With our Stewardship Sunday two weeks ago including the inspiring remarks by Julie Chay and last week’s Gospel relating the rich young ruler coming to Jesus with Our Lord’s subsequent proclamations on material possessions and wealth; I thought it might be appropriate to continue this theme as each and every one of us now prays about our pledge commitment to God’s work in this place for the important upcoming year.
I shall begin on a somber note: Some years ago the evening news carried a story about a young high school senior who got into his brand new yellow Corvette, drove away from his family’s multi-million dollar home to a nearby park, hooked up a hose from the car’s exhaust pipe to inside of the car and there died of self-inflicted carbon monoxide asphyxiation. He was a good-looking boy, a good student, rather quiet, had never caused problems and left a shocked and grieving family asking, “Why did he do it? We gave him everything he could have ever wanted?” A tragic tale about our culture of materialism which can strangle us even while we are still young.
If you take a child, even a very young child, into Toys R Us, you will not have to teach the child what to do. Hours of training by the media have taught every child that there is no higher calling than consumption and materialism. On the other hand, for many children going to church on Sunday can be a disorienting, confusing experience where they are not sure what to do. What does that say about human nature and the society in which we live? Alas, it is as if self-gratification, even greed comes quite naturally to us. But it is also a sad observation that our culture has become a vast supermarket where we are trained to desire more things.
We live in a world of manufactured need where advertising preys on our insecurities and kindles desire; we become pliable victims ever wanting more and more. Such desire becomes contagious, imitative and puts us in conflict with our fellow human beings. Whatever our neighbor has that we don’t have diminishes us, because we have built our self-image on what we have and when we lack, we are less of a person; and so run on an endless treadmill of acquisition that can never be satisfied. The socialist calls capitalism “legalized greed” and the capitalist calls socialism “legalized envy” – there is a matter of truth in both claims.
I remember as a little boy about 8 or 9 years old, being taught the great stories from the Bible in Sunday School. Of course, the Books of Genesis and Exodus and King David’s life in the Books of Samuel, so full of action, adventure, and intrigue, provided the most exciting and interesting stories for a little boy. In the New Testament, like most kids I guess, I mostly loved the miracles of Jesus – raising a dead child to life, walking on the water and calming a ferocious storm, feeding 5,000 people, and a woman being healed by merely touching the hem of his tunic. And then there were his parables – “earthly stories with a heavenly meaning” our Sunday School teacher told us – great stories about a treasure hidden in a field, a pearl of great value, a lost coin, frivolous bridesmaids, a lamp hidden by a bushel, a misbehaving prodigal son… and then there was a rich farmer who had it made; in fact he had to build more and more storehouses for all amassed until he proclaimed: “And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years: take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you!” (Luke 12:13-21)
And that parable I remember the most, having the greatest impact on me, even as a child – I suspect because it shocked me so much. I was a materialistic youngster; I loved my toys and games and stuffed animals, my own bedroom, and all my things. As I grew into adulthood I still loved and love my things, but thankfully now after the decades and some hard lessons along the way I have come to realize that they are not really mine and that I am only using them; like the antiques I cherish so much which belonged to other people and witnessed their lives and dreams and hopes and sorrows; I know that when I die they will belong to someone else.
The rich man in the shocking parable is wise by the world’s standards, one most would admire for leaving nothing to chance, well prepared for the future. Except for one very important thing: He does not have a future. God says to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you prepared, whose will they be?” “So it is”, says Jesus who adds the punch line, “with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
The great irony is that the man in the story has done everything “right.” We would call him a success by the standards of our society. He is a prudent businessman, a shrewd investor, he has the “good life” And yet our Lord calls him a “fool”! We don’t find that pejorative word all that frequently in Holy Scripture. But we do find it in the 53rd Psalm where we read, “The fool says in his heart there is no God.” To the Psalmist, a fool is anyone who lives as if God were not. And Jesus calls this businessman a fool. It seems like there is a connection between the atheistic fool of the Psalms and the materialist fool in the parable. There is a definite link between lack of godliness and greed. The rich man says, ‘Soul take ease’ but that is precisely what we cannot take in our human condition.
The Christian faith challenges us - it is not that we desire, but that we desire too little. With no proper object for our desires, we breathlessly run headlong toward everything, believing that we are in charge and that the “good times” will last forever. In our state of disoriented desire we transmute love into lust, achievement into possessiveness and vocation into drudgery. St. Augustine put it best when he wrote in his ‘Confessions’, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Many have an illusion of control because they believe they can have all their needs met by industry, effort, and material things. Yet it is precisely this illusion that takes us furthest from God and impoverishes our spirit. The rich man made the mistake made by so many in believing that he really possessed his great wealth, although Jesus correctly points out that in fact, it possessed him. It is reported that film magnate Sam Goldwyn on being told that he couldn’t take it with him replied, “Well then, I just won’t go.” But that is not an option.
We must be clear that Jesus’ parable about the rich fool is not a plug for the annual budget. Rather, it is about the blessing of stewardship in the fullest sense of the word. It is about our basic spiritual health and relationship to God and one another. It is about our priorities and making positive choices in offering back a conscious proportion of what has been so generously given to us.
The question posed by the parable challenges us to live a life that matters: the life of the Gospel, a life for others and not just for our own self-centered pleasures. We are promised the best gift of all – freedom from worrying about our possessions and future. Not only can we give up our long cherished treasures and illusions of wealth and mastery, we must do so in order to abandon ourselves to the extravagant abundance of God’s love. This is risky business of course. But with great risk (in the case of Gospel-living) comes the promise of great reward. Too often, like the rich fool we live as if we did not know that… or believe it. But lucky for us, God never fails to lavish his gifts and treasure upon us in spite of our own spiritual miserliness. Most of us pray, perhaps daily, reminding God of our perceived needs and petty wants. We would all be terribly put-out and inconvenienced if God suddenly could not be bothered any longer with our affairs and pleadings, if God felt there were more important things to be concerned with, like the theory of relativity or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Yet the wonder is that each one of us matters far more to God than stars colliding in far away galaxies, high speed Internet access, H D plasma televisions, or the latest iPhone.
The rich and foolish man tore down his barns and built bigger ones. He opened more bank accounts, invested in high-tech start-ups, raked in his profits. Nothing wrong with that… Except God invites us to invest our resources and ourselves in the Kingdom of Heaven.
The story is told that at the funeral of the fabulously wealthy Aristotle Onassis, one of the mourners turned to another and asked, “How much did he leave?” And his friend replied, “Everything. He left everything.”
