Barnes: When we started sewing pockets in our clothing …

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him.”

— Romans 15:13

The first seven years of my life were shaped by the teaching I absorbed in a Free Will Baptist Church, where Pentecostal praise and worship included fervent “Amens” and jubilant shouting in the aisles.

I thank God for that early witness and the formative experience of seeing my mother shout, happy in the Lord! Nothing in my seminary education, or in the seminary teaching I was called to do myself, has erased or diminished the truth I learned there and then. All glory to God!

After those first years, our family of three moved to another cotton mill town, where we attended another Baptist Church, but the closest Pentecostal church was too far away from the cotton mill hill for us to walk there. Still, the Holy Spirit taught truth at that Body of Christ, too, to us and many others. Praise the Lord!

Seminary and higher education made me more reflective, but not less faithful. I offer here what I know and trust and am learning still. Let us reason together, our Lord says to us; let us listen, study, learn, pray, and learn to obey His Word.

Now, if you have not already done so, stop, and read Luke 12:13-21. When you have read the text thoughtfully for yourself, then, let us move forward. Perhaps I landed on the parable of “The Rich Fool” for the personal reason that I am trying now to decide what to do with material possessions I no longer want or can use, cluttering a family homestead I do not live in anymore. I have no place now for the great amount of stuff I have accumulated over the years. Like those of the rich fool, my barns are not big enough to contain it all.

Cynthia Briggs Kittredge passes along a funny monologue, performed by the late comedian, George Carlin, on this very subject of our attachment to our possessions, a malady we all share:

“You got your stuff with you? I’ll bet you do. Guys have stuff in their pockets; women have stuff in their purses. Stuff is important. You gotta take care of your stuff. You gotta have a place for your stuff! That’s all your house is; a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.

You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down and see all the little piles of stuff. Everybody’s got his own little pile of stuff.”

Dr. Mary Lynch Johnson, my major professor at Meredith, memorably told our senior English class one day, “We got into trouble when we started sewing pockets into our clothing.” Those were wise, instructive words from my beloved and esteemed professor, Dr. Johnson. They bear some thinking about; I have not forgotten them.

Wiser and more instructive are the words of Jesus. Luke records the incident. Responding to a request from a listener about his inheritance, Jesus surprises him, and others in the assembled crowd, with a stern warning against greed and consuming desire for property and other material wealth, “Take heed and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.”

Knowing that his caution has not hit the mark, Jesus uses shock to rivet their attention, and shatters further their expectations, with a story about excessive wealth, obsessive greed, misplaced security, and God’s unavoidable, unanticipated, Sovereign Will. At story’s close, Jesus speaks His Father’s irreversible conclusion to this man’s life journey.

But I am getting ahead of this remarkable parable. Heretofore pleased with his wealth and deeming himself secure in it, this “certain rich man” had believed he had solved his predicament about where to store it all. “Thinking within himself,” his thoughts (and ours) are known to God.

Jesus discerns them and discloses those thoughts to the puzzled crowd now waiting to hear “the rest of the story.”

Here, Jesus inserts a note of humor, perhaps sarcasm, into his otherwise alarming parable, even as the rich thinker talks to his soul as one might confide in another, “And he said, this will I do; I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.”

What about this matter of the soul’s taking its ease and relaxing with eating, drinking, and merriment? It calls for some attention, lest we miss instruction Jesus is giving to us, in our day.

Next week, stay with me, and we’ll try together to hear His voice.

(To be continued.)