Rich (sermon, August 15, 2010)

Luke 12:13-21

The musical “Children of Eden” by Stephen Sondheim tells the story of Adam and Eve. Many years after Eve is tempted by the serpent’s promise of immortality and she and Adam are expelled from the garden of Eden, they sing a song about the life they have fashioned for themselves and their two sons, Cain and Abel. Listen to the lyrics:

We tried to make a home
Heaven knows the life’s been hard
Summers brief and arid
Winters bleak and numb
Look what we call home
These old walls are stained and scarred
I can still remember
What each scar was from
You could call it run-down, worn out, threadbare
and I guess you’d come close to home.

On this barren plot
We’ll plant our wheat and dig our wells
And we’ll be a family
Steady as a star
Look at what we’ve got
Only what we’ve made ourselves
Though it’s next to nothing, look how rich we are
Funny now how Eden doesn’t seem so far.


We’ve all heard it said at one time or another in one way or another: you don’t need things to be rich. Things don’t make you rich. You can be rich in love. You can be rich in friendship, rich in knowledge.

But it should come as no surprise that although we’ve heard that things don’t make us rich, the truth of that expression doesn’t always sink in. After all, according to one recent statistic, Americans are now subjected to five thousand advertisements a day. Five thousand! How can a wise grandmother’s words -- things don’t make you rich -- compete with five thousand declarations a day that if you only had this car or that phone or a house like that, then you would be happy, satisfied, content... then, you would be rich?

Now before I go any further I should make it clear that this is not a stewardship sermon. Well, let me put that in a different way, because it is a sermon about money, and any sermon about money is about stewardship. But this is not a sermon when I am going to ask you to give more money to the church. We think of stewardship season as October or November when the church leaders are working on the budget for next year and people stand up and talk about why giving is an important part of faith. Giving is important for your life of faith and for the church, but that’s not what today is about. It’s the middle of August, so it’s not stewardship season. The text before us has nothing to do with a particular season and everything to do with what it means to be human. Because no matter how much we may believe the old saying that “things don’t make you rich,” we all know how it feels to want something more or bigger or better and to want to keep it all to ourselves.

And that’s exactly what’s going on with the man Jesus describes in this parable. He was a rich man, and he was indeed rich in things. He owned land, presumably a lot of it, and his land was fertile. He not only had more crops and goods than he could use for himself, he even had more than he could fit in his storage units.

Now remember, this text comes from the gospel of Luke. And in Luke’s gospel, being materially rich isn’t good or even neutral. It is inherently bad. In Luke’s gospel, back in chapter one, Mary sings that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly: he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” Mary’s song declares a major theme of the gospel story Luke tells, a story in which God sets out to bring justice to a world in which the poor have too often suffered at the expense of the rich.

The problem is, it looks like that justice still hasn’t come. Two thousand years after Mary sang that good news of what God would do in Jesus Christ we look around and see this huge divide, in our city, in our country, in the world, between the wealthy and the poor. The story Jesus tells offers us a glimpse as to why this might be, how it is that we can live in a world with such vast resources, where some people literally throw away food every day while others starve to death.

Jesus offers us an explanation for this when he tells us the rich man’s response to the abundance of crops the land produces. Listen to what the man says: “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?...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.”

The answer is right there in that abundance of first-person references. This man’s sin is not that he is wisely preparing for the future. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. His sin is that he is totally and completely preoccupied with himself. As one commentator put it, “he has fallen prey to worshipping the most popular of gods: the Unholy Trinity of me, myself, and I.” (1) He has no regard for anyone else, not for the poor in his own community who desperately need just a portion of his abundance, and certainly not for God, who created the earth that produced that grain and the clouds that sent the rain and the sun that made the plants grow. This man lived in a universe populated by no one but himself. It doesn’t even occur to him to honor God who made the abundance possible or to share with his fellow human beings in need. He was rich because he had many things, and, as far as he was concerned, he had earned them all himself.

The writer David Sedaris tells a story of when he was eight years old and moved to a new town on a street where the only family on the block who didn’t own a television were the Tomkeys. Instead of a TV, the Tomkeys had a boat, and on the weekends, they would leave town and head for the lake.

That year, Halloween fell on a Saturday. David and his sisters dressed up and went from house to house collecting candy. The next night, as David and his family sat watching TV, the doorbell rang. David, his mother, and sisters all went to answer it, and there, on their doorstep, stood the Tomkeys, the parents dressed normally and the two children in Halloween costumes. The father explained that they had spent the weekend at the lake and so the children had not been able to trick or treat. “So I guess we’re trick or treating now, if it’s not too late.”

“Of course it’s not too late,” David’s mother said. Then she told her children to go and get the candy.
“The candy’s all gone,” one of David’s sisters said. “We gave it all out last night.”
“Not that candy,” their mother said. “The other candy.”
“Do you mean our candy?” another sister asked. “The candy we earned?” The children knew this is what their mother must mean, especially when she fixed them with that look that only a mother can give. They hurried off to their bedrooms.

In his room, David grabbed the brown paper bag marked “My Candy. Keep Out.” He dumped it on his bed and started searching for the crummiest candy, the only things he would even consider giving away. As he divided his candy into piles according to what he liked best he knew that any minute his mother would come into his room and indiscriminately grab whatever she could to give to the Tomkeys. Then it occurred to David that the only thing to do was to eat as much as he could right then and there. So he started unwrapping the miniature chocolate bars and cramming them into his mouth.

Moments later, his mother entered the room, and in desperation, he started breaking apart the candy he couldn’t fit into his mouth because, as he explained, “while it hurt to destroy them, it would have hurt even more to give them away.” As his mother grabbed a roll of Necco wafers, he pleaded with her, “Not those. Not those,” and as he did, bits of chewed up chocolate sprayed from his mouth.

His mother just looked at him and said, “You should look at yourself. I mean, really look at yourself.” (2)

If there is anything good that has come out of the global recession we are in, it is that our society has been forced to take a good look at itself. So many of us fell prey to those thousands of advertisements that come at us every day and became consumed with the belief that we must accumulate more and build bigger houses and storage units to put it all in so that we could finally relax, eat, drink, and be merry. Instead, most of us are learning the hard way that the money we stored up in things or in the stock market really had nothing to do with our ultimate security or even our happiness.

Last week, on the online edition of the New York Times, the second-most emailed story was called “But Will It Make You Happy?” The story was about how, in the face of the current recession, Americans’ patterns and ideas about consumption are finally starting to change. We are saving more and spending less and we are discovering that what truly makes us happy is not buying things, it’s having experiences. People have found out that making memories with their friends and loved ones is worth a lot more than a new couch or a fancy car. (3)

In the same way, Jesus tells this story, not to frighten us into believing that all wealth is bad, but to remind us that what we earn and what we have cannot be where we place our ultimate sense of worth and security, because in the end, these things will fail us. (4)

Things don’t make us rich. And we all know it, deep down. It’s not that having things is inherently bad. It’s when the things we have distract us from the deeper truth that our security comes not from anything that can fit in our house or garage or bank account but from the knowledge that God has freely showered us with the greatest gifts we could ever possess: the gifts of identity, meaning, love; the gift of relationship with the One who created us and of relationships with our fellow human beings who are also created in the image of God. When we remember this, when we live secure in this knowledge, we are able to recognize the abundance around us, no matter what “things” we have or don’t have, and we will be generous with that abundance just as God has been so astonishingly generous to us. Look around you and see -- see! -- how rich we are. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. David Lose, commentary on Working Preacher.
2. David Sedaris, “Us and Them,” from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Read it online here.
3. Stephanie Rosenblum, “But Will It Make You Happy?” The New York Times, August 7, 2010.
4. David Lose, commentary on Working Preacher.