The Guard of our Heart

Sermon Luke 12:13-21 August 4, 2019

The Guard of our Heart

Psalm 121 is a psalm that provides comfort and offers the reminder that in all things God is with us. In the NRSV it goes like this:  I lift up my eyes to the hills—
    from where will my help come?
² My help comes from the Lord,
    who made heaven and earth.

³ He will not let your foot be moved;
    he who keeps you will not slumber.
⁴ He who keeps Israel
    will neither slumber nor sleep.

⁵ The Lord is your keeper;
    the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
⁶ The sun shall not strike you by day,
    nor the moon by night.

⁷ The Lord will keep you from all evil;
    he will keep your life.
⁸ The Lord will keep
    your going out and your coming in
    from this time on and forevermore.

In this psalm it is clear to the reader that the Lord is the guard of our hearts, our lives and our very being. Our children’s catechism begins with the question, “who am I?” and we all answer, “I am a child of God.” From the beginning to our very end we belong to God. When we remember this, it becomes the heart of all of our life and our decisions. It isn’t just on Sundays or on days when we find ourselves worried about a moral dilemma. 

God isn’t the guardian of our hearts when we are in poor health or in need of our prayers to be answered. 

God is our guardian from our going out and our coming in, from this time and forever more.

With this understanding of God’s ever-presence we find ourselves without excuse for not consulting God in of our circumstances, whether we are rich or poor or satisfied or hungry, filled with abundance or scraping the barrel. 

God insists that we belong to him in all of this.  

Strange isn’t it that when it comes to money, parables about money, straight talk from Jesus about money, anything written in the Bible about money, we preachers completely avoid it. There is a fear of preaching these Biblical texts. The fear that one of may be offended. There is a fear to speak of these texts because it can mis-interpreted into a need for more funds for the church and the preacher is finding him/herself caught up in the annual capital campaign for the church. There is a legitimate fear of preaching or even talking about these texts of money because they speak directly to our hearts, our nature, our real personhood.

The heart of this story reveals the greed, the idolatry of this man. The last thing we want to do is relate to a man in a parable that has a poor heart toward God.

If I had had time this week, it would have been delightful to turn this parable into one of the skits similar to what our youth did all week at VBS. The skits were hilarious and brought the point home of what was most important in each of the stories. The children were really able to understand the power of God’s love within them as it related to faith, boldness, kindness, thankfulness, and hope.

The parable is self-explanatory and really needs no interpretation. 

Perhaps what is most important with this text is our self-reflection.  

Let’s consider together a few elements of the parable.  

It starts out with a man asking Jesus to arbitrate a family dispute. 

How many police officers have been trained to save lives, to help people in trouble, to really be there to defend us-but spend more time arriving at homes caught trying to solve domestic disputes that have gone violent?

Jesus warns the man that he will not come between he and his brother, but tells him to be on guard for greed. 

Perhaps, the question before we enter into the parable is to ask ourselves where do we find greed in our life? 

Where do we find ourselves worried about the fairness of life? Because life is not fair-it is truly not fair. 

Where are we screaming to our moms that our brother has the bigger piece of cake? 

Where are we more concerned about what we believe is ours than we are about our relationship? 

Where is it more important in our lives to build up bigger and bigger things, our reputation, visual wealth, positions, name dropping, tall, tall silos, than it is to spend time in prayer consulting with God regarding our decisions?

Jesus enters into this parable to respond to the man who is worried about what his brother will do with his inheritance. 

We discover the man in the parable only considers his soul as a storehouse. This man has great wealth but only talks to himself about what to do with it. He shows no gratitude to God. 

He neither prays, nor kneels, nor offers up anything in appreciation to God. 

He doesn’t show gratitude to any of the workers who helped him achieve his wealth. He doesn’t show any gratitude to his family or his neighbors. The man in the parable is living his life in a selfish bubble.

The man fails to realize that all he plans to do requires the work of the hands of others. He has ignored completely the process of how he was able and continues to be able to live a life of wealth. He can do nothing on his own and yet assumes he is alone. And this is where God and God’s laws come in.

The condition is not that wealth or building storehouses or being rich is bad. Nor is it bad for those who are seeking to improve their lives to gain a better foothold in life, who struggle and scrimp and save to make ends meet, is also not bad or good or anything in between. But, where is God?

If our idolatry is the paycheck, the 401k, the social security, the inheritance from our family, then these things come first in our thoughts and our planning and our relationships and we have considered our "self-interest as our cardinal virtue". (Quote from Working Preacher) This is where Jesus is rebuking the brother who wants Jesus to act as executor. This world view ruins relationships. It ruins how we approach God and how we approach everyone in our family and in our life.

The tenth commandment is probably the hardest commandment of them all. We have all fallen to it. We do not see the wealth in our own home but see it beyond our walls. The Lord comes to us with gentleness in many things but he comes to us without shame and with boldness when it comes to our allegiances.

Jesus offers the truth in this parable about who and whose we are. It is not a parable to those who have great wealth or live comfortably to feel guilty at all. When there are those who accumulate and enjoy the life and the possessions they have, all with the understanding that these do not define them, they live their life of faith with fullness. 

The point isn’t the possessions but the greed and the idolatry. 

Our hearts our very being belong to God and God is jealous of our allegiance to anything else. 

What a joyful gift that is to know how much God really wants to be fully present with us at all times and through all things.

Jesus is the guard of our hearts. He wants to be first. He wants us to put all else aside and seek him in all things. 

Seek the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you. 

Let us call upon God to come by here and reside in us, reside in our hearts now and forever. Amen.