What is Enough?

Here is my sermon from yesterday. The passage was the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12:13-21. If you would like to receive one of the contentment keytags that were given out, please let me know.

Now I know that in hearing today’s passage from Luke, which is a story we think we would normally hear later in the fall some of you are probably thinking to yourselves, “man, they are really moving the stewardship campaign earlier and earlier.” But, this is one of the times when as a preacher it’s useful to use the lectionary, because I can blame the lectionary for causing me to cover this topic. It also gives me plenty of ideas for songs to sing after the gauntlet was thrown down for me by Greg Yanchenko last week. But there is no need to worry about the money sermon today, because today’s scripture is not really about money. Instead, it’s about something that may be even worse than hearing about money, it’s about hearing about our stuff. As George Carlin told us, “If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it,” he said. “Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff.”

If you do a search for home many times fool appears in the bible, you will find that it, along with derivates like foolish, fools, etc, appears 173 times. 103 of those are found in the psalms, proverbs or Ecclesiastes, which you might expect since they are part of the wisdom literature. The word appears only 38 times in the New Testament, 10 of those in the gospels, with six in Matthew and 4 in Luke. But of all of the 173 times it is found, only once does God say it. Jesus calls people fools several times, including calling the Pharisees fools just previous to today’s reading, but what seems striking to me, is that when God comes a calling, God is the one who calls the man a fool. I don’t quite know what to make of that yet.

In doing my research on this passage, I find that many of the commentators focus on the story of the fool, but totally skip what sets the story up; a man comes to Jesus and tells Jesus to tell the man’s brother to divide the inheritance with him. If you were here two weeks ago when Elizabeth Windsor preached you might remember that her passage had Martha telling Jesus that he should tell Mary to help her do the work around the house. I think there is a definite connection between these two stories. You might also hear echoes of the story of the parable of the Good Samaritan in the way this parable is set-up in telling us about a certain man and what is required of us.

Jesus obviously knows some background information about the brother’s request for help that we do not have. The man’s request would not have been an unusual as there is certainly a tradition for people to go to religious leaders, including Moses, and have them intervene on these issues. But Jesus’ response seems a little strange in that he automatically changes the request from a man seeking justice to be done, to one of a man driven by greed asking for assistance in getting his desires, which allows Jesus to tell this rather strange story of a certain rich man.

Now although the claim that the man was rich would certainly have raised connotations for the original audience hearing this parable, especially the fact that he was rich in land, we are not told anything about him. In fact there is no judgment raised about the man. We are not told that he is bad or evil, or that he will be eternally damned, as happens in other stories. We are not told that he lied, cheated or stole in order to accumulate his fortune, all we are told is that he is a certain rich man. No judgment is made about his possessions per say, but instead about how he views the possessions and what he does with them.

This parable is also not against saving for a rainy day, in fact scripture supports that, we need look no further than Joseph telling the pharaoh to put away grain for the coming seven year drought. You should be saving for your retirement, and you should also be saving for a rainy day. The current estimate from financial planners is to have seven months income set aside to protect you, that is in addition to your retirement accounts. This is part of what it means to be a good steward, but this is very different than what the man in today’s parable is doing. The man is not stockpiling for a rainy day, or to help out those in need, he is gaining more and more simply for the sake of gaining more and more so that he can enjoy himself.

That is what he says, and this is the key portion of this passage, the man says to his soul, “Soul, you have ample good laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink and be merry.” Of course, he missed out on the final portion of that statement, found most famously in Isaiah, which is that tomorrow you die, and of course that is exactly what happens. That is why God calls him a fool. The man is making assumptions and acting and living as if there is not a God, and as if he controls the length of his life. The word translated here as soul, in Greek is psyche, meaning closer to self.

The man believes that he is in control of everything in his life, so much that he can even sort of refer to himself in this way and tell himself what to do. If you are familiar with Aristotelian philosophy, he is the prime mover in his own life. Notice how much I is used in the story, the man says “I will” do something four times, and it is also “my barn, my grain, my goods.” Everything is entirely about the man. He talks to no one else, and no one else is even mentioned in the story until the one who can actually control things, God, comes in and demands the man’s life.

The real problem with possessions we are told is that they cause us to believe that we are self-sufficient that we don’t need anything or anyone else, we can do it all ourselves. Even those who helped him are never mentioned. Certainly he was not planting, harvesting or putting his crops away himself, nor was he building his own barns, but those who were assisting him are never mentioned because he believes that he is doing everything himself. He doesn’t believe that he owes anything to anyone else, because he foolishly believes he is the one in control, that he is self-sufficient that he has everything he needs, so much so that he can tell himself what he is going to do not only with his property but even with the rest of his life. But what he finds out is that he is not in control of his life, and that the things that he has built up make no difference at the end of his life.

The man believes that he is self-sufficient, that he doesn’t need anyone else, including God, and that is the way he lives his life, but no matter how much stuff he accumulates, no matter how big his barns are, no matter how many years’ savings he has, he is not alone in the world and he does not control his future. You can live as if God does not exist, but that does not change the reality that we can be called to meet God at any time. The man makes his possessions the entirety of who he is.

Now in our culture, keeping up with the joneses is not only a saying it is a reality, and what studies have also found is that this is worse in economically diverse communities. If you routinely have exposure to people who have bigger and more stuff than you do, then we want to move up to what they have so that we can feel good about ourselves. It’s like the old Janis Joplin song: “O Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz, my friends all drive Porches I must make amends, worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends, O lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” Why does she need a Mercedes? Because her friends all drive Porches.

We are continually told to accumulate, to gather, to build bigger and get more. We are inundated by stuff, and more stuff than we can keep. Our houses have become so full that we need storage units in order to keep it all. In the US, we currently have 2.3 billion square foot of storage unit space, which is three times the size of Manhattan, and that’s with the square footage of the average home having more than doubled in the last thirty years. Do you know what it would cost to provide clean water to every person in the world? $10 billion. We spend $22 billion dollars annually on storage units, and yes that is a capital B billion, and storage usage has increased 65% in the last 15 years and is still growing. In fact it is one of the fastest growing sectors of the real estate market.

Now just to let you all know, this is not me banging a stick over your heads as if I am not guilty of the same issues, because it’s not true. When we moved into the parsonage, which was the biggest house we’ve ever lived in, and more house than we need, what was the first thing we did? We went out and bought new things to fill up the space. We had extra space and so we had to fill it up. But is there another way to live? Are we as Christians called to walk a different path and to live a different life? After my Thanksgiving sermon last year, someone came up to Pastor Joel and said that he didn’t really need anything else for Christmas, and was wondering what we as a church could do to change our practices, that would allow us to give that money to those truly in need. We didn’t have the time to implement anything at the time, but I did a little research and found a program called Advent Conspiracy which we will be running this year.

The program seeks to take the focus of Christmas off of us and the accumulation of things and put it back onto the birth of Christ. Each year in America we spend $450 billion dollars on Christmas. $10.6 billion alone is spent on the Friday after Thanksgiving, traditionally known as black Friday. The four churches that got together to form the program said that rather than running around like chickens with our heads cut off spending money we don’t have on gifts people don’t need or want, what if instead we created a new tradition in which we focused on things that really matter, like spending time with our families and friends, and what if we took the money we didn’t spend on Christmas and used it for other purposes, like relieving our own personal debt, or setting up an emergency fund, or spending it to further the kingdom of God by providing the world with clean water.

We can live our lives in one of either two realities. We can either live lives of contentment, or we can live lives of discontentment. Those are the two realities. Discontentment leaves us uncertain, questioning and hungering for something, anything to make us content. That is what advertising is all about, making you feel that you cannot be content in your life without this widget in your life, and you know you have to have it because everyone else has it as well, or they have last year’s model and so you want to be better than they are so you need this year’s model. As the saying goes, we end up buying things we don’t need, with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. But we don’t have to live that life.

We can also choose to be content with what we have, and in order to help us make a move in that direction, the ushers are going to be passing out these little key tags. On one side they say contentment, and on the second side they have a prayer. The prayer says “Lord, help me to be grateful for what I have, to remember that I don’t need most of what I want, and that joy is found in simplicity and generosity.” We have plenty, so take one for each key ring you want it to be on, put it right next to all the keytags you get for discounts at other places like the grocery store, or place it in your wallet, glue it to the credit card you use the most, put it wherever you think you need it the most. If you want to take some to give out to friends, relatives, neighbors, please do, but don’t take them if all they are going to do is be added to your collection of stuff. The purpose is to help us eliminate the stuff and clutter or our lives, not to increase it.

Whenever you are feeling discontentment and thinking that you need to buy something in order make yourself feel better, pull it out and say the prayer. When you are at the grocery store and you pull out your keys to give to the cashier look at it, say the prayer and ask if you really need everything you are buying, or do you just want it. Don’t bury this in the middle of all of your other keytags, make sure it is the first thing you see.

As the ushers pass the tags out, I would like to sing one more song, thank you Mr. Yanchenko. You will recognize the tune because we use it for Lord of the Dance, but it’s originally from a Shaker song called Tis the Gift to be Simple, and it goes like this:
Tis the gift to be simple tis the gift to be free
Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
Twill be in the valley of love and delight
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
Till by turning, turning we come round right

Martha was distracted by the many things, but this man and the brother are distracted by one thing. The brother is focused on the things he does not yet have, but wants, and the rich fool is focused on what he has, and wants more of, and they distract them from seeing and focusing on God. They view economics and things as a zero-sum game, in which there are those who have and those who have not, but that is our economic system, that is not God’s economic system. In God’s system the Israelites are fed with manna falling from the sky and with water from a rock, in God’s system 5000 people are fed with five loaves and two fish, in God’s system 4000 are fed with seven loaves and fish, God’s economic system feeds all of us from a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. God’s system is not a zero-sum game, because when we choose it there is enough for everyone because when we are focused on God we realize what is truly important, we push everything else to the side, we focus on the one thing and we are rich towards God and towards each other. This parable is not about being rich or poor, having lots of things or few things, it is about where our allegiance is and where our focus lies, is it on God or on things, is it on what we have or want or is it on God, is it on what we need or on what we desire?

It is not our possessions in and of themselves that are the problem. It is the love of things that is the problem. The things themselves are neutral, it is all in our relation to them. Do we put our trust in them, or in God? Do we put our allegiance in things or in God? Do we worship our stuff, or do we worship God? Do we believe that we are self-sufficient and independent, and live as if there is no God, or do we believe that we are connected to each other and to God? Or, ultimately, does our faith in God have any impact on the practical matters of life? When you look for things to fill your life, then there can never be enough, you will always need more, but when you look instead to God your blessings will overflow and you will never be lacking. Amen.