Luke 12:16 – 21
Oops!
Imagine with me for a moment that we tried something different this morning. What if, during the Great Entrance, instead of bringing bread and wine forward, I asked everyone to empty their wallets. Cash, checks, credit cards—everything. Then, we piled it all on the holy altar. And then—and here’s where it gets interesting—we set it on fire! Just lit it up and watched it burn.
You’d think I’d lost my mind, wouldn’t you? “Father, what are you doing? That money could feed the hungry! It could keep the lights on! It could support ministries!” And you’d be absolutely right to object. It would be insane.
But here’s what’s strange: God commanded exactly this kind of thing in the Old Testament. Not with money, obviously, but with something just as valuable—livestock, grain, the best of what people had. These were called whole-burnt offerings, and the instruction was clear: burn it all. Every bit of it. Nothing left for the priests, nothing taken home, nothing practical. Just… consumed by fire.
Now, if you’re like me, this raises an immediate question: Why? God doesn’t eat. He doesn’t need our steaks or our grain. And normally, when people brought offerings to the Temple, the priests got a portion—that’s how they were supported, how they fed their families. It was practical, it made sense. But these whole-burnt offerings? They seemed like pure waste.
Ugh!
So what’s really going on here? Why would God ask for something so apparently wasteful?
The answer, I think, comes in today’s Gospel reading. Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool—the man who had such a successful harvest that he had to tear down his barns and build bigger ones. He says to himself, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.” And God says to him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
Then Jesus adds this devastating line: “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”
Not rich toward God. That’s the key, isn’t it?
The whole-burnt offering suddenly makes sense. It’s not about God needing the meat or the grain. It never was. It’s about us needing to learn something—something deep, something that goes against every instinct we have to hoard, to save, to secure our own future.
When you take your finest lamb—the one you could sell for top dollar, the one that could feed your family for a week—and you watch it go up in smoke, something happens inside you. You learn, in your bones, that your security doesn’t come from what you can stockpile. You learn to let go. You learn, in a small way, what it means to give the way God gives.
Aha!
Think about how God gives. The rain falls on the just and the unjust. The sun rises on the evil and the good. God gives His only Son. God gives His very self. There’s no calculation there, no “What’s in it for me?” God’s giving is total, complete, whole—like a whole-burnt offering.
And we’re called to become like Him. “Be merciful,” Jesus says, “even as your Father is merciful.” The offering we give to God isn’t a payment. It’s a lesson. It’s us learning to be like God. It’s us, in a sense, buying a class in divinity—and paying the tuition with our own treasure.
Whee!
The Church Fathers talk about three stages of our salvation: purification, illumination, and theosis—deification. That last word throws people sometimes. Deification? Are we becoming gods? Well, we are being invited into union with God, to share in the divine nature, to become by grace what Christ is by nature.
And here’s what that means practically: we learn to love like God loves. We learn to give like God gives. We learn to hold our possessions—and even our very lives—with open hands.
The rich fool’s problem wasn’t that he had wealth. It was that he thought it was his to hoard. He built bigger barns for himself. He planned years of ease for himself. He congratulated himself. And all the while, he wasn’t rich toward God.
Yeah!
So what does it mean to be “rich toward God”? It means recognizing that everything we have is already His. Our money, our time, our talents, our very breath—it’s all on loan. And when we give it back, when we “burn” it in service to Him and to others, we’re not losing anything. We’re learning the divine economy, where the one who loses his life finds it, where the last are first, where dying leads to resurrection.
Every time we put money in the offering plate, every time we give our time to someone in need, every time we forgive when we could hold a grudge, every time we love when we could protect ourselves—we’re offering a whole-burnt offering. We’re saying, “This could have been mine, but I give it back to You, God, because I want to learn Your way. I want to be transformed. I want to become like You.”
That’s the path to theosis. Not just believing the right things, not just showing up on Sundays, but being transformed from the inside out, becoming people who give as God gives, who love as God loves, who hold nothing back.
The rich fool died that very night, and all his carefully stored treasure went to someone else. But the one who is rich toward God? That person is storing up treasure that cannot be taken away—the treasure of a heart that’s learning to beat in rhythm with the heart of God Himself.
So the next time we give—whether it’s money or time or forgiveness or love—we’ll remember: we’re not just supporting good causes. We’re practicing resurrection. We’re rehearsing for heaven. We’re becoming, little by little, what we were always meant to be: Christians transformed into the image of God.
Amen.