Lavish Love

Elizabeth Macaulay

This joke I am about to tell comes to you courtesy of Ralph Tarvin.

It seems a very wealthy man knew he was dying. Because he was anxious about what was going to happen to all the money that he made, he called to him three of his best friends. He explained his concern, and asked them if they would do him a favor.

Of course they agreed, since lessening their friend’s anxiety was important to them, especially at such a vital time.

The rich man had this request. He was going to liquidate all of his assets. He would then divide it into thirds. What he wanted from each of his friends is that they would find a way after the funeral to slip the money into his coffin, so that he could rest for all eternity in the presence of the money he had given so much of his life to make.

Well, the man died, and the day of his funeral arrived. After the service and burial, the three friends had a chance to talk with each other. Knowing the strangeness of the request and knowing the temptations the request presented, they wanted to know if each one had followed through on the request.

The first shared that he had put MOST of the money in the man’s coffin, keeping some aside as a sort of carrying fee. The second was a bit put out with the first. He couldn’t believe that his friend would have taken any of the man’s money. “I”, he shared with his friends, “Put all of the money in the coffin, just as I was told to.”

The friends turned to the third. They wanted to know: did he comply with the man’s wishes?

“Absolutely”, he replied. “And to make extra sure that the money was safe, I deposited the amount in my bank and wrote him a check for the full amount.”

“Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” (Luke 12:15)

Theologian Marcus Borg, in his book The Heart of Christianity, makes this observation:

The central values of our culture are “the three A’s”: attractiveness, achievement, and affluence. For many of us, our sense of who we are depends upon how well we measure up to these identity-conferring values … thus, no matter how good our parenting was, we grow up wounded. Our socialization and life in culture confer conflicting and conflicted identities. Not only are we not whole, but many of us have a low, sometimes desperately low, sense of self-worth. (Pg. 190)

What has Jesus to say to those throughout the ages who are bound by identity conferring values that constrict our souls?

Jesus teaches that our life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions. We have to remember that the crowd listening to Jesus on this day was largely those who were “have-nots”. They were people used to watching the grasping and biggering of those who had abundance in their culture. In their day, as it continues in ours, there was the notion that if someone was abundantly blessed, they must have found favor in God’s eyes.

The converse was believed true, as well. That if someone was struggling constantly to procure the most basic goods in life, their struggle was somehow viewed as proof that they must have somehow fallen out of God’s favor.

Jesus took the way that we so often rely upon our possessions to proclaim who we are and he exposed it for the idolatry that it was and is.

Be careful, he says. Do not come to believe that the size of your paycheck or your house or your bank account define who you are. Your dress size, your children’s achievements, your awards and your titles, they do not define who you are.

The issue, Jesus teaches, is this: How is it that you live? How is it that you practice your relationship with God?

Are you rich toward the God who loves you like a child, who offers to you all of creation as an inheritance and who calls you every moment of your life to live into the wholeness of living in holy embrace?

Or are you too busy working to buy the things that – trust me on this - will not heal the aches and hungers your wise soul knows are so real that only God can gentle them into peace.

Are you so busy trying to convince yourself that you are alright that you forget about the always available gift of spending time in the company of a God who KNOWS you are more than alright.

You are, in fact, lavishly loved.

Why is it we will not allow ourselves to be still long enough to let that kind of wealth seep into our souls?

Here is what I ask from each of us in the week to come.

Let us consider our abundance. We have so much. We have food enough to share. We have more home than we need. We have people in our lives who love us. We have this community, dedicated to gathering at least weekly to remind ourselves of our call to be rich toward God.

In this week, consider your abundance, and consider how you live your richness toward God.

Jesus teaches us that wealth is not found in building better barns and biggering our lives.

Wealth is found in being open to God, mindful of God, rich toward God.

So I end with a poem you might want to paste into your daily planner or whatever it is that runs your life at breakneck speed. When you are tempted to give away too much in order to chase those three “A’s”, call to mind this prayer.

It is the vision of another kind of richness–

Prayer, by Stuart Kestenbaum

Our problem – may I include you? - is that we

Don’t know how to start, how to just close

Our eyes and let something dance between

Our heart and our lips. We don’t know how

To skip across the room only for the joy of the leap.

We walk, we run, but what happened to the skip

And its partner the gallop, the useless and imaginary

Way we could move through space, the horses we

Rode before we knew how to saddle up, before we

Had opinions about everything and just loved

The wind in our faces and the horizon in our eyes.

Being rich in God causes us to know the wind in our faces and the horizon in our eyes.

We were not created to trudge and clutch. May we be a people of the gallop and the leap.

Amen