8/5/07

Rev. Dr. Jon Smoot 

 

Just in case you’re wondering if you hit some strange and frightening time-warp or worm-hole, and somehow it’s November and Stewardship season here in the dog days of August, let me put you at ease. Although I’m not talking about money, I do want to talk with you this morning about that most crippling of human conditions; and that is fear: Peel back even our most suave, and self-assured of veneers, and I know we’ll discover that all of us have had moments, seasons, or perhaps even lifetimes of anxiety. Fear of dying, fear of living, fear of not having enough, fear of disease, fear for our children, fear for our environment, fear of the unknown, fear of terrorist attack, fear of identity theft, fearful of our government, and now, fear of bridges. No wonder one of the fastest growing commercial sectors is the security business. Most fear has its basis in terror over loss of control. Some of you have expressed anxiety about your next pastor – what will he or she be like, or where will the next pastor want to take our church? When will the pastor come? – we’re anxious because the search process is something over which we have no control.

 

What’s fear got to do with our story today? Everything. Our story opens with a shout from someone in the crowd: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” Jesus immediately realizes that the man is afraid of losing out. We can assume that this is the younger brother in the family – Jewish law stipulated 2/3 to the older brother, 1/3 to the younger. This guy figures Jesus will side with him, since Jesus doesn’t seem to mind trashing other rules and regulations. Jesus doesn’t bite. Instead, he says, “Friend, who set me to be probate judge over you?” Jesus is not about to insert himself in a family feud over who gets the antique china set or grandma’s jewelry or Dad’s vintage Corvette Stingray.

 

Jesus decides that this guy’s question about money is a wonderful moment to teach about fear – where it comes from and how to overcome it. He uses a certain word a great deal in all of his teachings about wealth and possessions: Mammon – it’s Aramaic and means; “that in which you put your trust.” The story starts out on the monetary level, but quickly moves to trust. In what, or in whom, do we trust? Jesus knows our hearts and knows how quickly our hearts run away from home, run away from simple and single-minded trust in God and God alone, and that’s where fear starts. As soon as we diversify our objects of trust, fear gnaws its way into our bowels, fueling the compulsions and the anxieties that take over. It is fear that drives the universal human belief that having more things makes life better.

 

Jesus tells us to take great care and be on guard about greed. The Greek word we translate here as greed is pleonexia which means, literally, “Much-having.” Acquisitiveness. Now, one way this sermon could go is a finger-wagging, moralistic diatribe against the congregation, for excessive attachment to things and this parable is a cautionary tale to scare you into guilty faith and compliance with pledge requirements for our budget. I suspect that Jesus, hearing such a sermon, would fly up to the chancel and chase the minister out of the church with a whip.

 

Instead, look where the parable goes: A certain rich man is confronted with a very good problem: he doesn’t have enough barns or garages in his McMansion to handle an amazingly abundant harvest that the land provided. But this good fortune ironically plunges the man into anxiety and inner uncertainty. All of a sudden we find ourselves inside this man’s head and are listening to his internal monologue – and it’s all about him; not a whit of gratitude for the fact that it is the land that produced abundantly, not a whit about how he might use the bumper crop to feed and aid the community. Listen to him: The abundance has become a burden: “How do I manage my miracle? What should I do? I have no place to store my crops. I will do this. I will build bigger barns. I will say to my life, Life, you can now relax, eat drink, be merry and retire to the Northern Neck.”

 

One commentator notes that this kind of “mammon-sickness,” as he calls it, displays two clear symptoms: The first is Anxiety. That gnawing, unshakeable, low-grade anxiety that comes when we conduct our lives as if we were sovereign, that it all depends on us. It is a practical atheism, in which we say we believe in God, but live our daily lives as if there were no God. We are showered with gifts from God, but somehow wind-up figuring that it is all our miracle to manage. We’ll do anything to preserve the self-deception that we’re in control. As if. And anxiety and self-preservation drive us to clutch at anything: people, possessions, reputation, promises of security where there is no security, only the illusion of it. As the wise among us will attest, in clutching anything, we lose it. Jesus earlier asks, “What does it profit a person if they gain the world and lose their own soul?” The first symptom of mammon-sickness is Anxiety. Can’t change anything by being anxious, but that’s never stopped anyone from worrying.  

 

The second symptom of mammon-sickness, according to this commentator, is “neighbor-numbness.” This man in the story is neighbor-numb: other people don’t even exist for him. Although he has so much to share, he is so caught up in self-protection and security that others have slipped off his radar screen. Entire cultures can go neighbor-numb, which I fear is true of ours. Martin Luther King, Jr, in preaching on this text closed the sermon on this provocative question: “May it not be that the ‘certain rich man’ is Western Civilization? - Rich in things and poor in soul?” Poor in soul we can define as anxiety-driven and neighbor-numb.

 

The opposite of fear is not security, personal or national. You see, security is the ultimate human idol – and this idol can only create more fear and neighbor-numbness. In the name of security, our national fears are now perversely directed at immigrants and visitors to our shores. In the name of security, our national fears are legitimatizing torture of human beings, created in the image of God.

 

Let me bring this closer to home and turn the security question around: What right do we have to any claim of security when our neighbors a handful of miles away live in daily threat and reality of gun violence? What right do we have to any claim of security when we neglect to love and care for every other human sister and brother as Jesus loves us? What right do we have to any claim of security when we are personally and commercially choking the life out of the environment? There is no such thing as security as long as there is injustice, and greed, and contempt, for human life and hope or environment.  

 

I want you to note that Jesus does not call the man in the story evil or bad, and he is not chastised for his wealth. Jesus calls him a fool: He lives completely for himself, he talks to himself, he plans by himself, he dies by himself. He is a fool because he has forgotten about God, the giver of all gifts, and he has forgotten his neighbor, with whom he is to share his gifts. And in so doing, he forfeits his life. God does not take his life from him – the man has done that for himself. Our text ends; “So it is with those who store up mammon for themselves, but are not rich toward God.” Those last three words are better translated, “Rich into God.” There is wealth beyond measure in learning to trust God, utterly and completely.

 

You see, the opposite of fear is not security, it is trust. Our lifelong journey is to learn to pare down our multiple portfolios of misplaced trusts. God judges all of our misplaced trusts not as bad or evil, but as essentially untrustworthy – they are not worthy to bear the full weight and glory of the heart-trust of a human being. For the Christian disciple, trusting God does not mean throwing ourselves on an utterly unknown mystery and hoping for the best.

 

Rather, trusting God and God alone means trusting in the ultimate power and faithfulness of divine love and justice, propelling us back out into God’s world with good news of hope, and shalom and reconciliation. Trusting God and God alone means that our lesser hungers for security will evaporate over time, and with them, our fears. Rich into God means, like Lazarus, stumbling out into the light of day, ready to be unbound from self-concern, and ready to be open-handed and open-hearted to God’s world.

Thanks be to God!