Year C, Pentecost 8, Luke 12:13-21, Now you have it, now you don’t

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

Year B, Pentecost 13, John 6:51-58, Give me Jesus

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.  Amen

We are a hungry people with cravings that long to be satisfied, and those cravings control our lives.

Craving: a powerful desire for something.  That’s the definition.

It’s a deep longing, a yearning, a wanting, a hunger and thirst that aches to be satisfied.

At their best, cravings play a crucial role in our lives.  We need food, we need water, and without them we die.  And so part of our natural makeup is that God has placed within us a craving, a hunger and thirst for these essentials of life so that we might seek them out and be satisfied.

This is true even for specific items.

Take salt, for example.  When we sweat, we lose the essential chemicals that salt contains, and so we must replenish them.  And so we crave things that are salty.  All animals do.

Near Sandpoint we have the Scotchman Peaks wilderness area.  There are mountain goats up there that are often present alongside the well hiked trail.

These goats have become accustomed to the frequent visits of humans and have even become accustomed to licking these visitors.

Wildlife biologists are quick to explain that the goats are not just friendly, they crave the salt that is present on our skin and see us as a ‘salt lick’, a place to replenish this natural requirement.

If you want to attract deer or other animals to a particular place, one of the ways is to set out a block of salt.  That’ll do it.

These are the natural and healthy cravings that are intended to sustain our lives.

We have other cravings that will destroy us.

There is an addictive element to this cycle of craving something, and then satisfying that craving.

It’s a most basic experience of pain and pleasure that holds us captive.

We hunger and satisfy ourselves with good food.

We thirst and satisfy ourselves with a drink.

Part of our fallen nature is that these most basic desires and satisfactions that are essential to life get distorted, to the point of being harmful to us.

Yes, we hunger and are satisfied, but some people so crave food that they eat to excess, and are never fully satisfied, and gain extraordinary amounts of weight to the point that their very lives are jeopardized.

And then we also find ourselves getting hooked satisfying cravings for things that are harmful to us.

Alcohol is one example.

Taken in moderation, alcoholic beverages are a natural form of beverage that are not harmful.

And yet, they are intoxicating.

Some people will crave the effect that alcohol has when consumed in a large quantity.

I’m one such person.

I liked the way I felt when I drank.

Karla is quite different.  She never could stand the feeling of intoxication, and so the most she would ever drink was a half glass of wine, or so.

What happens for people like me begins with the craving for the feeling of intoxication, the “buzz” that comes with drinking, and then the satisfaction when that craving is met.

Actually, the feelings of intoxication are the body’s adverse reaction to alcohol, and are intended to warn us, to alert us when enough is enough.

But if we crave that feeling, and seek to constantly satisfy it, eventually our bodies become accustomed to a level of alcohol in the system.  This is called habituation.  We might also refer to it as an increasing tolerance for alcohol.

What happens is that more and more alcohol is required to achieve the same feeling.

The next phase is that we become so accustomed to a certain amount of alcohol that our bodies experience withdrawal if we don’t get enough.  At this point we are not drinking for the pleasure it produces, but to avoid the pain of withdrawal.  We are hooked.  And we will drink even to the point of dying.

To crave something--
At its best it leads us to the most basic requirements of life.

At its worst it leads us down a pathway to death.

It’s not just substances that we crave.

We crave other things such as power and prosperity.

One of the most far reaching examples of this is what happened in Germany during the last century.

The Treaty of Versailles brought an end to the first world war, but it did so by imposing very punitive restrictions on the German nation.  Coupled with that was the great depression that left Germany both powerless and impoverished.

Into the vacuum of powerlessness and impoverishment Hitler came with a promise.

To use today’s lingo, he offered the promise to the German people to ‘make Germany great again’ by promising that which they craved: power and prosperity.

In seeking satisfy this craving for power and prosperity, the German people were led down a path that led ultimately to their destruction, again, during World War II.  Atrocities were committed all in the name of satisfying these two basic desires.

Cravings.

As a nation we also have an unquenchable hunger and thirst for power and prosperity.

We might defend ourselves and maintain that we’ve not been led down a pathway like Germany, but the craving is there, nonetheless.

Power.

Imagine a president of our country proposing that we downsize our military and relinquish some of our power.  Some politicians, such as Ron Paul has suggested that we do that, maintaining that we just can’t afford to do that.  His candidacy never got very far.

Our craving for power is such that we would never willingly accept being less than the most powerful nation in the world.

Likewise with prosperity.

We want to be the largest economy in the world.  And there seems to be no end to our appetite for material things.

One example of our prosperity is our phones.

Our appetite for cell phones, that didn’t even exist a few years ago, is such that we have made Apple, the maker of the iPhone the first Trillion dollar company in our nation.  The only companies that have exceeded Apple’s net worth are oil companies in China and Saudi Arabia, also signs of our prosperity.

And every politician in our country is judged based on the effect of their policies on the economy.

Power and prosperity, two of our basic cravings and desires.

The problem is that you can never have enough of either to be satisfied, and the quest for both power and prosperity will end the end, destroy us.

St. Augustine wrote:

“You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”

These words from the opening lines of his “Confessions” might be paraphrased to read:

“We crave you, O Lord, and we will never be satisfied until we are filled with you.”

From our Gospel lesson:

“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”

That we hunger and thirst is no secret.

But the only thing that will satisfy the yearning within our souls is Jesus.

Everything else will, in the end, lead to our destruction.

Jesus, will lead us to God our Father, and our life and salvation.

On the surface, it doesn’t seem so.

We crave power, and Jesus died on the cross.

We crave prosperity, and Jesus told the rich young man to sell all that he had, and come follow him.

In 1 Timothy 6 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 as regards power, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians:

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

We are a curious people, we who follow Jesus.

In a world consumed with the craving for pleasure, for prosperity, and for power, we kneel at the altar to receive a morsel of bread, and a few drops of wine.

It is hardly enough to satisfy the hunger and thirst within us, one would think, hardly enough.

Except that it is Jesus.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says:

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Jesus.

Only Jesus.

There is a reason Jesus was first laid in a manger, a feeding trough,

Because he, and he alone, is the one food which nourishes the soul and satisfies the desire of every living thing.

Would that we might all recognize that the craving that lies deep within us is not for food, or drink, or pleasure, power, and prosperity, but for him.

Amen