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Creekside Church
Sermon of May
25, 2008
"Stuff"
Matthew
6:24-34
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Rev.
David Bibbee
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Years
ago, caged canaries were a common and necessary accessory in coalmines.
Canaries have a highly sensitive metabolism. When a canary died in
a mineshaft it signaled the presence of deadly methane and carbon
monoxide, and alerted the miners to evacuate. These little winged
sentinels saved the lives of many miners.
Today, the decline
and disappearance of species of insects, birds, and plants are signaling
that something is wrong in our environment. They are an early warning
system alerting us to dangers, which must be dealt with now.
Today I will
identify a sign that things are out of kilter in our culture. Two
weeks ago, on the outskirts of the village of Birchwood, Wisconsin,
population 518, I saw a dead canary. You couldn't miss it. Nothing
changes much in Birchwood. It takes quite a while for new trends
to make their way to this quiet little village. The canary wasn't
there last year, but there it was on County Road F -- two rows of
self-storages units.
In addition
to all the other crises impacting our world, the Wall Street Journal
recently identified another -- the storage crisis. We've run out
of places to store all of our stuff. The size of families has decreased
since 1970, but the size of the average house has increased by 40%!
The hyper-houses popping up across Elkhart County with their walk-in
closets, cavernous basements, and three car garages still aren't
big enough to hold all of our stuff.
The comedian
George Carlin performed a routine that exposes America's addiction
to things. He says that life is all about accumulating stuff, then
finding a place to put it. A house is a pile of stuff with a lid
on it. We're protective of our stuff. We lock it up and install
security systems so we won't have to worry about someone stealing
our stuff -- like the fourth grade math test we've kept for forty
years.
Secure in the
knowledge that our stuff is safe, we go out and buy more stuff.
Vacations are challenging because we have to decide what stuff to
bring along. We pick it, pack it, and when we get to where we're
going we unpack it and put our stuff in the places where it belongs.
There's bathroom stuff, drawer stuff, and closet stuff, and after
it's unpacked we realize there is a problem. There are more places
than our stuff can fill, so we must go out and buy more stuff to
fill it!
Moving is a
back-breaker and an eye-opener. When Sue and I moved, the number
of things we've collected over the years astounded us. Lots of boxes
have yet to be opened because we don't know where to put everything.
More than once we've asked each other, "Do we really need all
this stuff?" Without saying the word, we both know the answer.
An anthropology
professor at the University of California did a study of our consumer
society. She writes, "Twenty-first century American is the
most materially saturated society in global history." As
I read her conclusions this statement jumped off the page for me
-- "Finding a place to store all our material possessions has
become 'an overwhelming burden' for most middle class families."
This explains why storage facilities are growing like housing developments,
and not even Birchwood, Wisconsin is exempt!
We are burdened
by and buried under mountains of stuff. Christians and those who
are not have a consumption addiction. The more we get, the
more we want. The more we get, the deeper our dissatisfaction grows.
Advertising has conditioned us to equate happiness with acquisition,
and has given us a bad case of what Tony Campolo calls, affluenza.
In the closing
verses of last Sunday's lesson from Matthew, Jesus ordered the disciples
to make more disciples. "Take my message to all the
nations. Teach my commandments -- be salt and leaven and light.
Transform the world by demonstrating what life is like lived by
the principles of God's kingdom." The trouble is, the world
does not take kindly to kingdoms with competing claims. Long ago
the world learned that the best way to neutralize the influence
of the church is not by threatening it, but by seducing it.
There's no denying
that you have been seduced. I have been seduced. The American church
has been seduced. We are wedded to stuff. We're not conscious of
it, but our possessions give us a sense of identity. When you visit
Sue and me, you will see paintings, photographs, and carvings of
birds and other wildlife all around the house. Our home has a nature
theme. The things we display say something about who we are. The
things we collect express our love of God's gift of nature and the
pleasure it brings.
The things we
are attached to give us our sense of identity. But we get into trouble
when we feel we lack something. Advertisements push a product, and
we buy it. Months later another version with more power,
more memory, and more speed comes along. Suddenly
we're not satisfied with what we've got, so off we go to replace
it.
We've been seduced
with chronic dissatisfaction to the point that we no longer own
our possessions -- they own us!
Our overabundance
of stuff doesn't just create a storage issue but a spiritual issue.
There are some things that cannot be done. Jim Croce sang, "You
can't pull on Superman's cape, and you can't spit into the wind."
Arabs have a saying, "There are two things that cannot
be done -- retrieve the spent arrow and the spoken word. We've heard
the expression, "You can't get blood out of a turnip,"
and "You can't fight city hall." And Jesus said:
"You
can't worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you'll end up
hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other.
You can't worship God and money both." (Matthew 6:24
The Message)
The "prosperity
gospel" that is so popular these days teaches that God wants
us to be materially blessed. Love God by giving to God and he'll
see to it that you get the good stuff. The slick, pinned-striped
preachers who preach this nonsense misuse the Bible in a ways that
oppose the overall biblical teaching about material wealth. The
Bible affirms the good that money can do to help the poor, alleviate
suffering, fight injustice, and expand the reach of Christ's church.
But it warns us that our stuff can separate us from God.
It is not necessarily
a curse to be wealthy nor is it a virtue to be poor. Proverbs 30:8
says, "Give me neither poverty nor riches… lest I be
full and deny you, or lest I be poor and steal in the name of my
God." Having things is not a sin. Stuff is value neutral,
but not what it does to our relationship to our first love. If we
are not careful, using things and loving people turns to loving
things and using people.
Jesus not only
understood the perils of possessions. He understood what drives
the desire that makes us rich in things and poor in soul. The reason
we bury money and all it buys deep inside our chests is ANXIETY.
These anxious days we're living in rub off on us. What if gas hits
$5 a gallon? What will happen if we're in a long recession? What
if our house doesn't sell? What if the stock market slump keeps
on taking big bites out of my investments? What if we don't have
enough money to run the church?
When we're
anxious we draw in on ourselves and refuse to go into the world
to make disciples, teach the love of Jesus, and baptize people into
his Kingdom. When we're anxious we curl up into fetal balls and
whimper, "We can't! We don't have the means. We hold tight
to what we've got or we'll lose it." We are unsure there's
a safety net beneath us. Better be safe than sorry. Better see to
our own security. And before you know it, trust is grounded in goods
instead of the goodness of God. An anxious Christian is an oxymoron.
"Therefore
I tell you, do not be anxious about your life and what you shall
eat or drink or wear. Isn't your life about more than food and clothes?"
Jesus said that. There's an important word in this passage -- LOOK.
In the Greek, the word that is translated "look" is emphatic
and strong. "LOOK HERE, PEOPLE! Open your eyes and look INTENSLY."
What did Jesus say we are supposed to look at? Not numbers. Not
Dow Jones and NASDAQ. Not the gas pump. Not the headlines. Not the
next thing to roll off the assembly line.
He said, "LOOK
at the birds of the air. They don't plow, plant, reap and store
their crop in four-story silos, yet God feeds them. Doesn't God
value you more than a goldfinch? Are you anxious that last summer's
wardrobe will be out of style this summer? LOOK at the lilies of
the field. They don't try to out-fashion the daisies. But not even
Solomon dressed to the nines could beat a lily in a beauty contest.
If God cares for birds and flowers, doesn't God care even more for
you, his children?"
Dan Gilbert
is a psychologist at Harvard. He studied what it takes to make people
happy. Here is what he discovered: "Once you have enough to
meet the basic needs of food and shelter, incremental increases
of wealth and material possessions have little effect on happiness."
Duh!!
D. H. Lawrence
wrote a story called, "The Rocking Horse Winner." It is
the story of a family that was always desperate for money and lived
way beyond its means. The little boy in the family named Paul accidentally
discovered that if he raced his rocking horse, the names of winning
racehorses would mysteriously pop into his head. The family had
a goldmine in Paul's ability to name winning horses. His gift won
the family race after race, and money flowed like a river into their
bank account. But their fabulous wealth didn't satisfy. The more
they won, the more they wanted. The more they won, the harder and
faster they pushed little Paul to rock his horse. In the end, the
attempt to satisfy their appetite for money caused Paul to die of
exhaustion on his rocking horse.
We can't have
it all and have a committed relationship with God. We can serve
God with money, but we cannot serve God and money. What the world
calls "the good life" with stuff overflowing isn't simply
incompatible with Jesus. It is hostile to Jesus. The more we have
for ourselves, the more leftovers there are for Jesus and the mission
of his church.
How much of
our time do we spend thinking about stuff? How much energy goes
into the protection and upkeep of things compared to the time we
intentionally spend with our Maker? Do we care more about nice things
or broken people? I'll leave it up to your to sort out the implications.
A Quaker farmer
posted a sign by the road that said: "Free Land -- 40 Acres."
But the line below gave a condition. "Free Land -- to the person
with a satisfied heart and mind." A passerby read the sign
and raced up the lane to the farmer's house. He approached the old
Quaker and said, "I saw your sign and I'm here to get the free
land." "Did thee read the condition?" the farmer
asked. "Indeed I did," the inquirer replied. "My
heart and mind are content, and I want for nothing." And the
Quaker asked, "Then why dost thee want the land?"
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