Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost: Whoever Dies with the Most Toys, Still Dies

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23

Psalm 49:1-11

Colossians 3:1-11

Luke 12.13-21

While, of course, the Greek of the New Testament has no parenthesis – or punctuation for that matter – I was drawn to the parenthesis in the translation of Paul’s letter to the Colossians in which he equates greed with idolatry.  In our 21^st century mind-set we have at least some understanding of greed.  Idolatry, however, is no longer really part of our common currency; yet still, disguised, it is all around us.  It is all around us, because we human beings seem to be hard-wired for it, we must worship something.  When I was a small boy growing up in a Roman Catholic school, I imagined idols to be like the large heads on Easter Island; and I imagined idolaters as those who lay prostrate before them.  However, the idol and idolatry are much more subtle than that, and they make themselves present in the most covert of ways.  At its essence, the idol requires of its adherents everything they are and have, and in return promises everything they desire.  The problem is that ultimately the idol can’t or won’t deliver – at the very least.  At the worst, once you have given everything required, you don’t find yourself free to enjoy the benefits promised; but instead find yourself trapped by the idol, by its demands and responsibilities. 

We can perhaps begin to discern Paul’s correlation between idolatry and greed;  greed:  “acquisitive or selfish desire beyond reason”; and while, it certainly is easy to concur that greed is a bad thing, do we ever really try to understand its compelling attractiveness or its undermining destructive power?  Are we willing to go into the dark places where it lives to discern it multitudinous disguises?  Are we willing to examine ourselves and unmask our own and varied devotion to it, that is, our idolatry?  If we are not, then no matter how much we may decry greed, we will more than likely end up its slaves, because – like the need to worship – the desire to possess beyond reason is so a part of us, particularly since we convince ourselves that our money and possessions, and our devotion to them, will keep us beyond the grasp of the uncertainties inherent in the human condition.

There is in all this another word that comes into play: “avarice”.  Now, if greed is “acquisitive or selfish desire beyond reason”, avarice is actually “extreme greed for wealth or material gain”.  The medieval theologians rightly understood avarice as particularly pernicious because of its very insatiability.  In short, when is enough, enough?  This too is a question which we must ask ourselves: in any situation, in any enterprise, how much is enough?  Avarice always traps us into believing that there is never enough at the present, and that only when we have accumulated thus much or achieved X, then we will have enough and then we will be able to enjoy the fruits of our labours.  Yet, somehow enough never happens.  Isn’t that exactly the kind of thinking Jesus is warning against?  Isn’t it exactly what this fellow in the parable said to himself.  Seeing the abundance he had amassed, “he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’  Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.  And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ ” (Luke 12:18-19)  What are the chances, do you think, that after building his new barns he would have relaxed?  More than likely slim, because to the avaricious enough never is enough, and only in the end does he learn the truth that “whoever dies with the most toys, still dies.”  The end of idolatry is always death in one way or another, because only God can give us what it is we are really looking for as we run around trying to possess and control everything in sight.  Only in God can we find the validation we long for, only in God can we find our truest selves, only in God can we find lasting security, only in God can we find fullness of life and freedom.  Whenever we believe that something or someone else can provide those things for us, we have entered into the world of idols and idolatry, and no matter what they promise, no matter what we render to them, they will eventually disappoint and abandon us.

For us who live within a capitalist system, greed and avarice are especially dangerous because our devotion to them can easily be disguised as “fiscal responsibility”.  In a society whose the guiding mythos is the self-sufficient pioneer who pulls himself or herself up by their own bootstraps, we can often forget that in the end all things are really gift and all things are really God’s.  Worshipping at the altar of avarice, we can avoid facing the truth – at least for a time – that no amount of money, possessions or achievements will preserve one from the ravages of time, neither from the inevitability of death, and that ultimately we must let go of everything –absolutely everything – and that no matter what we do or how well we have prepared we cannot control that eventuality: “I  hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun,” says the preacher in Ecclesiastes, “seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me – and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish?” (Ecclesiastes 2:18-19)  Certainly, true wisdom lies in accepting – while we are still alive – that not even what we toil for is ultimately our own; indeed, that it is only ever a loan.  All those toys and trifles we amass and guard so carefully, will one day slip out our hands and out of our reach, and the stark reality will hit us that “whoever dies with the most toys, still dies”. 

This does not mean that we should avoid wealth altogether, that we should not make responsible and reasonable provision, but that wealth for wealth’s sake is nothing more than futile idolatry, not to mention just down right selfishness.  Andrew Carnegie, the industrial tycoon and philanthropist who gave to the us our own Carnegie Library here in Hanford, is quoted to the have said that “surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.”  In other words, all things are God’s and those who are blessed with them are called not to hold on to them, but to distribute them according to the needs of the greater community.  It seems here that while storing up treasure, Carnegie was still rich towards God and knew that dying with the most toys was far from winning, but indeed a kind of defeat, declaring as much when he also said that “the man who dies rich dies disgraced”.

Greed, avarice – they are just other forms of idolatry; ways of convincing ourselves that there are things more trustworthy, more secure than God, that we can be shielded from the uncertainties of the world by amassing enough, while at the same time never allowing ourselves to discern realistically what enough is, and keeping us on the treadmill of accumulation for accumulation’s sake.   Yet the idol always disappoints, and our devotion to it will only earn for us in the end the stark words in Luke’s Gospel: “You fool!  This very night your life is being demanded of you.  And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Luke 12:20); or, more succinctly, “whoever dies with the most toys, still dies”.