PROPER 13C – Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23; Psalm 90; Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11; Luke 12:13-21 -

5 August 2007 - A sermon preached by The Rev. Victoria Joseph Kempf for St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado

Do you remember that scene in the movie, “Jaws” when they catch and kill a huge shark, the animal called “a vast eating machine”? They take the shark into a marine laboratory, cut it open. Out of the stomach comes a bunch of half-eaten fish, an old tire, bones, a piece of a boat, a clock.

That’s us. We want so much. We are so full of desire. If you take a child, even a very young child, into Toys R Us, you will not have to teach the child what to do. Hours of training by Barney and Disney have taught a child that there is no higher calling than spending, getting more and more.

Our society has become a vast supermarket where we are trained to want. We live in a world of advertising which manufactures need. We don’t know what we are suffering from until TV tells us there is a cure for it.

Desire is contagious. I want something because someone else wants it. We don’t want to be left out of the great race for things.

Two years ago, Joe and I woke up very early (about 4:30) on the day after Thanksgiving. It seems as if the “shopping vibes” rocking the nation were in the air. So we thought, “We can’t sleep anyway, let’s get up and go see what all this is about.” So off we went to Kohl’s. It was astonishing.

The lines stretched all around the inside of the store, met in the back and then extended up the center. People were calling each other on the phone to report on what they had found. One person would be plopped in line as a place-holder (usually a sleepy husband) while others would run around and grab things to hand off to him in line.

It was exciting … for a little while. We got some things, terrific buys, really, stood in line with everyone else, and saw those same things for sale later in the week. It’s not an experience we will ever duplicate.

Sometimes people stand in line for days for the newest toy.

Gotta have it.

Gotta have it.

Gotta have it.

It was one of the founders of Woolworth’s Five and Dime who revolutionized merchandising. He had the bright idea to put merchandise out on tables for everyone to see. Before that, people entered a store and told a clerk what they wanted. The clerk would go and get the merchandise from the storage area. Woolworth’s was the first to lay the merchandise out to be seen, and touched, and the rest is history. His inventive method created a people who no longer know how even to name what we want. Show us everything and we will invent a desire for it all. The surest way to drive people like us crazy is to ask, “Well, what do you really want?”

We don’t know, other than that we want what we want and we want it now.

The Gospel story is about a man who has a lot of stuff. He is so rich that he has to demolish his barns and build new ones for his overly abundant harvest. Then the man said to himself, “Soul, take it easy. The economy is going my way. The Market is up. Relax.” Most would call this man a success, a prudent business person. And yet Jesus calls him “fool.”

The rich man says, ‘Soul, take it easy.’ But I wonder if he really did. What about robbers? What about conniving relatives and heirs? What if the economy tanked and he had to sell what he had just to survive? Having it all doesn’t make us rest easy. We want even more, and then worry about losing what we have. Our lives are ceaseless striving … we run like hamsters on a treadmill of desire.

We want the newest and the latest model. No sooner than we get it home, we realize that we no longer have the latest model – there’s something new.

Poet Emerson wrote “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Things are a demanding god.

What do you want, really?

Buddhism teaches that the purpose of religion is to get you over your wants, to help you to extinguish desire. Blessed, complete detachment is the goal. But Christianity is not like that. We don’t ask people to quench all desire, but rather to stir up desire for the right thing.

Our problem as humans is not that we are full of desire. Our problem is that we long for that which is unsatisfying. Having no idea what we really want, we breathlessly run toward everything. Love becomes lust, achievement becomes materialism, and vocation becomes drudgery. We make our lives our own creations, forgetting our Creator.

There’s a terrific movie that came out a couple years ago, “Stranger than Fiction”. In it a man lives a very simple life. He doesn’t run after things, in fact, is apartment is rather stark and simple. He doesn’t desire anything, really. He counts the strokes when brushing his teeth. He counts the steps he takes to the bus stop to go to work. He works as an IRS agent, and unfortunately, is pretty good at his job. But something happens to him. Something happens that causes him to desire more. Not more things, but more of life. Not stuff, but actual living. And that life includes fear. Not fear of losing stuff, but a fear more primal, a fear of losing the life he has finally learned to love.

Simple moments begin to mean something … cookies … friendship …finally love.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, I won’t reveal the secrets, but ultimately he experiences what Jesus called “losing your life to find it.” There are so many little things we experience every day which are hints, gifts, revelations of a good and loving God.

Bigger than the newest toy, more important than security, stuff or desire.

In Stranger than Fiction, the narrator says that after people fall from a great height, she thought that their faces, in death, looked peaceful, content. She said it was probably from feeling the wind in their hair as they fell.

Why don’t we count the wind in our hair, as one of our riches? The color blue in a clear sky, the feel of a baby’s skin, the touch of one other hand on ours? The sense of community and fellowship. The smell of baking cookies. The sound of crunching leaves underfoot in the Fall. The gift of time, given or received.

What if each of these moments is a teaser … a promise … a hint of the riches we have in the heart of God?

What if God would just love to bake us simple bread and offer us sips of rich red wine in the hope that we would turn aside from what we think makes us happy, and actually live … in the expansive love of the heart of God.

What do you want … really? What do you really want? And what do you have … really? What do you, through the grace and love of God, really have?