Bishop William Willimon was chaplain for many years at Duke University. He is a well-known writer and speaker. He says wise things in a witty way.
Once Willimon and his wife had a group of students over to their home after a chapel service. They had a picnic, then some of the students lingered to play basketball or to talk. Willimon sat on the patio with one student who said, “Dr. Willimon, thanks for having us over to your home. This is the first time I’ve ever been in a faculty home.”
“That’s a disgrace,” Willimon said. “I think that we faculty ought to have students in our homes as often as possible.”
“Well, few faculty think that way,” said the student. “And you have a beautiful home,” he said. Then the student added these words: “Let me ask you, do you feel at all guilty being a Christian and living in such a nice house?”
Willimon responded, “Now I’m remembering why it was not such a great idea to invite you people over to my house.”
“Such,” says William Willimon, “are the challenges of attempting to be Christian in the midst of affluence.” (1)
Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, once noted that an increasing number of affluent people in our land are doing what wealthy people do in developing countries. “They build walls around themselves to keep the poor away,” says Fillmore. “They don’t share. Religious folks among the wealthy theologize that God has blessed them. They say they worked hard or that their parents or husband or wife worked hard, so they deserve all the possessions they have, and they are entitled to the luxurious lifestyle they enjoy. They feel no obligation to share significantly with others.”
He tells about an article that appeared in the Atlanta Constitution which described a rich young man whose income was a million dollars a year. The young man had just built himself a plush mansion. “The article also revealed that he was a Sunday school teacher. When he was asked about his great wealth in light of his Christian commitment, [the young man] replied that God had given him the talent to make money, and that justified his using it on himself. There was not a word about sharing anything.”
Fuller notes that while he was on a visit to a Habitat project in Nebraska, his host drove him past a new six‑and‑a‑half‑million‑dollar home of a local business tycoon. It was enormous, surrounded by a high fence. He was told the owner had installed buzzers in the house so family members could find each other! (2)
When, any reasonable person might ask, is enough enough?
Futurist Faith Popcorn tells us that a new phrase has been coined for opulent homes like this business tycoon’s. They’re called “starter castles.” (3) The building of most of these starter castles occurred before the recent real estate meltdown, to be sure, but still they point to a very glaring development that is occurring right here in our country the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots.
It all sounds very much like a parable that Jesus told. It is a familiar story that has an uncomfortable ending:
“The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ’
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ ”
Jesus concludes his parable like this: “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”
Ouch! I would like to think he wasn’t talking to you and me, but I suspect he was. We may not think of ourselves as rich when we compare ourselves to somebody living in a six‑and‑a‑half‑million‑dollar home. But if we compare what we have to the citizens of a nation like Haiti since that sad land has been on our hearts this past year we are wealthy indeed.
You and I need to carefully consider the role of money in our lives. In the first three gospels, one out of every six verses deals with the use or abuse of money. Sixteen of the thirty-four parables that Jesus told deal specifically and directly with money. There are over 500 verses in the Bible that deal with prayer, but there are over 2,500 verses that deal with money. No one who seriously follows Jesus can avoid this subject. Jesus precedes this parable with this admonition: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
This is true. Our life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions. Elizabeth McKee Gore said something recently that puts our lives into perspective. She said, “If you get a raise, you smile, go out for drinks, celebrate.” Then she contrasts this celebration with the lives of people in Mali, West Africa. In Mali, she says, “If a child lives to their first birthday, they celebrate by giving him or her a name. They don’t name their children before then because mortality rates are so high under the age of one. Families that have children over five years old are thought of as wealthy or rich. Between disease and high food prices the chances of having multiple children over five are slim.” Here, she says, you can find the true meaning of wealth. (4)
Think about that for a moment. If you have children over five years old, you are wealthy or rich. How much would you take for the health of your children? If you have people who love you and you’re healthy and they’re healthy, you’re rich. I don’t care what your balance sheet says. If you have enough to eat, and clothes to wear and a warm house on a cold night, and then a little more to share, you are very rich indeed.
This past January television brought us up close and personal with the earthquake in Haiti. Television news teams showed the bodies of tiny children who died in that horrible quake. Haiti already was the poorest country in the western hemisphere. It sure makes our problems seem tiny in comparison. I know that the recession has been very hard on many families. Still, in many ways you and I are rich.
We have more than we need and yet many of us have a difficult time sharing with others. This is a matter of deep spiritual concern, for the teachings of Jesus have much to say about our obligations to those who are not as blessed as we are.
In one of his writings Gerard Hughes, a Roman Catholic priest, asks what you would do if, one evening, there were a knock on the door and, when you went to open the door, there was Jesus standing there. Jesus is grinning from ear to ear and says to you, “There you are! At last I’ve found you! How wonderful to see you! How much I love you!” And you smile from ear to ear in return and you invite Jesus into your house.
“Out comes the best china, the tea and the cake . . . and you and Jesus have a really wonderful . . . evening. Now, good Christian that you are, you invite Jesus into your life and you insist that Jesus must stay with you and become part of your family. And that’s when the trouble starts. Before you know it, Jesus has invited the local homeless person to join in with your household. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, one day you come home to find that Jesus has invited into your house all the local lads who go around the neighborhood stealing cars and destroying other people’s property.”
So what do you do? “You decide you need to put a stop to all this, and you politely invite Jesus to step inside the cupboard under the stairs. [When he does, you proceed to] lock the door [of the cupboard] with Jesus inside and very probably you nail it shut just for good measure. You then proceed to decorate [the door] possibly with a cross and a candle and maybe even some sort of liturgical cloth for the appropriate time in the church year. And every time you walk past the cupboard under the stairs, you bow to it reverently and say a prayer. The net effect of this is that you’ve got Jesus, in your house, in your life but most importantly of all you’ve got him where he can’t cause any more trouble!!” (5)
This may sound like a bizarre little parable, but Father Hughes has hit us where it hurts. If Jesus’ parable doesn’t trouble you, you are in denial. Someone will protest, “But pastor, we are saved by grace, not works.” And that’s true. But salvation means that Christ comes into our hearts and takes residence there. We become like him. That is what it means to be saved. It doesn’t mean we are perfect. It certainly doesn’t mean we are all Christ means for us to be. But it does mean that we are on the path. It means that we have Jesus’ heart for a world in need.
“Watch out!” says Jesus. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
So, where does this leave us? Should we take all we own, sell it and give proceeds to the poor? No, it’s clear from Scripture that Jesus calls only a few people to this kind of radical commitment. At the same time, however, we need to take Jesus’ teachings seriously. May I make some simple suggestions suggestions that may be very helpful in this time of economic uncertainty?
First of all, learn to live more simply. This is the first step you can take in living more like Jesus wants his followers to live. Live more simply.
A resolution came out years ago from the Lausanne conference of evangelicals which all of us would be wise to heed. The resolution went like this: “We humbly commit ourselves to develop a just and simple lifestyle, and to support one another in it.”
A just and simple lifestyle . . . Most of us have too much stuff, and like the rich landowner in Jesus’ parable, we have to build bigger houses and bigger garages just to hold our stuff. Some of us even have so much that we rent mini-warehouses to hold it all. Does it make us happy? No. We’ve simply become addicted to acquiring.
Randy Alcorn in his book The Treasure Principle describes our problem like this: “It’s a matter of basic physics. The greater the mass, the greater the hold that mass exerts. The more things we own the greater their total mass the more they grip us, setting us in orbit around them. Finally, like a black hole, they suck us in . . . Every item we buy is one more thing to think about, talk about, clean, repair, rearrange, fret over, and replace when it goes bad.” (6) God is calling many of us to a simpler way of living. That’s where we should begin. Many of us already have too much stuff.
Two, evaluate your level of giving. Not just to the church, but to every aspect of God’s work including charity and missions.
Dr. Carl Menninger, the world-renowned psychiatrist, was talking on one occasion to an unhappy but wealthy patient. He asked the patient what he was going to do with so much money.
The patient replied, “Just worry about it, I suppose.”
Menninger asked, “Well, do you get that much pleasure from worrying about it?”
“No,” responded the patient, “but I get terrified when I think of giving some of it to somebody else.”
Then Dr. Menninger went on to say something quite profound. He said, “Generous people are rarely mentally ill.” (7) I didn’t say that. Dr. Carl Menninger said it. “Generous people are rarely mentally ill.”
He is right. People who cannot share with others have deep-seated problems. If your level of giving to the work of God and the service of others requires no sacrifice, then you have Jesus locked in a cupboard, and he is not really living in every part of your life.
Here’s the final thing we need to see: the extent of our giving is the most accurate gauge we have of the authenticity of our faith. Jesus said it as clearly as it can be said: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (12:34).
Many years ago, missionary Bob Roberts was a guest speaker in a church. In this service he was sharing his burden for hungry children in the Philippines. Afterwards a young boy, about seven years old, came up to him and said, “Jesus spoke to me tonight while you were telling us about the hungry children . . . When you said that for a quarter a day you could feed a child and give him a vitamin, I thought, I’ve got to help. But I didn’t know how I could. That’s when Jesus spoke to me.” The lad extended his hand and said, “This is my shell collection. I believe Jesus wants me to give these shells to help the children.” With those words, he placed the shells in Roberts’ hand. Roberts accepted the shells, but he wondered how they could help hungry children.
A few weeks later, Roberts spoke to another congregation. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the seashells and told about that boy and his desire to feed hungry children. At the end of the service, a man approached Roberts and said, “I would like to purchase those shells for $100!”
Bob Roberts added this comment, “My freckle-faced friend may never know that his sacrificial offering provided 400 meals for Filipino children. He may not have understood how the Lord would use this small gift to feed the hungry, but he knew God wanted him to give what he had . . .” (8)
God came to the rich man who had to build bigger barns to hold his goods and said, “You fool!” He was foolish, wasn’t he? We all need to learn to live more simply, we need to evaluate our level of giving, and we need to understand that the extent of our giving is the most accurate gauge we have of the authenticity of our faith. Jesus said it best, of course, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
1. Sojourners, March-April 2002, http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0203&article=020322.
2. No More Shacks! (Waco, TX: Wordbooks Publisher, 1986), pp. 38-39.
3. Faith Popcorn and Adam Hanft, Dictionary of the Future (New York, NY: Hyperion, 2001), p. 236.
4. http://www.foundryumc.org/sermons/Gore_10_19_2008.htm.
5. PAMBG at http://pambgsermons.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html.
6. (Sisters,OR: Mulnomah Publishing, 2001).
7. David A. Renwick, http://www.2preslex.org/S020217.htm.
8. Bob Roberts, “Six Small Seashells,” Mountain Movers, April 1996.
