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So Much Stuff              Luke 12: 13-21                     August 5, 2007

“All you need in life,” writes George Carlin in his book Brain Droppings, “is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff.”

That's all your house is,” he continues, “a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you're taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody's got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff.

And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn't want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you're saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That's what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get...more stuff! Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore.”

If I’m not mistaken, this is the third time, over the past year, that I’ve quoted George Carlin in my sermon.  The first time, you may recall, the subject was the Ten Commandments (Carlin thinks there should only be two), the second time was Carlin’s hilarious description of the difference between baseball and football; and now, here I am, quoting this philosopher/comedian once again.

So, by now, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind – I’m a pretty big George Carlin fan.

The truth is, I’m a George Carlin fan for two reasons.  First of all, he almost always makes me laugh, which is a good thing; but the second and more important reason is that he makes me think.

Like many successful comedians, Carlin has a knack for taking the common things in life and putting an absurd twist on them. By stretching an idea – taking it to an extreme – he not only produces a funny routine, but he often reveals a truth that’s worth listening to.  A truth that needs to be taken seriously indeed.

And in that respect – when you look at them that way – one could argue that the routines of George Carlin are a lot like the parables of Jesus.

For example, the underlying message of the “Place for your stuff” routine I quoted from a moment ago is right in line with the underlying message of the Parable of the Rich Fool, which happens to be our Gospel Lesson for this morning.

“Your house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get…more stuff,” Carlin writes. “Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff anymore.”

Compare that statement with Jesus’ parable.  The rich fool in the parable says pretty much the same thing as Carlin does:  “I have no place to store my crops,” he laments. “So I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.” “Then I will eat, drink and be merry.”

In both the parable and the comedy routine, the central focus is stuff – the stuff we accumulate, the stuff we save, the stuff that worry about. 

Most of us really love stuff, you see.  If we’re young, the stuff takes the form of athletic shoes, I-Pods and PlayStations, if we’re older it takes the form of gadgets for our home or accessories for our car or some other form of adult “toy.” 

The most popular sports and hobbies all involve the accumulation of stuff.  Why, even the biblically sanctioned pastime of fishing, these days, requires hundreds of dollars worth of equipment.

And just as Jesus was fond of reminding his First Century followers about the folly of storing up treasures on earth rather than being rich toward God, so Carlin and other social commentators are fond of reminding us 21^st Century westerners – particularly us 21^st Century Americans – that the accumulation of stuff is a pretty trivial pursuit – not likely to result in anything of substance.

Actually, Paul sums up the message pretty well in our Epistle Lesson for today.  “Set your minds on things that are above,” he writes to the Colossians, “not on things that are on earth.”  Translation:  “Don’t be preoccupied with your stuff.  Focus, instead, on your spirit.”

 All of us have heard this admonition before, haven’t we?  We know that one of the central components of our faith – we Moravians would call in one of the “essentials” – is this:  if we are to be who we are intended to be; if we are to live in a way that God would have us to live; if we are to enjoy the connection with God that God created us to enjoy, then we need to find a way to rid ourselves of our preoccupation with the stuff that makes up our material world.

If, when we wake up in the morning, the first thing that explodes in our consciousness is the pursuit of stuff – or the pursuit of the money that is necessary to accumulate stuff, then our relationship with God will suffer as a consequence.

Believe me, friends, I know that this central truth is much easier to talk about than it is to actually implement.  I know that as humans we are natural seekers of pleasure and that the best way we know of to satisfy our hard-wired need to find that pleasure is – in our culture anyway – to buy stuff.

Just look around you.  Every day, we are bombarded with unbelievably attractive examples of ways we can pursue happiness.  And, 99 times out of 100, those ways involve either the purchase of something – a new cell phone or a new car or a new set of golf clubs or something else that we had no idea we needed until we heard it cleverly described to us in print or on television or – these days – on line.

So the question becomes, how do we resist?  Since we know that we are by nature drawn to be preoccupied with earthly pleasures, and since we know that God calls us away from that preoccupation and toward something better, what can we do?

Is there anything, other than beating ourselves up and wringing our hands, that we can do to bring ourselves closer to the ideal that Jesus refers to when he tells us not to store up riches for ourselves but be  “rich toward God?”

Allow me to suggest three modest possibilities:

First, we can find a time in each day to ask for forgiveness.

Actually, I can think of no better way to begin a daily period of meditation and prayer than with the words “God, forgive me.” 

Personally, I find that just the act of saying those words – preferably aloud – draws me closer to God than almost any other exercise.  It doesn’t matter, by the way, that I know that we are already forgiven – the power of those three simple words is extraordinary. 

Perhaps it is because my natural tendency is to blame someone or something or create excuses.  Perhaps it is because asking forgiveness is an admission that I am not as strong as I think I am.  But whatever the reason may be, the forgiveness prayer – as difficult as it is sometimes  to pray– always moves me at least one small step closer to the “things that are above,” as Paul would call them, and away from stuff of this world.

Second, we can find someone – or even better, a small group of “some-ones” – who share our desire to grow in our faith, and our commitment to confront our human tendency to get swallowed by the daily temptation to let the priorities of the material world crowd out the priorities of God, and regularly spend time with that group.

Meeting on a regular basis with a small group of fellow Christians for study, reflection and fellowship should be a priority for every one of us. 

For sure, personal prayer is important.  And it is impossible to overstate the power of corporate worship in this meeting place.  But if we really want to grow in our faith and deepen our spirituality, we also need to find a way to work on that task with a small group of brothers and sisters.  Jesus’ decision to surround himself with a handful of close friends was no aberration.  On the contrary, it is a prescription for spiritual success.

And finally, we can find something concrete that we can do which, in and of itself, points us in a direction away from our natural tendency to accumulate stuff.   To put it in the vernacular, if you will, we need to find a concrete way to put our money where our mouth is.

Perhaps it is participation in a mission activity.  Perhaps it is teaching in our Sunday School or Vacation Bible School, perhaps it is serving on a committee or Board, perhaps it is making a commitment to tithe – or at least give proportionally.  Perhaps it is several of those things.

The commitment is different for each of us, but here’s the simple truth:  if I take a look at my life and at the way I spend my time and my money, and can’t find something I am doing that demonstrates my faith commitment to serve God and not just myself – to do something other than plod along, day after day in pursuit of stuff – then I am missing the boat.   I am doing myself, and my God, a disservice.

Christopher Hitchens’ book, entitled God is not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything is currently number 6 on the New York Times bestseller list.  It has, in fact, been among the top 10 bestselling nonfiction books for months.  And it is not alone. There is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. All of these authors have jumped on what appears to be a current wave of popular sentiment against all things related to God and religion.  It is now “in” to call yourself an atheist.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of Hitchens’ book this week and read it.  While I suppose it is well-written – Hitchens, after all, is a bright, well-educated guy – it is also pretty easy to dismiss this rant – and it truly is a rant – as the babbling of a dedicated, self-described religion-hater.

  That said, however, one truth, inferred, if not directly stated, by Hitchens in his book, stands out above all the rest, in my view:

Until people of God in general, and Christians in particular, stop watering down the clear message of our text for today – and, indeed the clear message of literally dozens of the other sayings of Jesus – namely, that our faith does not affirm our consumeristic, stuff-accumulating culture but rather challenges it and calls it into question, the potential, revolutionary influence of our faith will never be able to accomplish what our Lord laid out as his primary objective:  bringing to pass the Kingdom of God.

Or to put it differently, so long as we accept a business-as-usual attitude toward our culture and refrain from swimming upstream against the strong current flowing in the direction of stuff-accumulation and away from spiritual formation, we will slowly drown.  And our Church will drown with us.

The good news, however, is that our God is stronger than the prevailing current and that God doesn’t expect us to swim upstream with our own strength.   If we draw on the power of the Holy Spirit and hold on to each other and support one another we simply cannot be defeated.

The God that forgives us and is present with us when two or three of us are gathered together and blesses us abundantly when we work and give to support the work of the Body of Christ, our God has promised us victory.

Thanks be to God.                               AMEN