They Demand Your Soul.

Jesus said, “There was a certain rich farmer.” Now, he didn’t say what the man’s name was. Jesus left him rather impersonal. To make it a little bit more personal, let’s give the man a name. We’ll call him Sam. “Sam’s fields brought forth abundantly.” Now, we might even want to call him uncle. That would be all right, too. “Uncle Sam’s fields brought forth abundantly.” The fields brought forth so abundantly that a big committee in Washington wanted to know what he was going to do with all that wheat, cotton, potatoes, and hogs. “Oh, we’ll put up a good big program of storage,” he said. “We’ll pull down our little barns and we’ll build big ones all over the prairies of Kansas and the plains of Georgia, and there we will store our goods. . . . [T]hese folks over there in [other countries] starving and crying for bread. Let them die. If they weren’t so lazy, they would have plenty to eat. What they need to do is get them a good Secretary of Agriculture.”

When he got it all pulled in and harvested, he said, “I say to my soul, soul, you got it made. Recline, dine, wine, and shine.” And God said to him, “You nitwit. This very night, they are demanding your soul of you.” [In Greek, the text] doesn’t say, “This night your soul shall be required of you.” God didn’t kill that man. It’s the third person plural. “They are demanding your soul of you.” Who is “they”? All these barns, all these granaries, all these fields, all this stuff he had given himself to over the years. They are demanding. This guy didn’t die. Something more tragic than that happened to him. He lived. He lived in bondage to the very things he thought would serve him. They demanded his soul of him.

Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith and Other Cotton Patch Sermons. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Clarence Jordan (1912–1969), a farmer and New Testament Greek scholar, was the founder of Koinonia Farm, a small but influential religious community in southwest Georgia. He was also instrumental in founding Habitat for Humanity.