"Foolishness"

Luke 12:13-21 Children: I have one rule for this Children’s Time: you can’t tell a story about someone else, even if it would be a perfect answer to my question. And you can’t point at someone else, even if you know that they could give the perfect answer to my question. No, the rule is that you can only talk about yourself and no one else. Here’s the question: What’s the most foolish thing you have ever done? If you’re dying to point at your wife or brother, please sit on your hands. If you’re tempted to whisper in the ear of your husband or daughter, “remember that time when you …”, please put a sock in it. This is question is for you and only you to answer. All other answers will be whistled as a foul, or declared out of bounds. So here’s the question: What’s the most foolish thing you’ve ever done? My own story of foolishness is represented by a hockey puck. One day the pond actually froze where I lived in Maryland, and all of the transplanted northerners dug around in their basements and found skates and hockey sticks. One of us even found a puck. Though the ice was thin, we played a game of hockey, a rare winter experience in Maryland. At one point in the game, the puck slid over to a part of the pond where the ice was especially thin. It was our only puck, so we had to get it back. Fortunately, we were smart high school students and we knew the ice would break if any of us went over there to the thin ice. I’m pretty sure I was the one who came up with a plan: “Let’s get one of these little kids to go over and get our puck.” So we grabbed one of the eight year old skaters and said, “We’ll give you a quarter if you’ll get our hockey puck back.” But every other little kid on the pond heard the promised award, and a dozen of them sprinted over to get that puck before we could stop them. And as you can easily figure out, twelve eight year olds weigh a lot more than one teenager. It could have been a huge disaster, with a dozen ambulances pulling half-drowned and half-frozen children out of the water. I was very lucky that the ice held, and I didn’t have to spend the rest of my life in jail for being a fool. The most foolish thing you have ever done? The reason I have asked this question – and thanks to all of you who were brave enough to share your foolishness with the rest of us – is because the Jesus has a strong word for people like us who do these things: YOU FOOL! Wow, Jesus is usual pretty gentle in his speech, but there it is: YOU FOOL! What were you thinking? Jesus is telling a story, and I love hearing his stories, they always get me thinking in new ways. You did what! What were you thinking? Hold on, for a bit, and I’ll try to answer this in a moment. Adults: Jesus is telling a story, and I love hearing his stories, they always get me thinking in new ways. This story is about a man who is a successful farmer, so successful that he harvests more grain than he has room for in his barns. So he tears them down and builds bigger barns. Then, happy with his wisdom and success, he prepares to live the easy life without any worries. But here the story takes a sharp turn, “You FOOL!” Jesus says. He has all of that wealth, but he suddenly dies and all that success was for nothing. He was rich to himself but not to God. There is a web page that you may have run across in your internet travels, called the “Darwin Awards”. It awards people who do the most foolish things imaginable. At the top of the web page it reads: “Honoring those who improve the species...by accidentally removing themselves from it!” It goes on to note that most Darwin Award recipients receive it posthumously. Two co-workers decided to celebrate the 4th of July two years ago in their own special way. The plan? They loaded an old washing machine with tens of pounds of firecrackers, lit a fuse, dropped the lid, and ran. But nothing happened. Twenty minutes later, they decided that the fuse was a dud and went back to try again. Presumably neither was aware of the chemical friendship between oxygen and fire. As they lifted the lid the entire washer exploded, landing them both in the hospital for several days. Shrapnel from the washer spread in a 25-ft radius, leaving a large crater in its wake. Or the person who took his new car out on a drive on Canandaigua Lake one winter on a day that was too warm, and the car fell through the ice. Or the college student who enjoyed entertaining his friends by opening beer bottles with his teeth. A great party trick, except that by the time he was thirty nearly every tooth required a painful root canal. What are some of the foolish things you have been a part of? I have this fallen tree in the front yard, too heavy to move, so I decided to pull it with my car by screwing a big bolt into the wood and then tying it to the back end of my car. I moved the car forward and in less than a second the back window of the car shattered into a shower of glass that ricocheted all over the inside of the car, covering me with chunks of glass. It turns out that the rope got real tight and then the big screw pulled out and rocketed right at the back of my car, smacking into the window. This happened several years ago, but I’m still finding bits of glass in the floor mats from time to time. When I took it into the repair shop I admitted how foolish I had been, and the repair guy, Dave, looked me right in the eye and said, “we’ve all done things like this”. Now if you were a spectator you would have been quick to intervene with all of your wisdom and experience to tell the people about to embark on disaster to reconsider, right? Firecrackers in the washer? Driving a car on the ice? Using your teeth to open beer bottles? Those are obviously foolish things to do. I wish you had been there the day I tried to move that fallen tree. But here’s the hard part of the story Jesus tells: There’s nothing that the man did that looked foolish at first. It seems like he’s a good farmer, and a wise merchant. He thinks that about himself, and his peers probably agreed. But Jesus calls him a FOOL, for not seeing the big picture, for not understanding the things that are really important, for trusting in his riches instead of God. So it gets me thinking about the things that I do that appear to be intelligent, the things that all of us do thinking we are wise, not realizing how foolish we really are. What are the things we don’t yet realize are foolish? The things that we think are wise and intelligent, prudent and rational … but may not be smart at all? How about our high reliance on petroleum as the cornerstone of our economy? Of course, petroleum powers automobiles, heats our homes, fuels industry, but it’s running out, evidently involves greater and greater risk to get it, destabilizes entire economies as the price rises, the use of it contributes to pollution, protecting oil resources from competitors requires the diversion of a huge amount of social wealth, and may be a key reason for outright war. Yet I pull up the pump and the thing I am usually thinking is how smart I have been to find the best price for gasoline in the county – did anyone pay less than $2.78 per gallon this past week? The last thing I think as I fill up the gas tank is that I’m a fool, but maybe I am? Can you think of some other things that appear to be smart but may end up being incredibly foolish? Ellieana’s first birthday is coming up so I went to the store on Friday to look for some gifts. What could be smarter than to buy some cool gifts for a baby? After all, our children and our grand-children are our greatest treasures. I went to a major chain store well-known for having a big supply of children’s toys. I found lots of good ones that Ellieana would enjoy, with good prices, and there were even some deep discounts. I felt smart that I had come to the right place, but then I started looking at the labels of each of these attractive items. Not one was made in the United States of America. Now I’m not a national chauvinist most of the time, but there is a major trade imbalance involving China, and it is widely understood that jobs being created in China to make plastic toys for children are causing American jobs to disappear. After diligent searching I finally found a little soccer ball made in the United States and a set of awesome toy cars actually made in Plattsburgh. I felt a little less foolish when I got to the check-out line, especially when I turned down the offer of a plastic bag for my purchases – plastic is a petroleum product, too. I have given two cases of foolishness, and you might choose to debate me about these particular examples., or have better ones to suggest But I encourage all of us to think about the things that we do that seem wise and intelligent. But that may turn out to be foolish! I once heard of valuable guideline for making important decisions - it’s called seventh generation thinking – will the decision we make today benefit the seventh generation down the road, or will today’s decision hurt the seventh generation? I had heard about this, but I looked it up last night and found that this is an Iroquois teaching, something from right here in western New York! Cool.