Hal Steger lives in a home on a bluff that overlooks the pacific ocean.
Its worth $1.5 million and its paid off.
He and his wife also have more than $2 million in the bank.
Their net worth of about $3.5 million
leaves them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.
But Hal typically still works 12 hours a day and an extra 10 hours on the weekends.
He works in Silicon Valley,
which means that though by almost any measure Hal is very wealthy,
he is surrounded by people with more wealth, often much more wealth.
As reported in the New York Times,
when CEO’s are routinely paid tens of millions of dollars a year
and a hedge fund manager can collect $1 billion annually,
those with a few million dollars often see their accumulated wealth as puny,
a reflection of their modest status in the new Gilded Age,
when hundreds of thousands of people have accumulated much vaster fortunes. “Everyone around here looks at the people above them,” says Gary Kremen,
the 43-year-old founder of Match.com, a popular online dating service.
“It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys worth $7 million wondering what’s so special about them
when there are all these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Mr. Kremen estimates his net worth at $10 million.
That puts him firmly in the top half of 1 percent among Americans,
but barely in the top echelons in affluent towns like Palo Alto and Menlo Park.
So he logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he says,
he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.

Many of us may choke on these words
but the attitude expressed here is very similar to what happens in many other places, including right here in Calgary.
Its just a matter of degree.
This past week the Calgary Herald reported that a recent poll found
that a majority of Canadians think of Calgary as a place of all work and no play,
that we are a nose to the grindstone city with no nightlife or culture.
I suppose that all depends on whether you think riding a mechanical bull is culture
and whether tying a lasso is an art form.
But the truth is that we know very well the kind of thinking reflected in the NYT article. For the first time ever the average home price in Calgary is over $500,000.
It’s a number that most of us find difficult to comprehend.
So its understandable to some degree that people are a bit anxious.
But I suppose there’s a big difference between a bit of anxiety and sheer greed. Remember the words of Jesus.
Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.
Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.

These words were directed toward a crowd that Jesus had been teaching,
including a man who had asked Jesus
to intervene in a family dispute about an inheritance.
After denying the man’s request, Jesus told the crowd a parable about a rich fool.
Unlike the people living in Silicon Valley,
the rich fool in Jesus’ parable was not very anxious.
In fact he was quite content, the only issue for him was,
‘What to do with all the abundance?’
Jesus says, the ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest.
It was so abundant that the man ran out of room for all the surplus grain.
What shall I do, I have no place to store my crops, thought the man.
His answer to the dilemma was singularly selfish.
This is what I will do.
I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, you have plenty of grain laid up for many years.
Take life easy, eat, drink and be merry.
Note, there is not a single word about sharing,
about giving to those in need,
about recognizing God’s role in his abundance.

The fact is that it is not a sin to be rich.
The world needs people who know how to get things done,
who know how to grow a good crop.
The rich man is not called a fool because he is rich.
The rich man is a fool because he has failed to realize the divine dimensions in life.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes it clear that we are not to call anyone a fool. Anyone who does will be in danger of the fires of hell.
But in this case, Jesus himself calls the man a fool.
What could warrant such harsh condemnation from Jesus?
The Psalmist may have put it best.
The fool says in his heart, there is no God.
The rich man is a fool because it is clear from his words and actions
that there is no place for God in his heart.
Faced with the abundance of crops, the man’s question is,
‘What shall I do?,’ not, ‘What would God have me do?’
His solution also revolves completely around himself.
This is what I will do. I will tear down, I will build bigger barns, I will store my surplus, I will say to myself… Its all about himself.
There is no place for God.

The man is a fool and we know the phrase that a fool and his money are soon parted. And so it would be for the rich fool,
for his life was demanded of him that very night.
It reminds me of the words of Jesus,
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his very soul?”
The missionary Jim Elliott once said,
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
Jesus ends the parable by saying,
“This is how it will be with those who store up things for themselves
but are not rich toward God.”
I think that I can safely say that most of us aren’t as selfish as the rich fool in the parable. And after all it’s a parable, he is not a real person.
But still, it is a parable and the parables of Jesus often speak to us and confront us
in ways that reach into the very depths of what we truly believe and how we truly live. Jesus ends the parable by saying,
“This is how it will be for those who store things up for themselves
but are not rich toward God.”
And so the question I want to ask this morning is, are we rich toward God?
And just what does that mean?

How do we demonstrate our richness toward God?
Does it mean that we give money to the church?
Would it have meant that in the time of Jesus
that people should have been giving money to the temple?
I suppose that’s part of it and frankly we all know that without the commitment of people the church would not be able to do much of what we do.
There are bills to be paid, salaries to be remunerated,
roofs to be fixed and floors to be waxed.
But I think that it goes beyond just giving to the church.
Jesus calls the rich man a fool because there is no room for God in his heart.
The key in understanding what it means to be rich toward God
is to recognize that God has established, from the very beginning of creation,
a pattern of interaction between God and us
which necessarily involves other people.
Being rich toward God is just the same as any other aspect of our relationship with God, it is never isolated as something just between God and me.
It always involves other people.
Scripture records in 1 John chapter 4,
“If we say we love God, yet hate a brother or sister, we are liars.
For if we do not love a fellow believer whom we have seen,
we cannot love God whom we have not seen.”
Again, “By this, says Jesus, everyone will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another.”
Faith in Jesus, faith in God, is not a narrow corridor where there is only room for two. Faith is expressed in our works with others, faith without works is dead.
“Show me your faith without deeds,
and I will show you my faith by what I do,” says the author of the Book of James.
Even the demons believe that there is a God, but belief means nothing on its own.
It must translate into action.

By necessity, being rich toward God means being rich toward people.
There’s no getting around this truth.
God has designed our relationship with him around the reality of others.
We cannot say we love God without loving God’s people.
We cannot say we are rich toward God without being rich toward God’s people.
Its critical to know that when we begin to lose sight of God in our lives,
it becomes a very easy thing to lose sight of the needs of others.
As his life is demanded of him, God asks the rich fool,
“Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”
The implication is that we can’t take it with us
and its all going to go somewhere else anyway,
so why wouldn’t we take the opportunity
to make sure we had some input into where our wealth would go
and how it could be used to help others.

The wonderful and hard thing about the God we believe in is that our God,
the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition,
has always been about being involved with people.
There is a tendency among many these days to nebulize the concept of God.
God is just there in the background, filling space.
I hear so many people acknowledge that they believe in God
and yet have no idea how to translate that faith into concrete action.
Its almost as if we would prefer it that way.
Sure we dutifully place our money into the church offering plates
or even make donations to some charitable cause or another.
But in many ways those acts only serve to keep God in place
as background noise in our lives.
Its not that we don’t believe that God exists,
its that we don’t think that God’s existence makes a real difference in our lives.
But that’s not the way God wants it.
If it were, would God have sent Jesus his son into our world,
into our existence, as one of us?
It if were, would the son of God died for our sins, for the sins of people,
not just me but my neighbour as well?
God, our God, deals with people, not just concepts.
And it must be the same for us as well.

Being rich toward God means being rich toward God’s people.
After all how can we possibly give anything to God that doesn’t go through people?
God doesn’t need our money, but people do.
God doesn’t need our time, but people do.
God doesn’t need our compassion, but people do.
And the only way we can have the freedom to be rich toward God
is to be free from the greed that tells us that life consists in an abundance of possessions. We need to understand the difference
between what we possess and what possesses us.
Clarence Jordan, a Baptist minister,
wrote a translation of the gospels into the idiom of the modern South.
The Cotton Patch Version of the parable reads as follows:
“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.”

Barry Vaughn, who teaches at the University of Alabama, writes,
One reason that I like Clarence Jordan’s translation of the story is that,
alone among all the translations of the New Testament in my library,
Jordan translates the story correctly.
The New Revised Standard Version reads,
“This very night your life is being demanded of you.”
But that is not what the Greek text says.
Rather, the Greek says, “They have demanded your life.”
Who were the “they” who demanded the life of the farmer?
His things, of course.
He no longer owned his possessions; they owned him.
Or in Jordan’s words, “Your goods are putting the screws on your soul.”
Somewhere deep inside, we all know that Jesus was stating a powerful truth.
Everything we own also owns a little bit of us.
If we own a house or a car,
then we are under an obligation to earn money to pay for the house or car;
we have to take time to see to it that our house or car is cared for.
We are no longer quite as free as we were before.
The rich farmer made the mistake of believing that he really possessed his great wealth, although Jesus said that the reality was that it possessed him.

Movie magnate Sam Goldwyn, on being told that he couldn’t take it with him, replied, “Well then, I just won’t go.”
But that is not an option, it wasn’t for him, it isn’t for us.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
The reality is that this statement is not only true for fools.
All of us one day will be separated from our wealth,
and the question will be,
have we been rich toward God
or have we been rich only toward ourselves?
Have we been wise stewards of the possessions God has entrusted to us,
or have we been possessed by them?

As we leave here this day, I invite us to consider,
what preoccupies us above everything else?
What do we think about the most?
Is it about that next thing we can possess,
the next house, the next car, the next vacation?
Would these things truly fulfil us, once and for all?
Or is it possible that we might become more fulfilled,
because we were created to be fulfilled differently,
as people who share more of ourselves, willingly, freely, lovingly
with our spouses, our children, our neighbours, our friends?
Would we be more fulfilled if we shared more of our treasures
to make a difference in someone else’s life?
In the Kingdom of God things don’t always work they way they do here.
In God’s kingdom, being rich comes about not by acquiring, but by giving away.
How else could it be with the God of Jesus Christ?

Prayer: God of grace, thank you for the gift of abundance. May we also seek the gift of wisdom that we would know that to whom much is given, much is expected, that we cannot say we love you without loving others. May we be rich toward you as we share our riches with those in need around us. Through Jesus Christ, our undeserved and unexpected gift we pray, Amen.