Sermon for Sunday, August 5, 2007Soli Deo Gloria A Mystery Solved!by Rev. Jerry Herships |
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Luke 12: 13-21 13Someone in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." 14But he said to him, "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" 15And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." 16Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17And he thought to himself, "What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' 18Then he said, "I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' 20But 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?' 21So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." Ah, the good life. Anyone know who that was singing? Don’t worry, I’m not going to call on you. See there’s a noted difference between Harvey’s preaching and mine. Harvey wants to make sure you know which three are the synoptic Gospels….I play name that tune. THAT is the difference between three plus decades of being a preacher…and three plus weeks! That was Bobby Darin singing about the good life. A question that has been asked since the beginning of time by philosophers, rabbis, and holy people all around the world. It has been one of the great mysteries human kind has tried to crack. As Bobby says, full of fun seems to be the ideal. Or like the character in our story, to eat drink and be merry…for the record, he ripped off that line from Ecclesiastes. So what is so wrong with wanting to enjoy your life? Is there anything wrong with that? Or was this guy just a victim of really, really, bad timing. Saves all his stuff to enjoy in retirement and then dies. Is that wrong? Is that what happened here? Maybe things are not what they seem at first glance. I love a good mystery. I am a total sissy when it comes to watching horror movies. I will probably have nightmares JUST because I mentioned them. But mysteries... like CSI. Does anyone watch CSI? There are tons of them now. It doesn’t matter which one— CSI Miami, CSI New York, CSI Aurora. What I like isn’t the blood and guts but the ones where I have to watch the story and try to figure out the missing piece. What didn’t they tell us? What did they tell us that I missed? What assumptions did I make that aren’t there? We have one of those here today. It’s like a CSI: Holy Land. After some detective work on my part, I had to change my assumptions about today’s story, and as a result, change my message. Here is a clue. What is the one thing you need in a good murder mystery? What is the first thing they discover in a murder mystery? The body, right? Someone has to be dead. Otherwise, well, otherwise, it makes for a really, really poor murder mystery. It becomes a different story all together. Here is my discovery about today’s story. There is no dead body. The guy in the story never dies. I will tell you what does happen to him by the end of the message. There are a lot of things we could talk about with this story, but I am going to only talk about three things that I think are worthwhile takeaways.
First, let’s look at him being greedy. First, before I talk about greed, I’m going to let this guy talk about it. [Wall Street clip] The guy is already rich. It says the land of a RICH man produced abundantly. Here is a guy with bunches ALREADY. And yet, we know from the story that his actions tell us that he is ready to take more. He wants "more" so much, he is willing to tear down his old barns to build bigger ones. This reminded me of the years we lived in L.A. and I would drive through Beverly Hills and see these HUGE mansions getting torn down so the new owners could build bigger mansions. These were perfectly good homes… perfectly good big mansionly type homes. But the owners wanted MORE. I heard a speaker call this the disease of “MORE”. It is a craving that can be hard to satisfy. It is the idea that what was, just isn’t good enough—either the amount or the type of stuff. I think God is not bothered by things…I think God is bothered by excess things. Look at how many times the guy says “I”. Did you count? He say’s “I” six times and “mine” or “my” five times. He so self absorbed. It is all about him. He is like a biblical Paris Hilton. Now, I would love to tell you that this is only the case in Beverly Hills and Bible barns. I know I can add at least one name to the list of folks who, more often than not, crave for more. [mine]. When I moved to L.A. in 1986, I had this one CD carrier. It kinda looked like this. It held 12 CD's…and I didn’t have it filled. Now I have this many CD’s (bring them out). Safe to say, my old CD holder wasn’t big enough to hold all of my CD’s. I had to buy “bigger ones” and bigger ones and bigger one until I just got sick of it and said, “enough is enough”…and I went out and got this (show iPOD). The cravings didn’t change. They just changed forms. Sad to say I could have illustrated this with any number of things. Ties, shoes, wine racks. I am both aware of this and embarrassed by it but I am working at it—baby steps. Maybe clothes, music and wine aren’t your thing. Most guys are like, “I got a pair of shoes. Why do I need another pair of shoes?” Maybe it is power tools. Or golf clubs. Or computer geeky type stuff. Or home decorating stuff. Maybe you don’t have any vices like this. See me after the sermon. You will be preaching next week. The point is that it is far too easy to point a finger at others and say “tisk, tisk” and ignore what might be happening under our own collective roofs. We are certain that just this one more thing will be the tipping point and tilt us over into the happiness zone… and it will…for awhile. But then it will get old and we will be off on the hunt for more. Without question, this is the story of someone who had a lot but wanted still more. I have much to glean from this story. The next point is: at what cost is this greed? By hording more are we hurting anyone? I really, really, hope this is a rhetorical question. Now I want to be clear we are not saying it is bad to have things. Things, like money aren’t bad in and of themselves. If we look at the scripture we see that it ends with, “so it is with those that store up riches for themselves BUT are not rich towards God.” This is HUGE! The point is not things are bad or money is bad, it is when we sacrifice the needy so we can have more. We put the greed in front of the need. We don’t ever want to put the greed in front of the need. I was very impressed with myself when I wrote that, say it with me: Don’t put the greedy in front of the need. New thought. I want to take a poll. Anyone happy here with the current gas prices? Does anyone look at the pumps and say, “yea that’s about right.”? Would anyone want to pay twice as much for gas? Or three times as much? Or four times as much? Now let me ask you, what would you pay if you could get your gas for free out of your garden hose? Don’t answer yet. But keep that in mind during this next piece. Maybe we don’t have a bunch of CD’s, or golf clubs, or a fancy house. There is a good chance we have had…this (show a bottle of Fiji water). O.K., maybe not you, but someone you know. Someone has to be drinking bottled water. There was a great article in Fast Company last month about the water business. Anyone want to take a guess how much bottled water we drink in the U.S.? More. More. More. We drink….wait for it… a billion (with a b) bottles of water a week. AND we pay two or three or four times the cost of gasoline for a product we have always gotten and can still get….for free. Now here is Jerry’s serious part of the sermon. The sad irony is, one in six people in the world have no dependable safe drinking water. For example, Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles…a day, and at the same time, more than half of the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water. What this means is that someone in L.A. or Chicago …or Denver can get safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water easier than most of the people of Fiji. This doesn’t even mention the 1 billion bottles of water we move around the U.S. in ships, trains, and trucks. The article says that water is so heavy in fact that you can’t fill an 18 wheeler with bottled water—you have to leave empty space…thank God gas prices are so low…Oh yea, one last thing, we pitch into landfills 38 billion water bottles a year—in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic. What could we do with the money that we spend on a billion bottles of water a week? What could that money buy? The amazing thing is we wouldn’t even have to go without water to do it. Is bottled water a modern day example of our excess? My third point is trying to solve the mystery. Actually, it is the second mystery. The first is simply what is the good life? The second mystery lies in the passage. It says clearly in the text he dies. Or does it? Is that what it says or is that what we heard? Here are the actual words from the NRSV in verse 20: “But God says to him, You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.” This is when reading the Bible gets cool….o.k. maybe just for me. But I have gotten into the habit of reading the footnotes at the bottom of the page ’cause that’s where all the cool stuff is…o.k. not all the cool stuff but more cool stuff. There it says in my study Bible that the declaration by God in Greek is difficult, reading literally, “Fool! (this part stays the same) In this night your soul they demand from you.” The subject “they” maybe a reference for God, but more likely it is “the things” that now own the man and that claim his life. WOW! (I know some of you are going….”Bible geek talk, you’re on the air”) but this is huge because it goes from being a story about “you can’t take it with you”…which most of know….to a story about being cautious of getting so much stuff that the stuff starts to take control of your time and your life. When this does start to happen, God in God’s genius created for us…the garage sale. We have all had that feeling of “too much”. Whether it is at the end of thanksgiving dinner or trying to find something that we are “pretty sure” is in the storage space. My dad who is 88 currently spends half his year in Michigan and the other half in Florida. He has to…if you live in the Midwest or the east coast and you hit retirement age…it’s the law! You hit 65….off you go! Anyway, he talks about how they are going to give up one of the places because it is just too much work going back and forth and shutting down one place, and having the water turned off and canceling the mail and packing up the stuff and driving down. He told me it just started taking up too much of his time and energy….his life. His stuff started to own him. There is the story of the guy who just had his house burn to the ground out in one of the California fires that have been happening for years in the summer there. In one of the ultimate examples of turning lemons into lemonade, when asked about how sad he must be having lost so much he said, “Are you kidding? At last, I am free.” Maybe this guy, at least for himself, solved the mystery. How are you going to solve your mystery? |
