Fear whispers and whines that we need so much more, just can’t be happy, without it; we heed our fear, the fears being promoted all around us, and we remain unhappy.  We want to be angry, and life obliges us.  How is any of this helpful?  Let us learn the wisdom of God: daily bread, our manna.  Jesus told us not to worry about food, or clothing.  Why?

Jesus says, “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” (12:21).  He is not saying we should store up nothing; prudence is also a blessing.  It is possible to store up and to be generous toward God.  Let us store up; let us give.  Let us be generous to God by being generous toward those around us, and those far away.  All will be called to account, including us.  Jesus is very clear about that.  We have been blessed with faith, Amen!  Beloved, faith looks like something, even if it’s just a small little something that may not look like much to us.  The way to acknowledge and honor God is clear: be rich toward God who is rich toward us.  Why store up and accumulate clutter you will never use and from which you derive no great benefit?  Not just physical, material clutter, but soul clutter?  What void is all that stuff trying to fill?  Frugality is good but has its limits; liberality is blessed and reflects the character of God.  There is reasonable and wise preparation, and there is wasteful, even foolish accumulation.  Whatever we consume ultimately becomes rubbish and ends up in a dump.  Whatever we give to God grows, bears fruit, and returns to us, a blessed, joyful harvest of the peace of a living faith.