When growing up, I use to play a board game called "The Game of Life". In this game you would take your game piece, which was a little car, and move it across the board and reenact various life events, like getting married, having kids, and landing various spots that allowed you to make money. At the end of the game, the winner of the game was the player who had the most money.

There is something about this game that is uniquely American. The winner of a board game is the one with the most money. That is how much of society works: the one who has the most money is the winner. Money seems to be what drives our American economy. It allows us to get more stuff and may make us think we are happy. However, there is a darker side to money. It can turn friends into enemies and can divide families. In fact, at the heart of many disputes is the question of money. We see in our Gospel reading that there is a dispute about money.

Jesus is in the middle of a sermon and suddenly someone from the crowd raises his voice: "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." Whoever this person was, his mind was obviously not on Jesus’ teaching, but rather focused on money. I think that we can empathize this man as knowing who gets the inheritance is a vitally important thing. Even though we live in a wealthy nation, we often feel like we need more money. One thing that is constant in American society is that the more we have, the more we want. Maybe get a fancier car, or a fancier house, or any number of new gadgets. And this is something that we are all guilty of doing.

We find in this anonymous person in the crowd, a desire for more stuff, in this case part of his brothers inheritance. It looks like he would go through every means possible to get it, even approach Jesus to help him. I imagine that whoever this anonymous person in the crowd, his brother must have been a follower of Jesus. Why else would he ask Jesus to intervene in this dispute? I bet both brothers heard Jesus emphasizing giving being better than receiving. This anonymous person in the crowd probably thought Jesus could repeat such teachings about it being better to give than to receive, which would work out nicely for him.

However, Jesus knew that the reason for asking this question was not one of charity, but one of greed. So Jesus tells a parable to help the man learn about what is most important in life.

The parable begins with a farmer whose land has produced plentifully. In fact he has so much stuff; he doesn’t know what to do with it. He decides that his problem is not that he has too much stuff, but that his barns are too small. He decides to tear down his barns and build bigger barns. Then he can store his abundance in there. Once he has new barns built, he can sit back and be satisfied. But what if he were to die that night? Whose will all this be? I think the only thing we know for sure is that they will be the farmers.

I think that what the parable is emphasizing is that if we focus all our attention on accumulating more and more stuff, we can easily miss what’s important in life: God. This is especially important for us today as we live in this society that values wealth. Where Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are considered successful because they have more wealth than anyone else in the world. But does wealth really mean that our lives are in order?

As the parable makes clear, no matter how we plan, death can come at any moment. Security in life does not depend on having bigger barns, but on God alone. Jesus reminds us that God is the source of all good things. God gives us the thing that will never perish, or be lost in the stock market: eternal life. Elsewhere in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, "Lay up treasures in heaven, which will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys." These treasures in heaven are the investments that we make in others. By helping others we can help build bigger barns in heaven. Of course we don’t do this because it will get us a one way ticket to heaven, but as a response for what Jesus has done for us.

There’s a story I want to tell that is attributed to Leo Tolstoy and I think makes some of the same points as the Gospel reading.

Leo Tolstoy tells the story of a young Russian who inherits his father’s small farm. He immediately starts dreaming of how to expand his property when one morning a well-dressed stranger visits him and makes him an offer that is too good to be true - he could have free of charge all the property he could walk around in one day. The only condition was that he returns to the same spot from which he started, the grave of his father, before the sun went down. Seeing the rich fields in the distance, he sets out without taking any provisions or saying goodbye to his family. He figured he could cover six square miles in a day. After a short while he decided to make it nine, then twelve and finally fifteen square miles. By noon he makes it to the halfway point. Though hungry with his legs aching he continues. He was near the point of exhaustion but the obsession to own the land drives him on. With only a few minutes left before the sun went down, he gathers all his strength, stumbles across the line, the new owner of fifteen square miles of land, and then collapses on the ground, dead. The stranger smiles and said, "I offered him all the land he could cover. Now you see what that is, six feet long by two feet wide, and I thought he would like to have the land close to his father’s grave, rather than to have it anywhere else."
Having said that, the stranger whose name is Death vanishes, saying "I have kept my pledge."

At one point in our lives we will have to meet this mysterious stranger. We must ask ourselves, "What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart?" Paul reminds us in Colossians, "Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth." Everything we have comes from God alone. The game of Life does not end with the winner having the most money. Rather the winner is the one who has eternal life. So while we could put our trust in the building of bigger barns. Or we can put our trust in the one who died on cross for each one of us and has given us eternal life.