No one can serve two masters. Either you will
hate the one and love the other, or you will be loyal to the one and have
contempt for the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
--Matthew 6:24 CEB
I guess it was the combination of nice weather and being
unable to have garage sales earlier in the pandemic, but my neighborhood was
full of them this morning. This wasn’t a neighborhood-wide sale but rather a simultaneous
spasm by people who all had the same idea. I got to the church later than
normal this morning, because I stopped at a couple or ten of them. I’m a sucker
for garage sales and I always have been. The possibility of getting something I
want or need for a deal was bred into me by a father who missed his true
calling as a horse trader.
At middle age, however, I’ve found I enjoy garage sales less
than I used to. Just like this morning, most of the time I look over what
people have and find nothing I want or need. I already have too much stuff.
Between my wife and I, we have three sets of parents who have down-sized in
their retirement. (Her parents divorced and are both remarried.) In our
basement and in our closets, we have stuff they passed on to us, much of it we
will never use. We accepted a lot of these parental castoffs, because our
parents couldn’t bear to part with them and keeping them in the family eased
their struggles with letting go. A time of purging looms in our future
like a monster in a horror movie waiting to jump out at us.
Another reason garage sales don’t thrill me like they used
to is I’ve lived long enough now to understand more stuff doesn’t equal more
happiness. Once you move out on your own and eventually fill your own living
space with what you like/need, there reaches a point where having more is too
much. A scale tips from buying what you need (or at least what a typical middle-class
American believes they need) to mindless consumption. There’s a good reason why
self-storage units are one of the most in demand businesses today. Possessions
can become a trap where we serve them rather than them serving us.
Comedians and writers I enjoyed growing up pointed out the absurdity
of allowing our things to control us rather than vice-a-versa. Stephen Wright said
in his hilarious deadpan delivery, “You can’t have everything. Where
would you put it?” Erma Bombeck quipped, “The odds of
going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread
are three billion to one.”
Struggles with material consumption failing to meet
spiritual needs aren’t new. Every religion and every philosophy has addressed
our human propensity for ascribing ultimate meaning to finite things. Yet, the
modern western economy is based upon consumer spending, and so literally many
people’s jobs and retirement investments depend upon more people buying more
stuff they do not need. The scale of the pressure to find our meaning and
purpose in things is greater than ever before.
This leads to serious spiritual pitfalls. Arthur Simon, former president
of Bread for the World, wrote in his classic book How Much is Enough?, “When things are valued too much, they lose their value because
they nourish a never-satisfied craving for more. Conversely, when things are received
as gifts from God and used obediently in service to God, they are enriched with
gratitude. As sages have said, contentment lies not in obtaining things you
want, but in giving thanks for what you have.” I don’t know about you but I haven’t seen many commercials by
multi-national corporations urging me to be grateful for what I already have.
Our need to consume and possess more
and more also comes with deep ethical considerations that if you’re like me, you’d
rather not consider. Liberation theologian Jon Sobrino writes in his book The
Good Life, “’What's
wrong with wanting a good life?’ people may ask, taking it for granted as
their manifest destiny. We have already hinted at the answer: the
precipice of dehumanization. In our world, structurally speaking, "the
good life" is only possible at the cost of a "bad
life" and death for the poor.” I’m too busy ordering my next Frappuccino
to consider whether the person who picked the coffee beans my expensive drink
is made out of was fairly paid.
Of course,
Jesus warned us about all of this, but we never seem to heed his teachings. We
can’t serve two masters. We can’t serve God and wealth. In a society like ours
where we are bombarded by messages saying we don’t have enough of this or that,
it’s difficult to consider what wealth we do have. Wealth belongs to the 1% not
to me. Yet, compared to most people on earth and most humans who have ever
lived the average middle-class American is indeed wealthy. If we begin the
difficult task of differentiating between our wants and needs, our wealth will
be revealed. Then, perhaps, we can begin to grasp the truth that the most
important things in life do not fit into our online shopping carts.
My wife
has a bumper sticker on her car which says, “The best things in life aren’t
things.” I haven’t put a similar bumper sticker on my own car, at least not
yet. I’m still stopping at garage sales and still struggling with the deluded
hope that the God-shaped hole inside me can be filled by something I buy.
Grace and
Peace,
Chase
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