Decluttering seems to be the new spiritual trend right now. Maria Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is consistently topping the New York Times Bestseller list, and was featured in articles in both Living Lutheran and The Christian Century. And Thursday morning while I was driving into the office and pondering what I was going to write for the sermon, the theme for The Diane Rehm show was The Lure of Minimalism. Seems like everyone is ready to sell you the next best thing to help you achieve the goal of not having so many things, which seems more than a little bit ironic.
The truth is I’m a bit snarky about the whole minimalist lifestyle; having lived it by default for the past fifteen years. There are only so many possessions you can hang onto when you move across the country once or twice a year. I remember several years ago talking to my cousin, who was waxing poetic about my free-wheeling lifestyle. How glorious it must feel to know that everything you own fits in the back of your car, and that you could, at a moment’s notice, pack up and move anywhere. “You know what else is nice,” I responded, probably snarkier than was really necessary. “Owning a toaster. Sometime you just want a piece of toast, and there is no good way to make toast without a toaster.” Now, before any of you rush out and buy me a toaster, I got one for Christmas last year, so I’m all set in the toast making department. My point is minimalism is it’s only desirable if you have it by choice. Freedom is only freedom if you’ve chosen it.
My own life example is fairly trivial, but there can be real danger in the zest for minimalism if it leads us to romanticize poverty. The fact is there is nothing more time-consuming, exhausting, and, ironically, expensive, as having nothing. When I worked at N Street, women would be lined up outside our door for the 7 am opening, because the night shelter closed at 6. Attempts to get housing were stymied by not having enough money for a down payment, but housing assistance meant hours in line at Department of Human Services, during working hours, an impossible task for someone who was working. They couldn’t buy in bulk, because you can’t save anything, so food, toiletries, etc., cost more. If they needed a car for work, they didn’t have credit for a loan, so they would be forced to deal with loan sharks and end up paying way more in interest. People in poverty have higher levels of stress, less time for self-care, and less money for nutrition, leading to higher risk of illness. And with less health benefits or jobs that offers sick leave, they often have to choose between medical care or feeding their families or keeping their homes. Poverty is only romantic if you’ve never been poor.
Of course, that’s not to say that wealth is the magic solution. The clichéd phrase “money doesn’t buy happiness” is cliché for a reason, it’s true. Ever read what happens to people after they win the lottery? They usually end up broke and miserable. And look at the man in our parable this morning. His land produced so abundantly, a veritable cornucopia of riches, that he had no place to store it. So he tore down his barns and built bigger ones, just to contain the expansiveness of his harvest. But listen to the preponderance of personal pronouns: “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops? I will pull down my barns, and I will store my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul…” My, my, my, the tone of man in the story bears more than a passing resemblance to that of a demanding two-year-old. This man is so obsessed with his possessions that they become a character in his story, the only other character in his story. They are his friends, his family, his community, his everything. Then God appears on the scene in verse twenty and says, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.” Notice there is a verb and object in this sentence, but no subject. We know what is being demanded, his life, but not who is doing the demanding. Since God is the one making the statement, we could assume God is the subject. But remember, the only characters in the story are the man and his possessions. So, what if the subject is the possessions? What if God is saying that the possessions themselves are demanding the man’s life? And with only two characters in the story, the man and the possessions, whose will the possessions be, when the man is gone? The possessions will have their freedom; the man will have nothing, not even his life.
In the Old Testament, wealth was often used as a sign of God’s blessing, but such blessings came with strict warnings about the judicious use of riches. A diligent study of scriptures demonstrate that the man’s good fortune would expect him to make provisions for his whole community, not store it up in barns so he and he alone could relax. Because, of course, he could not relax. He would instead be forced into the never-ending task of building bigger barns and more storage to satisfy his ever-increasing need for self-sufficiency and security.
So what is the man to do? If my earlier point is true, that poverty is expensive, exhausting, and bad for one’s health, and the point of this parable is true, that excessive wealth is stressful, exhausting, and bad for one’s health, what is possibly the good news that we take from this teaching from Jesus?
Let’s read on in Luke, and see what Jesus said after this parable. We’ll pick up at verse twenty-two:
“[Jesus] said to his disciples, ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well."
Do not worry, do not be afraid. That, I think is the overarching point of this parable. Stuff is not in and of itself inherently evil, but when stuff becomes a character in our lives, a character that separates us from God and from each other, the place where our heart lies, then stuff controls us. We don’t need to have less stuff in order to be closer to God; we don’t need to have more stuff to prove our value to God. Instead as we get closer to God, we will find ourselves a part of communities who share stuff so that all of us have the stuff that we need, be it more stuff or less stuff. Stuff itself is the symptom of the problem, the cause being that most human belief that we can do it on our own, that we do not need God or each other in order to set our lives in order. Whether it manifests in exhaustive efforts to simplify or desperate quests to have more, the sin is the same, the self-centered belief that we alone are the source and ground of our own security. This sin causes our stuff, be it too much or too little, to consume us, eventually demanding from us our very lives.
So the question then is not how do we have less stuff, or more stuff? The question is how would we live, if we were free from the burden of stuff? How would we walk through the world differently if stuff didn’t control us? Let’s use for an example, our church. I use this as an example because we’re already pretty good at this. I wasn’t here when you made the switch, but I’ve heard the growing pains stories about when Co-op first moved in. I’ve heard about the signs, the battles over toilet paper, the lessons on feet wiping, I know it was not an easy transition. But to a large part, you’ve done it. One of the things I absolutely love about being the pastor here, and one of the things that’s earned us the nickname around the synod as the unicorn congregation, is that this is really a place where no one blinks when the hallway is so stuffed with furniture we can barely make it to coffee hour. When a visitor comes and noticed the bulging clothing closet, we are more apt to gush about the ministry Co-op is doing during the week than to complain about the mess. That’s not to say that we don’t get frustrated, which is normal. I’ve lived in enough group houses to know that communal living is always a struggle, no matter how much you love your roommates, but for the most part you’ve made it work.
But we’re a small congregation, and this is a big building, and I know the expense of keeping up this building and paying for the ministry we do here is stressful. The budget never balances and we’re already surprisingly good at stewardship, so even as we are doing great work, that nagging question remains, how long will we really be able to make it here? How long will we really be able to keep the doors open, the lights on, and a roof over our, and the Co-op’s, heads? Being a member of a small, struggling church like Trinity is a full-time commitment, you can’t float along like you could in a larger, more stable congregation. So it may seem possible for us to ignore this parable, we are, after all, certainly not building up any barns to store our fabulously overwhelming resources. Heck, I would be happy if this barn had a few less plumbing issues. But reading this parable in conjunction with the section about worry that follows it, I wonder if we might hear in it the promise that God will give us what we need, a promise that frees us to hold even more lightly to the few things that we have.
And I think the blessing of being a small struggling church is, unlike the man in the parable, let’s face it, we already don’t have anything, so we don’t have to give up anything but the worry. We don’t have to give up anything but the fear. The thought I’d like to leave us with this morning, the truth that I hope drives all of the decisions we make throughout our redevelopment process, and really throughout the whole life of the church is this: God has given us the kingdom. It is already ours. Everything we need is right here. So how would we live, if we already believed that? What risks would we take, what blessings would we find, if we let go of any attempt at our own security and truly lived without fear?
Dear people of God, we literally have nothing to lose but our fear. So let’s dream big. Who is God calling us to be? Do we want a youth center, a housing program, a community center, a farm? How will we live with the abundance that we have? Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment