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Last year Mary Sue and I did what an average American will do 11.7 times during the course of their life.
We moved.
We left behind the little horse farm where we had lived for almost 19 years and moved to another little horse farm about a dozen miles up the road.
I can only say that cleaning closets, sorting clothes, packing boxes, and lugging furniture – and then doing the whole thing in reverse at the new place – is a task better undertaken by people at least 20 years younger. Exhaustion became a way of life for the better part of five months.
One of the more fascinating aspects of our experience was the phenomenon of junk.
As it turned out, we had quite a lot of it. I knew there were plenty of throwaway items gathering dust in our barn loft, and I suspected we would be making more than a few trips to Goodwill.
I ultimately contacted a local junk hauler last summer and suggested that we could probably fill an entire dump truck. It seemed like overkill when they pulled up with two trucks. But they quickly filled both. Later in the fall I once again reached out to the junk guys. “One truck should do it,” I assured them. Nevertheless, they arrived with two trucks. Yet again they filled both to the brim with used-up items large and small that we clearly no longer needed, and in some cases had forgotten we even owned.
I had no idea we were such junky people.
Jesus had something to say about the stuff we hold on to, and that inevitably fixes its hold upon us.
Consider the Parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12:15-21, where he tells the story of a farmer who hits the jackpot:
“The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink, and be merry.’
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”
According to Jesus, the object of life is amazingly simple: We are called to become rich toward God. Anything that gets in the way of that is the worst thing that could ever happen to us.
According to Kenneth Bailey, the late Middle Eastern cultural historian, the farmer in Jesus’ story has a different plan.
“The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop.” Right off the bat, Jesus makes it clear that this bumper crop is not primarily the result of this man investing six months of 80-hour workweeks. The ground yielded the grain. And who owns the ground? God does. Likewise, God owns the temperaments, the resources, and the brain cells that we use to make our living.
This farmer, however, is in a self-congratulatory mood. He says, “What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.” He thinks he’s quite a guy, and now he has the happy problem of figuring out what to do with his unearned surpluses. He decides to stockpile them. He will hang on to his stuff as a hedge against future need.
Things haven’t changed all that much in 2,000 years. People still tend to think that building bigger barns is the pathway to personal security. The primary difference is that we have so much more stuff.
As of last October, there are 52,301 self-storage facilities in the United States. A half century ago this industry didn’t even exist. Today it’s worth about $42 billion. That’s a lot of money just to make sure other people are watching our excess stuff 24/7.
Furthermore, this man hasn’t been talking to God about his next steps. He’s confidently having a conversation with himself. “I will say to myself, ‘You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’”
But then comes the thundering voice of God: “You fool! You were stockpiling these gifts for the future? The future is now.”
Without so much as a notice in the mail, God is calling in his loans. He says to the farmer, “This very night your life will be demanded of you.” The verb translated “demanded” was part of the vocabulary of first century economics. The farmer’s life has always been on loan – something he has obviously failed to grasp.
He isn’t a fool because he wants to store his crops, and certainly not because he is a person of little intelligence. In the Bible, someone who scores 1600 on his SAT can still be a fool.
This man is foolish because of what he thinks is going to bring him happiness. Everyone knows how this story is going to end. When someone dies it’s not unusual to hear people ask, “I wonder how much he left.” The answer is always the same. He left it all.
Everybody always leaves it all. And as Mary Sue and I discovered anew last year, there’s plenty of truth in the old adage, “Your kids don’t want your stuff.”
Make no mistake: Having money does bring comforts and a certain measure of happiness.
It’s wonderful to have a car that doesn’t routinely break down. And it’s great to be able to fill it with gas. And it’s a relief to be able to buy some better cuts of meat at the grocery. But such short-term joys must not be confused with finding meaning in life.
The transforming news is that you can be rich toward God. Right now.
Even if your bank account is empty. Even if you’ll never have enough money to purchase your favorite professional sports team. Even if you have enough throwaway junk to fill four dump trucks.
Don’t be a fool, Jesus says.
Having stuff will never lead to the joy of simply trusting God, which is what our souls crave most deeply.
Which means we can all go to bed tonight knowing we are very rich people, indeed.