Episodes
Sunday Aug 04, 2013
Pack Light
Sunday Aug 04, 2013
Sunday Aug 04, 2013
Rev. Dean Snyder
Luke 12:13-21
Our own Theresa Thames is in the process of having her ordination in the American Baptist Church become a United Methodist ordination and officially becoming an elder in the United Methodist Church. Next Sunday Theresa will preach the sermon that will be reviewed by the Baltimore Washington Conference Board of Ordained Ministry as they prepare to receive her as a United Methodist pastor. Please be here to support her as the sermon is videoed.
So we asked Theresa to take the lead in planning the entire August teaching series.
She chose for this Sunday when I was scheduled to be the preacher, a text about a person who had decided he had enough to live on the rest of his life and that he didn’t need to work anymore and could just spent the rest of his life, eating, drinking and being merry. We might say it is a story about a person who had decided to retire.
I’ve been trying to figure out if Theresa chose this text intentionally for me because what happens after this guy in Jesus’ story decided to retire was not so good.
When I am retie next year, Jane and I will be moving. Hardly a week goes past when one or another of us looks at our house and say: “What are we going to do with all of this stuff? How did we accumulate so much stuff? Whatever will we do with it when we move?”
We have too much stuff. I wonder if anybody else has this problem.
I have not done the research that I am about to share with you. It was done by John Ortberg, pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church.
Here is Ortberg’s research:
In 1950, the average size of a house in the United States was 983 square feet, and it housed on average 3.37 people. By the year 2011, the average house was 2,480 square feet, and it only housed, on average, about 2.7 people.
I was born just a few years before 1950, so in my lifetime the average size of a house in the United States has tripled and the average number of people living in the house has decreased by .6 of a person.
But, in spite of having much larger homes, our homes are still not large enough to hold all of our stuff. So we started putting our stuff into our garages. Ortberg found one study that showed that in 75 percent of homes in the US, people could not put their cars in their garages because there was too much other stuff stored there. Three out of four homes with garages have so much stuff in the garage their cars won’t fit.
Somewhere within the last 50 years someone had a brilliant idea and decided to build buildings to rent space to people so that we would have even more space than our homes and garages to keep our stuff, and the self-storage industry was born. So now we can rent space for the extra stuff we want to buy but don’t have room for in our house or garage.
I often pass a place on New York Avenue coming into DC called U-Store where you can rent a ten foot by ten foot room for your stuff. The rent varies from $170 to $211 a month depending on which floor your room is on. Apparently the ground floor and the penthouse are the most expensive and the most prestigious places to rent to keep your stuff.
The self-storage industry has become a major business in America. 2.35 billion square feet of building space is devoted to self-storage … places to keep our stuff that won’t fit in our houses or garages. That is three times the size of Manhattan Island. Self-storage is a $22 billion industry. For the last 35 years, the self-storage industry has been the fastest growing area in commercial real estate.
There is now a Self-Storage Association … an association of self-storage professionals. Its office is in Alexandria. The SSA has 6,000 corporate members. It will have its fall conference and trade show September 22-26 in Los Vegas when Bob Bader and Dean Jernigan will be inducted into the Self-Storage Hall of Fame.
A $22 billion dollar industry devoted to extra space to keep our stuff.
When people don't pay their rent, the people who own the space get to take their stuff, and auction it off to other people. I’ve never seen it but John Ortberg says that a couple of years ago they started what became a hit TV show called Storage Wars about auctioning off people’s stuff when they got behind on the rent for their self-storage room. The show became such a big hit that it spawned other shows like Storage Wars: Texas and Auction Hunters.
Now I know there may be good reasons why people put their stuff in storage. We have a daughter living overseas who keep some of her stuff in self-storage because our house is so full of our stuff that we don’t have room to store her stuff for her.
And I know people who keep their stuff in self-storage while they live somewhere else and rent out their homes wherever it is they expect to go back to someday.
But still, basically we spend a major part of $22 billion dollars a year to store our extra stuff that will not fit into our houses (triple the size they were in 1950) and our garages, where our cars won’t fit.
Jesus’ point in his parable is that we might have more stuff than we could ever consume in a lifetime … we might be rich in things … but we are not really rich if our lives are emotionally impoverished, spiritually impoverished, relationally impoverished or anxiety-driven.
I am about to leave town to preach at Marsh Chapel and on WBUR, the Boston public radio station. It is a series Boston University is doing featuring preachers from key Methodist pulpits in the North.
I was invited to preach two Sundays in this series. I had to pick two topics … the two most important things I had to say.
The first topic I chose is marriage equality and why marriage equality is important not only in the civil society but in the churches.
I struggled long and hard about what the second topic would be, and the topic I finally chose is eternal life. I think we pastors of the more liberal churches who have been educated in university seminaries have not done a good job of teaching about eternal life. I haven’t.
The matter of eternal life is really about what we think is transitory and temporary and what we believe is lasting and never ending.
What do we believe lasts and what do we believe is passing away.
John in his first epistle writes:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of [God] is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from [God] but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever. (1 John 1: 15-17)
All of our stuff is passing away. It is you and I who will live forever.
In his memoir "The Eyes of the Heart," Frederick Buechner writes about conjuring up his grandmother Naya while he is in his study writing. Even though she had died years and years earlier, she seemed so real to him at the moment that it was hard for him to tell whether she was merely in his mind or actually in the room.
Buechner and his grandmother have a conversation about death. Buechner asks her what it is like to pass away. Lighting one of her ubiquitous Chesterfield cigarettes, she tells Buechner that the euphemism passing away is a very misleading term to use for a person's death.
It is not we who pass away. "It is the world that passes away," she says.
The stuff in our houses and garages and self-storage units is in the process of passing away. Our stuff is passing away, all of it.
I’ve been thinking some about people from my childhood and youth this week. Miss Moore who taught me English and Latin and who gave me books to read –not to the class but to me personally—I guess because she saw something no other teacher seemed to see in me she wanted to feed. I think of her often. She has died but she has not passed away.
June Miller who taught our youth Sunday school class. We treated her awfully. We spent the week planning questions that we hoped would be impossible for her answer or that would embarrass her because they were about sex. She always hung in with us. Always kept a sense of humor. Always listened. She has died but she has not passed away.
Stewart Paul. He found me in church every Sunday to say hello and to ask me something about my life. Every Sunday. He showed an interest in me. After I’d left for college, he heard years later that I was going to seminary. He asked my parents to ask me if I would visit him and his wife. He gave me a check for $100 for books. I used money from that check to buy the first book by Karl Barth I ever read. Stewart Paul has died but he has not passed away.
My office here at the church is full of stuff. My house is full of stuff. Some of it I enjoy. Some of it just clutters my life. But all of it is passing away.
I am not passing away. I will die but I will not pass away. You will die but you will not pass away.
So the reminder from Jesus, his prayer for us, is that we invest ourselves in that which never dies.
This is Jesus’ warning -- That we not miss the truly rich
and wonderful adventures of our lives because we tried to take too many
suitcases with us.
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