You Can Take It With You!                                                   12/1/46

 

Scripture:  Luke 12: 4-21

 

Four or five years ago, an able cast of young people at Lincoln High School presented the excellent and rather popular play, “You Can’t Take It With You.”  You may have seen it; or you may have seen the play done elsewhere by professional actors.  It is a whimsical treatment of a good point.

 

An elderly man, still young enough to be able to enjoy life a great deal, proceeds to do just that, and to encourage others in his quaint household to do likewise.  The good-natured comedy of the play issues from his quiet but firm insistence that real living is quite apart from the material possessions by which many of us set such store.  His idea seems to be that you can’t take things with you beyond this mortal life, so why let them get in the way of your enjoyment of living here and now?

 

The Bible has a good deal to say about fools.  A complete listing of all Biblical references to a fool, or fools, would furnish a considerable gallery of their portraits.  There is the fool who said in his heart, “There is no God” -- the atheist.  There is one whose very name means foolishness -- Nabal.  There is a jealous fool who is always getting himself into trouble with his foolishness -- and he is a king, too -- King Saul who said to David, “I have played the fool and have erred exceedingly.” 

[I Samuel 26: 21].    Many times the word appears in the Old Testament.

 

It is used again in the language of the New Testament.  In general, those characterized as fools by Jesus are etched in the exclamatory phrase: “O! for these slow of heart to believe!”  [Luke 24: 25].   And there is another kind of fool portrayed by Paul when he speaks of “fools for Christ’s sake.”  [I Corinthians 4: 10].

 

In the 12th chapter of Luke, Jesus sketched the portrait of a man who, shrewd and capable as he was, emphasized in his own life and actions a great spiritual idiocy.  At that time, Jesus was exceedingly popular, and great crowds gathered around to hear him talk, crowding so close that they sometimes stepped on one another.  Jesus was speaking on lofty themes such as: The Providential Care of God; The Forgiveness of Sins; The Guidance of the Holy Spirit in matters of Everyday Living.

 

In the midst of this thoughtful, penetrating discourses, a voice cried out from the crowd, “Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me.”  The poor fellow may have been a member of one of those families in which the inheritance of property passes only to the eldest son, keeping the estate intact (as though the estate were important above people) but making scant provision, if any, for the younger brothers, or the sisters, in the family.  Feeling left out of life’s comforts through no fault of his own, this fellow looks for anyone who can get his fortunate brother to divide up!

 

It was a mundane question, not without point, but Jesus met it with a severe rebuke.  Jesus had been talking about what makes life really worth living when the thought and spiritual glow of his message was interrupted by this man who wanted, above all else, to “get his,” or what he thought ought to be his.  And Jesus answered, “Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you?”

 

And then Jesus took advantage of the interruption to elaborate very briefly a spiritual truth.  In a few swift strokes of verbal art, he etched upon the mind of the crowd the evil of a covetous and grasping spirit. For the making of the picture, he used a parable - the story of a Rich Husbandman - or a well to do plantation owner.

 

Now it is silly, and shallow, to jump to the conclusion, after reading this brief parable, that Jesus taught that it is wrong to have or hold some goods, - though Jesus always manifested more interest in the use of goods than in possession.  No such point was intended.  There was no commendation of five foolish maidens going to a wedding who neglected to have some oil for their lamps.  There is no commendation over improvidence to have the things that are needed for good use.  This gentleman farmer was not condemned on that score, nor pilloried as a fool for such reason.  To be perfectly honest, the man does not appear to be a bad man at all.  He had some very good points, familiar features of good citizens.  His moral behavior does not appear to be anything but commendable.

 

(1)  He was a man of economic integrity.  He was no speculator, but was a farmer, a producer of wealth.  There is no hint that he was guilty of any dishonesty or sharp practices with his neighbors.   He is not accused of any unfairness to his employees; and he likely paid the prevailing wage and looked after their welfare.  He was a benefit to the community, as an employer of labor, and a producer of needed goods.  According to the customs of his time, no one would challenge the source of his riches.  He had prospered honorably.

 

(2)  This man in Jesus’ story was also a man of foresight and of good common sense.  As an experienced farmer, he could see the indications of a bumper crop.  And so he proceeded to exercise his abilities in just the way God seems to have intended these faculties to be used - (whether by man or by the squirrels and bees and other humbler creatures.)  He did some careful calculating.  He had no intentions of burning his surplus grain or killing a proportion of his little pigs to create a price-sustaining shortage.  So he made provision for the future.  By the time harvest came around, he planned to have his crops under cover.

 

(3)  The man was practical.  He saw a need and set about, with no delay, to build larger barns and granaries.  Every man is under obligation to make such provision for his future as he can, to protect his family with some insurance, to be saving and set aside some of his plenty for a rainy day fund.  Probably this man also looked forward, as one should, to the retirement that must come if one survives to the point where he no longer has the vigor to produce enough for current necessities.  There was a practical expectation of the day when his own faculties might be sufficiently impaired to make it necessary for him to step aside and let someone else run the farm.  If this should happen, he wanted to be in a position to take the necessary ease without dependence on someone else’s current earning capacity.

 

“Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.”  Some of these features make the portrait of what we call a substantial citizen, the kind of man we like to honor by making him a director of the bank, an executor of an estate, a trustee of the church, a member of community welfare committees, where his counsel and leadership may benefit many.

 

But for all that, God called him a fool in Jesus’ story, and 1900 years of history have failed to delete that statement from the Bible or change the opinion.  Why?  Wherein lay has foolishness?  Was it wrong to work the farm so as to make it earn all it could?  Was it wrong to provide for a number of years even though he (like everyone else) could not know whether or not he might live out one more year?  It does not seem so.  For the cool probability was that he would live for many years!  And if he should die, his family would need some provision to tide them through to a point where they could care for themselves.

 

Albert Joseph McCartney, the new director of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club, suggests that the Rich Husbandman’s folly is this: that while providing for a probability, he neglected a certainty.  While it was probable that his mortal life would last for some years, it was certain that his soul would live through eternity.

 

Listen again to the man’s folly: “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years.”  Where does it say that he had anything laid up for his soul?  For his bodily needs and mortal existence, yes; but for his eternal soul -- what?  Will corn and barley nourish his spiritual nature?  He needs grain here, but can he take it with him beyond the portals of mortality?  His barns may bulge with abundance; yet his spirit may be starved for all that plenty.

 

The man has not provided too much, but too little!  He was not so much over-provident as too limited in foresight!  He had prepared well for the probable.  There is no evidence that he was prepared at all for the certain!!

 

I think McCartney’s comment puts the spotlight on the right place.  There is the point of the parable.  Jesus saw that the man’s heart was focused on his goods in a way that gave him a false sense of security.  And that false sense of security kept him from seeking, and finding, his security in God.  If he was well hedged against fear of hunger or need of shelter, did he have any hedges against fear of disgrace, or of suffering, or the sorrow of seeing a loved one in trouble, or of loneliness or of physical death, or of spiritual futility?  His goods could not help him at the more vital points!

 

A Chicago man of means was critically ill with a malady that would evidently number his days.  Propped up in his bed, and doped with medicine, he was busy with pencil and figures when his pastor called.  “Doctor,” he said to the clergyman, “I haven’t anything to do now but to lie here in this bed trying to figure out how I can manage my estate after I am gone, but I’ll be blankety blank if I can do it!”

 

Well, there is the terrible picture of our poor human folly.  An arresting phrase in this short, pointed story of the Master, is this: “Then whose shall these things be?”  Is not that a pathetic line?

 

What about providing some of what you can take with you?  A Nobel Peace prize has just been announced - awarded jointly to two people, one of whom is John R. Mott, Christian statesman who made his position with the YMCA a spring board for practical world wide service in Christ’s name.  There’s something for a soul to take along!

 

A missionary, with what some might call fanatical zeal, headed for the Pacific Islands many years ago - toward loneliness from former pursuits, loneliness and danger for himself and his wife and future family.  Living where others had abruptly died among savage folk, he and a few others like him invested a whole life in the gospel of love.  Decades later soldiers and sailors in danger discovered the spiritual seed he had sown among fuzzy-headed natives.  Many an endangered soldier or sailor, never having believed before in Christian missions, rose to sing their gratitude to names unknown to them except by the fruits of those earlier labors.  There’s something to take with you!

 

You can’t take wheat and cotton and steel with you beyond the portals.  But the true values you can take with you, to the very presence of God in eternity.  Cultivate, store, and spend unselfishness.  Make kindness a habit.  Speak a word of encouragement.  Lend a helping hand along the way.  Have a sympathetic concern for the unfortunate, an interest in every good cause, a lift for the fallen, a smile in passing.  Then someone may rightly say, “Soul, thou has much treasure -” in heaven now and then -- “where moth and rust doth not corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal.”

[Luke 12: 33].

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, December 1, 1946.