"Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool."
I want to share with you a dramatic little
story from the gospel as recorded by Saint
Luke.
It is a story of a man who by all standards
of measurement would be considered a highly
successful man.
And yet, Jesus called him a fool.
If you will read that parable, you will discover
that the central character in the drama is
a certain rich man.
This man was so rich that his farm yielded
tremendous crops.
In fact, the crops were so great that he didn't
know what to do.
And it occurred to him that he had only one
alternative, and that was to build some new
and bigger barns so he could store all of
his crops.
"Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry."
That brother thought that was the end of life.
But the parable doesn't end with that man
making his statement.
It ends by saying that God said to him, "Thou
fool.
Not next year, not next week, not tomorrow,
but this night, thy soul is required of thee."
And so it was at the height of his prosperity
he died.
Look at that parable.
Think about it.
Think of this man: If he lived in Chicago
today, he would be considered "a big shot."
And he would abound with all of the social
prestige and all of the community influence
that could be afforded.
Most people would look up to him because he
would have that something called money.
And yet, a Galilean peasant had the audacity
to call that man a fool.
I'd like for you to look at this parable with
me and try to decipher the real reason that
Jesus called this man a fool.
Number one, Jesus called this man a fool because
he allowed the means by which he lived to
outdistance the ends for which he lived.
You see, each of us lives in two realms, the
within and the without.
Now the within of our lives is that realm
of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature,
religion, and morality.
The without of our lives is that complex of
devices, of mechanisms and instrumentalities
by means of which we live.
The house we live in, that's a part of the
means by which we live.
The car we drive, the clothes we wear, the
money that we are able to accumulate -- in
short, the physical stuff that's necessary
for us to exist.
Now the problem is that we must always keep
a line of demarcation between the two.
This man was a fool because he didn't do that.
He didn't make contributions to civil rights.
He looked at suffering humanity and wasn't
concerned about it.
He probably gave his wife mink coats, a convertible
automobile, but he didn't give her what she
needed most: love and affection.
He probably provided bread for his children,
but he didn't give them any attention; he
didn't really love them.
And so this man justly deserved his title.
He was an eternal fool.
He allowed the means by which he lived to
outdistance the ends for which he lived.
Now number two, this man was a fool because
he failed to realize his dependence on others.
Now if you read that parable in the book of
Luke, you will discover that this man utters
about 60 words.
And do you know in 60 words he said "I" and
"my" more than 15 times?
This man was a fool because he said "I" and
"my" so much until he lost the capacity to
say "we" and "our."
This man talked like he could build the barns
by himself, like he could till the soil by
himself.
He failed to realize that wealth is always
a result of the commonwealth.
And oh my friends, I don't want you to forget
it.
No matter where you are today, somebody helped
you to get there.
In a larger sense we've got to see this in
our world today.
Our white brothers must see this; they haven't
seen it up to now.
The great problem facing our nation today
in the area of race is that it is the black
man, who to a large extent, produced the wealth
of this nation.
And the nation doesn't have sense enough to
share its wealth and its power with the very
people who made it so.
And I know what I'm talking about this morning.
The black man made America wealthy.
That's why I tell you right now, I'm not going
anywhere.
They can talk, these groups, some people talking
about a separate state, or go back to Africa.
I love Africa, it's our ancestral home.
But I don't know about you.
My grandfather and my great-grandfather did
too much to build this nation for me to be
talking about getting away from it.
Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth
in 1620, we were here.
Before Jefferson etched across the pages of
history the majestic words of the Declaration
of Independence, we were here.
Before the beautiful words of the "Star Spangled
Banner" were written, we were here.
For more than two centuries, our forebearers
labored here without wages.
They made cotton king.
With their hands and with their backs and
with their labor, they built the sturdy docks,
the stout factories, the impressive mansions
of the South.
Now this nation is telling us that we can't
build.
Negroes are excluded almost absolutely from
the building trades.
It's lily white.
Why?
Because these jobs pay six, seven, eight,
nine and ten dollars an hour, and they don't
want Negroes to have it.
And I feel that if something doesn't happen
soon, and something massive, the same indictment
will come to America, "Thou fool!"
That man said he didn't know what to do with
his goods, he had so many.
Oh, I wish I could have advised him.
A lot of places to go, and there were a lot
of things that could be done.
There were hungry stomachs that needed to
be filled; there were empty pockets that needed
access to money.
America today, my friends, is also rich in
goods.
We have our barns, and every day our rich
nation is building new and larger and greater
barns.
You know, we spend millions of dollars a day
to store surplus food.
But I want to say to America, "I know where
you can store that food free of charge: in
the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God's
children in Asia and Africa and South America
and in our own nation who go to bed hungry
tonight."
There are a lot of fools around.
Because they fail to realize their dependence
on others.
Finally, this man was a fool because he failed
to realize his dependence on God.
Do you know that man talked like he regulated
the seasons?
That man talked like he gave the rain to grapple
with the fertility of the soil.
That man talked like he provided the dew.
He was a fool because he ended up acting like
he was the Creator, instead of a creature.
And this man-centered foolishness is still
alive today.
You know, a lot of people are forgetting God,
people just get involved in other things.
But I tell you this morning, my friends, there's
no way to get rid of him.
One day, you're going to need him.
The problems of life will begin to overwhelm
you; disappointments will begin to beat upon
the door of your life like a tidal wave.
And if you don't have a deep and patient faith,
you aren't going to be able to make it.
I know this from my own experience.
I grew up in the church.
I'm the son of a preacher, I'm the great-grandson
of a preacher, and the great-great-grandson
of a preacher.
My father is a preacher, my grandfather was
a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher,
my only brother is a preacher, my Daddy's
brother is a preacher.
So I didn't have much choice, I guess.
But I had grown up in the church, and the
church meant something very real to me, but
it was a kind of inherited religion and I
had never felt Lord, an experience with God
in the way that you must have it if you're
going to walk the lonely paths of this life.
But one day after finishing school, I was
called to a little church down in Montgomery,
Alabama.
A year later, a lady by the name of Rosa Parks
decided that she wasn't going to take it any
longer.
She stayed in a bus seat, and you may not
remember it because it's way back now several
years, but it was the beginning of a movement
where 50,000 black men and women refused absolutely
to ride the city buses.
And we walked together for 381 days.
That's what we got to learn in the North:
Negroes have to learn to stick together.
We stuck together.
We sent out the call and no Negro rode the
buses.
It was one of the most amazing things I've
ever seen in my life.
And the people of Montgomery asked me to serve
as the spokesman, and as the president of
the new organization -- the Montgomery Improvement
Association that came into being to lead the
boycott -- I couldn't say no.
And then we started our struggle together.
Things were going well for the first few days,
but then about ten or fifteen days later,
after the white people in Montgomery knew
that we meant business, they started doing
some nasty things.
They started making nasty telephone calls,
and it came to the point that some days more
than 40 telephone calls would come in, threatening
my life, the life of my family, the life of
my children.
I took it for a while in a strong manner.
But I never will forget one night very late.
It was around midnight.
And you can have some strange experiences
at midnight.
I had been out meeting with the steering committee
all that night.
And I came home, and my wife was in the bed
and I immediately crawled into bed to get
some rest to get up early the next morning
to try to keep things going.
And immediately the telephone started ringing
and I picked it up.
On the other end was an ugly voice.
That voice said to me, in substance, "Nigger,
we are tired of you and your mess now.
And if you aren't out of this town in three
days, we're going to blow your brains out
and blow up your house."
I'd heard these things before, but for some
reason that night it got to me.
I turned over and I tried to go to sleep,
but I couldn't sleep.
I was frustrated, bewildered.
And then I got up and went back to the kitchen
and I started warming some coffee, thinking
that coffee would give me a little relief.
And then I started thinking about many things.
I pulled back on the theology and philosophy
that I had just studied in the universities,
trying to give philosophical and theological
reasons for the existence and the reality
of sin and evil, but the answer didn't quite
come there.
I sat there and thought about a beautiful
little daughter who had just been born about
a month earlier.
We have four children now, but we only had
one then.
She was the darling of my life.
I'd come in night after night and see that
little gentle smile.
And I sat at that table thinking about that
little girl and thinking about the fact that
she could be taken away from me any minute.
And I started thinking about a dedicated,
devoted, and loyal wife who was over there
asleep.
And she could be taken from me, or I could
be taken from her.
And I got to the point that I couldn't take
it any longer; I was weak.
Something said to me, you can't call on Daddy
now, he's up in Atlanta 170 miles away.
You can't even call on Mama now.
You've got to call on that something in that
person that your Daddy used to tell you about.
That power that can make a way out of no way.
And I discovered then that religion had to
become real to me and I had to know God for
myself.
And I bowed down over that cup of coffee -- I
never will forget it.
And oh yes, I prayed a prayer and I prayed
out loud that night.
I said, "Lord, I'm down here trying to do
what's right.
I think I'm right; I think the cause that
we represent is right.
But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now;
I'm faltering; I'm losing my courage.
And I can't let the people see me like this
because if they see me weak and losing my
courage, they will begin to get weak."
And it seemed at that moment that I could
hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin
Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand
up for justice, stand up for truth.
And lo, I will be with you, even until the
end of the world."
And I'll tell you, I've seen the lightning
flash.
I've heard the thunder roll.
I felt sin- breakers dashing, trying to conquer
my soul.
But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still
to fight on.
He promised never to leave me, never to leave
me alone.
No, never alone.
No, never alone.
He promised never to leave me, never to leave
me alone.
And I'm going on in believing in him.
You'd better know him, and know his name,
and know how to call his name.
Don't be a fool.
Recognize your dependence on God.
Centuries ago Jeremiah raised a question,
"Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?"
He raised it because he saw the good people
suffering so often and the evil people prospering.
Centuries later our slave foreparents came
along.
And they too saw the injustices of life, and
had nothing to look forward to morning after
morning but the rawhide whip of the overseer,
long rows of cotton in the sizzling heat.
But they did an amazing thing.
They looked back across the centuries and
they took Jeremiah's question mark and straightened
it into an exclamation point.
And they could sing, "There is a balm in Gilead
to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick
soul."
And there is another stanza that I like so
well: "Sometimes I feel discouraged."
And I don't mind telling you this morning
that sometimes I feel discouraged.
I felt discouraged in Chicago.
As I move through Mississippi and Georgia
and Alabama, I feel discouraged.
Living every day under the threat of death,
I feel discouraged sometimes.
Living every day under extensive criticisms,
even from Negroes, I feel discouraged sometimes.
Yes, sometimes I feel discouraged and feel
my work's in vain.
But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.
"There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded
whole.
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick
soul."
