Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen
Money can’t buy
you happiness, but it beats poverty.
A pastor friend
of mine and I were talking to each other about his daughter and my sister’s
college friend.
This friend was
from a very wealthy family.
They were rich
enough that she and her mother would go cruising every summer, simply going
from one ship to another all summer long.
Not only that,
but they’d bring one of the girls friends along as a “personal secretary”, an
opportunity that both my sister and this pastor’s daughter had enjoyed.
That afternoon,
Darryl and I were talking about this and we remarked that money doesn’t buy you
happiness, and we really wouldn’t want to be all that rich, and so on and so
forth.
Then Darryl
turned to me and said, “But if we are honest, we may say we don’t want to be
rich, but in truth, we’d all like to give it a try for a while.”
Today’s lessons
are not the most uplifting passages of scripture.
Quite frankly, if
someone spoke like this today we might put them on an antidepressant.
And the scripture
passages are fairly negative toward wealth.
From Ecclesiastes:
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity
of vanities! All is vanity.
I hated all my toil in which I had toiled
under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me—and who
knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for
which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.
Then in Psalm 49
we read:
For we see that the wise die also; like the
dull and stupid they perish and leave their wealth to those who come after
them. Their graves shall be their homes forever, their dwelling places from
generation to generation, though they had named lands after themselves.
In Colossians we
are warned to “Put to death, therefore,
whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and
greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on
those who are disobedient.”
And finally, in
the Gospel we hear the parable of the rich man who built larger barns to store
his great wealth, only to die an untimely death:
“And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have
ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said
to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the
things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up
treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
When we read the Bible,
there are two contrasting messages regarding wealth.
In the Old
Testament, wealth was considered a sign of God’s special blessing.
There were three
signs that God’s favor was shining down upon you. First, if you had plenty of children. Second, if your flocks flourished. And thirdly, if the crops were bountiful.
And all three of
these things were the measure of one’s wealth, and God’s favor.
But then when we
turn to the prophetic writings, and the New Testament, all of a sudden there
are all sorts of warnings and judgments rendered regarding wealth.
Greed is idolatry.
Greed is to
desire more of something than you need.
Karla and I are
at the point in our lives that we are thinking about retirement and the future.
The number one
question that almost everyone asks as they approach their retirement years is
what???
Have we saved
enough to be financially secure throughout the remainder of our lives?
We want to have
enough money so that we can be confident that we will never run out, no matter
how long we live.
The thing is,
though, that there is a fine line between “wanting enough so that you’ll never
run out” and “desiring more that you need”.
Right?
Desiring more
than you need is greed and idolatry.
Wanting enough so
that you don’t run out is considered being responsible.
Again, it’s a fine
line between the two.
In Timothy Paul
writes:
For the love of money is a root of all kinds
of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the
faith and pierced themselves with many pains.
And then in Hebrews
it is written:
Keep your lives free from the love of money,
and be content with what you have; for he has said, "I will never leave
you or forsake you."
These two verses
get to the heart of the matter.
What really is at
stake is a matter of faith.
To put our trust
in money and to seek security from the balance in our bank account is to turn
away from faith in God and the security only God offers.
Be content with
what you have, for "I will never
leave you or forsake you."
Be content with
what you have, for "I will never
leave you or forsake you."
I can say all
this, but I remain concerned about the future.
I would like to
build larger barns, as the man in Jesus’ parable did.
I’d like to feel
secure.
That’s the bottom
line for me.
I’d like to feel
secure.
One of the things
I grieve as time passes by is the loss of a collective memory of our history.
Specifically, my
parents and grandparents lived through and remembered the Great Depression.
The collective
memory of them was “we may not have had much during that time, but we had
enough”. “There was always love, and
food on the table.”
Do we have faith
in God, sufficient to feel secure, trusting only in him even when our own
resources might fail us?
That, you see, is
the issue with money.
It will one day
fail us.
This happens in
two ways.
First, one thing
we know, if we pay attention, is that the economic prosperity we are currently
enjoying will one day give way to a recession.
It’s an inevitable part of the economic cycle.
One of the things
I am humored by is the way politicians like to take credit for a good economy
and blame others for a bad economy.
My belief is that
the economy will have its ups and downs regardless who is in charge and it’s
all just a matter of time.
And so today, I
might have plenty in my retirement account, but who knows what I’ll have
tomorrow. Easy come, easy go.
Take my house,
for example. By some estimates it has
appreciated by about 40% in the 7 years I’ve owned it. That’s real good.
But the housing
market could collapse tomorrow, and its value could tank.
But you know
what? It’s still the same house.
Back to the
point: Investments fail us at times
because of the ups and downs of the market, and the risks inherent in
them.
Jesus could have
made the point that the rich man who built larger barns could have woken up the
next morning to a devastating fire and lost everything. Many have.
But the point
Jesus does make, is that no matter how much we have in this life, we leave this
world the same way we enter it, naked and without a penny to our name.
When we look
toward our own deaths and our security then, no amount of money will help
us.
“So it is with those who store up treasures
for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
Underlying this
is what I believe is the most profound question of faith.
Faith is to trust
in someone else. Not ourselves.
We live so much
of our lives trusting only in ourselves that sometimes it is a challenge to
trust someone else.
I really learned
this lesson when I had heart surgery.
I couldn’t help
myself.
I couldn’t do
anything.
I simply had to
trust, first of all, in the medical team to care for me, and most importantly
to trust in God that whatever happened I’d be ok.
But in that
moment I was out of control. I needed to
trust another.
Remember the
story of manna in the wilderness?
That was one of
the most important lessons God tried to teach the people during that time.
If you remember they
were instructed to gather only as much as they needed for that day. If they gathered more, it would rot.
What God wanted
them to learn was that he would take care of them tomorrow, just as he had
today.
That’s the faith
question.
God has provided
me with what I needed every day of my life, thus far, can I trust in him to
continue to provide for me in the future?
Faith.
To have faith is
to believe God when he says "I will
never leave you or forsake you."
Amen
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