Sermons

Becoming Rich Toward God

The gospel of Luke continues to challenge us with what is real, what matters, and what lasts. In recent weeks, we’ve heard gospels where Jesus does not take sides, but instead redirects us to a better question and deeper concerns. Today, we meet another sibling with a conflict. Someone in the crowd says, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” It’s a familiar plea.

Family tensions, finances, fairness. These themes run through every generation. But what’s striking, as in the story of Mary and Martha, is that Jesus refuses to step in and arbitrate the conflict. He doesn’t ask, “Well, who’s the older brother?” or “What did your father’s will say?” Once again, Jesus avoids taking sides to lift us above the dispute—to ask a greater question.

The issue, Jesus says, is not who’s right, but what’s rich. Not who deserves the inheritance or perhaps wealth itself, instead, he wants to talk about what it might be to be rich towards God. He pivots the conversation from the wealth to the soul.

If “pivot” and “Jesus” are in the same sentence, you know a parable is on its way. Jesus ignores the request to tell anyone anything and launches. A rich man has a good year, I mean, a great year. The land produces abundantly. So abundantly that he doesn’t have space to store it all. So he does what many of us might call wise, even shrewd: he decides to build bigger barns. He secures his future. He creates a cushion. And then he says to himself, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink, be merry.”

I mean, a casual chat with the soul about worldly goods is absurd. Or at least I hope we know it is absurd. The teaching from Luke, from the church, and hopefully from us all is that we recognize our connection with God is not a monetary one. Often, it is money that gets in the way of having a deeper relationship with God.… Camel… eye of the needle, anyone? “Soul, you have ample goods…” As if the soul cared about barns. As if security came from storage. And Jesus delivers the backflip parable twist, “You fool! This very night, your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared—whose will they be?”

This is how Jesus ends it: “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

The question becomes, how do we become rich towards God?

After we moved into our house, we had garden beds installed, as well as side beds. I suspect we selected the plants for the side beds, but I don’t remember. After the first year, the tree we got flowered, and then there were berries. I looked up what the berries were and found out that they were serviceberries, or as I grew up calling them, Saskatoon berries. My mum used to make jam, and I heard you could make jam out of these, so I went picking and getting berries I could reach. Leaving a lot for the birds, I was in the kitchen looking at berries when I asked the ancestors for help, and we made jam.

In telling that story my friend Paul gave me Robin Wall Kilmer book The Serviceberry, abundance and reciprocity in the Natural World “Many indigenous people, including my Anishinaabe relatives and my Haudenosaunee neighbors inherit what is known as “a culture of gratitude“ where lifeways are organized around recognition and responsibility for earthly gifts, both ceremonial and pragmatic.” I think this is helpful in moving us to answer the question of how to become rich to God.

The rich fool does not have a culture of gratitude; he does not see the harvest through the eyes of abundance or reciprocity. He believes he is entirely self-sufficient. He has reaped, constructed, stored, and secured. In his mind, he no longer needs anyone. He even addresses his soul as though it were a separate enterprise—an independent entity he can now retire.

But according to Scripture, the soul is not some detached part of a person—it is the person. It represents your life, your identity, your very breath, given by God. So when the man says, “Soul, relax,” he is speaking to himself, attempting to pacify an inner restlessness that his material success has failed to calm. We often do the same: we strive, accumulate, and achieve, and then wonder if it’s enough.

This is where Jesus speaks with clarity: “You fool. This very night your soul will be required of you.” The Greek word used, apaitousin, can be translated as “they demand,” “is required,” or “will be demanded. “It means, ‘they are demanding your soul back.” It carries not just the implication of death, but of accountability. We, as people of the way, those of us who follow Jesus, or chase the divine spark, need to hold that accountability for ourselves and for others.

Luke’s Gospel is unwavering in this call. Again and again, Jesus challenges us to break free from the exhausting cycle of scarcity and enter into the liberating abundance of God’s kingdom. In Luke 6, “Give, and it will be given to you—a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.” In Luke 14, he urges us to host banquets not for those who can repay us, but for the marginalized—the poor, the blind, the lame. In Luke 18, he commands the rich ruler to sell all and follow him. And in Luke 19, when Zacchaeus gives away half of his wealth to the poor, Jesus proclaims, “Today salvation has come to this house.”

I heard someone say that being rich toward God doesn’t require reckless giving; it requires open-handed living. It means we hold our resources loosely, recognizing them as tools for love rather than trophies of achievement. It means living with the deep conviction that nothing we possess is ultimately ours; we are accountable to share it, not hoard it, and accountable to those on the margins.

Let me end with Robin Wall Kilmer. “Our oldest teaching stories remind us of failure to show gratitude, dishonor the gift, and bring serious consequences. If you dishonor the beavers by taking too many, they will leave. If you waste the corn, you’ll go hungry. Enumerating the gifts, you receive a sense of abundance, knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing “enoughness“ is a radical act in the economy that is always urging us to consider more. Data tells a story that there are “enough“food calories on the planet for all 8 billion of us to be nourished, and yet people are starving.

May we realize that it is our distribution that is o, and let us be faithful and May we be rich—not in things, but in love. May we be rich toward God.

May it be so, Amen