"What's Mine Is Mine"

Luke 12: 13-21, Ordinary 18

Dr. Al Reese
Parish Associate

August 5, 2007

            Fifty-eight years ago this summer, I taught this parable to a group of mid-high school boys and girls at old Suwannee Presbytery’s youth camp on the Santa Fe River in Northeast Florida. After a couple of days of study and meditation with the parable with the 10 kids I had in my class, we got down to serious business brainstorming about its meaning, its purpose, and especially about what Jesus might have wanted us, 1900 years later, to hear the story say to us. It was a great group of kids. One of them in 1994 was a candidate for a call to this church … his name was Dwight Bailey … and if you were on that PNC, you might remember him. Another of them recently retired as a Professor at Shands Medical School in Gainesville, and in 1976 operated on my older son who had his cheek bone crushed by a 100 mile an hour fast ball in Sanford, Florida. His name was Perry Foote. Another, a brilliant and beautiful girl named Beverly Ott, went to Hollywood after college at Agnes Scott, and was immediately given a contract by Paramount Studios, only to never achieve her goals because of a tragic auto accident near Sacramento in 1961. They were all remarkable kids … just like the ones Kara has today at GSPC.

            This is how they interpreted the parable and its larger meaning. First of all, the lucky farmer whose crops produced a bountiful harvest believed that his fields had yielded what was his alone, and he would use it to secure his future.

                        What’s mine is mine and I’ll keep it, he believed.

            During those first two days, we discussed greed, hedonism, preoccupation with possessions, idolatry, and a culture whose chief legacy, according to the prophetic poet of the time, would be remembered by 3000 lost golf balls. My kids thought it was very interesting that Jesus did not condemn the farmer for any of these obvious selfish sins … Jesus just called him a fool. While all of us confessed that this hard word from Jesus pinched a bit, none of us believed we would be quite so insensitive or obtuse.

            The next day we talked about philanthropy, and the kids were fascinated with the whole concept of just giving away large sums of money. We talked about Carnegie and Eleanor Roosevelt, and I told them about a story my Dad often told me about seeing John D. Rockefeller stride out of the old hotel at Ormond Beach during the depression with both jacket pockets filled with dimes which he tossed randomly to the crowd gathered to see the richest man in the world completely untouched by America’s greatest era of poverty. If we were discussing the parable today, we would talk about Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, Bono, Tiger Woods, and a host of others who are definitely more moved that John D. was by the cruel distribution of the world’s resources. Philanthropy is a wonderful thing, they all agreed, and it surely must make God happy when wealth is shared with the least of our brothers and sisters. What’s mine is ours and I’ll share it. What a nice philosophy.

            But there was a deeper meaning to this parable they all agreed, or Jesus would not have called the farmer a fool for his narrow view of self-sufficiency. Where did the farmer’s bounty come from? Who gives gifts to all and makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust? And as they talked about that, they wrote an alternative to their first two philosophies which were:

                        What’s mine is mine and I’ll keep it.

                        What’s mine is mine and I’ll share it.

            Now the new philosophy had to reflect not only an alternative to these two, it had to reflect what they believed Jesus was trying to say to them about possessions, and so this was their new philosophy:

                        What’s mine is God’s and I will try to use it for God’s glory.

            They tried very hard to reduce the number of words to make it as pithy as the first two, but each effort failed. They could have said:

                        “What’s mine is God’s, and I will be grateful, or,

                        What’s mine is God’s, and I will not forget it, or,

                        What’s mine is God’s, and I will use it wisely,

But none of these passed muster. What they finally said was,

                        What’s mine is God’s, and I will try to use it for God’s glory.”

            If there is a simpler statement for or definition of good stewardship, I don’t know what it is … and this from mid-high school kids in an outdoor pavilion studying the Bible in July in North Florida, where it gets even hotter than it does in Mobile.

            What a gift those kids were to me that summer. I was 18 years old and would go off to college in one more month. I have never forgotten their lessons to me, and I hope you won’t either.  Amen.