“Building Bigger Barns”
August 3, 2025
Luke 12:13–21
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” ***
Have you heard of “Self-talk?” Self-talk refers to the talking we do to ourselves, both internally and aloud. It is estimated almost all of us engage in self-talk.
I have been talking to myself aloud since I was a kid. I talked to myself while riding bike, mowing the lawn, even when sitting in church.
It turns out that talking to yourself has real, science-backed benefits which have transformed the way we think, feel, and act. “As children, we internalize the voices of our caregivers and we also can develop highly critical voices that originated to keep us from making mistakes in an environment that wasn’t fully safe.”[i] As we grow into every stage of our lives, how we talk to ourselves can steer the ship of self-worth, socialization, and motivation.
University of Michigan Psychologist Ethan Kross authored a book about self-talk titled: “Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It.” Kross observes that our inner voice can be encouraging and accusatory. For example: “You can do it!” or “You are going to fail miserably and people are going to laugh at you.”
Kross reveals how fast and chatty our internal conversations unfold. When we are speaking with each other the rate is around 120–150 words per minute. When we talk internally to ourselves the rate is about 4,000 words per minute. It is estimated that level of internal chatter goes on about half the time we are awake each day. [Ethan Kross, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It (Crown, 2021), xxii.]
We get a glimpse of internal chatter in the parable about the rich man. It begins after someone in the crowd asks Jesus to be the arbitrator in a family inheritance dispute. Rejecting the request, Jesus warns saying: “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly” From there the parable lets us listen in on the rich man’s internal chatter — his self-talk. He asks himself:
“‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he answers himself, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul: Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”
I love that this character does not just talk to himself, but talks about what he is going to say to himself in the future! It gets a little chatty inside this man’s head. Professor Kross tells us we may be more like this man than we know.
Jesus first words in the parable “The land of a rich man produced abundantly” sets off a chain reaction of worry, an avalanche of anxiety for the rich man. It leads him to nervously rehearse future conversations with himself and even imagine the destruction of his own property.
Think about that for a moment. The man has so much. His barns are full with what the earth has produced. So much that the man is thrust in some sort of chattery existential breakdown: “Who am I? What should I do?”
The first thing the man decides as a way to solve his self-inflicted nervousness is an act of destruction: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones.
In response to all the goodness that has come into his life, the man proposes not just but destruction, but hoarding as he says to himself, “There I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul: Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”
The rich man feels like he has life under control — his retirement plans firm and fruitful.
However, right here God enters. God interrupts and calls foolish all of the self-talk of the rich man. God cuts right through the rich man’s chatty spiral. With a jolt of mortality God says, “this very night your life is being demanded of you. And the bigger barns and all within — whose will they be?”
God uses many strategies to bring us back to the truth about abundant life.
Is it not just the rich man who gets caught up in self-destructive spirals. Do you know people who fool themselves thinking they will or have reached the point of securing their lives? Know anyone who believes they will get themselves to the “relax, eat, drink and be merry” stage of life?
Back in March at the start of the season of Lent, Ash Wednesday is the usual time when we are confronted with the truth of our mortality. Do you recall the words? “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” In the original language of the bible, “dust” can also be translated as “topsoil.” Try that out: “Remember that you are topsoil and to topsoil you shall return.”
We are not dust in this life. We are topsoil that for a time is scooped up and filled with the breath of God. This topsoil permits us to do and be and accomplish an array of things in this life –all before we are retuned again to the earth from which we came.
A well-known 5th century theologian named Augustine who was influential in shaping western Christianity said that our bodies are “the earth we carry.”[ii] We are physical entities, but in that is also part of our spiritual identity.
Think back to how Jesus started the story of the rich man. He said, “The land of a rich man produced abundantly.” The rich man had forgotten that he was part topsoil created by God and given to him to use and become to God a fruitful part of “the land that produced abundantly.”
From all the rich man’s self-talk, it was apparent that he had no intention of benefiting anyone with his earnings. He thought only of himself. The main point of his living was to achieve what he considered his true security by building larger barns. Then he could eat, drink and be merry. Nowhere in his thinking did he consider sharing, being generous with his barns full of food to share with the hungry. Apparently, he would remain alone in his merry, selfish, greedy self-state.
In a book titled “I Will Tear Down my Barns” by Paul Schroeder, he poses what Jesus could have said to the rich man: “If you fill larger barns, what do you intend to do when they fill up? Will you tear them down only to build bigger to fill? What could be more ridiculous than this incessant toil, laboring to build and then laboring to tear down again? If you want storehouses, you have them in the stomachs of the poor. The bread that you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes that you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are getting dusty are for those who have none, and the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy.” [iii]
On this August day in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere’s growing season, this parable should interrupt whatever chatter is going in us and diverting us from grasping the truth of living the abundant life God give us.
In this interruption, start by looking over the land that is producing abundantly and recognize ourselves in it. Like the land, we are created for a time to be topsoil producing abundantly and to be given to others abundantly. And thereby being rich toward God.
Image: Rembrandt’s early works, The Parable of the Rich Fool, also known as The Money Changer, was painted in oil on canvas in 1627.
[i] “Talking to Yourself Is Completely Normal — and Might Actually Be Good for You” Ria Bhagwat
[ii] augsburgfortress.org/downloads/9781506431451%20Sample.pdf
iii [iii]St. Basil the Great, “I Will Tear Down my Barns,” in On Social Justice (Popular Patristics Series Book 38), translated by C. Paul Schroeder, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Yonkers, New York: 2009), 47–48.]
