Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 5, 2007

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 12:13-21)

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But Jesus said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And Jesus said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

I want to tell you this morning why I think Immanuel has some of the greatest young people ever in the history of the church. And those of you here who are the seventh and eighth graders who were on the confirmation trip to Bay Lake this past week will recognize yourselves in this story. This is not to embarrass you, but to suggest that perhaps you might be models for discipleship for the rest of us.

The theme for the confirmation camp was “The Disparity Between Wealth and Poverty Around the Globe.” On one particular evening, all thirty of the campers and us counselors were invited by the camp staff to a Feast of Nations. When we arrived, we were randomly assigned to groups by country. Some of us were assigned to a group sitting on the floor over here labeled Senegal, with a traditional cloth from Senegal and a simple bowl of just beans. Over here, there was a group from Laos, sitting in a larger circle, also on the floor, and they had, each of them, a small bowl of plain white rice, no flavor, and a glass of water. Over here was Nicaragua, also a large group sitting in a circle, with rice with a little bit of tomato sauce, but not that much to go around. Over there in that corner, sitting at a table with silverware and napkins, was Ireland. And the campers assigned to Ireland—there were just three of them—had a large bowl of potatoes in the middle of the table, plenty for all of them to eat.

But over in one corner over here there was a fancy-restaurant table with candlelight, tablecloth, fold-banded napkins, fancy silver, fancy crystal. And the three who sat in chairs above the rest of us at that table had waiters and servers coming back and forth and back and forth, bringing them salad, garlic bread, spaghetti, and dessert. And their table, you might have guessed it, was the United States. And the three of them, randomly assigned out of the group to that table, all happened to be from Immanuel.

Now, picture thirty hungry, nearly starving seventh and eighth graders, after a full day of morning sessions, an afternoon of either hiking for some and all-day swimming in the lake for others. Now it is 5:00 p.m., time for dinner, and only three of them are served a fancy spaghetti dinner, restaurant-style, while all of the rest of the campers and counselors have only a bowl of beans or a little bit of rice to share among five or six or seven people in this corner, or just rice and water over there, or potatoes and water over there. As the dinner went on, those of us eating just beans or rice on the floor, without enough to go around, were getting hungrier and hungrier, and some were getting angry. And those being served a spaghetti dinner—with food left over at the end of the meal to throw away—were feeling gradually worse and worse about their privilege and satisfaction. Even though they were elevated and the others were all on the floor, these three had become friends with all of the seventh and eighth graders at the camp, and they were not able to separate themselves geographically or distance themselves emotionally from the rest of their friends.

When the group dispersed into our discussion circles, the three representatives of the U.S.A. were summoned by the camp director to the front of the dining hall. There on the front steps she let them in on the secret that all of their friends would now be invited to a wonderful spaghetti dinner, as well as them, and that the three of them would get to serve it to them.

The camp director was immensely impressed with the maturity of insight of our three youths. But she was most impressed with this: that all three of them had secretly strategize and had stashed garlic bread into their shirts and the pockets of their shorts, and into a beach towel that they were going to smuggle into the cabins to give to their friends that night. Not only were these three Immanuel young people remarkable and remarkably insightful, they demonstrated a capacity for empathy with their friends, beyond their years, as well as determination to act upon it.

Need I say more about the quality of our young people at Immanuel? For when faced with a choice between privilege and hunger, between hoarding or sharing, but most importantly between callousness and sensitivity, they opted for the pathway of the heart, showing not only the capacity for compassion but the ability to defy instruction of the camp director for the sake of their friends, who they thought were going to go to bed hungry and in need.

They themselves became a parable for the group of counselors who heard the story from the camp director the next morning; a parable as exquisite as those that Jesus tells in the Gospels, for in caring for their friends they demonstrated precisely the qualities that Jesus was hoping will be cultivated in his hearers when he tells the story of the rich young fool in Luke for today; for whereas the rich young man in our story becomes progressively elevated by wealth from the rest of humanity, these three seventh and eighth graders, already at age 13 and 14, refused to remain elevated above the rest of their friends. Whereas the rich young man insulates himself from the well-being of those around him, these three seventh and eighth graders refused to allow their privilege to distance them from others. Whereas the rich young man carried on a narcissistic conversation with himself, these three seventh and eighth graders planned a strategy for how they might share their goods with others.

Let us be clear, the rich young man in Jesus’ story was not a bad person. There is no evidence that he was dishonest. In fact, we learn that he had come by his wealth by hard work and good business sense. He built barns, and when they were full he built better ones. He is not a bad person. He is, biblically speaking, a fool, for he never glances in the direction of God, nor in the direction of the neighbor, as he goes about accumulating his wealth. He speaks only to himself and about himself: “And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But God says to him, “You fool! This very night your soul will be required of you.”

Not only is the rich young man under the illusion that his accumulated wealth can secure him for the future then, he is under the even greater illusion that one can live the abundant life without giving a glance in the direction of God, who is the source and ground of all life, or the neighbor whose welfare and well-being is, biblically speaking, inextricably bound up with our own. He is not a bad person; he is a foolish person, for his circle of awareness extends no further than the circumference of his very own accumulated possessions, which in the end is a very small world, indeed.

“Take heed! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed,” Jesus says, “for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, for what will it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” Jesus, in a sense, is telling the young rich man, as well as us, before it is too late, that affluence cannot buy the good life or eternal life. You have been given the good gifts that you have, not to throw your lives away, but to have the opportunity to give your lives away, for the sake of the neighbor who, our young people from Immanuel demonstrated so well, can be a friend as close as the bunk right next to us at confirmation camp, or as far away as our global friends in Senegal, all around the world.

I left Bay Lake Camp on Wednesday, proud of the seventh and eighth graders from Immanuel, for I left confident that their lives would be larger than the small circle of accumulations that they someday may possess. I left with the confidence that they would continue life with the wisdom burned into the door on a sign above the dining hall at Bay Lake, which read: “THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS IN LIFE ARE NOT THINGS.”

And I left Bay Lake at noon on Wednesday, heading south on Highway 169, following the big yellow school bus carrying our youth, turning onto Highway 10 going east, then south on 35E to 94, and all the way back to First Lutheran in St. Paul, without even the slightest premonition that just four hours later another school bus would go down in the tragic collapse of a bridge on 35W, not much further away from where we were at two o’clock on 35E; but this time with 61 small children, who would be rescued by a counselor who risked his own safety and well-being to secure theirs.

In the four days since, Minnesota has witnessed not only the suffering of the consequences of a tragedy, but we have also seen remarkable demonstrations of human empathy, and compassion, and courage; people who stepped out of their own small circles of comfort and security to risk helping a neighbor in need. Like the story of Alicia Babatz, interviewed on Friday from her hospital bed, one of those who miraculously escaped a sinking vehicle and found her way up the riverbank, where she was able to lie down. On the shore, another young woman stayed by her side, keeping her talking and alert until an ambulance came. In her interview, Babatz said that she knew only the woman’s first name—it was “Jenny”—and she hopes that soon that woman will come forward so that she can meet her again.

Recovery from this tragedy will be slow, and it will take many of us—depending on whether we were affected directly or indirectly—a long time to process all that we have seen and heard, of both horror and heroism.

But my spirit this day is lifted and encouraged, to know that at Immanuel we have some of the finest young people the world has ever known, for what makes the difference in a moment like that is the distance between those who have cultivated a heart full of compassion and those who have not, those wise enough to stay connected to the rest of their brothers and sisters and those who have insulated themselves in a small circle of comfort, reserved only for them. The rich young man was not a bad person, but a fool, and a heartless one at that.

May God grant all of us this day to see role models in our youth for the role models they truly are, with gifts of mercy, maturity, and empathy beyond their years, “for what shall it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?”

Amen.