"Treasure Hunting"
Sunday, August 08 2010 - luke, rich, riches, treasure, worth, family, africa, lesotho, cultural
Rev. Leah Atkinson Bilinski; August 7-8, 2010; Scripture Text: Luke 12:13-21
There is a story in one of my mother’s cookbooks that has grabbed my attention since I was a teenager. Over the years, I have forgotten it and been delighted to rediscover it when happening to sift through soup recipes at my parent’s home. In the handful of times I have run across it, I always linger to read it and refresh myself in a view of the world increasingly different from those views to which our culture has come to instill. The story goes like this:
Brenda was an American woman who spent three years living in a rural Lesotho village in southern Africa with her family. One afternoon, while walking through the village, Brenda stopped to visit her friend ‘Me Malebohang.
Arriving at her house, Brenda found her at a table in the courtyard cutting up a pumpkin. It was early winter, pumpkin-harvesting time. Since pumpkins keep well, they are the main vegetable the Basotho, the people of Lesotho, eat during the winter.
“What a bad pumpkin harvest!” ‘Me Malebohang said after they exchanged greetings. “More than half of the pumpkins rotted in my field. These eight are the only ones I have to keep for winter.”
Time passed as their conversation flowed from talk of pumpkins to other topics. When Brenda rose to leave, ‘Me Malebohang reached for one of the largest pumpkins on the wall and handed it to her. “You can’t give me this pumpkin,” Brenda protested. “You just told me that these are all you have!”
‘Me Malebohang laughed. “We Basotho know that this is the way to do it. Next year I may have nothing in my field, and if I don’t share with you now, who will share with me then?” Still smiling, she took the pumpkin back and cut it in half. “Here,” she said, “you take this half and give the other half to your neighbor, ‘Me Mephethetso. Go well!”[1]
“Go well,” ‘Me Malebohang said joyfully. “Go well,” ‘Me Malebohang joyfully blessed. But her blessing was more than just a kind, shared prayer for future blessing by God. Her blessing was made full and authentic in the here and now by her participation in the blessing.
She took down and joyfully – without hesitation -- gave away what was literally a life-giving object of security. She filled her simple words, wish and prayer of blessing – “Go well” – with the means by which to do so. She gave life. And she smiled and rejoiced in doing so. //
“Fool!” some in our culture might say of ‘Me Malebohang. “Now with what will the woman feed her own family? She just got rid of 1/8 of her family’s staple food security for the winter! That’s not very responsible!”
And it’s not. If you were to hold ‘Me Malebohang up to models of financial “responsibility” that have developed in this country, she might not be judged very credit-worthy. A bank might look at such actions and reject her for a small business loan in favor of this other chap over here – the one who built the larger barns and saved for his future. He’s the responsible one, our culture tells us. He’s the one actively thinking about and planning toward his future. He’s the one making good investment decisions. If a person who is “responsible” is, as the dictionary says, “liable to be required to give account,” then surely, this man is the one with his portfolio in order for the bank and for those family members who will inherit all of his net worth…isn’t he?
Ah, there’s the rub, right? This horrid story of Jesus’ that hits way too close to home because in many ways, we in this country aspire to act in the same “responsible” ways as the rich man with his storehouses, planning toward a secure future.
I do it too. I sat down with my quarterly mutual fund report just yesterday, tracking how well (or not so well) my retirement investments are doing, thinking about what next step Jamie and I might be benefited to take. I hate this task. And I hate it especially because I’m a person who can’t escape challenging scripture. It seeps into my head at the most inopportune times -- with just about every life decision I make. I’m mad at someone and I want to verbally take them apart. And then some words about “doing unto others” or being humble or reflecting the mind of Christ comes into my head and guilt-trips me. Or at other times, like when I wanted a nice diamond ring for my engagement, but my knowledge of diamond-trading oppression in Africa and biblical words about letting justice flow like waters, blah, blah, blah, came in between my ears and ruined it all for me. Or when we could have afforded that newer house or one of those sports cars with the racing stripes and the tight gears that I would just adore driving -- but biblical words about tithing and annoying stories of Jesus about taking care of the poor and others made us put church giving and other charitable giving at the top of our budget rather than in some bottom-of-the-budget, leftovers-section. And so yesterday, as I sat down with that quarterly report, having studied the scriptures for today’s service all week – well, you can imagine what started seeping into my head before I even opened the envelope. And those scriptures challenged me to think about my “net worth” more deeply.
So first, I sought to more accurately recognize just how financially well-off I am. I put down the quarterly statement, and I looked up a website I’d heard about from friends – www. globalrichlist.com. I plugged in Jamie's and my annual household income and learned that we are among the top 1% of the richest people in the world. By the website’s calculations, I’m number 37,673,625. That means that there are only about 37.5 million people richer than me…out of a world with a population of 6.9 billion. And then I started plugging in other numbers – other annual incomes of people I know – and I learned that if your household income is just $47,500 or higher, you’re still within the top 1% of the richest people in the world. If your household income is above $33,700, that still lands you in the top 5% of the richest people in the world. And even if your household annual income is $25,400, you’re within the top 10% of the richest people in the world. For the children that came up during children’s time, that ten dollars I gave you – according to the World Bank, that’s more than 85 out of every 100 people in the world make per day.[2]
And if that doesn’t make sense to you, then let me put it in other terms that might help: I want everyone out in the congregation today, that in the year 2010, has a toilet inside your home to raise your hand. // People that can afford to live in a home or apartment that has indoor plumbing – by the world’s standards, we are rich. Now raise your hand if you eat more than once a day. // If we eat more than once a day, by the world’s standards, we’re rich. // We are rich; and we’re so rich (and so used to it), we don’t even know how rich we are.
Or if we do know how rich we are, all too often we label it “a blessing of God,” slap a “property of” sticker on our resources, say a short prayer of thanks to God for the immense privilege we seem to have been allotted among all God’s people on this good earth, and go about our merry way, building those barns to which we think we’re entitled, amassing “security for our future” – whatever that means.
And from our front porches, lemonade in hand and fat smiles on our faces, we puzzle at persons like ‘Me Malebohang – people who seem to rejoice more in a different kind of blessing than in the assurance of knowing that one’s family will be provided for. “Fool!” we think to ourselves, “She has been irresponsible to her family.”
But if we are to listen to Luke’s scripture today, then we must recognize that we are the ones whose ideas of net worth, blessing and responsibility are more often askew. And Jesus with his parable, doesn’t come to pat us on the back for our “responsible actions,” but comes to question whether we have been “responsible” by his definition – whether we have acted from a place where we recognize that we are liable for our actions TO GOD. // And much like he did with the money changers in the temple, with this parable, I believe Jesus is turning over our lemonade-sipping chair with us in it:
“The land of a rich man produced abundantly,” Jesus relates to us. “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.” //
Being rich has nothing to do with being blessed. Did you notice how the rich man in the story, despite his possessions and security, has no one to whom he speaks? He talks to himself, patting himself on the back and declaring what words of encouragement he will say to his own soul. He speaks these self-soothing words of encouragement…because no one else is there to say them. // Perhaps there is no one else because he has invested in things more than people. Perhaps there is no one else because his speeches have always been self-centered and laden with “I’s” and “my’s” more than “we’s.” Perhaps there is no one else because he has raised selfish children who are off living their own selfish lifestyles. Perhaps there is no one else because he has not allowed the poor to glean from the edges of his fields as Hebrew Scripture mandated. For whatever reason, there is no one else in this man’s life. That is a detail that the ancient world would not have missed when Jesus told this story. For them, immediate and extended family and all the people with whom you surrounded yourself – that was a huge indication of blessing. // No, being rich has nothing to do with being blessed.
Ah! But being blessed and recognizing our blessings, reaching up on that shelf to pull down the largest of our pumpkins that we might be a part of God’s blessings-run-rampant-across-the-face-of-the-earth, that we might be a part of spreading and allowing God’s blessings to grow willy- nilly, here-and-there-and-everywhere like crazy, uncontrollable, irresponsibly boundless mustard seeds – well, that recognition of blessing – that has everything to do with being rich…rich, that is, toward God.
And I don’t want you to miss that. Now let me be clear. I’m not advocating for everyone here to get rid of your retirement accounts and other financial securities. It’s an interesting notion. I have one friend who’s struggled with this scripture to the point that he has taken that very action, but I know I’m certainly not there. Where I am, however, is decidedly at a point in my faith where I want to put down my lemonade and sit with the question, “What will be the ‘net worth’ of my life?” When it’s all been said and done, will I have “heaped up” treasures that will testify to a life lived richly toward God? Or will I have heaped up treasures that testify unto another Kingdom?
The day is long and there are many open seats where I sit. Won’t you come and sit with me? I have a pumpkin to share with you. Come, let’s taste the Kingdom together. Amen.
Children’s time idea: treasure hunt (watch in a box for time, musical instrument or drawing in a box for talent, chatter teeth in a box for voice, etc.). Then give all kids a gift: box with $10 inside. Challenge them to use or put the treasure towards something that they think God wants their heart to care about.
[1]Schlabach, Joetta Handrich. Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook. (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1991) 73.
[2]Milanovic, Branco. "True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First calculations based on household surveys alone", World Bank Development Research Group, November 2000, page 30.
