Preachers and comedians have at least two things in common—being funny not necessarily one of them. They both do regular standup routines, and they often both draw for their material from snippets of family life.

Bill Cosby’s son once asked him if they were rich. He said, What’s this “we” business? I am rich; you are broke. Cosby told him that he first had to define rich—that there was a difference between being rich and being wealthy. Yes, they are rich, he said, but no, they aren’t wealthy. The difference between being rich and being wealthy, Cosby says, is this: Rich people buy yachts and worry about how much the fuel costs. Wealthy people don’t worry because they own the company that purchased the yacht. In other words, the difference between the rich and the wealthy boils down to … maintenance.

Well, that makes a pretty good bit but not much of a sermon. Sermons are based on making differences that amount to more than maintenance. Like when a man approached Jesus one day asking him to tell the man’s brother to divide the family inheritance with him. Jesus answers with a sermon that includes a powerful illustration and makes the difference over riches a whole lot more than maintenance. Jesus has a way of defining rich that goes to life and death. Actually, it even goes beyond that to eternal life or death.

Now, as we look at this Bible passage, the first thing we see is that the man doesn’t like the economic system he finds himself in and wants Jesus to rule on it so that he gets his fair share. He wants Jesus to take the role of redistributing wealth forcibly—taking it from those who have it and giving it to those who don’t. Jesus doesn’t get into that argument, presumably not because he doesn’t have an opinion about it, but because he wants to point the man—and us—to something more important about riches.

Here’s the thing: Whether you are a dyed-in-the-wool Adam Smith capitalist who believes that the market is always right because people, acting in their own self-interest, will ultimately balance one another out and solve all social ills in the process, or you are a secret socialist sympathizer with Karl Marx who suspects that capitalists will always do the wrong thing if given a chance and that the only way to have a fair and just economic order is to have a few enlightened people run the economy on behalf of the workers—either way, you’ll get little help from Jesus in support of your view. The gospel stands in judgment of every economic system, in part because every one of them fails in the end to allow people to carry their riches past the grave. Jesus’ worldview always considers the grave.

In Jesus’ day, when a man died and had two sons, the older son automatically got double the inheritance of the younger. If the younger were to get more, he would have to get it from the good graces of the older brother—not because the will so stipulated. In other words, the older brother in this case was not being accused of stealing the inheritance of the younger; he was only keeping his double share. And that sent the younger brother to the only court system Jews had: namely, a rabbi wise enough to rule in his favor. He was hoping Jesus would do that for him.

Instead, Jesus tells the man to watch out for his soul. It appears the man has come to define rich by how much he has. Take care, Jesus says. Be on guard against all kinds of greed. And here’s the kicker …  for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

How do you define rich? I would say we most of us tend to use some calculus similar to this man’s or to Bill Cosby’s. It’s based on possessions. How much do we have?

But since “how much” is a moving target, since no matter how much you have is less than you could have, how do you ever stop thinking that you are still not rich enough? This is Jesus’ point, and it’s one we have to take to heart because what’s in our heart is what defines us. Jesus wants to get greed out of our hearts in order to make us rich. Which itself seems so foreign to the way we think, doesn’t it?

In the 1987 movie-as-parable Wall Street, Charlie Sheen plays Bud Fox, a young man from a blue-collar family who wants to play in the big leagues with the really rich. He sets his sights on making deals with a corporate raider named Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. Gekko gets ahead any way he can: stepping on people if necessary, manipulating the market if possible, and ignoring the rules of insider trading. His most famous quote from the movie summarizes his anti-Jesus (if not antichrist) philosophy of life: Greed is good. Fox buys into that until something happens to wake him up. Gekko wants to take over Blue Star Airlines, the company where Bud’s father has worked for 24 years. Gekko secretly wants to break up the company and plunder the employee pension fund. Fox sees where all this is going: his lust for riches makes him a threat to the people who have loved and sacrificed the most for him.

Greed always has a crippling effect on our souls, because the soul is the way of talking about who we are in relationship with God and other people. If you choose to love possessions more than people, you may have everything and lose everyone.

The Greeks told a story about a King named Midas, who did a kind deed for Dionysus, one of the Greek gods known for being mean. Dionysus was so pleased that he offered to grant whatever Midas would wish for. Without much hesitation, King Midas asked that everything he touched be turned to gold. (This is where we get the phrase “the Midas touch,” don’t you know?!) Dionysus asked if Midas were sure, but the king was certain. So Dionysus granted his request.

Midas rushed back home to try it out. He put his fingertip on a bowl of fruit, and then a stool, and then a blanket. And each of these was instantly transformed into purest gold. The king began to laugh and dance and shout. Just look at this, he crowed, turning his chariot into a glittering mass of priceless transportation. His little daughter happened by and caught her father’s excitement. "Look what Daddy can do!", he cried, unthinkingly taking his child by the hand to lead her into the garden. And you know what happened? To his horror, he turned around and saw that she had been turned into a life-size golden statue!

Midas suddenly learned that what he thought was a blessing was really a curse. He couldn’t touch any useful object without it becoming useless, even if it was literally worth its weight in gold. He couldn’t even eat because everything he touched turned to gold before he could get it to his mouth. Midas regretted his decision. But fortunately for him, Dionysus was willing to take back this gift that had become a curse. Midas learned that there are things more important than gold.

Have we learned that? Really? Let’s return to Jesus’ story. The land of a rich man produced abundantly. Notice first that the man was already rich—by what standard we don’t know, but Jesus makes it clear that his new harvest is not what made him rich. Notice, too, that it was the land that produced, not the man. Sometimes we forget that what we have has less to do with our hard work than lots of other factors we conveniently forget. This is something our kids are learning in spades from their trip to the Dominican Republic. Just working hard doesn’t mean you will accumulate riches. You need a stable government, a business that has customers on the other end, costs that remain lower than what you can sell for, dependable and capable labor—not to mention good luck like good weather, for instance. We have to get it out of our heads that when our land produces or our business thrives—or when they don’t!—that that’s all about our deserving.

Anyway, so the man considers what to do with all his possessions, and his first two mistakes are grammatical: one, is his use of the possessive pronoun—MY crops, he says; and two, a verb form—no place TO STORE my crops.

Apparently it never occurred to him first that what he has is not really his. So here’s Jesus’ rule in George’s words, ready? What is really yours is only what you can take beyond the grave with you. If you can’t take it with you beyond the grave, you are going to leave it behind. And if you are going to leave it behind eventually, you ought to start making sure it hasn’t stuck to your soul like the weight of gold and will keep your soul from being so weighed down that it can’t get where it wants to go—which is UP, so to speak. Fool, God tells the man at the end of this tragic parable. This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you prepared, whose will they be?  Then Jesus adds this commentary: So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.

So this leads to the question of how treasure can lead us to richness toward God and not away from it.

The first thing we’ve already talked about has nothing to do with money. Poor people and rich alike can be greedy. They can both think their self-worth depends upon their net worth. So to begin, today, remind yourself what your soul is for. It’s not for things but for relationships. Who you are has everything to do being a child of God and a brother or sister and friend to others. When you fill up your heart with God and other people, you won’t have room for possessions to possess you.

Second, learn to save your money to use for good purposes; don’t store it up just to have it. If you do, it has you; you don’t have it. All possessions pass through your care in order that they can do some good. Too many of us think the good they do is to give us peace of mind by storing them away. But money doesn’t give you peace of mind; peace of mind gives you peace of mind. Once again, poor people and rich alike can fret away their lives worrying about money—the one worries about not having it, the other about not losing it.

Finally, practice giving. In our text for next week that we have to jump ahead to a bit to get where Jesus is going, he tells his followers not to be afraid, because it’s God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom. To give it to us! So sell you possessions and give alms, he says. In other words, become a giver, not a possessor.

Some of you can’t bring yourselves to do anything with your savings or investments or retirement funds because you are so used to having it socked away that you think it’s in a lock box and you can’t touch it. But you have to go get it in order to give it. And then it can do some good instead of just sitting there.

Look, most of us define rich as someone who has a lot more than we do. We think being rich is always just a little out of our reach, and so we keep reaching for more.

But what if being rich means really rich toward God? And what if the only way to be rich toward God is to give like God—the God who in Jesus emptied himself and took the form of a servant in order to give us eternal life.

I’m just saying … no, Jesus is just saying.