“Foolish Things”
August 3, 2025
Rev. Rebecca Migliore
You Fool! You who do Foolish Things! Don’t we all dread hearing those words? We do incredible gymnastics so we won’t look foolish. We keep ourselves from unadulterated joy because we might seem foolish. So what exactly is Jesus talking about now that is foolish? We want to pay close attention.
--It can’t be the young man who wants justice in a fair splitting of the inheritance, can it?
--It can’t be the man who has done well for himself, and has had the good fortune of having a bumper crop, can it?
--It can’t be wanting to provide for ourselves, for our retirement—wanting just a little bit of ease sometime in our lives, can it?
Of course, Jesus wants us to be just and equitable! Of course, Jesus wants us to celebrate when good fortune looks our way (or maybe when we accomplish something after so much hard work)! Of course, Jesus wants to help us help ourselves (in days to come)—I mean hasn’t he just said, “Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened.” This seems a perfect example of just such a situation.
Ah, but there is something missing in this story, isn’t there? Something big. Something like the whole “love God, love neighbor as self” thing. Focus on God doesn’t figure in our younger brother’s mind, nor in the mind of the man who gets a windfall. Neither do other people come into the frame. It is just me, me, me. I want a bigger part of the inheritance (than the law suggests for a younger brother). I want to keep all of my over-abundance—so I’ll pull down my already adequate barns and store houses and build even bigger ones so that I can live on easy street. (No thought for those who might not have had such a banner year. No inkling that sharing was even in the picture.)
You fool! You who focus on Foolish Things! Here is where God appears. To show how foolish this behavior is. God says, “I demand your life of you tonight! What good will any of this do for you then?” So, it is (Jesus says) for those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God. (Preview: Next week, we’ll hear more on this topic, including the famous “Consider the lilies…”)
This is vintage Luke. In Jesus’ version of the “beatitudes” not only is there “Blessed are the poor” but also “Woe to the rich”! Wealth, in the gospel of Luke, in itself is not bad, it’s a distraction. As Jesus sees it, wealth often gets in the way of getting close to God. Remember the “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”? The writer of the gospel of Luke wants us to stay on the straight and narrow path. There is no prosperity gospel here. But neither do I see an insistence on making one’s self poor. It’s not about the money at all. It’s about how we respond to what we are given by God.
Let’s play with this story. Let’s pretend that Jesus wanted to tell us a parable about someone who was truly rich (towards God). First of all, there would be a lot more people in the parable. It might start off with our owner coming in from the fields and gathering around a table of family and friends and saying, “Guess what? God has graced us with a harvest that is so great, we don’t have enough storage space!” Everyone claps their hands. As the excitement dies down, the owner asks, ‘So, what do we do with the surplus? Any ideas?’
And one person pips up, “We could throw a big party for the whole community!” Another offers, “We could make up bundles so that every family in the region would have a little more over the winter.” A third muses, “I agree we should share our harvest, and that could be done in any number of ways. But let’s not forget to lift up prayers of thanksgiving to God for this blessing.”
Jesus in the gospel of Luke is often trying to get us out of the “me” mentality and into the “we” mentality. Although in Luke’s version of the Lord’s prayer we don’t start with “Our” Father, when we get to praying about ourselves it is all plural: give us our daily bread, forgive us our sins (and we should do the same), do not bring us to a time of trial.
Foolishness is thinking that we, singular, are the center of the universe. Foolishness is thinking that everything that we have is Just for us. Foolishness is thinking that this life is a whim, a time of recess, not something that matters in the ultimate sense.
So what should we do? How should we live? Jesus probably would think those were absurd questions. We already know what is required of us, he chides—justice and mercy (with the focus on the community not the individual) and a close walk with God. Jesus has already taught us to pray—with a prayer that contains spartan demands—for food, for taking away barriers to community, for protection from the bad things that can happen to good people. That doesn’t seem like much as far as possessions are concerned. And yet, we can imagine that if we were given those things (along with God’s kin[g]dom coming for us all)—we would be content.
Do we really need to have our grass be greener, our mansion be bigger, our portfolio be more diversified? Is that really what fills our spirits? Jesus considers it to be a very poor diet, a foolish diet in fact. There is more, Jesus whispers. There is more for you and me and everyone else. There is more for our world. So much more that God wants for us. Don’t delay. Don’t hesitate. The time is now.
As Mary Oliver asks in her poem “The Summer Day”—“Tell
me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In “When Death Comes” Oliver tries to answer her own question. When she imagines the end of her life, she doesn’t want to have wasted a moment.
…And therefore I look upon everything
As a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
And I look upon time as no more than an idea,
And I consider eternity as another possibility.
And I think of each life as a flower, as common
As a field daisy, and as singular,
And each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
Tending, as all music does, toward silence,
And each body a lion of courage, and something
Precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
If I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
Or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
That is one poet’s glimpse of being rich towards God, of focusing on community (human and otherwise), of focusing on reveling in all we have been given, and being eternally grateful to the Giver.
May it be so for all of us. Alleluia, Amen.