Profit Tables and the Prophet’s Table
A sermon on Luke 12: 13-21 by Nathan Nettleton, 2 August 1998

Message:
God has created us for relationships, and any values or priorities that are willing to sacrifice relationship for something else will cripple us.

Sermon.

Last Tuesday’s Age newspaper had the story of a doctor on the front page. Dr Stephen Vaughan is a cancer specialist who has just quit after 23 years working in Victoria’s public hospital system. As the paper said, Dr Vaughan is the sort of doctor the system needs. Even after treating more than 7000 public patients, it is obvious he still cares. Listen to his words: “Sometimes caring means sitting at the side of a dying patient for 20 minutes, not talking, not doing, just being a presence.”

This is a doctor who still wants to listen to patients and understand their needs - rather than just shove them through but, he says, the changes to the public health system mitigate against that. Caring seems to have disappeared in a system that rewards those who shove patients through the fastest. Over the past few years Dr Vaughan has seen his colleagues working harder and harder, squeezing patients through the system. He has seen budget cuts erode the quality of care. He believes they have forced hospitals into dodgy accounting and cooking the books to make patient throughput figures more impressive. He has seen enough. Had enough. The system has no place for a doctor who sits at a bedside for 20 minutes without doing anything you can bulk bill for and he’s not willing to treat patients as ledger entries, so he’s quit.

Amidst all the stories of doctors and lawyers and the like rorting the system and milking it for all its worth, it is nice to come across a man of integrity for whom people do not have dollar values. And it’s tragic that he feels the need to walk away because there’s no place for him. No place for a man who values people over profits.

The context is entirely different, but the same values questions are under examination in the gospel reading we’ve just heard. A man in the crowd comes to Jesus and says, “Rabbi, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” I don’t know how many of you have ever been involved with a dispute over the dividing up of a deceased parent’s estate, but they’re never pretty. In our culture if all else fails, the executor can always just sell up everything and divide up the proceeds equally, and usually the lawyers are the only big winners.

But in Israel at the time of our story the selling up option was not on. You see the family inheritance usually consisted mostly of land, the family farm, and since the Hebrew’s sense of connection to their land was somewhat similar to that of our Aboriginal people, you can’t just sell it off. Your father has left you a little bit of the holy land itself. You can’t just turn it into cash. And it is usually not just like dividing up a suburban block for a couple of townhouses either. It is very difficult to work out a fair division of a farm. What if one half has a creek running through it and the other half doesn’t?

Now this fellow who approached Jesus may have been entirely justified in his view of how the property should be divided. It might have been his brother that was holding out unreasonably. Well in those days the practice was that if you couldn’t settle a dispute over a will, the first one of you who got a recognized rabbi to agree with your proposed division of the property won. The other was legally bound to accept the rabbi’s ruling. The down side of this practice was that while it sped up the dispute resolution process, it also allowed the odd rabbi a speedy way to pay off the mortgage on the beach house at Joppa. Now one reason I suspect that this fellow was not trying to rip off his brother was that if he had been, he was making a very poor choice of rabbi. So it is entirely likely that this bloke had a very reasonable claim and that his brother was being obstinate and selfish.

But Jesus doesn’t just step in, look over the details and make a ruling does he? As we see so many times in the stories of Jesus, there is an attempt to drag him into a conflict on one side or the other and Jesus not only refuses to be drawn in but he responds in a way that challenges everybody involved to step back and look at the whole thing from another angle so that a way of reconciliation might be found. Because one thing is sure in this, if this bloke got a rabbi to resolve the thing there would be no reconciliation with his brother.

It would have been a bit like a woman and her son in America last year who after ten years putting in $20 each to buy tickets in the state lottery each week actually won a $4.2 million payout. But the son immediately claimed that he’d bought that ticket with his own money, so the mother, who said that their relationship had previously been "loving and close" sued him for her half. “Teacher, tell my son to divide the family winnings with me!” Once you bring in the lawyers to resolve a family dispute, you might win the dispute but you’re unlikely to still have a family.

So Jesus tells a story of a bloke who’s got all the goodies but no family. A rich man who was making money hand over foot beyond what even he expected. He reminds me a bit of a man I used to work for who I always reckoned if he hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth would probably have starved to death. But even his most bungled decisions seemed to make him money. While I worked for him he formed a partnership with another company who installed a million dollar machine in his factory. Now my boss was sufficiently incompetent that when he signed the agreement he thought it only made one product when it actually made eight. But the upshot was that it made him eight times as much money as he expected and he bought another new Porsche.

Now the bloke in Jesus’ story has eight times the harvest he expects and it won’t all fit in the barns so he has to decide what to do about it. Now the first things most Jews would have done in the circumstances were to give thanks to God for this great blessing and then celebrate with all their friends by throwing a party. And the usual thing to do when making a tough decision like what to do with the excess would have been to walk down to the town gates where the elders of the community spent there time chewing over the problems of the universe and discuss it with them. The culture in those meetings was against introducing a solution too quickly because there was no point in messing up a good debate by introducing a definitive answer. Community discussion was valued for its own sake. So most people in this bloke’s position would have gone down there, or at least chewed it over with their own family.

But he doesn’t do any of these things. He thanks no one and when he celebrates he celebrates alone. When he wants advice he talks to himself. That’s what it says: “He said to himself, ‘What shall I do?’ And then he answered himself, ‘I shall do this: I will pull down my barns and build bigger barns, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.’” Note this was a bloke who not only had a bumper crop but he already had so many goods that he was storing them in the barns too. And then he’s still talking to himself. “And I will say to myself, ‘Self, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink and be merry.’” You can imagine why this bloke has got no one else to talk to. He’s the sort of character who’d sell his grandmother if there was a buck in it. The sort that no one wants for a friend.

Jesus prefaced his story by saying that your life does not consist in the abundance of your possessions and now he’s set up this almost Christopher Skase type picture of a totally pathetic creature who’s lived as though life was just a case of “he who dies with the most toys wins.” So he’s saying to the man with the property division problem, “How much is it worth to win this one? Will your life really be better if you destroy your family to get your hands on the inheritance?” When Jesus said that life doesn’t consist in the abundance of possessions, he didn’t spell out the alternative. He didn’t need to. It was obvious to every one in a culture that was still structured around extended families and community networks.

In our culture it’s much harder for many of us to see. We are constantly bombarded with images that tell us over and over that life consists in driving this car, in wearing this fragrance, in having this logo on the side of your shoes, in drinking this coffee. Images telling us that not only can we have it all but that we deserve it all and that we’ll be pitiful and miserable failures if we don’t have it all. We have industries devoted to shaping the conversation when we talk to ourselves so that when we look in the shop window and think “Isn’t that beautiful,” the following voice that says, “Yes, but you don’t need one and you can’t afford it,” is quickly drowned out by voices that have been well tutored in saying, “You need another one. You deserve it. You’ve earned it. You have a right to it.” Even voices saying, “You’re contributing to the economy by buying it. You can put it on credit. You’re keeping the wheels of industry turning. You’re a responsible citizen.”

I don’t know how many of you have been watching Seachange on the TV, but in last Sunday’s episode, Laura, the former big city lawyer who dropped out of the rat race a became the local magistrate in a small coastal town, was being lured back to the big smoke by her former boss. “Come on,” he said, “You’ve done your escape thing. You’ve spent some quality time with your kids. It’s time to return to the real world. We’ll double your salary.”

Back to the real world. The world where you’ll sacrifice your kids for a pay rise. The world where all relationships are expendable in the pursuit of the dollar.

That’s becoming more and more our world isn’t it? In Jesus’ day to be rich was valued, but to rich without family or close relationships was seen as a ludicrous waste and a pitiful condition. Today we’d probably elect that man Premier. He’d certainly be a shoe in for an available CEO position. We’d probably have him restructuring our hospital system, deciding how much to spend on maintaining our water quality, or something. No wonder the good doctors are walking out. We keep electing politicians who believe that treating sick patients and supplying water to major cities should be profit making ventures. Funny how the profits look better if you provide less treatment or cut a few corners on filtration systems isn’t it?

Having crippled ourselves with a consumer culture of covetousness - work, shop, accumulate, die - we are now seeing what goes on when we structure the institutions of our society on the same principles we’ve been living by. We find they become as sick and friendless and dysfunctional as the people running them.

An individual’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions. A society’s life does not consist in the profit dividends of its essential services. Jesus points us back to what our lives do consist of: our inter-relatedness with God, with one another, with our world. The web of connections which you can and do take with you. Any values or priorities for which you are willing to sacrifice those inter-connections, those relationships, are values and priorities that will cripple you and drain you of spirit, of life itself.

Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly.” Jesus came to reconnect you with the sources of life, with love, with hope, with care, with joy, with the very God of life.

At this table that God places the bread of life and the life blood of the universe in our hands and says, “Eat. Drink. This is my body, given for you, that you might have life.” At this table Jesus invites you into relationship with God and with every one who gathers at this table. The choice is yours. At which table will you find the life you want? If what you’re busy having a conversation with yourself about where you’ll store all the things you really want when your cards come up on the Blackjack table then you’ll probably find nothing of recognizable value at this table and you’ll walk on by. But if you’re sick of living like an island, working like a robot and being treated like a ledger entry, then at this table you’ll find the way out. Ordinary things of no monetary worth, but priceless is you are looking for the way back into connection with the Spirit of the Universe and with those who are travelling into fullness of life.

Alternative last paragraph if communion not being celebrated.
You won’t find much encouragement in the world around you, because love and hope and care and joy are not saleable commodities. If you attempt to sell them or give them a dollar value on a balance sheet they mutate into something else. But if you would walk away from the values that rate profits over people, you can look for a lead to Jesus Christ who repeatedly calls us to see life through a different frame, through a different set of values. And you can look to Jesus Christ because he lives and is shaping in our midst a new community who live by renewed values. You can look to Jesus Christ because he not only shows us how put our security for the future in God, but he is our security for the future in God.