April 5, 2025, First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA
When I’d finished going over the slides, a man sitting toward the back of the church said, “Show me those slides again, Reverend.” I clicked back through them quickly, naming the interlocking issues as they piled up on top of communities like the one where we were sitting (Harlan County WVa).“Well, I’ll be damned,” the man said after I’d finished going through the slides again. “They’ve been playing us against one another.” White Poverty, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, page 120
Luke 12:13-21 Cotton Patch Gospel: Somebody in the crowd said to [Jesus], “Preacher, speak to my brother about dividing the inheritance with me.”
Jesus said to him, “Say, fellow, who appointed me as a judge or arbitrator between you two?”
Then he said to them, “You all be careful and stay on your guard against all kinds of greediness. For a person’s life is not for the piling up of possessions.”
He then gave them a Comparison: “A certain rich fellow’s farm produced well. And he held a meeting with himself and he said, ‘What shall I do? I don’t have room enough to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll tear down my old barns and build some bigger ones in which I’ll store all my wheat and produce. And I will say to myself, ‘Self, you’ve got enough stuff stashed away to do you a long time. Recline, dine, wine, and shine!’ But God said to him, ‘You nitwit, at this very moment your goods are putting the screws on your soul. All these things you’ve grubbed for, to whom shall they really belong?’ That’s the way it is with a man who piles up stuff for himself without giving God a thought.”[1]
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
This past week I went to the dentist… not my favorite thing, but I’m fortunate; I have a very good dentist with an excellent office staff, and I have dental insurance. While I was in the waiting room, a patient was talking with the insurance manager – I could hear a little of their conversation – “So, here are your options, sir… your insurance will pay for the extractions, but it doesn’t pay for dentures, and – let’s see – it’s $2750 for the upper denture and $2750 for the lower, so the total will be $5,500. If you don’t have the cash for that, we offer two different credit plans… and off she went, in the kindest way possible, explaining the differences between plan A and plan B.
And from the stunned look on the man’s face, I could well imagine that he didn’t have almost $6000 sitting around in the bank. And, if you’re poor, if $6000 is more than you can pay out, the cost of the credit was also going to be a burden. So all the time the dentist was doing his thing, I was wondering how many time poverty robs people of their teeth… and how losing your teeth changes how you relate to society, what and how you eat. I’m willing to bet that having no teeth, because you couldn’t afford dental care, makes it harder to get a job, maybe even to hold a job. It seems to me that dentures, and good dental care, are things we just take for granted, but if we’re poor, they’re just not available. And at some level, it’s all about the greed in today’s lesson. Poor people don’t have money, but someone else does, and more than they’ll ever need.
The owner of that farm that Luke tells us about was a man who wanted to corner the market in his neighborhood, corner the market on grain. He wanted to be the person everyone came to when their own supplies ran short. He wanted to be rich, he wanted to be –umm- feared, he wanted to be able to take advantage of the poor so he could scoop up their land, he wanted to wreak vengeance on anyone who’d made fun of him in his early days. In short, he was consumed by greed.
Years ago, Ron Sider, who was a professor at the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in suburban Philadelphia, told a story about the rich fool he named Bigger Barnes, and here’s what he said about this guy:
The rich fool is the epitome of the covetous person. He has a greedy compulsion to acquire more and more possessions, even though he does not need them. And his phenomenal success at piling up more and more property and wealth leads to the blasphemous conclusion that material possessions can satisfy all his needs. From the divine perspective, this attitude is sheer madness. He is a raving fool.
In our own society today, we madly multiply sophisticated gadgets, bigger houses, fancier cars, and fashionable clothes—not because such things truly enrich our lives but because we are driven by an obsession for more and more. Covetousness, a striving for more and more material possessions, has become a cardinal vice of modern civilization… (p. 98)
And then Sider makes a qualification. He says, ‘Possessions are dangerous. But they are not innately evil. Biblical revelation begins with creation. And created things, God said, are good. (Genesis 1) p. 99 It is not because food, clothes, wealth and property are inherently evil that Christians today must lower their standard of living. It is because others are starving. Creation is good. But the one who gave us this gorgeous token of affection has asked us to share it with our sisters and brothers. (p. 101)
Greed doesn’t have to be the result of one dominating personality; in New Brunswick, Canada, the Irving family runs what sounds like the whole province. They’re the Irvings behind Irving Oil, so they have a refinery in Saint John, two paper mills, building supply stores, railways, gas stations…subsidized housing, four radio stations, transport trucks… they make steel and frozen French fries. They even have their own security firm. Pollution is common. And if you don’t get along with the Irving companies, it’s hard to find work.
One in every 10 people in NB works for Irving, yet it is the one of the poorest provinces in Canada.
There was a huge profile of the company and its influence in a recent New York Times article; and I kept wondering where the edge is between being a responsible employer and being the company taking advantage of the people where they are… just what are the signs of corporate greed? Just what is a reasonable and fair profit? What does a company owe the community where it’s located? These are the questions our Christian faith calls us to ask.
The guy with the stuffed-full barns is a reminder to all of us. Jesus wants everyone to know that greed isn’t a challenge just for us, but also for the wealthiest people in the world. Greed is a problem for everyone.
Most of all, this season, because we’ve been spending Lent understanding how an entire economy can trap people in poverty leading to deep and dangerous divisions in our world… because of all that, this time, we want to be clear, that even for the wealthiest, there’s a difference between enough and too much.
It’s not about dollar amounts. It’s about what we do with the money we have. Our Christian faith tells us that the moral way to handle abundance is to share what you have, to use your excess to build up our society. That means planning, thinking about what we want, what we need, how we can share. It means encouraging companies to do the same, whether we’re the owners, the stockholders, or the neighbors.
We are called by God to fight against the temptation of greed, of the understandable yearning to have more and more. We are called to be advocates of generosity, teachers of the religious practice of sharing. We are called to be love incarnate in our world.
May it be so. Amen.
© 2025, Virginia H. Child
[1] Clarence Jordan, The Cotton Patch Gospel (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Pub., 2004), Lk 12:13–16.
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 