LK 12: 13-21

Laterally Luke…Pentecost + 8…Revised 2019

Been building any bigger & better barns lately? If so, stop! Stop right now! I’m not the one telling us this; Jesus Himself is! What might this barn-building business actually mean in today terms rather than those of yesteryear? Begin with the fact that Jesus, a great spinner of yarns, tells the parable in response to a chap in the crowd, let’s call him Bill, appealing to Him to arbitrate in a family dispute. Jesus, though, isn’t buying into this!

The first thing that strikes me is Jesus noticing & responding to ‘someone in the crowd’. How many ‘Bills, or Wilhelminas’ - get lost in the crowd today? Though few of our congregations are ‘crowded’ today, it’s too easy for ‘what’s his name / what’s her name?’ to get lost in there somewhere. With Jesus, though, little people always count, & because they count, we count. With God. Everyone counts. Not, in any theoretical way, but in personal, flesh & blood, down to earth reality. Does our faith community need to learn everyone counts? What steps may we need to take to make that happen? Certainly not by building bigger & better ‘barns’ of any kind!  

Whereas Jesus chooses to steer clear of the legalities ‘Bill’ wants to involve Him in, churches of various stripes have long run on legalities. An example of our choosing to live by Law & not by Grace. God gave Moses Ten Commandments, Jesus summar-ised them in two. But parishes, dioceses, & the national church in which I've long served, keep on building bigger & better barns - Rule Books - many centimetres thick! Has that infectious disease known as ‘statute-bound’ struck where we are a member? If so, is there anything people in the pews, ‘little people’, can do about it?

Thomas (Ch.72) has an interestingly different take on this incident. Tom has Jesus asking the fellow, “Who made me a divider?” then asking His disciples, “I’m not a divider, am I?” Might it be that the tale is about both the Greed Jesus sees as the motive for the fellow’s approach to Him, & the Divisiveness such greed brings among us? Is it both that lead to Jesus’ warning about building barns? Of all shapes & sizes?

Have the man in the crowd & the rich man of the parable both lost their ability to live free & alive to God? The one bound by a family property dispute, the other by busi-ness opportunism? Jesus doesn't seem to have a problem with property as such, only with how we feel about it & what we do with it. Why not apply Jesus’ parable about barns to anything stopping us from being free & alive to God?

Brian

Afterthought: Are feeding the poor in their poverty traps, caring for those who have no-one else to care for them, providing shelter over the heads of the homeless, & the like, ‘barns’ Jesus would encourage us to build today?