The Aim of Stuff

Luke 12:13-21

November 6, 2016 • Mount Pleasant UMC

VIDEO: “If I Were a Rich Man” clip

I grew up in a comfortable home in the thriving metropolis of Sedalia, Indiana. You may know that Sedalia really is a big town—population 150. And I was related to about half of them! (I am not kidding.) We didn’t have an extravagant home, and sometimes I scare my kids by telling them tales of what we didn’t have. We didn’t have heat or air conditioning upstairs, in the bedrooms where my brother and I slept. We didn’t really have air conditioning downstairs, though Mom and Dad still have a window unit that is built into the wall. It will cool about a room and a half really well, but it had to be pretty hot outside for Dad to turn it on. We didn’t have a VCR or cable television. We only had one bathroom, no shower (just a bathtub), and—horror of horrors—the telephone was connected by a cord to the wall. Honestly, Sedalia was a great place to grow up, and there are times I long for the simpler days before technology took over our lives. We had friends, we had family and we had the whole outdoors to play in.

When I went to college, my world began to expand. I had never thought of our family as rich; in fact, there had been times where I had wanted something, and my parents had told me they couldn’t buy that because we didn’t have the money right now. If anything, I thought of ourselves as less-well-off than the average person; not really “poor,” but certainly not rich. Then, over spring break of 1988, our Ball State InterVarsity group went to the near north side of Chicago and we spent that week learning about inner-city missions. I was moved enough by that experience that I signed up (and so did Cathy) for two months of ministry on the west side of Chicago, in the Austin community, with Circle Urban Ministries. So here we came, almost college seniors from relatively small towns in Indiana, intent on saving the world—or at least the west side of the city. What I learned in those two months changed my life forever. I learned, first of all, that I was rich. In terms of sheer financial ability, I had far more than anyone who lived in that neighborhood. I had the freedom to up and leave the city if I wanted to; many of them could not. I had lived in a large home in comparison to many that we visited that summer. We had a yard when most who lived there did not. I had never thought of myself as rich, and yet I was. And maybe more than that, I learned about poverty as a life-consuming mindset, one that is hard to break out of. My Sedalia worldview was forever shaken by what I experienced on the west side of Chicago.

Whatever our level of income, we are rich, whether we think so or not. I was further stretched by the words of Pastor Andy Stanley: “Rich is the other guy. Rich is that other family. Rich isn’t just having extra. Rich is having as much extra as the person who has more extra than you do. Rich is having more than you currently have” (Stanley, How To Be Rich, pg. 14). We are the richest nation on earth, but we are not more content or more happy. “Adjusted for inflation, the per capita income of Americans has more than doubled during the past forty years. This means that the percentage of homes with dishwashers has increased from nine percent to fifty percent, the percentage with clothes dryers has grown from twenty percent to seventy percent, and homes with air conditioning have increased from 15 percent to 73 percent. But with all of that, there has been no gain in the level of happiness. We’ve gotten more stuff, and although it is stuff we think makes life richer and more enjoyable, our happiness has not increased with the stuff” (Kalas, Preaching in an Age of Distraction, iBooks edition, pg. 78-79). We have much, and so for the next three weeks, we’re going to be looking at what the Bible has to say about wealth, riches and stuff. (Jesus actually talks more about money, by the way, than he does about any other single subject. The church doesn’t talk about it nearly as much as Jesus did.) We’re going to be asking the question, “What Has Your Heart?” In other words—what is the most valuable thing you possess? It’s a question that gets at the core of who we are.

Sermon Study Guide

Today, we most often measure the quality of our living simply by what we have (cf. Kalas 77). Jesus told a parable about a man like this, a man who would most likely be just as comfortable in our time as he was in his own. Whenever we encounter a parable, it’s important to know what provoked Jesus to tell this story. In this case, according to Luke, it’s in response to someone shouting out to him from the crowd. There is a family dispute, Luke says, over who gets the inheritance. Imagine that: arguments over money! The trouble is, Luke doesn’t say that the parents are even dead yet. This may just be a premature brotherly squabble over who will get what when the parents are gone, but we need to remember that, in Biblical tradition, the oldest would by law be entitled to a “double portion” of any inheritance. In other words, in my family’s case where there are just two children, my brother and I, I would, under first century law, be entitled to two-thirds of the inheritance, and Doug would get one-third. This is probably a younger brother who wants it to be divided equally, 50/50. But Jesus will not and does not directly engage the man; instead, he reminds the crowd of something they need to fear: greed (Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 159). (Can you imagine how the man who called out might react to Jesus calling his actions “greed”?) Jesus sums up what is to come with a simple statement: “Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions” (12:15). Then, he launches into a story.

There was once a man, Jesus said, who was already wealthy. Jesus describes him as “rich” even before the abundant harvest comes in (12:16). The word can also mean “opulent” or “abounding.” This man wasn’t just rich; he was millionaire-rich. He was probably of the class that wouldn’t have had to work if he didn’t want to. Had Jesus known such a man when he was growing up in Nazareth? Just across the valley from Nazareth was Sepphoris (a place we’ll visit on our Holy Land trip next year), possibly the place where Joseph and later Jesus went to work. Sepphoris was where the wealthy lived, while Nazareth was the place where their servants, mechanics, carpenters and such lived. Nazareth was the poor village; Sepphoris was the wealthy city. Had Jesus known a man—or several men—like this one in his parable? It’s speculation, but I would bet he did, a man who didn’t have to work, a man whose servants planted and watered and harvested his fields each and every year, adding to his wealth. And so it happens, on this particular year, that his abundance is overwhelming, even for him. His fields have a spectacular year; the weather is just right and the growing conditions are ideal. The harvest is abundant; the word used there is related to our English word “euphoria,” a feeling of intense pleasure. The rich man couldn’t believe his good fortune as all the crops are brought in.

What will he do with it all? He discusses it with himself (and, by the way, anytime someone talks to themselves in the Gospel of Luke, it is never a good sign—Card 159-160), and he decides to tear down his barns, build bigger ones, and store up the grain. Now, listen carefully to what he says: “I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry’” (12:19). Wait a minute; he was already rich with more than enough. Now, with this particular abundance, he finally feels he has enough? Probably not. If the wealth he had before was not enough, why would this new wealth be “enough”? And what will he do with all of his grain while he tears down his barns and builds new ones? All the rich man can see is the “more stuff” that has come his way, and it’s affecting the way he lives his life. As the late Dr. Ellsworth Kalas put it, “This kind of living, this constant striving for more, is a process of slow death. All the beauty of life is slowly consumed in the search for still more” (Kalas 80). After all, “success has an insatiable appetite” (Kalas 77).

And then there’s the “God factor.” This man seems to not be thinking about God at all, but God is thinking about him. God has noticed him. And God now speaks to him. “You fool,” God says. Now, let’s stop there a moment. Jesus told us not to call each other by the name “fool.” In Matthew 5, he says, “Anyone who says ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell” (5:22). He says that because we don’t truly know the heart of the other person, and because such an accusation is not in harmony with the love he calls us to show each other (cf. Matthew 22:39). Yet, here is God calling this rich man a “fool.” Here’s the difference: God does know the heart of each person. God knows the heart of this rich man. God is the only one who can legitimately call him a “fool,” and to me, that’s even more frightening. It means the man really is a fool, and in Biblical language, a fool is one who has turned their back on God, who seeks to go through life without God. Psalm 14 describes a fool this way: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (14:1). But even though we may know someone who says that, we’re still not allowed to call them a “fool” ourselves; only God knows a person’s heart, who they truly are, and God calls this man a “fool.”

Now listen to the rest of what God says to this rich man: “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?” (12:20). And perhaps even more chilling is Jesus’ conclusion: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God” (12:21). I say it’s chilling because we are those people. We have things and stuff stored up in abundance. A whole industry has developed around storing things we don’t need or don’t have room for in our homes—storage lockers have sprung up everywhere. We need places to keep our stuff, just in case we might need it some day. When it gets out of control, we call it hoarding. It’s actually a diagnosable disease, defined this way: hoarding “is a persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions because of a perceived need to save them. A person with hoarding disorder experiences distress at the thought of getting rid of the items. Excessive accumulation of items, regardless of actual value, occurs” (Mayo Clinic). Maybe that’s what the man in this parable had! I knew a woman many years ago who was part of a large family, and whenever family members died, she would take many of what they had and put it in a storage locker. She had the place packed full, and would visit it often, supposedly to sort things out, but she never did throw anything away. Add to that the fact that her apartment was stacked neck-high with magazines, newspapers and other such items; there was barely a single path through the mess. Now, folks like that are extremes, but it’s painfully obvious that “stuff” has a way of grabbing ahold of our hearts.

Now, maybe you’re not that bad. I routinely go through things and do a purge; we did when we moved here and have continued to get rid of things we no longer need. But, honestly, we still have too much stuff. We put up a shed in our back yard to mainly hold “treasures” that we don’t need in the house but we don’t want to part with. We have more stuff than we need, and I’m willing to bet that’s true of most of us, no matter what our income level is. (I’m hoping it’s not just me!) The question, no matter how much we have, is this: do we own our stuff or does it own us? Having stuff is not bad or evil. “The main issue in this parable is not wealth. Rather, it is our attitude toward obtaining wealth” (Bock, NIV Application Commentary: Luke, pg. 344). The problem is not our stuff, but our heart. Our problem is greed, “the attitude that piles up stuff simply for one’s own use” (Bock 345). Greed is the attitude that says, “It’s all for me, and not for anyone else.” When we watch small children grabbing toys away from each other, we see that the seeds of greed are rooted very deeply within us. As we grow, we have to learn how to share; it’s foundational to both the human experience and the Christian life.

So here’s the question: what impact does “the God factor” have in the way we make decisions about our stuff? We don’t want to hear God say to us, “You fool,” so how should our response to riches be different than the response of the man in the parable? The Biblical record, starting with Abraham in the book of Genesis, says we are blessed to be a blessing. Way back in Genesis 12, when God first called Abraham to follow him, God said to him, “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;…and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:2-3). I don’t believe that was just a promise to Abraham, though it certainly was that. It’s a promise that extends to all who trace their faith back to Abraham, all the way down to you and me. We are blessed to be a blessing. Whatever blessings we have are not just for our own enjoyment. Our blessings are meant to be used to bless others. We might say that the aim of the stuff we have is this: we’re to “aim” our stuff toward a world in need rather than toward ourselves.

Jesus says our calling is to “be rich toward God” (12:21). He doesn’t go on to define a three-step process by which we become “rich toward God,” though sometimes I think we wish he would have. That’s often a very personal process, something that requires us to make particular decisions and individual choices. It certainly calls us to examine ourselves. “No matter how much or little I have, how do I feel about what God has given me? Is it mine? Am I a steward of what has come my way? Am I generous? Do I take the things God has given to me and store them up for my own purposes? Do I seek to grab what others have?” (Bock 346). And those are just a few of the questions we might ask ourselves. The Christian response to greed is generosity, and that’s about more than just money, though it certainly includes that. Giving is much more expansive than just money; it has to do with developing an attitude of servanthood, following the example of Jesus. The last night he was with the disciples, they spent some of the early evening arguing about which one of them was the greatest, the best disciple (cf. Luke 22:24-30). So Jesus got up from the table, and used what he had to show them the way to life, the path to truly following him. It wasn’t about what they had or who they were. It was about how they used what God had given them to serve others. Jesus knelt down in that borrowed room, took a basin of water and a towel that had been left by the door, and washed the feet of each disciple there. Even Judas, who had already agreed to betray him. Even Peter, who thought he was too good to have his feet washed by Jesus. He washed twenty-four dirty, stinky feet and then sat down again. That’s when he said to them, “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you” (John 13:15). Giving of what we have available, giving of ourselves in service to others is the church’s response to the greed that surrounds us.

What if we took seriously Jesus’ expectation that we would serve others? What if we saw giving of our time and energy as a spiritual discipline? Because it is. The founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley taught that spiritual disciplines could be divided into two categories, works of piety (those things that specifically deepen our relationship with God) and works of mercy (those things that have the potential to change our world). Under “works of mercy,” Wesley listed these things: “doing good works, visiting the sick, visiting those in prison, feeding the hungry, giving generously to the needs of others, seeking justice, ending oppression and discrimination, and addressing the needs of the poor.” Giving of our stuff, aiming our stuff at the needs of the world is one way we grow more like Jesus. It’s our version of what Jesus did at the table on that final evening in the Upper Room.

This morning, in your bulletin, you should have found the updated, expanded, new and improved version of a “Servant Catalog” that I introduced a couple of months ago. This finalized version has descriptions of each area and ministry, and I’m certain there are still things we have missed in the community and in our church. The only way to know you have missed something is to print 400 copies of a document, distribute it, and wait for the email complaints to come in! (But, seriously, if we have missed something, send it to me and we’ll get it in the next version.) Here’s the point of this “Servant Catalog.” Some of us, my age and older, remember when the Christmas catalogs would come in the mail, or when you would pick one up at the store. My brother and I would pour over the catalogs and look at all the things that we could get for Christmas, if only Santa would cooperate. So every year, we would take markers or pens and circle what we wanted, or what we thought we wanted. Anyone else remember doing that? Well, this is the same sort of idea, only I’m asking you and Jesus is asking you to pour over the possibilities and places where you might give of yourself in service to others. Prayerfully ask God: where are you calling me to aim my stuff, my energy, my life? If you call Mount Pleasant your church home, we expect five things: your prayers, your presence, your gifts, your service and your witness. We’ll talk more some of those other expectations in coming weeks, but this Servant Catalog focuses on your service and your witness. Some of these opportunities require your physical presence, some require financial support, some require giving away our stuff or using what we have for the sake of others. But there is not a single possibility listed in this servant catalog where, when you jump in and take part, you won’t be blessed. You have been blessed to be a blessing, and when we set our hearts on blessing others, we find God has a surprise for us: we are blessed as well.

This morning, as we move to the Lord’s Table to take communion together, I invite you to fill out the response card in the Servant Catalog and bring it forward as you receive communion as an act of commitment. You may want to spend some time praying over your response and bring it back next week; that’s fine, too. What’s important is that we are seeking to answer God’s call, as individuals and as a church, to serve, to bless those around us, not for our own glory or gain, but for God’s. We want to be people who are rich toward God, and, as Andy Stanley has said so well, being rich is not a matter of what you have. “It’s what you do with what you have” (Stanley, How To Be Rich). So…what will you do with all God has given you? As we prepare our hearts for the bread and the cup, I invite you to take a few moments and fill out the response cards. Then we’ll come together to the table.