Sermon for August 10, 2025

I won't be in Bristol (Tennessee) this morning, where I'm usually preaching and presiding at Faith Lutheran. I'm in Williamsburg, helping my mom and dad recover from her hospital stay.

But someone will be delivering/reading this sermon:


August 10, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Luke 12:32-40



Last week’s Gospel told us to be “rich toward God” (Luke 12: 21). At the midpoint of Jesus’ ministry, this week’s Gospel gives us a road map of reminders of how to be rich toward God.

“Be not afraid”—Jesus tells us this in the very first sentence of our Gospel for today. , It’s an echo of familiar Advent and Christmas readings. “Be not afraid”—it’s often the first thing that angels say when they appear to humans. It’s the message at the beginning of today’s Gospel, and it’s the message that begins the book of Luke, with an angel telling Zechariah, the eventual father of John the Baptist, not to be afraid. The angel Gabriel appears to Mary, the eventual mother of Jesus, and tells her not to be afraid.

And that’s just in the first chapter. In the second chapter, an angel tells the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night not to be afraid, and they go off to Bethlehem to see the Messiah. In the 5th chapter, after a phenomenal catch of fish, Jesus tells Peter not to be afraid for he will now be fishing for people.

And these are just the places where we have those words explicitly. An essential part of the message that Jesus delivers throughout his ministry, across his life and death and resurrection, could be summed up this way: “Be not afraid.”

And yes, easier said than done, this teaching to put aside our fear. So many elements of life have the ability to make us afraid, both as individuals and as a larger society. It is so very hard to follow this teaching: be not afraid. It was hard then, with Jesus right in their physical midst. It’s hard now.

Jesus goes on to give us a countercultural way to deal with fear. Our culture would tell us to build bigger barns so that we can save up for an uncertain future. But in today’s reading, Jesus tells us to give away all our worldly possessions. Just the thought of doing that might make us tremble.

Notice that we don’t sell our possessions just for the sake of lightening our load or leaving less of a burden for the loved ones who will have to dispose of them after our death. No, we are to sell what we own so that we can give to the poor, and this message, too, should be familiar, as Jesus returns to this teaching again and again.

The Lutheran Study Bible notes that rabbis interpret this concept of giving to the poor this way: "anyone who gives to the poor, lends to God.” And we know that God’s repayment schedule is amazingly generous. Perhaps this idea will make it easier to part with our worldly goods or at least to be aware that our worldly goods cannot save us.

Jesus warns us over and over again not to trust in earthly treasure. He's clear: earthly treasure will always, ALWAYS, fail us. That's not the message the world wants us to hear. The world wants us to rush and hurry, to buy more stuff, to build more barns for our stuff, to accumulate and hoard and lie awake at night worrying that we won't have enough. The world wants us to pay attention to our bank accounts. Jesus tells us to be on the lookout for God.

Jesus wants us to be aware of what is pulling our attention away from God, and it’s worth developing a daily or hourly awareness of where our minds and hearts are. When we consider our day’s activities, what is life giving and what is soul crushing? It’s a good practice to do as we review the day. It’s a good practice to begin the day by thinking about these questions as we think about upcoming day: What points us towards God? What pulls us away?

In the last part of today’s reading, Jesus sounds the theme that we hear in Advent texts, a theme that’s so important we return to it across the Gospels: be alert. Keep your lamps lit. It’s not enough to do the daily inventory of what is giving us life and what is sapping our spiritual strength. We need to do the activities, build the habits, cultivate the patterns that will knit our lives closer to God.

And then, at the end of the text, some role reversals, the kind that Jesus spends his whole life making. We’ve got a mini-parable about servants staying alert for the master who has been away at a wedding banquet—the master will return to serve them for a change. Then, as now, the ones in charge rarely serve the people who are below them. But Jesus tells us that the ones who are greatest are the ones who serve. This message, too, is one we hear repeated throughout the teachings of Jesus.

We end with an even shorter parable, about the homeowner who would have behaved differently had he known when the thieves would show up. Are we the homeowners? Is Jesus the thief in the night? Yes.

Here is another of Jesus’ frequent messages, the one about why we need to be alert. Jesus tries to tell us in every way that he knows how that God has a way of passing by unnoticed, especially if we’re not paying attention. We spend our lives working to fill purses that can wear out or be stolen or be destroyed in other ways. If we work this way our whole lives, we’ll get to a point where we realize we’ve focused on the wrong treasure. And by then, it may be too late—not because we’re going to hell, but because we’ve already missed out on so much here on earth.

Jesus comes to bring us salvation in many forms and one of ways is the idea of an abundant life. Not just the abundant life we hope to have in Heaven, but the one that we can cultivate right here, right now.

Jesus comes to announce that we’re already living abundant lives, if we would stop and notice. God has already given us the kingdom. Look at the verb tenses in verse 32: “has been pleased to give you the Kingdom.” It’s already happened—God has been pleased to do it—past tense. But it’s also ongoing: to give. It’s the infinitive form of the verb, and in this case, it does mean that the action will be happening ongoing, happening throughout infinity.

If we believe that we already have everything we need, two things might happen. It might be easier to give more away. And it might be easier to feel less afraid—which again, will loosen our grip on our possessions and all the other elements of life that distract us from the life that God wants us to have.

We don’t even need to believe that God has given us everything we need—we can just act like we believe it, which means we’ll stay alert and we’ll give away more and we’ll look for other ways to serve. We can behave our way into belief, instead of waiting to have the right belief mindset before we take action.

And in this way, we’ll discover that we have had an abundant life, a Kingdom life, all along.