Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”

• Luke 12:13-15

Boilerplate

I was born into a Presbyterian Church.  For all my life up until now, I have been a member of one Presbyterian Church or another.  It is told that the founding fathers were wondering how the organizational structure of the US Constitution should be set up and a founding father who was Presbyterian showed how it worked in his church.

So, if anyone has had enough time to screw up bureaucracy and the church as a whole, the Presbyterians are great at it.

I had someone tell me that I do not sound like a member of the Presbyterian church, and I replied that I might just be a Reformed School Dropout.  This is a play on words.  Reform school is what they used to call a special school for juvenile delinquents so that they could be incarcerated and given an education at the same time.  They do not have these schools anymore or they call them something different.  Presbyterians and a few other denominations are considered Reformed Theology instead of protestant, but the military could not understand the distinction, so my dog tags read PROTESTANT, meaning Christian and not Catholic.  And of course a school dropout is someone who quit before finishing.  Thus, I think I really dropped out of the reformed way of thinking and the bureaucracy of the denomination when I accepted Jesus into my heart.

When my heart is moved to do something, I feel that it is the work of the Holy Spirit.  Once I suggested that I was going to buy a banner to show where people were being persecuted for their faith and I simply wanted a prayer made on a specific day, the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted.  The pastor said he would send that to the worship and discipleship teams for approval.  As usual, it was buried in committee until after the specific day.  Bureaucracy had triumphed and the Holy Spirit was grieved.  The next year, I bought the banner.  I handed out prayer cards to my Sunday school class.  I displayed the banner each Sunday for a month before the day of prayer, and I took the banner down before a bureaucrat caught me.

Yes, I am a Reformed School Dropout.

Discussion

In some of Jesus’ rebukes regarding bureaucracy, the rebuke might stem more from being a distraction from what Jesus’ primary mission was.  He was to establish Himself as the Messiah and then die for our sins.  Without fulfilling the Old Testament prophecies, could He really be the promised Messiah?  And some of the arguments brought to Him were simply distractions.

But even if this was an unwanted distraction, Jesus uses this occasion to teach that you cannot take it with you.  Possessions are more of a burden than they are a blessing.

I remember a friend in the Tri-Cities area of the high desert in Washington state.  He had just sold his boat that was docked on the Columbia River.  He was downsizing so that he could retire.  He suggested one day that if you ever thought about getting a boat, you should get a grocery bag filled with $20, $50, and $100 bills.  Then flush them down the toilet to illustrate “fun on the water.”  And then if you think to yourself, “That was fun!”  Then, you need a boat.

In other words, you better enjoy all the effort to maintain the boat to make it lake, river worthy.  Repairs are expensive and as the boat ages, you may be repairing most of the time and enjoying less.

So, refusing to be the judge over the two brothers is silly when whatever inheritance they get is gone when they die, but there might be a need to go to a judge in the meantime.

But another lesson Jesus was teaching was pride and greed.  Both are nasty sins.  We do not deserve all we desire.  What we have is what God sees that we need, in most cases.  So, thinking that we deserve more is telling God that God “did something wrong.”

So, a lot of our civil cases out there would be considered frivolous in that way of thinking.  Not just a frivolous lawsuit, but a sinful lawsuit.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.