What or Who's Your Idol?

What or Who’s Your Idol?
1 Timothy 6:6-19; Jeremiah 31:1-3, 6-15; Luke 16:19-31

My story is a lot like yours. When Paula and I got married, we had a few things of our own. We got a used bed frame from a friend and bought a mattress set and a sofa with wedding money. We furnished the rest of our apartment with pieces from our parents’ homes. When we moved to the first church manse, all we needed was the car, and half of a 20 ft. U-Haul truck. Eleven years later, when we moved to Waverly, we had acquired two children, a cat, and enough belongings to fill a full-size van twice, the car once, and the biggest trailer the mover had. The disassembled swing set was strapped to the back of the trailer. I would hate to think how much space would be required today, even after moving two children into their own homes.

In the  closing remarks of his first letter to Timothy, Paul tells the up and coming presbyter, “We didn’t bring anything into the world and so we can’t take anything out of it” (v. 7). That may be, but between birth and death, we grasp everything we can, like sailors clinging to the flotsam of a shipwreck. It’s as if our lives depended on how much we can hold onto. That’s why we don’t easily identify with the parable that Jesus told about the pearl merchant selling his entire stock in order to purchase the pearl of great price. We want all the pearls we have and the other one too.

As the bumper sticker says, whoever dies with the most toys wins. Its an economic world. Everything has to be latest and newest, bigger and better. The housing bubble and the recession we are still trying to get beyond, the military budget, the race for super-encryption that the NSA can’t yet decipher, even the massive outlays made for medical care – as wonderful as it is – are all symptoms of our unwritten, unconscious desire to cling to everything that we can get our hands on and our arms around.

The grocery store my mother shopped at would have occasional shopping sprees. The drawing winner would get ten minutes to go through the store and get as much in the shopping cart as was possible. Mom never won that drawing, but we would sometimes try to decide whether it was better to grab high-priced but perishable items or lots of lesser priced shelf stable items. We had a freezer, so we would probably have gone after meat rather than canned goods.

“We didn’t bring anything into the world and so we can’t take anything out of it.” So what are we doing with everything in between?

Paul wants us to grab onto something other than our checkbooks and retirement portfolios. I suspect that he would argue that people who seek to maximize their worldly worth, so as to not get underwater with overextended or sub-prime mortgages, are probably deeply submerged in the spiritual accounts mortgaged beyond all possibility in matters of spirituality.

That was probably the case with the rich man in Jesus’ parable (Luke 16:19-31). He may have had sumptuous Michelin five-star feasts and designer label purple linen clothes, but he was bankrupt in his spiritual portfolio. He wound up in the spiritual debtor’s prison with no way out.

“We didn’t bring anything into the world and so we can’t take anything out of it.”

Too often both the Timothy excerpt and the parable recorded by Luke have been used as cheap shots to condemn people with wealth or as sop for the poor urging upon them a pale future hope of eternal life.

Paul, in his words to Timothy, wanted to provide the basis for believers to shape the way they relate to others and to world. Paul wants Christ’s followers to cling to Christ first and foremost. He tells his readers to take hold of eternal life. This isn’t a futuristic goal, something we get for having behaved in our time on earth. Recent scholarship suggests that Paul was less future oriented and more concerned with the present than has been assumed.

When Paul wants believers to grab eternal life, he means now, in the ways that they live out their faith in Christ. We have no say in what happened before we were born (“we didn’t bring anything into the world”) and we won’t have any say about what happens after we are gone (“we can’t take anything out of it”). So the only effect we can have on the world, the only prospect we have making a difference, the only opportunity of being faithful, is while we are in the world. Eternity is now. “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!” (Mark 1:15).

Eternity happened when the “Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Christ’s coming not only interrupts present time with the eternal, but also converts it and creates new life. That changes how we look at life. As Jesus said so often, “You have heard that it was said, .... But I say to you.” The blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear: sometimes literally, always spiritually.

Paul again gives the commandment to seize,  to grab, to lay hold of, as he concludes his admonition to Timothy. “Tell people who are rich . . . to do good, to be rich in the good things they do, to be generous, and to share with others. When they do these things, they will save a treasure for themselves that is a good foundation for the future. That way they can take hold of what is truly life” (vv. 17-19). By this statement Paul sets up a contrast between real life and destructive life. Paul sees that the pursuit of riches – for riches’ sake – is the destructive life.

As he said earlier, “People who are trying to get rich fall into temptation. They are trapped by many stupid and harmful passions that plunge people into ruin and destruction” (v. 9). Paul’s grammar suggests that the damage he speaks of is not just the self-inflicted damage of the people who pursue riches, but also the damage they do to the people who are destroyed in the pursuit of those riches.

That is a very subtle distinction. And it is one that brings us all up short. Even those of us who perceive ourselves to be relatively poor are caught in the complicity of it. We want cheap electricity, for example, and we are willing to let miners get black lung disease to feed our electric meters. We want the freedom to drive anywhere at 60 or 70 mph, and we are willing to risk destroying coast lands for off-shore drilling, risk contaminating ground water through hydraulic fracturing, or make enemies of Islamic people, all because of our greed for petroleum. We want inexpensive clothing made for slave’s wages in fire-trap factories. We want low priced food laced with pesticides that cause chronic diseases in underpaid and uninsured migrant workers. We want. We want. We want.

The real life which Paul affirms is “richly provided” by God. It is not about us and our cravings for latest and newest, bigger and better, winners and losers. It is about a fullness of life that is to be shared, to be given and not taken. When we orient our lives around God, when we understand that we are but a single atom in the whole molecule of God-created life, then we can begin to scent out real life, true life, eternal life – all in the here and now. Focusing on God allows us to see what is temporary as well as what destroys ourselves and others.

Orienting around God is but a start. Unless we are careful, we will develop practices and rituals which will take the place of God, and start a new cycle of destructive life. Only as we keep giving away does the fountain of living faith, the well of living water, keep flowing.

“We didn’t bring anything into the world and so we can’t take anything out of it.”

We are not called to worship the sign of the dollar or even the sign of the church. We are called to worship the one whose sign is the cross.