Refections on Sunday's Sermon

Sunday, August 5, 2007
"Someone in the Crowd” Luke 12:13-21

This statement is taken from Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

“The Contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are. But the Judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

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This Sunday I will present a first person sermon of the man in the crowd from Luke's story in the 12th chapter of his Gospel. In Luke's story you have a young man asking Jesus to get his brother to be fair in splitting his inheritance and Jesus responding by telling the parable of the of the rich farmer trying to deal with a bumper crop.

As is so often true in Jesus' stories the two men, the young and the rich, seem to be pretty descent people by the standards of the community.

The actions of the young man are in line with what who be expected of him in his situation. His father has died and now there is a disagreement with his brother as to how the money is to be split. Just as I often get request as a minister to help families sort out issues so the young man goes to this respected teacher to get him to weigh in on the family squabble. The problem is that the young man is asking the wrong question of this particular teacher. It is not about money, for Jesus, it is all about relationships in the context of God reign.

The rich farmer in the parable also reacts in an expected way. In the story he has fallen into the abundance of a good year. Now that he has received this unexpected blessing he must be wise in what he does with the gift. Not unlike the person who is careful to invest his unexpected luck in the sale of his Internet startup so the farmer decides to build a new silo to hold his wealth. This is a move that will set him up for life. Again this decision sounds sensible to the community but he is asking the wrong question about his blessings in the light of what Jesus is teaching, what Jesus is living.

In both these stories we see that Jesus is asking his followers to be more than decent people in the eyes of their community. In the gospel of Luke Jesus is calling his disciples to a revolutionary approach to living. It is a life of putting others' needs before your own needs. It is a life of sharing our abundance with others in ways that might seem foolish to those around us but just business as usual for those who are following in the sacrificial spirit of Jesus.

This Sunday we will seek to understand the motives of this young man after his father's death and take an educated guess as what might have happened to his life after his encounter with Jesus.