Storage

Scriptures:       Hosea 11:1-11                 Psalm 107:1-9         Colossians 3:1-11         Luke 12:13-21                         

When I moved from South Philly to Conshohocken, I was going from a row home to a one-bedroom apartment – and in fact I still live in a one-bedroom apartment in Conshohocken, just in a different complex.  And so I had to downsize slightly, but didn’t know what to do with various accumulated books, mementos, tools and such.  I ended up renting a storage bin.  The monthly charge was annoying, but for a time I rationalized to myself that it was a choice between a storage bin or renting a bigger and more expensive apartment – and so I went with the bin – for a while anyway.  But after a number of months I had to ask myself:  The monthly charges are adding up to hundreds of dollars.  Is the stuff I’m storing worth it?  Do I really need this stuff?  Really?  And eventually I ended up giving away the usable items, making a number of folks very happy at least for a moment, and tossing a lot of accumulated junk that wasn’t doing me or anyone else any good, that surely wasn’t worth the monthly cost of a storage bin.  It pained me a bit at the time to part with some of the items….but several years down the road, not only do I not miss them a bit, I can’t even remember what most of them were.

There have been many articles on “simplifying your life” – ridding your house of unwanted clutter, giving away items that aren’t being used.  I remember one such article advising that “If you haven’t worn a given shirt or pair of pants in six months, you’d be better off giving it away.”  (Whoever wrote that suggestion must live in California where they don’t need different sets of clothes for winter and summer.)  All good ideas – and ideas I should consider, because I can be a bit of a pack rat - not so much packing away extra clothing – what clothing I own is in regular use, and a lot of my clothing has really seen better days, and by the time I give clothes away they’re usually in such bad shape that even homeless people don’t want them.  But I’m a pack rat mostly with books and backdated magazines, though I’m trying to do better.

Today’s Gospel reading sounds a little bit like one of those magazine articles on simplifying your life.  But Jesus reminds us that the stakes are much higher than simply uncluttering our minds, that our actions have real consequences for others and perhaps eternal consequences for us.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, and is teaching his disciples along the way, with the crowds following.  At a point in the journey, a voice comes from the crowd: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”  This request may seem odd to us, but it might not have been unusual for Jewish teachers to be asked to intervene in family and property disputes.  In fact, Moses himself, in the book of Numbers, had handled a family dispute over property, though of a different kind.  Likely the father of the two brothers had left the farm as a unit to both brothers – traditionally, the elder son received twice as much land as the younger - and it would seem that some family friction between the two brothers led to the younger brother’s request that the farm be divided so that he could be independent of his older brother – a request that the older brother evidently had refused.  Jesus sees beyond the legal issue that the brother raised to the spiritual issue behind it.  He responds to the brother, “Friend, who appointed me as an arbitrator between you?”  And then to the crowd he said, “Take care! Be on guard against any kind of greed, for one’s life does not consist of one’s possessions.”

And then Jesus tells a story about a man whose fields produced a bumper crop, produced more crops than the man knew what to do with.  It was more than he could store in his barns.  And though it was a nice problem to have, nonetheless it was a problem – where to put all this food.  Today the man might consider renting a storage bin, but the man’s plan was to pull down his barns and put up bigger barns, and kick back and enjoy life – “eat, drink, and be merry”  But, as we know, there’s another part to that saying, specifically the words “for tomorrow we die” – and that’s exactly the message the man gets from God.  “Fool!  Tonight you die!  And all the goods you’ve stored up, whose will they be?”  And Jesus concludes his parable by telling the crowd, “And this is how it is for those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

That phrase “rich toward God” refers, among other things, to giving to the poor and helping those in need.  Remember that elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus told a rich young man to sell all he had and give to the poor, *quote* “and you’ll have treasure in heaven.  Then come, follow me.”  In the Jewish culture of the time, “treasure in heaven” specifically meant almsgiving, charity. Elsewhere Jesus said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  The man with the bumper crop had ample treasure on earth, but he kept it for himself.  So when he died, he had nothing to show God, no treasure in heaven.  Metaphorically, his account in heaven was overdrawn, or at best had a zero balance.  Put another way, the man went into eternity spiritually bankrupt.

The original words that I interpreted as God saying “Tonight you die!” were interpreted in the New Revised Standard as “This very night your life is being demanded of you.”  The original Greek is odd; it reads “This night they will demand your soul.”  It’s commonly interpreted as “God will demand your soul back from you.”  But it could also be interpreted as “your possessions will demand your soul”; that is to say, your possessions, the very things you’re carefully storing up because you think they improve your life,  will instead cost you your life.  A sobering thought.

The thing that’s striking, of course, is that it didn’t even cross the man’s mind to use his bumper crop to help his neighbors.  His thoughts were all about himself:  what shall I do, for I have no room to store my crops.  I know what I will do: I will pull down my barns and put up bigger ones.  Then I shall say to my soul “Eat, drink, be merry”  I, me, my, mine.  As far as he’s concerned, it’s his world, and everybody else was just in it.  But God’s words remind the man that even his life was not his own, but was just on loan from God.

Sayings and parables such as this are not popular among American Christians, particular those who consider themselves conservative Christians, Bible Christians, those who see themselves as taking every word of the Bible literally, but whose Bibles apparently have some pages missing from the Gospels, who harass their neighbors with obscure and out of context verses from Leviticus while ignoring verses in the Gospels that go right to the very heart of Jesus’ teaching.  One of the scandals of most televangelists and many megachurches is the amount of money they have coming in, and how much they keep for themselves. For example, eyebrows were raised in 2014 when thieves broke into a safe at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church and took the offerings from that weekend’s services - $600,000 in cash and checks!  For one weekend!  Multiply by 52 and we get a picture of a church dealing sums of money you and I can hardly imagine.  And who is that money benefitting?

Now I want to be clear:  we can’t use charity to buy our way into heaven.  That’s an especially strong teaching in Protestantism.  One of the things that led to the break with the Catholic Church was Rome’s selling of indulgences – get out of purgatory free or at least cheap cards.  But the church doesn’t have the power to issue “go straight to heaven” cards, not at any price.  Before God, all of us are bankrupt, and it is only by God’s grace that any of us are saved.  But God saves us, not to keep us as the persons we are, but to transform us into the persons God would have us be. As Paul in Romans put it, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” And a sign of that transformation is sharing with others, is caring for neighbor rather than just for ourselves.

If we are living in the way of Jesus, we cannot separate our faith from our behavior; as Jesus said, “You can tell a tree by its fruits; a good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit” and “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  Jesus also said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”  Regardless what we may tell ourselves or others about our faith, if we’re honest with ourselves, two of the best ways to tell our priorities, is to look at our checkbook or credit card statement, and to look at our calendar.  How do we spend our money?  How do we spend our time?  What we do here at church is intended to praise God, and also to refresh us and to help us make decisions about what we do out there, including how we spend our money and our time.  Out there is where the rubber meets the road.  If our faith makes no difference to our life, we may have cause to doubt the reality of our faith.  If what we do here on Sunday has no effect on how we live Monday through Saturday, we’re wasting our time.  It’s important to recognize, though, that, for many of us, the question of “where does my money go” is answered with “food and shelter, we’re barely staying above water”, and the question “where does my time go” is answered with “I’m working three jobs so my family doesn’t starve.”  And so this is where those in the church who have the means can make life a little less grindingly hard for those who don’t.  And regardless our income level, we are all faced with decisions every day on whether, in considering a purchase, “Do I really need that?  Is it a need, or want, or a whim?  Is that something I want, or something an advertisement convinced me I want?”

Taking Jesus’s parable in a slightly different direction: Remember, the rich man in the story likely didn’t harvest his own bumper crop.  He likely didn’t get his hands all that dirty. He owned the land, but he likely had day laborers do much of the actual hands-on work.  Did he pay them fairly?  Could he have given them an extra portion of the harvest that they had helped produce?  I ask this only to lead us to consider ourselves, where our food comes from, who harvests it – and how they are rewarded for their labor.  There’s a picture that circulates on the internet, usually around thanksgiving, that I put in the bulletin.  The top panel shows a family gathered around the table, praying, “Thanks, Jesus, for this food.”  The bottom panel shows a Latino man, presumably named Jesus, loading vegetables onto a truck – and the caption says, “De nada” – “it’s nothing”.  The photo asks us to remember that while our food ultimately comes from God, between God and our kitchen table stand a whole succession of people involved in making it available to us – those who plant, those who harvest, those who transport the food, those who stock shelves at the supermarket. And are those who do the hard work of planting and harvesting fairly compensated?  While family farms such as those of the Amish who sell at the Reading Terminal are an exception, those who plant and harvest at large industrial size farms often endure miserable wages and working conditions.  The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, based in Immokalee, FL, which represents farm workers in a number of states, campaigns for fairer wages and better working conditions for farm workers, who often work under conditions that could be considered modern-day slavery.  Their Fair Food campaign asks fast food companies and food retailers for an increase of a penny a pound paid to tomato pickers. A penny a pound, such a small amount that could make a major difference in the lives of these workers.  After long campaigns, Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, Chipotle, among others, have agreed.  Wendy’s is still holding out – refusing an increase of a penny a pound. The UCC has supported the Immokalee workers in their efforts to get Wendy’s to sign on to pay the extra penny a pound, to improve the lives of these workers.

Jesus said, “One’s life does not consist of one’s possessions” – and thank God for that!  May we guard from being possessed by our possessions, and instead keep our eyes on the prize of following Jesus.  Amen.

Note: 

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers campaigns for fairer wages and improved working conditions for farm workers.  Learn about their Campaign for Fair Food at http://www.ciw-online.org/campaign-for-fair-food/   The UCC has supported this campaign; learn more at http://www.ucc.org/boycott_wendys