University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

IN WHAT WAY RICH?

Luke 12:13-21

A Communion Meditation by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

18^th Sunday in Ordinary Time   August 5, 2007

            Lawrence Wood is a Methodist pastor in Michigan. A while back, he wrote about an experience there that contains echoes of Luke’s parable of the rich fool.

Here in the rural upper Midwest, it seems every other person has a pole barn. Usually it’s full of old tires, old brakes, a trailer, dozens of tools gathering rust, coffee cans loaded with lug nuts and screws. But then almost nobody in America lives like the desert monks.

Ed and Edna’s place is pretty typical, I think. Her cupboards, bureaus, cabinets, garage, attic and spare bedroom have been crammed full of things that define her. ("Oh, you know Edna Furbelow," says her neighbor, "she collected Hummels.") Every once in a while, Edna took some of the clutter out to the front yard and sold it, although no one stepping inside her house ever knew the difference. Now that Edna has died and her husband’s pole barn has finally gotten emptied, everything must go.

[Says Wood,]  It’s too bad she’s not here for the lesson, because there’s something morally instructive about an estate sale. Absent the owners, the items lose their meaning, so that even Ed and Edna’s kids and closest friends think, [Goodness], there’s a lot of stuff here. What a lot of junk! The agent, who doesn’t want to haul it away, has priced everything low: books go for 50 cents, a big set of plates for a few bucks. Here is an old rusty bicycle from the Eisenhower era and a once-prized lamp that now seems hideous. Set out on the green grass outside the barn, Ed’s band saw and drill press, his pride and joy, appear headed for retirement. Now the auctioneer calls out Lot 152, a collection of four hundred Hummels. Eyes roll and knowing smiles break out, but no one bids. The auctioneer looks at the estate agent, the agent looks at Edna’s oldest daughter: a lifetime’s hobby and a person’s identity have come to this. It’s almost possible to hear Jesus asking, And all these Hummels, whose will they be?[1]

            Edna Furbelow affords us only a glimpse-in-miniature of the point Jesus drives home in his parable of the rich fool. Edna’s collection of Hummel figurines was nothing compared to the huge barns the rich fool needed to store his accumulated wealth, but it does somehow bring us back to the “stuff” of our own lives – all that we have accumulated across the years – and the attachments and obsessions that go with such stuff. The photographs I showed to the children of the possessions of different families in different cultures around the world are stark reminders of how acquisitive we are in this nation, and of how much we collect.  Moving both of my adult children in recent days has been another reminder, even though their collections are modest by comparison.

            The comedian George Carlin used to draw lots of laughs talking about all that accumulated “stuff:”

That’s all your house is [says Carlin] – a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it, and when you leave your house, you’ve got to lock it up. You wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. That’s what your house is – a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. Sometimes you’ve got to move – got to get a bigger house. Why? [Not enough] room for your stuff anymore.[2]

We laugh at Carlin because his caricature strikes a resonant chord in our own experience. We know he’s right, if exaggerating, and that is what makes his remarks funny. But deep down, particularly given Jesus’ words of warning, we know it’s no laughing matter. Our homes – even the more modest ones – contain a myriad stewardship lessons.[3] What we buy and what we store and what we keep and what we share are glimpses into the truth about each of us.

            At its heart, Jesus’ parable of the rich fool is a warning against idolatry. The Biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson says,

Idolatry, in simple terms, is the choice of treating as ultimate and absolute that which is neither absolute nor ultimate…. Functionally … my god is that which I serve by my freedom…. Our freedom is not found in scattered outbursts of random activity, but in the shaping of a direction [and a pattern]…. Even if it is hard to discern… there is a pattern to our lives which manifests itself in the many small responses we make moment by moment, day by day.[4]

It’s not that wealth or possessions are intrinsically evil; they are not. They aren’t the problem; the problem is the mind or heart that makes such things into gods – and that happens more subtly than we may think. Consider the patterns of your days – of your needs and your wants, of your habits and your passions, of your bank statements and investment portfolio and your credit card receipts. Consider the ways such patterns mesh or conflict with Christ’s call to travel lightly and simply, to share from the abundance we have received, to put the claims of God first in priority.

            “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed,” Jesus said; “for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions.” Of course, he’s right. We know he’s right. We do. We could live without our stuff. We could. We could share more than we do. We could. But… let’s be honest… there’s also a certain security in the wealth we have accumulated. If gives us certain capacities and affords us certain opportunities we would not have otherwise. It’s true, but sometimes the security we think it provides is mostly an illusion... especially when the crisis comes. Our wealth, says Jon Walton, cannot solve some of our more important problems in such times. 

It will buy you a good oncologist, but it cannot buy one moment of time to extend a life when that life is over. It will get you a good psychiatrist, but it cannot buy sanity or peace of mind. It may attract some hangers on, some companions of sorts, but it cannot buy trust or love or lasting friendship. It can buy you the best of educations, but it cannot confer wisdom. Possessions are, for all we trust them, passing things, of temporal and not eternal worth. And that is what the man with the barns missed. He didn’t understand how time works; there are transitory and there are eternal things.[5]

The problem is, we are all the time confusing the one and the other. To know the eternal things and to live into them is, I believe, what it means to be “rich toward God,” as Jesus says. To live lives consumed by transitory things may be satisfactory for a season, but in the end it leaves us spiritually impoverished… adrift from our moorings, apart from the purposes and relationships that give life meaning.

Wednesday I began my seventeenth year at University Church. Because I knew I would be gone that day, the day before I marked the anniversary the way I have done several times before. I went down to the Anne McClamroch McFall Memorial Garden, now beautifully renovated. I studied some of the plants, amazed at the way some of the vines have begun to creep to the top of the arbor. But mostly I spent my time looking at the names on the wall – so many people I have known and loved during these last sixteen years. I thought about them, one by one… so many remarkable people. There were the extroverts and the introverts, the up-front leaders and the quiet servants. There were the elderly and the very young… those who died suddenly, tragically, and those whose deaths were long and labored. Of the latter, I remembered watching more than a few come to terms with the fact that all their striving and all their acquisitiveness, even all their best efforts, ultimately had to be relinquished and entrusted to someone else. Ultimately, and sooner for some than for others, their whole lives had to be handed back to God.  As I thought about them this Tuesday past, I reckoned that many of them, in the end, came to understand that the only things that would finally matter after they were gone were the good they made possible along the way and their investment of time and energy in those they loved and those they served.  I remembered, too, that those who seemed to have found the greatest contentment in the face of life’s final mystery were those who had seen their lives as full of gifts, those who had lived their lives fully as stewards of the gifts that had been entrusted to them.

            Last Sunday we sang Harry Emerson Fosdick’s great hymn, “God of Grace and God of Glory.” As we did I was struck by one verse in particular… the one that says:

            Shame our wanton, selfish gladness,

rich in things and poor in soul.

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,

lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.

There are, it seems to me, at least two ways to be rich.  One is to acquire a lot of stuff… wealth and many possessions. The other, I believe, is to cultivate few needs, and then to discover that all those needs have been met. What are those needs? Well… food, water, of course… but what else? I think, for me, what I need for my life to be full is the company of those I love … laughter, perhaps… and music… and kindness… and daily hints and reminders of God’s abundant grace. In that sense of the word I have to confess that I am a very rich man, indeed.

What about you?  What do you need for your life to be full? In what way will you be rich?