Sermon August 5, 2007

“Riches”
August 5, 2007 – Luke 12:13-21

I’d like to share a story called “The Rich Family in Church” by Eddie Ogan

I’ll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my little sister Ocy was 12, and my older sister Darlene 16. We lived at home with our mother, and the four of us knew what it was to do without many things. My dad had died five years before, leaving Mom with seven school kids to raise and no money.

By 1946 my older sisters were married and my brothers had left home. A month before Easter the pastor of our church announced that a special Easter offering would be taken to help a poor family. He asked everyone to save and give sacrificially.

When we got home, we talked about what we could do. We decided to buy 50 pounds of potatoes and live on them for a month. This would allow us to save $20 of our grocery money for the offering. When we thought that if we kept our electric lights turned out as much as possible and didn’t listen to the radio, we’d save money on that month’s electric bill. Darlene got as many house and yard cleaning jobs as possible, and both of us babysat for everyone we could. For 15 cents we could buy enough cotton loops to make three pot holders to sell for $1. We made $20 on pot holders. That month was one of the best of our lives.

Every day we counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night we’d sit in the dark and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy having the money the church would give them. We had about 80 people in church, so figured that whatever amount of money we had to give, the offering would surely be 20 times that much. After all, every Sunday the pastor had reminded everyone to save for the sacrificial offering.

The day before Easter, Ocy and I walked to the grocery store and got the manager to give us three crisp $20 bills and one $10 bill for all our change. We ran all the way home to show Mom and Darlene. We had never had so much money before.

That night we were so excited we could hardly sleep. We didn’t care that we wouldn’t have new clothes for Easter; we had $70 for the sacrificial offering.

We could hardly wait to get to church! On Sunday morning, rain was pouring. We didn’t own an umbrella, and the church was over a mile from our home, but it didn’t seem to matter how wet we got. Darlene had cardboard in her shoes to fill the holes. The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet.

But we sat in church proudly. I heard some teenagers talking about the Smith girls having on their old dresses. I looked at them in their new clothes, and I felt rich.

When the sacrificial offering was taken, we were sitting on the second row from the front. Mom put in the $10 bill, and each of us kids put in a $20.

As we walked home after church, we sang all the way. At lunch Mom had a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs with our fried potatoes! Late that afternoon the minister drove up in his car. Mom went to the door, talked with him for a moment, and then came back with an envelope in her hand. We asked what it was, but she didn’t say a word. She opened the envelope and out fell a bunch of money. There were three crisp $20 bills, one $10 and seventeen $1 bills.

Mom put the money back in the envelope. We didn’t talk, just sat and stared at the floor. We had gone from feeling like millionaires to feeling like poor white trash. We kids had such a happy life that we felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have our Mom and Dad for parents and a house full of brothers and sisters and other kids visiting constantly. We thought it was fun to share silverware and see whether we got the spoon or the fork that night. We had two knifes that we passed around to whoever needed them. I knew we didn’t have a lot of things that other people had, but I’d never thought we were poor.

That Easter day I found out we were. The minister had brought us the money for the poor family, so we must be poor. I didn’t like being poor. I looked at my dress and worn-out shoes and felt so ashamed–I didn’t even want to go back to church. Everyone there probably already knew we were poor!

I thought about school. I was in the ninth grade and at the top of my class of over 100 students. I wondered if the kids at school knew that we were poor. I decided that I could quit school since I had finished the eighth grade. That was all the law required at that time.

We sat in silence for a long time. Then it got dark, and we went to bed. All that week, we girls went to school and came home, and no one talked much. Finally on Saturday, Mom asked us what we wanted to do with the money. What did poor people do with money? We didn’t know. We’d never known we were poor. We didn’t want to go to church on Sunday, but Mom said we had to. Although it was a sunny day, we didn’t talk on the way.

Mom started to sing, but no one joined in and she only sang one verse. At church we had a missionary speaker. He talked about how churches in Africa made buildings out of sun dried bricks, but they needed money to buy roofs. He said $100 would put a roof on a church. The minister said, “Can’t we all sacrifice to help these poor people?” We looked at each other and smiled for the first time in a week.

Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She passed it to Darlene. Darlene gave it to me, and I handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the offering.

When the offering was counted, the minister announced that it was a little over $100. The missionary was excited. He hadn’t expected such a large offering from our small church. He said, “You must have some rich people in this church.”

Suddenly it struck us! We had given $87 of that “little over $100”.

We were the rich family in the church! Hadn’t the missionary said so? From that day on I’ve never been poor again. I’ve always remembered how rich I am because I have Jesus!

It’s interesting to hear such a powerful story in light of our reading from Luke this morning. Here a family never knew what they didn’t have until they had an opportunity to see what others did have.

In our parable of the land owner, Jesus tells us of a man who had too much crop to store. So much crop, he would need to build new barns to hold it all, and then he would be able to relax and enjoy his many riches for years to come. But, it seems there are wrinkles in his plan. He won’t survive the night, he won’t be around to enjoy his wealth. A wealth and abundance he clearly wants to keep for himself. He must have thrown himself into acquiring his wealth, as he doesn’t appear to have any family to pass it on to. There’s also the question of how ethically he acquired this wealth? It is possible he captured all this wealth through taking over other farms, possibly by unethical money lending or other ugly schemes. If this is so, it clearly shows his greed. He allowed wealth to be his ultimate goal. To gain everything for himself, at the cost of relationships with others. Including a relationship with God.

In looking at the poor family, who didn’t even know they were poor, they lived each day to the fullest, serving one another in the home, and very eager to serve others in their church. Just as Jesus taught.

Being rich is not necessarily bad. In fact it can be good, allowing people to do many great things. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, started The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gave $1.5 billion dollars to make the world a better place in 2005. Including $850 million on global issues like disease research and vaccines. This was more money than the Canadian government offered in foreign aid to third world countries.

Bill Gates uses his amassed wealth to help the world. The farmer in Luke, used his wealth to pad his future. If you go to the website globalrichlist.com, you can enter your annual income and see how you compare with the rest of the world. If you earn $20000 a year, which is well below the poverty line in Canada, you are among the top 12% of the richest people in the world. If you make $60000, that puts you in the top 1%. Imagine! Top 1% with $60000, you can’t live any major North American city on this income.

The farmer clearly is very rich for his community. Yet he loses it all, he shares it with no one. It’s not about how much we have in the bank. It’s about what we do with what we have, no matter how little or how much we have. Everything in this world was created by God. Yet we continue to manipulate and abuse God’s creation. We see evidence of this all around us. Crimes against the environment, crimes against one another, disease, hurt, pain.

Yet we have money and skills we can offer. We can use the things we have been blessed with to serve one another. We can’t take it with us can we? So we might as well use the things God created to do God’s work. Makes some sense, doesn’t it?

I’ll close with this, a few lines of poetry from an unknown author.

Money will buy:
A bed but not sleep.
Books but not brains.
Food but not appetite.
Finery but not beauty.
A house but not a home.
Medicine but not health.
Luxuries but not culture.
Amusement but not happiness.
A crucifix but not a Savior.
A church-pew but not heaven.