The late, great Rev. Will Campbell, a Baptist from Tennessee who described himself as an itinerant preacher, once gave a sermon at Riverside Church, a huge, gothic church building that towers over the businesses and apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. On this particular Sunday, this old Southerner claimed into the pulpit of this hoidy, toidy, fancy church full of rich people and gave the Word. He said to the congregation, “Now I know what you’re thinking…how can we love Jesus and keep all this stuff,” and he gestured out toward everything. Folks looked at each other, some nodded, and they waited for the answer. “Well, he said,” ya can’t!” To the best of my knowledge, Brother Will was not asked back to Riverside Church.
Now, I don’t know what readings were offered on that Sunday that Will Campbell preached on the Upper West Side. Maybe they were the ones that we heard this morning, or maybe – because he was a Baptist – Brother Will just picked whatever readings he wanted. But that story is what I first thought of when I sat down with this week's Scriptures.
Because there is clearly a common theme. Solomon proclaims in Ecclesiastes in that wonderfully theatrical voice, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” The stuff that we’ve got, the successes that we seek, even our very lives themselves, it’s all vanity – it’s all driven by the desire to preserve the self. Paul, writing to the Church in Colossae, tells them to put to death whatever is earthly, and he names in that list greed, which he equates with idolatry. The desire for more and more stuff is the same, for Paul, as breaking the first Commandment, thou shalt have no other God but God. And Jesus in the Gospel from Luke tells the parable of a rich man whose business does so well, and he makes so much money, that he decides to hoard it all, rather than share it, and wouldn’t you know who won the pony, that very night, God takes his life, and all that stuff just goes to waste. Not exactly words of comfort this morning. What, then, are we supposed to do with such Scriptures?
There is much about the world that is different from the time when these Scriptures were first put down; heck, there is much about the world that is different from when most of you reading this blog were my age! In Jesus’ time there was no such thing as a 401K or pension plan – that we know of, anyway. Would Jesus say that investing in those sorts of things and putting our money aside like that is the same as the rich man who just kept hoarding his riches and never using them? Would Paul look at Millennials – my generation – and decry our greed because we don’t give to churches or charitable organizations as much as our elders due to the fact that the cost of education and basic living is so much higher for us? Would Solomon think that all our physical possessions are vanity?
As I see it, that’s a sort of black and white thinking, so to speak; an either-or mentality. There must be a right answer and a wrong answer. The Scriptures, of both the Hebrew Bible and our Christian Testament and Gospels, are a lot more gray, and when we consider that our modern ,Western world is so very different from the ancient, Eastern world that produced these texts, we can better appreciate the gray areas. Because one question that certainly isn’t black and white or either-or, and one that Scriptures like these invite us to consider is: how much stuff is enough?
What was enough for a family to live on in 1962 is not the enough to live on in 2022, for example. In 2007 when the iPhone first came out, having any cell phone was enough, and an iPhone was a luxury because not everyone had to have access to the internet at all hours of the day, but now that simply isn’t the case, and you can’t work in this world without one, meaning that a poor family cannot get by with just a flip phone but needs to constantly stay connected for their work or even to get notifications from their doctor. Perhaps worst of all, is that people today feel an overwhelming urge to judge and vilify folks when they raise legitimate concerns over the cost of housing or health care – "I got by just fine at that age," a person might say, or, and this is my favorite – "If she sold that iPhone maybe she could feed her kids." Vanity of vanities. Is there anything more vain than judging the actions of a brother or sister regarding the things that they do or don’t have or need in order to simply survive?
Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, says that there are three main obstacles to us, as Jesus puts it, inheriting the Kingdom of God; that is, knowing the fullness of God’s Kingdom here on earth. He calls them the 3 Ps – power, prestige, and possessions– which are, curiously, also the three temptations Jesus was faced with in the desert. When we do not understand what, in fact, is actually enough, we move into a scarcity mentality, a fear-based mentality, and that leads to a desire for more and more of those three P’s because, somehow, they make us feel more confident and more secure. This, then, blinds us to what should be our true motivation for wanting or needing anything at all.
So then we are invited by these Scriptures to search the deepest corners of our souls and ask ourselves: As individuals, have we made money and material possessions into idols, the driving force of our very existence, worthy of the attention and admiration reserved only for God? As a church are we compelled to give of our monetary gifts for the sake of beautifying a building alone, or to support our mission to serve the Church without walls; that is, God’s people in the world, namely the needy in our community and beyond – which is the point Brother Will was trying to make to Riverside Church. As a society, will we ever be able to determine what is enough, or better still, create a kind of society where everyone has enough – instead of our current one dominated by individuals who operate like the rich man in the Gospel, the kind of folks who use their wealth to travel into space instead of helping the poor. What is the deepest motivation of our hearts? Following Jesus? Or wanting more for the sake of wanting more?
One of the commentaries that I often use to help with preparing my sermons actually said that today’s readings might upset some people who are offended at what the Bible says about material wealth. The writer of the commentary even wondered how safe it was for us preachers to say something about material wealth form the pulpit. But it needs to be said. Our society has, indeed, been swayed by an idolatrous gospel of greed, and we need to refocus, especially now as we are trying to move out of pandemic that did nothing but hurt the poor and benefit the already insanely rich. We cannot follow Jesus and keep all our stuff if our reason for having the stuff in the first place is so misguided. That’s not the Gospel. That’s not Good News.
But what is Good News is the dream that God has for all of us. It began in the Garden, where we had all we needed and God walked with us in the evening breeze. It continued with the children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness begging to return to being slaves in Egypt while God pushed them forward in order to show them how to be different. It echoed through the prophets like Hosea and Amos, who cried out when the poor and foreigner were being oppressed and prayed for justice to roll down like waters. And it was given flesh and blood in the person of Jesus, who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable and called for everyone from the poor widows to the powerful elites, to see how much God loves them, and to know that such a love is enough.
This is shalom, God’s peace, this is the dream. And we Christians are bold enough to proclaim that it doesn’t have to be just a dream, but something that we can all work toward, when we search the motivations of our hearts, realize our security and confidence lie in God’s grace alone, and use what we have to lift up our brothers and sisters above ourselves. And that is anything but vanity.
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