The lectionary passage for tomorrow is Luke 12: 13 - 21 about the man who wanted to build bigger barns and wallow in his stuff.
How much stuff do we need in your life?
Perhaps all of us have got too much stuff. We surround ourselves with stuff.
When we are about to move house, we look at our stuff, and we think do I need
this stuff anymore, even stuff that has been in a loft for years, and we
haven’t had it out of the loft for years but we might now suddenly need it, or
things that are in sealed boxes we haven’t opened since 2003, can’t throw
anything in the box out, we need that stuff, or our bookshelves are full and we
have too many books now but will we get rid of some books, no, I might read
that one soon, so the books stay on the shelf. We love stuff. My Mother
collects stuff, people buy her ornaments which then collect dust, she started
buying donkeys (not real donkeys, china ones) now she has more donkeys that in
the donkey sanctuary in Sidmouth if you’ve been there. Everywhere you look in
her living room there are donkeys – stuff everywhere. She has a little bedroom
full of stuff. I try and have a nose in there when I visit but she knows what
I’m up to, and yells up the stairs, “Get out of that room!” I wonder what she
has in there I’m not meant to see! I did find a cat’s ashes that died some ten
years ago in a box on Monday. Stuff, too much stuff.
What about people who want more stuff? The
advertisers are brilliant at getting at people who want more stuff, you need
this product for life to be complete, you need a bigger house, you need a
better car, have more. You don’t need more, but have it anyway, because you are
worth it. The supermarkets are good at it. You go in with a list, in the order
things are from your memory, and they’ve moved everything around and they put
yummy chocolate biscuits in your way and you find them going into your trolley.
You don’t need them but you have them. You go to Macdonalds (I know it is bad
but now and again it is okay) and they say, “do you want to go large?”
You go to a carvery, and you watch people
pile up the plate with as much food as you can get on it, building up potatoes
like a Jenga tower. More. Because more is possible.
The man says:
“I will pull down my barns and build larger
ones...... and I will say to myself: “Self, you have plenty of stuff laid up
for many years; take it easy, eat drink and be merry.”
It looks as if he was very rich, owning the best quality land, maybe
able to employ the best farming practices, and also having the
good luck of a few bumper seasons. I suspect that he assumed that every gram of
his success was well deserved that his special character, or skill, or hard
work, or even his righteous prayers, were being justly rewarded.
“I’m a good man and I deserve
it.”
So what was wrong with him? He worshipped
stuff, basically. This is the only story in the Gospels where God speaks
directly with someone and God calls him a fool. With all his property and all his big
plans, he had missed the real point of life. He lost the plot. He threw all his
energies into physical prosperity and planned for future physical self
indulgences. He did not stop to ask: “Is this all there is to life?” And so he
died as a spiritual pauper. Remember Jesus doesn’t say ever a lot of stuff, a
lot of money is evil, it is what you do with what you have, or whether you have
too much and don’t share it that is the issue.
Martin Luther King once told the story about a lady who had a car
accident in Atlanta. The woman’s husband received a phone call to tell him that
the accident had taken place on the expressway. When he got the call, the first
thing the man said was “How much damage did it do to my Cadillac?” He never
even thought to ask how his wife was doing. Martin Luther King comments “Now
that man was a fool, because he had allowed an automobile to become more
significant than a person. He wasn’t a fool because he had a Cadillac, he was a
fool because he worshipped his Cadillac. He allowed his automobile to become more
important than God.”
The man in Jesus story was called a fool because he got his priorities,
his allegiance all wrong. Surrounding yourself with stuff, more stuff, more
than you need, distorts your focus. This reading in our lectionary comes
straight after looking at the Lord’s Prayer. God gives us “daily bread” – no more than we need for today.
Remember the manna in the desert for the people in Moses day went off if
too much was given.
There was enough, and no more. We live in a world where too many people
have too much and too many people don’t have enough to even exist, let alone
live.
We live in a world, and some new hymn words from Singing the Faith (703) say this well, where we have lost the truth we need, in
sophisticated language we have justified our greed, by our struggle for
possessions, we have robbed the poor and weak. We live in a country where food
banks are a necessity. I wonder whether they should really be necessary? I live
in an area of real, perhaps hidden, but real poverty. What is the church
response to poverty, do we keep the best for ourselves and long for more from God just for
us, or do we share what we have and hope that God will bless others just as
much as he has blessed us, outside the church?
Last Sunday there was a fire at Marlborough House in St
Leonards. The residents there lost everything, and an appeal went out for
clothes to be taken to the YMCA on Tuesday and Wednesday. I went and took a bag
full and they were overwhelmed by the response of people, it really was
wonderful to see. All of us have too many clothes in a wardrobe we will hear
one day, or if you are like me, we will wear one day when we can do the buttons
up again!
The man in the story has no one else in his world. He is content to live
off material capital, with no social or spiritual reserves to draw on. God’s
Kingdom ways mean nothing to him. I think there is a message here for some
churches obsessed with buildings and what will happen to buildings that are too
big or too hard work. In the end God is bigger than a building, and we will
still be church even if we haven’t got a building to worship him in. We will
always have enough.
I read this appeal when reading about this
story:
“What do our lives consist of? What will we
offer to God? There’s nothing in my house that God wants except my soul. And
the shape my soul is in will probably have an awful lot to do with what it is
my life really consists of. How is your soul? What does your life consist of?
What do you still want to check off your wish list before you’ll finally be in
the right state of mind to think about discipleship, to think about answering
God’s call? The things you’ve been working so hard to prepare, to store up, to
save up – whose will they be? Take care! God’s abundance is so much richer
than the treasures you have here, and your life is so much more precious than
you think, and God wants that life – your life – right now. What does you life
consist of? What kind of soul will you give to God?”
