Supersize
Luke 12:13-21
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There’s a scene in the movie “Jaws” when they catch and kill a shark they believe to be the vast eating machine that has threatened the coastal livelihood of a small vacation town in Maine. They take the shark, cut it open and out of its stomach come a bunch of half-eaten fish, an old tire, some bones, a piece of a boat, a clock. That is greed.
A vast eating machine, so hungry, so full of indiscriminate desire that it seems to exist for no other reason than to consume.
Take care, warns Jesus in our reading this morning, be on your guard against all kinds of greed. I wonder if we would take greater care, if we would be a bit more cautious when we ventured out into the world if we actually regarded greed with the same degree of danger as the prospect of a ravenous shark just off the shoreline.
The truth is that this eating machine is always circling. It fills the airwaves with ads that are meant to sell us what we surely do not need, but nevertheless must have. It stalks us at the mall, hoping to fill our closets and drawers and bookshelves and garages, and any other available space we might have access to, coaxing us to make room for one more thing. And it slowly devours our relationships as it turns friends into acquisitions, spouses into accessories, and children into objects for satisfying our own unfulfilled dreams and desires.
All around us the impulse to consume is packaged, marketed, and made our reason for being. Who we are is reduced to our market demographic. And what we buy becomes one more piece of data for the algorithm to determine what might just buy again. Until we become one with the vast eating machine, so hungry ourselves, so full of indiscriminate desire that we exist for no other reason than to consume. And the tragedy is that we don’t know how to feel better about that, other than to keep consuming.
Eight years ago, a terrible flood event hit the community where we were living.
One housing development across the state line with more than 3,000 residents had to be evacuated for the better part of the summer because the Army Corps needed to build an impromptu levee across their property to prevent even greater catastrophic property loss. You may not have even heard about it because it was in flyover country. But to the residents and homeowners effected it was devastating. One of those families relocated just down the street from us in a family friend’s home. We got to know them, and I would go running with the husband from time to time. They had been about to start construction on a brand new home when the Army Corps announced they’d be releasing enough water to raise the Missouri river to flood stage for nearly three months. It had been a real wake-up call, my new friend told me. He’d halted the construction plans and said he’d be selling the materials that were already bought and stacked on the building site back to the supplier. They already had a beautiful house, he told me, they didn’t need to be building a bigger one. The more we talked about it, the more it became clear that he’d been talked into building this new house, seduced by the idea of living alongside other people of means in his community. That is until the rains fell, and the flood came, and that very night- maybe not his life, but certainly the house his family called home was demanded of him.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think that with his story of the rich fool and his quest for bigger barns, Jesus was hoping to critique the American Dream. One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions? Are you kidding me right now, Jesus? But of course, Jesus was not speaking to someone from 21st century North America. He was talking to someone from 1st century Judea. If anything, the itinerant rabbi from Nazareth couldn’t have imagined just how bad it would get. On the one hand, there is something about this passage and the wisdom that Jesus has to offer that sounds almost a little trite; like something that could be stitched on a pillow…that would go on the sofa… that’s part of a living room suite… in a house filled with any number of other things. We nod our heads with Jesus. Yes, we say, we know that life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, and then we go home to all our stuff. A 2017 New York Times story titled Aging Parents With Lots of Stuff, and Children Who Don’t Want It, details the quandary familiar many adults who must soon dispose of the beloved stuff their parents would love them to inherit. One woman wonders how to break it to her mother that she does not intend to keep the Hitchcock dining room set or the buffet full of matching Lenox dinnerware, saucers and gravy boats. She could always build a bigger barn, or in move perhaps more familiar, rent a self-storage unit. According to the industry, one in every 11 Americans has a self-storage unit for their extra stuff. The self-storage industry generates $38 billion a year. After just about every natural disaster, someone is interviewed who lost their home and most of its contents. They usually say something like, “it’s only stuff. We’re just grateful to have everybody we love safe.” There’s a disconnect in there somewhere. There’s a disconnect between “it’s only stuff” and TV programs like Storage Wars and Hoarders. We know Jesus is right, but we still want our brother, or sister, to give us our share of the inheritance.
That’s because the stuff, the bigger barn, the supersized life is only the symptom of the much larger issue that Jesus names- the vast eating machine that greed represents in our lives. And greed isn’t really a matter of stuff, as it is the underlying spiritual malady that has us continually chasing after the stuff. In Jesus’ parable the rich man’s land produces abundantly. And what is his first thought? How to hold on to as much of it as he can for himself. Did you notice the pronouns at work. They’re the same whether you’re reading the translation of the original Greek. What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops? I will do this; I will pull down my barns…I will store all my grain. I will say to my soul. It’s like the opposite of the angel Clarence’s inscription at the end of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. This guy is rich and seems to have no friends. He doesn’t even appear to have neighbors. He’s talking to himself. He’s so consumed by the enterprise of holding on to as much as he can that he has no real relationships. Now to be sure there are people of means who appear to have many friends. But the question becomes how many of those friends are there because of the money and how many are there because of a real human connection?
This is really what is at the heart of the parable, because the precipitating question came from someone whose brother wasn’t willing to divide the family inheritance with him. He asked Jesus a question about how to get the stuff, but Jesus is telling him that the real problem is the relationship with his brother. Only he didn’t ask that question. He didn’t say, “Teacher, my brother refuses to divide our inheritance, how do I mend that relationship.” When the stuff becomes more important than the relationship, greed has got its teeth in us. When the value of our assets exceeds that of our friendships, or our family, or our community, then we make ourselves fools most to be pitied.
To be rich toward God, as Jesus suggests, is about more than the money we leave in the offering plate, although that’s not a bad start. Not because the church as an organization needs the money to fund our mission and pay its operating expenses. We do, obviously. But that isn’t why we are encouraged to give. To be rich toward God starts with understanding that anything we have, anything we acquire for ourselves, all of it is a gift. To be rich toward God starts with the profound realization that no matter what we think, or what anyone else says, our lives are not what we make them. They are a gift given to us by God. Anything we have to give we have because it was first given to us by the hand of our exceedingly generous and, dare I say, profligate God. So, our giving to the church is the spiritual act of recognizing that fact. It is the way in which we are encouraged to change how we view all that we have; not as something we have earned for ourselves, but as something gained by putting God’s gifts to work in the world. The abundance that motivated this man to build a bigger barn wasn’t of his own making. It is what the land produced. And yet in the foolishness of his greed, the man made no acknowledgement of this fact. It was almost as though he felt entitled to it all instead of considering those for whom the land may not have produced as abundantly- through no fault of their own. To be rich toward God may have its expression in the generosity we show others, but it begins with an attitude that is rich in its recognition of how generously God has already gifted us.
Ultimately, the foolishness of the rich man in Jesus’ parable is his belief that with a big enough barn, with enough stuff, he’ll have no worries and be free to eat, drink and be merry. It is truly a fool’s errand because as those who pursue it find out, you can’t build a barn big enough to eliminate the uncertainty of life. There’s never enough stuff to make us free, because freedom isn’t one more good to be acquired in a marketplace of goods. It is the gift that comes from the hand of God when we are liberated from the need for all that stuff in the first place. It is the gift that comes from not just letting go of what we have, but from letting go of the belief that it was ever really ours to begin with.