This is the video link:
07/31/22—Highland—Meute
“Rich Toward God”
Psalm 49: 1-12; Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2: 18-23; Luke 12: 13-21
Pearl: The value of being rich toward God.
Function: To energize listeners to find the wealth of giving away for the benefit of others and thus being “rich toward God.”
What is truly valuable to you?
- Friday morning, I listened to a news report on the terrible flooding in St. Louis, Missouri and on into Kentucky.
- A woman was interviewed who said that she lost her home and all of her possessions due to the high water which inundated her home and neighborhood.
- Then she went on to say that all of her family members are safe and okay. She expressed her gratitude that she did not lose her most precious possessions: her family.
- Despite her massive losses of property and possessions, she was thankful. Her family members were spared.
- The night before that, Thursday, a neighbor on our street was lamenting with deep sorrow the difficulty of that evening because it was the last night, he and his wife would have with two young girls they were fostering for the past two years.
- They had hoped to adopt them. My neighbor shared the heartbreak of his family, thanking friends for their prayers, and asking special prayers for the girls; the youngest only knew them as parents.
- Their sense of loss of what they so value is profound.
- Today’s scripture lessons bring us to reflect upon the accumulation of wealth and possessions and what is of true value.
- Solomon, in all of his God-given wisdom, became quite cynical in the thought of how all that he had accumulated would possibly be squandered by his heirs.
- He called it “vanity…a chasing after wind.”
- Jesus was asked to settle a dispute between family members over matters of inheritance.
- It is a pity how such matters split families and poison relationships.
- It is so sad to see how when wealthy individuals approach death, the sharks begin to circle around as if chum was thrown into the water.
- Solomon, in all of his God-given wisdom, became quite cynical in the thought of how all that he had accumulated would possibly be squandered by his heirs.
Today’s sermon is on economics and the use of wealth and resources. You may say to yourself, what do you, Pastor Ray, know about such things. You are a pastor and preacher of the gospel. It turns out that a very large percentage of the scriptures comment upon matters of money and the use of our resources.
The message is that wisely sharing and passing along what we have acquired extends God’s reign in the world as it blesses and provides for others. And in so doing value is created.
The wisdom literature of the Bible comments on the use of wealth a good bit. Today’s passages from Psalm 49 and from Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1 and 2, provide a bit of a cynical picture of the laying up of wealth.
- “When we look at the wise, they die; fool and dolt perish together and leave their wealth to others. Their graves are their homes forever, their dwelling places to all generations, though they named lands their own” (Psalm 49: 10, 11).
- Solomon concluded, “I hated all my toil in which I toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me—and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 2: 18, 19).
- These conclusions could be from those who made the service of money their god rather than the service of the living God.
- This past week the “Mega Millions” jackpot was as large as it ever was.
- How many of us fantasized about the ways in which such wealth would change our lives dramatically and provide a very substantial and new sense of security?
- It begs the question, “Why don’t we fantasize in a similar way about the security that our Gospel provides?” Or the security that our Lord God provides for us?
The storing up of wealth in bigger and bigger barns should not be the source of our security. As Jesus indicated in the parable, that very day could be our last day of life.
Wisely sharing and passing what you have accumulated ethically, compassionately, and responsibly provides for the welfare of others and therefore extends the realm of God in the world.
So, what makes our wealth real? How can what we have accumulated become valuable?
- When I first asked that question my mind went to when Jesus invited the “rich young man,” who asked Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, to sell all that he had, give the money to the poor, and then join in following him.
- This young man had acquired a great deal and could not part with it as Jesus invited him to do. Jesus must have sensed that his Lord was his wealth.
- Hopefully this young man learned from Jesus after all, and did a lot of good with his fortunes on behalf of serving others.
- Jesus also spoke in his “Sermon on the Mount” of “laying up treasures in heaven.” He said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6: 19, 20).
- What did he mean?
- The very things we give away for the good of others have a way of staying with us for eternity.
- The things we give away and pass along for the good of others enrich us forever, unlike the actual dollars and cents which rust and deteriorate and which can be stolen.
- Wise investment and the building of wealth is not a bad thing. Much wealth has done tons and tons of good.
- I am speaking of finding your security in wealth as opposed to finding it in the reign of God.
- What did he mean?
- Nancy and I are in a mode of cleaning out and decreasing a lot of what we have stored up.
- We have taken car load after car load to Mission Santa Maria near our home, and including our own Threads of Hope clothing ministry here in Highland.
- We both feel a lot better about these possessions now that we have passed them along to those who could benefit from them.
- We were not benefitting from them as they sat in our home. Now we are actually feeling better about them since we have given them away to others.
- We have taken car load after car load to Mission Santa Maria near our home, and including our own Threads of Hope clothing ministry here in Highland.
- Sam Polk related his relationship with massive wealth in a piece he wrote in the New York Times in 2014:
- In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.
- Eight years earlier, I’d walked onto the trading floor at Credit Suisse First Boston to begin my summer internship. I already knew I wanted to be rich, but when I started out, I had a different idea about what wealth meant. …
- I’d learned about the importance of being rich from my dad. He was a modern-day Willy Loman, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to materialize. “Imagine what life will be like,” he’d say, “when I make a million dollars.” While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality he sold kitchen cabinets. And not that well. We sometimes lived paycheck to paycheck off my mom’s nurse-practitioner salary.
- Dad believed money would solve all his problems. At 22, so did I. When I walked onto that trading floor for the first time and saw the glowing flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a fighter plane, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It looked as if the traders were playing a video game inside a spaceship; if you won this video game, you became what I most wanted to be — rich. …
- Over the next few years, I worked like a maniac and began to move up the Wall Street ladder. I became a bond and credit default swap trader, one of the more lucrative roles in the business. Just four years after I started at Bank of America, Citibank offered me a “1.75 by 2” which means $1.75 million per year for two years, and I used it to get a promotion. …
- But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember [him] saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”
- I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.
- From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that.
It is all “vanity and a chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes) if you do not ethically, compassionately, and responsibly share your resources and pass along generously from what you have acquired for the benefit of others.
Upon these “others” we should place our greatest value.
Friends, it is as we do this, that we become “rich toward God.”
