Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

Title: "Addicted to Affluence?"

Text: Luke 12:13-21

my mother has a good laugh at her own expense

when she thinks about her shopping habits.

She tells this about herself,

so I don’t think she would mind my sharing it:

Kroger’s has orange juice on sale for 89 cents?

Great! Let’s get 20 and stick ‘em in the downstairs freezer.

Coffee is on sale at Albertson’s?

Fabulous! You can’t ever have enough coffee.

Get at least 4 or 5 3-pound cans and store them in the hall closet.

(That’s their "Fibber McGee" closet).

There was a shoe store in San Angelo

that always had shoes in Mom’s size . . .

something you can’t count on even in big-city San Antonio!

And every time she came to visit me there,

we had to go, and invariably, she would find something.

Especially if they were having their semi-annual sale.

Maybe she didn’t need those shoes right away,

but sooner or later, a favorite pair would wear out,

and then she would be prepared.

One always needs classic black or navy shoes …

But every now and then she will laugh, and say something like,

"I must think I’m never going to die,

‘cause it’ll take me forever

to use up all the stuff I’ve bought!"

But to a certain extent,

don’t we all do that?

At some level, or perhaps with regard to certain issues,

don’t we act as if we think we’re immortal?

I don’t mean that we completely deny death . . .

we have all lost loved ones and know the pain of that loss . . .

and many of us have been through accidents or serious illnesses

and knew that our own lives were at risk . . .

I’m fairly certain that for each of us here,

the thought of our own death has crossed our mind

on at least a few occasions.

Many of us have no doubt made some plans,

like making a will,

having a life insurance policy,

or even writing our own obituary!

But I would guess that few, if any, of us

make our day-to-day decisions

with the thought of our own death at the forefront of our mind.

In some respects, it could get pretty silly. Imagine:

"No, I don’t think we should get a new car,

because after all, we might die tomorrow

and never get to enjoy it."

Or, "Much as I don’t want to, I’d better mow the lawn today,

because I might die tonight

and wouldn’t want to leave it looking messy."

Or, "Well, I’ll try to make it to lunch with you Friday,

but of course I can’t promise,

because I might be dead by then."

Or even, "I guess I won’t worry about

storing this bumper crop of grain,

since I might die tonight and never get to enjoy it."

The world would be more chaotic than it already is,

if we made all our decisions solely on the basis of

assuming we might be dead by tomorrow.

Not only that, but to confuse the issue

in other gospel stories, Jesus seems to berate people

who don’t plan ahead.

Like the parable of the wise and the foolish virgins . . .

Praise is reserved for the five

who thought ahead and brought extra oil

so they could keep their lamps burning.

And the five who didn’t think ahead about what might happen

are left out in the darkness

and they miss the wedding feast.

But how can it be a good thing

to have some extra oil,

and a bad thing to have some extra grain?

Surely Jesus didn’t mean to contradict himself . . .

but how do we reconcile the two opposites?

As we think about that, one thing we need to recognize

is that Luke, as a gospel writer,

was very much concerned about

issues of wealth and poverty.

More so than any of the other three.

Of course, the Bible as a whole has a great deal to say

about money, and about possessions.

But for Luke in particular,

it was a real problem that

some people seemed to have money to burn

while many others were barely surviving.

It especially bothered him to see those distinctions

among people of faith.

So Luke gives a lot of space to

Jesus’ teachings and sayings about riches.

And this story is one of those:

What do you do when you have an incredible harvest?

Or win the Powerball lottery?

Or inherit a substantial pile of money?

Or whatever?

Do you build bigger barns?

Buy a bigger house?

Open a bigger bank account or brokerage account?

Relax, eat, drink, be merry?

Or is something different required of us?

 

Jesus says to his questioner,

"Life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."

That’s how he leads into the story.

And we have to watch closely to see that,

yes, this parable is somewhat exaggerated,

which Jesus loved to do.

He starts out with,

"The land of a rich man produced abundantly."

Notice, the man was rich already.

It’s not that this agricultural miracle

brought him wealth for the very first time.

He already has more than he needs to get by.

Notice his plan:

"I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones."

He already had barns full of stuff.

Now he wants bigger ones.

In addition, notice the way Jesus describes a person

with an almost obsessive focus on himself.

He thought to himself, what shall I do?

I have no place to store my crops.

I will pull down my barns and build larger ones,

where I will store all my grain and my goods.

Then I will tell my soul,

Relax, eat, drink, be merry.

Through it all we get the picture of

someone who honestly believes that

if he can just accumulate enough stuff,

he’s assured of the quality of his life

and maybe even of the longevity of his life.

Of course, he is a caricature.

None of us is that bad.

But doesn’t at least a little of it ring true?

I mean, a couple of Decembers ago ago

I spent nearly the whole Christmas break

with a friend with a power saw,

building bigger bookcases, floor-to-ceiling,

because there was no room left in the old ones.

And of course the old ones didn’t get thrown away; oh no,

they just got moved to a different room of the house

and they continue to fill with books.

And somewhere deep down inside myself,

there probably was a little voice saying,

"You have many wonderful books laid up;

relax, read, and be merry."

Don’t we all have a similar tendency?

Not with books, necessarily . . . that’s my chosen addiction . . .

but with our money, and our possessions in general?

It seems like we invest them with

a certain kind of power . . .

as if they could insure that

our lives will be comfortable,

will be able to continue in

the style to which we’ve become accustomed.

I suspect also that

this parable has something quite different to say

to those of us who lived through and remember the Depression,

and a long period of never having enough;

than it does to those of us who are baby-boomers and younger,

who have spent our whole lives in a time of

relative prosperity.

It seems to me that our temptations

in relation to money and possessions are not the same.

As I was growing up, we "did without" a lot of things,

especially compared with a lot of the kids I went to school with.

But that was nothing compared to

the kinds of things my parents and their families "did without"

when they were at that age.

The temptation for my generation,

and those near to me in age,

is to take a lot of our relative affluence for granted.

We assume a certain level

beyond which it’s unthinkable to fall.

And so we’re not necessarily grateful to God for certain things,

because we expect those things.

They aren’t gifts; they’re things we couldn’t possibly do without.

But I think the temptation for a generation or two

who lived through some exceedingly hard times,

is different but just as insidious.

When you have had to "do without" for a long period of time,

and the time finally comes that you no longer have to

struggle and scrape and scratch to get by . . .

because having money and getting money was the solution to that problem,

money comes to have a real power for us.

It has almost a mystique.

And at some level, we’re honestly fearful of a parable like this,

which suggests that too much money is not necessarily a good thing.

We know what it’s like not to have enough,

and we don’t ever want to run that risk again.

For ourselves, or our children, or their children.

My experience of – relative affluence, at least –

is different from many of yours.

As it is different from most of the undergraduates I teach at SMU …

known as a place where the students have nicer cars than their professors!

We can tell quite different stories of poverty and plenty,

and we have different definitions of what’s "enough."

And yet, Jesus told this parable to an audience

that has to have included people with different experiences of wealth.

We have the first character, concerned about dividing an inheritance . . .

and he wouldn’t be concerned about that

unless there was a fair amount of money involved.

But we also have the disciples, and most of the crowds around Jesus,

who were poor, who may have had their own house, and a bit of land,

but not much more.

He told this parable to all of them.

And yes, he made the rich man in the story sound sort of foolish,

so they could all have a good chuckle at his expense . . .

but the story has a bite whether

you’re poor or rich, listening to it.

It has a bite whether you’re a baby-boomer, or a Depression baby,

or a Depression young adult, or a Generation-X-er,

or wherever you fall demographically.

It seems to me that there’s a twofold danger,

both for the rich man in the story and for us.

I suppose maybe they’re two sides of the same thing.

One danger is the tendency to forget

that all our possessions are ours

only by the grace of God.

All my books that I love

belong to God, and are on loan to me.

Maybe it’s easier to see this in Jesus’ story,

where it’s grain we’re talking about,

which comes pretty directly from the earth,

which is the Lord’s.

When we don’t recognize

that what we have is a gift from God,

it sets us up to misuse it in ways

that usually turn out to be selfish.

Which is the second danger.

Because the rich man in the story

firmly believes everything belongs to him alone,

he has no sense of obligation

to share out of his abundance.

We don’t even overhear him considering

a special bonus for his workers,

who must have put in a lot of extra hours

to bring in such a huge harvest.

Much less do we hear any notion

that he might give some of the excess

to the poor in the city,

or the widow up the road,

or any other of God’s children

who hadn’t had his luck.

And so it’s here that we need to look at

plugging ourselves into the story.

Not the specifics of how rich and selfish

the main character is, or may be,

but the general attitude toward what we have.

Do we have it, and enjoy it,

but could just as easily lose it or give it away?

Or do we hang onto our stuff pretty tightly

because of the assurance it seems to give us?

Are we able to be generous and giving,

or do our fears keep us hoarding?

You see, the problem is not that we have possessions.

The problem is that, in most cases,

our possessions have us.

They reassure us.

They tend to give us a sense of worth.

We acquire them,

and then wake up one morning to find they have hooked us instead.

So it is, says Jesus,

with those who store up treasures for themselves

but are not rich toward God.

That hurts . . .

but he’s right.

Especially in a society and a culture like ours,

which assign a person’s worth

by how much they accumulate.

And which assume that, if a person is poor or doesn’t have a lot of stuff,

it’s because something is terribly wrong with that person.

The only cure is

being rich toward God.

That doesn’t give us the kind of specific guidelines

that we often wish Jesus would have given.

He doesn’t tell us how much is enough,

and how much is too much.

And in a sense, it would be easier if he would.

The problem is, we’re all different.

"Enough" for me might not be "enough" for you.

Or it might be "too much" for you.

Jesus doesn’t give us simple answers because,

most of the time, there aren’t any.

What seems to be the general guideline,

the sense of what he’s saying,

is that having or not-having

shouldn’t matter too much to us,

as long as we have the necessities.

I freely admit, I’m not there yet.

I enjoy my "stuff" a lot.

I worry about money more than I need to.

But there are moments when I have experienced

that ability to let go,

and it’s a wonderful feeling.

To not feel tied to, or obligated to,

that whole houseful of stuff.

To feel like I could let it all go, and start over,

and that it would be okay.

Some day I hope it will be more than fleeting moments!

Because that’s what it’s like to be rich toward God.

To know that God’s presence in my life

is the only thing that really matters at all.

My prayer is that all of us will find that,

not just in our best moments,

but in all of life.

God’s love for us is so rich . . .

it’s all we really need. Amen.

© 2004 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)