Never Enough

Never Enough

Ecclesiastes 5:8-12

November 4, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

It was the fourth largest lottery prize in history. After 21 weeks of no winners, the Powerball jackpot had grown to $687.8 million. The chances of winning, they said, was 1 in 292 million, but they were wrong, because two people won this time. One in Iowa and one in New York. After the federal government takes its 24 percent and each respective state takes its share of taxes, it’s estimated that each winner will receive somewhere around $107 million. And while that’s quite a cut down from $687 million, $107 million will probably be okay with each winner. I’ve never had $107 million and don’t expect that I ever will, but I would imagine they will both be agreeable to that amount of money. And so will all the people who line up asking for a piece of the pie. Every time one (or two) of these winners is announced, it begs a couple of questions, for me anyway. The first is: what would you do with the money if you won? In the midst of trying to figure out who had won it, the Associated Press asked several customers of the shop where one of the winning tickets was purchased if they were the winner. One, a local pastor said, “It wasn’t me, but hey, if somebody hit the lottery and they wanted to donate to our church, we would in no way refuse it.” Another pastor friend of mine said in a similar situation, “I’d take it. That money has been working for the devil long enough; it’s time for it to start working for the Lord!” The second question that always comes up, of course, is this: how much is “enough”? How much money do we need? Not long ago, some folks on Wall Street in New York City were asked that question. Listen to their answers.

How much is enough? How much money do we need? That is the question, isn’t it? It’s a question as old as the world, and it’s a question that impacts our discipleship, our ability to follow Jesus faithfully. So I know what some of you are thinking right now: here comes the money talk. Some of the rest of you are thinking: that’s all the church ever talks about. That’s all the church wants. I hear that a lot from different people. But here are the facts: we don’t talk about money all the time. For the last ten months, Pastor Rick and I have preached about a wide variety of subjects, maybe occasionally touching on money, but focusing on a whole lot of real life topics and encouragement to follow Jesus more faithfully. The other side of that is that money is a real issue that affects our faith. How we handle it says a lot about what we really believe, and that’s why Jesus spoke a lot about money. Billy Graham is reported to have said: “The closest thing to a person’s heart is their wallet” (qtd. in Christopher, God vs. Money, pg. 4). And because that’s true, because it’s a real life issue that can enhance or detract from our ability to follow Jesus, we need to focus on it as an issue of discipleship. The hard truth is that we are in a war today, a battle of God vs. Money. Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). Two thousand years later, nothing has changed. If anything, the battle has gotten more intense.

The battle is real. The struggle is real. So, for the next couple of weeks, we’re going to talk about the battle and what we can do to align our faith with our wallets. That’s the direction we need to move to win the war. Now, I know on many weeks we tell those who are with us for the first time to “try us out three times,” but this week, I’m asking all of you to do that. This really is a topic that will take us three weeks to cover, and so those who like everything tied up in a nice, neat bow every week (like me) are going to be frustrated today. This morning, we’ll be focusing mostly on the problem, the challenges in front of us, and then over the next couple of weeks we’ll be looking at a Christian theology of money as well as some strategies we can practice to win the battle. So, hang in there with me. It’s a challenge that did not develop overnight in our world, nor will it be conquered overnight. But I do believe that as we engage with the wisdom of the Scripture, we’ll be able to enter the fight well-armed.

And so, as any good strategist knows, to win a war we first need to have a good picture of the battlefield. What does our world look like? What sort of impact does money have on our daily lives? I’m going to give you a bunch of numbers, not so that you’ll remember them, but so that you can sort of get a sense of the landscape we find ourselves in today. We know that, in some ways, it’s a rough environment to be in. Here in our community we’ve watched as several stores closed their doors in the last few months, even in the last week. Pizza City, just down the road, had its final day this past Wednesday. Local stores and national chain stores face the same challenges: competition from online businesses like Amazon that make it easy for us, as consumers (an important word we’ll come back to in a few moments), to bypass human contact and have things delivered directly to us.

But just because the stores are closing doesn’t mean we have quit spending. The average American in 2017 spent 32 percent of their income on housing, 16 percent on transportation, 12 percent each on food and on insurance and pension, 8 percent on healthcare, 3 percent on clothing, 5 percent on entertainment and 3 percent on petty cash items. That leaves 9 percent for “other,” which includes personal growth, education and charity giving. And when I say “charity giving,” that’s all charities, not just churches. According to the Barna Group, a Christian research firm, 45% of Americans give nothing to any sort of religious group, and over half of those who do give less than $500 annually. Only 2% of Americans tithe, which is the fancy religious word that means giving ten percent of a person’s income. So, let’s think about that $500 figure. $500 annually to a religious organization (less than $10 a week), but during that same year we as Americans spend almost $1400 on Thanksgiving and Christmas (including food and gifts), $327 a year on gambling, and $167 on jewelry. And here is one that is most frightening: on average, as Americans, we spend $3,075 every second on internet pornography (Christopher 2-4). What does the way we use our financial resources say about the health of our soul as individuals, and as a nation?

There’s another challenge we have to deal with. There’s this idea that money can buy happiness. We say it can’t, but we live like it can. We are taught, from the beginning of our lives, to like, think and act like we are first and foremost consumers. We are taught to “consume” the stuff that other people make, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively. As children, we somehow learn that the more toys we have, the better. We’ll hoard and we’ll hide and we’ll keep stuff and make sure others know that it’s “mine,” right? As good parents, we try to teach people to share, but then by our example, we keep buying more and more and more. The advertisers tell us, “You need it. You must have it. You deserve it. You’re worth it.” Recent research tells us that there is a little bit of truth in the belief that “money buys happiness.” Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that increasing income level does increase happiness, but only up until a person earns about $75,000. His research showed that after that more money just brings more money, not more happiness! However, other research at the University of California found that, on the whole, those with more wealth were not happier than those with less. They went into the research assuming the opposite was true, which is what our world teaches and believes. They thought that if you had a family member or a friend who got a new car or a nicer house, you will be filled with envy and therefore, less happy. And while envy may factor in, their research discovered that by and large, envy, even if present, did not create unhappiness. In other words, money doesn’t buy happiness long-term, as we’ve known all along (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ygLTykv2PA).

So that brings us back to the original question: how much is enough? How much money do we need? Often the answer is, “Just a little bit more,” but even when we get that “little bit more,” we’re not more content. In this money-obsessed world, how much is enough? That’s the question that faced the writer of Ecclesiastes, and so now (some of you may say “finally”) I want to turn to this morning’s Scripture passage, because the writer here asks some very important questions of his time and of ours.

Ecclesiastes is a different sort of book, a strange book in the Bible, and you don’t hear a lot of sermons preached from it, unless it’s at a funeral and the passage is the same one The Byrds based their hit song on: “To everything there is a season…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1ff). Turn, turn, turn! The author calls himself “Qoheleth,” which is translated as “preacher” or “teacher.” Or that might be his title rather than a name, so he might be someone who brings people together to learn. Jewish and Christian tradition have both said that Solomon wrote this book when he was very old, and so some of the “grouchiness” or cynicism of the book is attributed to that. Solomon was old, they say, and he had been burned by life one too many times. But other scholars point out that the writer seems pretty negative toward rulers and leaders, and they wonder if Solomon, the wisest man and the wealthiest king of Israel, would have expressed such views. So, it may have been Solomon, or some other wise man. We really don’t know for sure (cf. Ultimate Bible Guide, pg. 176). What we do know is this: the author is a keen observer of the human condition and is, at this point in his life, he is trying to answer one question: is there meaning and purpose to living? He starts the book saying “no.” “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless’” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Have you ever had a day like that? As you read the book, it seems like the Teacher has had a lot of days like that, and maybe you have too, but by the time we get to the end of the book, the Teacher has come to realize that life is only meaningless if it’s lived apart from God. At the end of this book, he says this: “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).

In between those two observations are a lot of declarations and thoughts regarding a wide variety of topics, including money. The passage we read this morning is just a snippet of what the Teacher has to say about the struggles in his own time, but it’s fascinating to me that we have the same struggles, some 2,400 years later. There are, in this morning’s passage, three quick thoughts that inform our own time, the first of which we have sort of already addressed: “Whoever loves money never has enough” (5:10). Now we’re back to the “how much is enough” question, facing the reality that no matter how much we earn, it will never be enough. Some people at this point like to quote John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, out of context. They’ll say, “Didn’t Wesley teach us to ‘earn all we can’?” And yes, Wesley did say that in one of his sermons, but that wasn’t where he stopped. That’s where we wish he had stopped, but Wesley’s instructions regarding money were actually three-fold; I preached about them a couple of years ago. Do you remember, those of you who were here? Earn all you can, so that you can save all you can, so that you can give all you can. No one piece of that is meant to stand alone. It’s not about the earning; we earn so that we can ultimately make a difference in the world. We’ll talk more about that in the weeks to come, but the question the Teacher asks us is this: when is “enough” enough? What will satisfy us? The Teacher says that if money is our top priority in life, we will never have enough. We will never be satisfied. I think our culture proves that each and every day.

The second observation of the Teacher builds on that: “As goods increase, so do those who consume them” (5:11). “Consume” is actually a pretty good translation; that word is also translated as “eats” or “enjoys” (Provan, NIV Application Commentary: Ecclesiastes/Song of Songs, pg. 126). We are consumers; from an early age, we are trained to “consume” goods. We even live in a culture today where it is cheaper to buy something new than to repair something old. Our culture is based on dissatisfaction. Let’s say I just bought a new TV, but now there’s that new HD TV. So I get rid of my TV and buy that one, then the 4K HD TV comes out. You want the latest and greatest, right? Well, you should, of course. “You deserve it. You’re worth it.” And the cycle never ends. I don’t know why, but Apple always seems to have an event when I’m getting ready to preach about finances, and this week, they introduced new, cooler, faster iPads and Macs. They’re slimmer, sleeker and better for the environment! Do I need a new iPad? No. Do I want a new iPad? Am I conditioned to want a new iPad? Well, that’s a topic for another day! We’re soon to enter the time of year where we’re told in ways both subtle and overt that it’s our responsibility to buy a lot of stuff so that the retailers will end the year in the “black.” That’s the point of “Black Friday,” right? It’s the day when we buy gobs of stuff so the retailers can make lots of money. And I’m not saying it’s wrong to shop on that day (or any other day); there have been times we’ve been out in the madness. The question we have to ask is if we’re buying more stuff just to be buying it. One commentator used a phrase that I almost used for the title of this message; he says we suffer from “the indigestion of materialism” (Provan 127). We’re consumers, and we consume so much that it has made us (and our culture) sick.

Then, the Teacher has one more observation for us: “The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether they eat little or much, but as for the rich, their abundance permits them no sleep” (5:12). Now, we might not like that observation, but at a gut level we know it’s true. As our wealth as a culture has increased, so have reports of depressions, anxiety, anger, worry, fear and so on. As wealth has increased, so have mental health struggles. We don’t sleep as well, partly because we spend so many hours trying to earn more so we can buy more so we can have more and for what? There is an old story that you might have heard, but it’s about an American businessman who watched as a Mexican fisherman docked his small boat along the pier. Inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. “How long did it take you to catch those?” The businessman asked. “Only a little while,” the fisherman replied. “Well, why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?” the American then asked. “I have enough to support my family’s needs,” the fisherman said. “So, what do you do with the rest of your time?” the businessman asked. “Well,” the fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

“Listen,” the businessman said. “I am a Harvard MBA and I could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds you could buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, and eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Then you could sell directly to the consumers, and open your own factory. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You could move to Mexico City, then to LA and eventually to New York where you would run your expanding enterprise.” The fisherman thought for a moment. “How long will this all take?” he asked. “15-20 years.” The fisherman thought again. “So what then?” The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would go public and sell your company stock and become very rich. You would make millions.” “Then what?” The businessman said proudly, “Then you could retire, move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.” As Andy Stanley has said, it’s not how much we have; it’s what we do with what we have.

The Teacher can make these observations because he knows the God who is a giver, not a consumer. He knows the God who gave us life, who gave us relationship, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills (cf. Psalm 50:10) and still pays attention to us. He knows the God we are called to be like, and the question we’re going to ask in the next couple of weeks is: how are we doing with that? Are we becoming more like the God who gives? You see, the Bible tells us about people who pile up stuff and who hoard what they have, but it’s never a positive image. There are never good things said about those who keep everything they have for themselves. Even our secular culture knows that instinctively; the most admired people are those who give. God is a giver, and we celebrate that truth every time we come to the communion table, as we’re going to do here in a few moments. Communion reminds us of that truth found in the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (3:16). God gave—Jesus came. He lived, he died, and he rose again so that we could live forever, so that we could have a relationship with the God who gives. More than that, Jesus’ life was not taken from him; he gave his life for our sake (cf. John 10:18) because God is a giver. That’s what we remember in the bread and in the cup. The bread—his body. The juice—his blood. Given freely so that we could know the Father. This morning, let’s pray that in this simple act of bread and cup, we become just a bit more like the God who is a giver. Let’s pray.