Rich Toward God

Hosea 11: 1-11

Luke 12: 13-21

What does it mean to be "rich toward God"? Many preachers would use this text to implore the congregation to give more generously because you cannot take the money with you when you pass away. However, I think there is more to this passage than just giving money to the church or charities. Despite the fact that we are behind in our budget, I'm learning that although I may worry about such things privately, it is not what we should worry about as a congregation.

Money is important. It is important to make our budget, but that cannot be the focus or our purpose as a church. What is the point of being open if our main concern is staying in the black? We might as well close our doors, give our assets to the poor or another church if that is all we are concerned about. It all comes back to what Jesus says at the end of this passage in Luke. "This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves, but is not rich toward God."

Again, it leaves me to ask, what does it mean for a person to be rich toward God? What does it mean for a congregation to be rich toward God?

It is important for us to pay attention to what we worry about the most. Whatever we spend the most time on in our meetings and our committees are the things we consider our mission and purpose. The rich landowner was concerned with himself. If we go back to the passage and read it again we will notice an abundance of me language when the landowner talks. He does not think about the Lord who has made this abundance possible. He does not think about those who are less fortunate than him and do not have anything to eat let alone excess grain to store. He does not even take a moment to think about selling the grain to others, but instead he wants to tear down his perfectly good barns to create bigger ones to store all that he has. He wants to sit back and count his grain, and enjoy a life of leisure.

Now, some of you may be wondering what is wrong about storing up for leaner months. Don't we all buy an extra toothbrush or the big jug of oil when it's on sale? We all tend to buy the 3 cans of corn instead of just the one we need at the moment because it's cheaper and we know eventually we'll need it. There's nothing wrong with that at all. However, we also know of people whose lives revolve around storing up as much as they can for themselves and giving nothing back to those who might need it.

Jesus warns us that we must be careful in how we let wealth and abundance distract us from our purpose here on earth. We are meant to live together; to share together; to love each other. If each of us sits in our houses busily counting our stored treasures then we are not experiencing the life God has given to us.

In the story of the 3 Little Pigs, each one builds themselves a house and goes to live in it while happily congratulating themselves on how successful they are to own their own home. Then along comes that wily wolf and he huffs and puffs and blows down the straw house of the first pig, and then he comes to the second pig's house made of sticks and he blows down that house. When he comes to the third house, made of brick, he cannot get in and with the three little pigs working together, they manage to defeat the wily wolf when he tries to get them by coming down the chimney.

Why am I telling you this old fairytale? Because the three little pigs are just like us. We go out into the world trying to make something of ourselves and we get so caught up in making everything just right and in having something bigger and better than everyone else that we lose sight of God. We stop giving thanks for God's blessing and begin to congratulate ourselves. We get comfy in our little houses with our treasures surrounding us whether they are that 50 foot television or the many pieces of jewelry we've accumulated in our life and we forget the big picture.

There are people out there that need us. What we have, we have been blessed with by God. We do not have to give everything up to prove our love for God, but we are told that unless we learn to be rich toward God, we are dead inside. The same is true for this church. Until we learn to be rich toward God, we are a dead church. We come here on Sundays, we show up for our meetings and yet we are not truly living until we make a difference in our community. Our church life cannot revolve around how to make budget no matter how tight it may get, and honestly, it's pretty tight right now.

If we want to be a vital church, a growing church, a church that means something more than just a pretty building people pass by; then we need to be vital people who understand the blessings Jesus has given us are not for us alone. We need to open our doors. We need to be inviting, always welcoming, and inclusive. We need to reach out and ask the community to come here and ask them what they want from a church. The most amazing part of it all is how much things will change and how great we will all feel once we begin to do this.

Change is hard, but it brings benefits with it. The grace and glory of God are given to those who show mercy and love to the people around them. We are a rich congregation compared to many. However, sometimes we do not act very blessed. We phone in the motions and wonder why nothing changes. It's time for us to remember what we were created for and what our purpose is as a congregation. Some of you are tired and feel like you have done your fair share.

But Jesus reminds us in this parable he does not care much about what is a person's fair share. The first person to talk to Jesus in this passage asks him to tell his brother to give him his 'fair share of the inheritance' and Jesus instead shares a parable about a rich man whose major concern was about himself and his fair share, and at the end of the story proclaims that man is dead inside.

Being a Christian is hard work. The whole bible talks about how hard it is to be a loving, faithful disciple and how it wears  a person down. We have work ahead of us. We have a lot left to do here at Trinity. Many of us want to go back to the 'glory days' when the church was always filled. I want to remind you that we can have glory days again, but it comes with work. We cannot just pray people into these pews. We need to reach out to them. We need to love them and each other. We need to stop bickering about the petty things and instead concentrate on what it means to be rich toward God.

If we only do what will benefit our life, if we only help out to make ourselves look good, if we deny help because we've 'been on that committee before' then we are not being rich toward God, but rich toward our self. These are hard words to hear, I know, because they apply to every single one us including myself. We all phone it in some times. We all do the bare minimum to scrape by for another month or another year when we get tired. Jesus is calling us on this attitude. He is reminding us that if we want to be alive then we must live a life that gives constantly toward others and not just ourselves.

We need to stop thinking of ourselves, and only of how change will affect "me or I" and instead think about how our church may become something truly spectacular when we start following Jesus' ways of being rich toward God. Perhaps when we learn how to do that, we will see that our glory days are not in the past at all, but they were always in our future.

Amen.