What Really Matters?

What would you do today if God told you would die tonight?

Kind of a heavy question. But think for just a moment: what if we knew for certain that our time was short? How would we live?

I would guess that most of us wouldn’t worry about the stock market and our retirement portfolios. We wouldn’t comb the adverts for buy-one-get-one-free deals. We wouldn’t bother buying the newest iPhone. In fact, we probably wouldn’t spend much time thinking about our money and possessions at all, unless it was to give them away. We’d have more important things to do with our limited, precious time, like being with loved ones and saying the things we’d put off saying for too long. Or going to places we love one more time, doing all those things that mean living life to the fullest. We might even regret all the time we spent doing things that now we realize didn’t really matter. As they say, no one says on their deathbed, I wish I spent more time at the office.

The parable we heard today is about just that – realizing, perhaps too late, what’s important about life. And it’s about money, yet another story Jesus told that has to do with how we think about our material possessions. Jesus talked a lot about money, more than we’re comfortable with, really, and this parable is pretty explicit in that regard. It’s not a parable telling us to divest from our IRAs and fling the money off the cliff, and it’s not telling us not to bother with IRAs in the first place. But it is quite clearly telling us to stop worrying about those IRAs, and to redirect our attention to what matters more – our love for God, and our responsibility to others.

The rich man in the parable has a problem with money. There are all kinds of clues in the parable as to the extent of the problem. For one thing, he’s not just your average farmer. Our translation reads, ‘The land of the rich man produced abundantly.’ The word translated ‘land’ could also read ‘country’ or ‘region.’ This man owns a lot of land, not just a little farm. He is the agribusiness of his day, CEO and owner of an enormous corporation. That’s not a neutral category, in biblical thinking: you don’t become super-wealthy without pursuing it pretty intently – without greed, in Jesus’ words. This rich man has taken much more than he needs to live. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, he has joined field to field until there is room for no one but him, left to live alone in the midst of the land. And now he has a surplus. But rather than consider how to share that, he has a little conversation with himself, revealing in its total lack of mention of anyone else. I will build larger barns, and I will have a place to store all this stuff, and I will say to myself, Enjoy! There’s no one else in his world – none of the workers on all of that land, none of his family, certainly no one of the poor in the region, it’s all him. He has more than enough for himself, yet he plans to keep it all for himself. And too late, he gets the word that he will die tonight – unable to enjoy all of the riches he has amassed for himself. You fool, God calls him – you unthinking one. You never thought of anyone but yourself – and now that self is being taken from you.

Nowhere in the man’s self-understanding is his dependence and reliance on others for all the wealth he has gathered. Others have toiled, others have labored, and he has reaped the profits – but their work means nothing to him. Nowhere in his understanding is the effect of his greed on others, all those who are unable to own land because he owns so much. Nowhere in his understanding is any kind of responsibility for others, or care and concern for them. And nowhere, certainly, is any sense that he owes all this abundance ultimately to God. And so he is a fool.

This rich man isn’t the only rich man who gets lambasted in scripture. Scholars have long noted the puzzling fact that although wealth is seen as a sign of God’s blessing, rich people are continually portrayed as examples of selfishness and lack of faith, while the poor are praised as examples of faith, those who rely on God for everything. It is amazing the church managed to last for so long with this kind of upside-down thinking at its core – it’s not the way the world works, to continually denigrate wealth and riches. Just look at how we bow down to the billionaires of our day. And throughout much of history the church itself was the biggest landowner in the area. And yet, the problem, scripture says, is not just the wealth – it is what wealth creates and reveals in a person’s life. This is one of those parables where Jesus paints a pretty extreme picture, a total caricature – although our oligarchs of today come pretty close, so maybe Jesus had a particular someone in mind too. But Jesus uses the extreme to make a point, and not just about the wealthy and uber-wealthy. A rich man like the one in today’s parable highlights the problem all of us have with material possessions. He’s the extreme, larger than life and so easier to see. But all of us need to be looking.

Material goods have a way of taking our focus. If we have money, we worry over keeping it; if we lack money, we worry over getting it. If we have stuff, we want more stuff, yet we also get overwhelmed with the stuff we already have. I know this firsthand: Jim and I are still sorting through things that moved across the country with us, every weekend struggling to get rid of things. Stuff, and money, takes our time and attention. And Jesus quite rightly wants to warn us away from that.

But Jesus is also warning us away from that self-centeredness the rich man expresses. He’s reminding us about stewardship, the biblical idea that we are not owners, but stewards, of all that we have. It’s a hard lesson to remember. It is so easy for us to think we;re the ones in the driver’s seat in all things. Our wealth and material success is our own doing. Our lives are our own. It’s our own bootstraps we pulled on to make this all happen. And yet, as God reminds the rich man, death is the ultimate announcement that we’re not in the driver’s seat at all. All the stuff we have, all the provisions we have put in place to protect ourselves, all the plans we’ve made, all of that evaporates completely when we die. All we really turn out to have is what we started with – life, the breath of God in us. Everything comes from God.

And that reminder should compel us to look around our lives today. Where did all of this stuff we have come from? Who worked to make it? What conditions did they labor under? Was the person who made this beautiful robe paid enough for their time? Is the money I’m spending on this new car worth it, or should I use it to feed people instead? Do I have so much now that it is more than I can possibly use myself? Whom else should I share it with? And how should I live with the little time I have left?

Jesus doesn’t give us simple black-and-white answers to these questions. But we are meant to ask them – to look at this caricature of the rich man and see just what features of ourselves we might recognize in him. To allow God and God’s priorities to sift through our money and our possessions, our time and our energy, and do some reallocating. Away from the greed and idolatry our culture upholds, and toward the trust and true abundance scripture urges us toward instead. Be on your guard, says Jesus, against greed of all kinds. It destroys your soul, ruins others, separates you from what is your true source of life in God. This is serious – we can see why Jesus talks about it so much. May we heed this warning, and embrace the good news of God’s abundant love for us and for all.