In my first semester of seminary, I took a class on canon law. The Episcopal Church’s canon law consists of rules for ordering the governance of the church, overseeing everything from what constitutes membership to the expectations of laity and clergy. My professor took an ordinarily dry subject and made it interesting, even funny.
He insisted that if we learned anything at all in that semester, we should understand the sole purpose of the rector’s discretionary fund. This fund, he said, should only be used to support charitable causes and to help those in need. And then he made us repeat a phrase that he insisted should be tattooed on our brains for posterity. It’s not my money.
Many clergy, he said, get into serious trouble when they don’t remember, it’s not my money. At the end of the semester, during my oral exam, the professor asked me a few questions, and then he said, “Tell me about the rector’s discretionary fund.” “It’s not my money,” I dutifully reported. And I’ve never forgotten that phrase since.
It has been tattooed on my brain so much that it has shaped the way I speak about the rector’s discretionary fund, as well as how I decide to distribute the money in it. I refrain from talking about it as my discretionary fund. It is, in fact, not my money. It’s the church’s money. If a rector leaves a parish, that money doesn’t go with her or him. The rector is simply the one who has the authority to decide how the money is used, within the confines of the purposes established by canon law. Interestingly—and this is an honest coincidence—today’s offertory collection is directed towards the rector’s discretionary fund, as it always is on the first Sunday of the month. And if you decide to contribute something towards it, just hear what I’m saying to you: it’s not my money.
I’ve found that being a good steward of this discretionary fund is a spiritual practice. There’s a sound theological rationale behind the knowledge that it’s not my money. From a theocentric perspective, nothing is really ours. Our lives aren’t ours. Our bodies aren’t ours. And our money certainly isn’t ours. If we revisit some key stories in the Old Testament, we can see this theme running persistently through God’s relationship with his people.
At the beginning of creation, God ultimately gives dominion of all living things to humans. But human beings don’t create those things, nor do they possess them. All living things are merely gifts from God, which humans should responsibly steward. The same goes for all of creation, which has been entrusted to our care.
And this is why, in that unfairly maligned Book of Leviticus, we find one of the most precious gems of advice from the Lord God as he is passing on a code of holiness to his people. When they reap the harvests of their land, they shouldn’t reap to its edges or gather up the leftovers of the harvest for themselves. They must leave them for the poor and the alien. It’s as if God is saying, “remember this: It’s not your land. It’s not your harvest.”
We could find countless other examples throughout the Old Testament and into the New to support the clear theocentric idea that everything is a gift from God. It’s not something we own or control or hoard. But this isn’t understood by the man in today’s Gospel reading who asks Jesus to help him get his share of the inheritance. He wants Jesus to arbitrate between him and his brother regarding an estate, and Jesus refuses to honor the man’s request. In turn, Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool and attempts to direct him to a more God-centered way of living.
The central problem with the rich fool is that in his worldview, he’s the only character in a static drama of privileged complacency. If you look up “solipsistic” in the dictionary, you will see a picture of this rich fool. He has a dialogue with himself. He speaks to his soul, questioning himself, and then answering his own questions without seeking advice from anyone, much less God. He has no regard for the poor or alien who might benefit from his lavish crop. He’s the center of his universe. He’s what St. Augustine of Hippo would have described as curvatus in se, curved inwards on himself. The only pronouns he seems to know are “I” and “my.” If the rich fool were to describe his situation after his unexpected bumper crop was realized, he would have said nothing about God. And therein lies the crux of his predicament. He’s functionally an atheist.
Little does he know that he will soon die, and his profligate wealth and ambitious plans to build more storage facilities for his hoard will decay along with his body. If only this poor rich fool could understand that nothing was his. He, of course, is only the recipient and steward of it. He apparently is partly responsible for the success of the harvest. But nothing is legitimately his. It isn’t his land. It isn’t his harvest. It isn’t his future. It isn’t even his life.
And when this recognition occurs to us, too—that nothing truly belongs to us—we’re turned outwards from ourselves and back to God, from despair to hope. From the navel gazing obsession of our curved bodies, we’re straightened out to stand erect and adore the God of heaven and earth who gave us all that we have. We may have dominion over all living things and this glorious creation, but it’s not ours. We may take good care of our bodies so we can live as long as possible, but they aren’t ours. We may have a good year at work and bring home the bacon, but it’s not our money. We may choose how to spend our time and talents to our own satisfaction, but that time and those talents are not really ours. They are on loan to us from God, to be used to the glory of God, and to be returned to God. The circle starts and ends with God, not us.
In telling the parable of the rich fool, our Lord has invited us to leave a transactional paradigm and enter the infinitely creative paradigm of the kingdom of heaven. We begin with the paradigm of the man who wants his share of the inheritance. It’s what he perceives to be his by right in a tit-for-tat exchange. But Jesus refuses to engage in such earthly economics, where it’s a zero-sum game, where there’s never enough, and where a paradigm of fear and scarcity reigns. At heart, the man who asks for Jesus’s help is afraid. He’s afraid he doesn’t have enough and won’t receive his due.
Perhaps Jesus talks so much about money not because he thinks that having money is evil but because he knows that our willingness to part freely with our money is the barometer of how much we trust in God and of how much we are willing to re-prioritize our lives to put God at the center.
The whole life and witness of Jesus Christ attests to the economics of the kingdom of God. In this kingdom, the math doesn’t add up, because when someone receives, another doesn’t lose. All can receive. There’s no competition, and there’s always enough. Nothing is owned by us, and everything is a gift from God. To understand the paradigm of this kingdom, one must believe that God really does provide and that there’s enough to go around.
We see inbreaking glimpses of this kingdom in the miracles of Jesus, where he feeds the multitudes from a few loaves of bread and some meager fish. We see it in his healing miracles even while he faces opposition and mistrust. And we see it epitomized in his death on the cross, where what seems to be the final nail in the coffin of an earthly life is the gateway to true life, eternal life. In Jesus’s resurrection, God shifts our worldview from transaction to the abundance of pure gift.
And it’s only by dying to self that we can enter this kingdom, where food, wine, joy, and peace flow freely. When we die to our need to control, we rise to a new life of trust. When we die to our fear of scarcity, we rise to a new life of hope in abundance. When we die to our hoarding tendencies to ensure the perfect security of our future, we rise to the belief that if only we could take a chance on God’s generosity, it just all might work out in the end.
The question for us is both a challenge and invitation: are we functional atheists like the rich fool, or is God truly at the center of our lives? Can we say, it’s not my money, they aren’t my things, it’s not even my life? When our desires are rightly ordered, we give thanks for everything—good fortune and even disappointments and failures—because we know that all we have and all we are is really God’s, not given us by right or by command, but freely and generously given. Before us are two paradigms: the fear and scarcity of this world, and the hope and abundance of the kingdom of God. Which will we choose?
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
August 3, 2025