Proper 13 (July 31-August 6)
Texts: Luke 12:13-34;
Colossians 3:1-11
RESIST THINKING LIKE THE RICH FOOL —
LEARN THE ECONOMIC WISDOM OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
In the July-August newsletter, I gave you a heads-up that the middle of Luke’s Gospel gives us the opportunity to talk about God’s very different economics, parallel to the way that the Gospel as a whole gives us the opportunity to talk about God’s very different politics. Human history shows us that human politics and economics have been deeply flawed, leading to seemingly endless cycles of nationalistic wars and large-scale economic oppression of human flourishing. For a year-and-a-half, we have looked at the nationalistic politics which have dominated human history and are casting a large shadow now. For the next several months, Luke’s Gospel gives us the opportunity to understand how oppressing large groups of people’s ability to flourish dominates our history of economics.
And let’s be clear once again from the start. In talking about God’s very different economics, we are talking about the Gospel itself. We are talking about how God is saving us. The Gospel assumes that because Jesus was raised from the dead, there will be some form of life-after-death. That’s good news in itself. But the really huge thing is that Jesus’ resurrection in the middle of human history means that God is also launching a way to begin saving our human history itself! We have fallen into a rut of deadly politics and oppressive economics. In Jesus the Messiah, God is modeling new politics and new economics which can help lead us out of the mess we’ve created. God is saving us in this life, too.
That’s really good news, right?! I began my newsletter column telling about going to a town hall meeting for our representative, Bryan Steil. I gave a short speech about what I call the Big Morally Repugnant Bill, now passed through Congress, because it represents the largest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich in our nation’s history. How can anyone morally justify voting for such a bill? Today, as we begin with the first of six encounters with rich people in the middle of Luke’s Gospel, we can ask this question again, “How can anyone justify voting in a democracy for such a large transfer of wealth to the rich?” It’s like we’re living through the Parable of the Rich Fool, since the politicians we voted into office are passing bills to install the foolishness of the rich. Jesus says, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” And then he tells us a parable about the foolish greed of the typical rich person.
So I think we need to be bold enough this morning to ask tough questions about our current capitalist economics. How is it that they lead to us living through the parable of the greedy and foolish rich man? If we go back to the so-called founder of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, one of the assumptions is that the typical human being is what he calls the “Rational Economic Man.” Which he characterizes as a greedy, isolated individual acting purely in self-interest to maximize return on investment. In other words, Adam Smith’s assumed human actor in capitalist economics is the rich fool in today’s parable! The capitalist system is designed to support this hypothetical caricature and seems therefore to produce them.1 Our politics right now are being dominated by greedy rich fools.
But each of us knows that exceptions to this behavior far outnumber the predicted stereotype. Don’t we? Isn’t the whole point of Jesus’ parable this morning that human beings can act differently? Watch out for greed, he’s telling us. Why? Presumably because as God’s Messiah, he has come to lead us into better ways of being human. Adam Smith seems to believe that we human beings can’t to better then his “Rational Economic Man,” behaving like the rich fool with any wealth we may achieve. But a crucial point of our revitalizing the Gospel message is to trust that we can do better. In our Second Reading today, Paul says it’s like taking off an old set of clothes and putting on new clothes. Right before and after today’s Gospel passage, Jesus gives us a “Son of Man” saying. Jesus himself is the Son of Man, of course, which I take to mean the next generation of being human. Jesus has come to save us from ourselves — to save us from the greedy versions of ourselves, for example — and to lead us into better versions of being human. To deny that we can become better versions of ourselves is to deny that he was the “Son of Man,” the first of a new generation of being human.
Can we imagine, for instance, a system which nurtures a different economic identity and thus reclaim ourselves as neighbors, with shared investment in mutual well-being? As it happens, abundant empirical evidence attests to the fact that we humans lean as much toward cooperation and generosity as we do toward self-interest under circumstances when we are not coerced by outside forces. Imagine — just imagine — if we created the social and political climate to serve this “Empathic Mutualist Human,” instead of Adam Smith’s “Rational Economic Man” who looks exactly like the Rich Fool in this morning’s parable. I mean, why not?2
What would this better human economics look like? Well, Jesus begins to paint a picture of that for us in the very next number of verses. Unfortunately, we don’t read them in the lectionary. So I’ve given you the next ten verses for you in today’s Sermon Notes. It’s a very familiar passage which Matthew places in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:19ff.). Luke moves it to right after the Parable of the Rich fool. It’s almost as if Jesus is now going to teach us how not to live and die like a rich fool.3 I won’t read this passage in full; I hope you’ll do that later yourself.
As you browse these verses now, Jesus begins by looking at God’s creation. Pay attention4 to things like the ravens and the lilies in order to understand how God has created this world for us to share. He tells us that the economics of the nations teach us to be anxious about having enough, which leads to things like the hoarding of the Rich Fool. He is teaching us that the economics of God’s reign, which we need to “strive for” (12:31), counsels the opposite: don’t be anxious about such things. God has created enough for all of us — if, that is, we don’t hoard things. Rich fools hoard things in ways that do end-up creating a scarcity. Pay attention instead to our fellow creatures and plant neighbors, like the birds and the flowers. There you will begin to see how to be better human beings who learn to share the abundance of God’s creation. In short, the economics of God’s reign are already embedded in the nature of God’s creation. We need to pay attention and learn from nature how to be better human beings.
These are the kinds of lessons ahead for us over the next couple of months as Jesus engages with rich men six times — sometimes in parables, like this morning, and sometimes in person, like Zacchaeus the tax collector down the road.5 We will pay attention to God’s creation, including us human beings at the times when we act more according to the intentions with which God created us. This morning I want to end by simply paying attention to a very important detail we’ve brought up before: Jesus was an indigenous person living on the fringes of someone else’s empire. He belonged to an indigenous group of people, the Jews, who had lived in other nation’s empires for centuries. So where might we look today for a similar wisdom as Jesus’s?
A resource book for me over the next couple months will be this one: The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Ms. Kimmerer is a botanist by vocation, a teacher of the plant world. And — surprise! — she’s an indigenous woman, a member of the Potawatomi first nation. In this book she does what Jesus does, teaching us to pay attention to God’s creation around us for clues to a better, more just, economics. I’ve read books on economics from several Nobel Prize winning economists,6 but I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of economic reflections more wise than this one. It is basically an extended reflection on our human economics that begins, “Pay attention to the Serviceberry tree. . . .” Let me read from the inside cover summary of the book’s message:
As Indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests Service-berries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the Serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of interconnectedness and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth — its abundance of sweet, juicy berries — to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times and a reminder that “Hoarding won’t save us. . . . All flourishing is mutual.”7
Isn’t that the simple message of today’s Parable of the Rich Fool, paired with the passage after it about paying attention to ravens and lilies? “Hoarding won’t save us. . . . All flourishing is mutual.” The gift economy of indigenous wisdom is not something we can immediately undertake as a nation. But it is something we already do in segments of common life, including here at church. Our Thread-by-Thread clothing ministry at Bethania is a perfect example of a gift economy, sharing clothing for free. Another example we’re familiar with are public libraries, with the free sharing of books owned by the community (and beyond through library sharing). One of the most spectacular examples are our National Parks, beautiful lands held in common and shared by everyone. The crucial thing in the weeks ahead will be to look for ways in which we can improve on our current economics which seem to emulate the thinking of the Rich Fool. We can do better. We can be better human beings.
So I look forward to the week’s ahead as we learn how the economics of God’s reign are saving us . . . if we learn to actually pay attention to them. . . if we learn such indigenous wisdom together. I hope you look forward to the weeks ahead, too, as we learn the very different economics of God’s reign. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, August 3, 2025
Notes
1. Much of this paragraph and the next is indebted to Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner, 2024), pages 44-45.
2. Ibid. This paragraph completes my riffing on Kimmerer’s challenge to Adam Smith’s “Rational Economic Man.”
3. I borrowed this phrase from Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Fortress Press, 2025), 134.
4. To translate the Greek katanoeō as “Pay attention” follows Myers, Healing Affluenza, 129. The NRSV translates it as the milder “Consider.”
5. I will be following Myers’, Healing Affluenza, in seeing the middle of Luke’s Gospel as six encounters with rich men. The Six Rich Man Sequences are as follows:
1. The rich man in the Parable of the Rich Fool (12:13-34)
2. The unnamed Pharisee who invites Jesus to dinner in Luke 14
3. The wealthy landowner and his “Unjust Steward” in the parable of 16:1-13
4. “Dives” in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in 16:19-31
5. The unnamed “ruler” (archon) who asks Jesus what he must do to inherit life on God’s reign (18:18-30)
6. Zacchaeus in 19:1-10
6. The economist I’ve read the most is Joseph Stiglitz. I’ve also read Milton Friedman, F. Hayek, Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty, Karl Polanyi, and Robert Reich.
7. Kimmerer, The Serviceberry, the inside cover.
