And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

If I were to ask you to list the three most valuable things in your life, I can– with a fair degree of accuracy – predict what they will be. And I know this because I do it with people from time to time and it always comes out about the same. And I know this because I read the love notes we send to God every year on Thanksgiving Eve when we list what we are thankful for.

The first thing that most of us would list would be our family and friends, and many of us learned that those categories often overlap each other and get a bit fuzzy, friends become family and often closer than those relationships of mere biology.

And the second thing would be our health and the health of others, a blessing that we become increasingly aware of as friends and peers start to lose their health, as the names in the obituary page start to sound familiar and the ages seem far too young. As for the third one, well let me hold on to that for a moment.

The first two are easy because we understand and believe the second half of today’s text: one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

We know that.

At least in our minds we know it.

We know that the people that God has given us, and the health that God has given us, are infinitely more precious than anything else, and yet are they the things that we work hardest at? Are they the things that we define ourselves by? Or are we still caught in the web of defining ourselves by what we do or how much we have?

If we are still measuring ourselves by our possessions, and I think most of us still are at some level, you have probably noticed that it is getting harder and harder to do in these recent economic times.

And I don’t think it’s going to get any easier very soon.

Now, I’m not bright enough to know what the next 40 years will bring, or how the historians of a future age will view the first half of the 21st Century, which is now about 20% over.

But I suspect, for at least the next 40 months or so we will continue to bump up against something that never seemed possible in the last half of the 20th Century: a time of limits, a time of reductions, a time of shortages.

From the time I was born, back on the Continental Divide of the Century in 1950 it was a given that everything would go up and get bigger and grow taller: buildings and people and economies were all continually expanding and we were always waiting for more and better new things to come.

And we were seldom disappointed.

Medicine, electronics, Rock & Roll, the ‘69 Mets, each miracle brought with it the expectation of the ones that would follow. No, we never did get our jetpacks, and I don’t think we will, but boy we sure got most of the rest of what we were promised, didn’t we? For the better part of 50 years we – our American culture especially – rode high, wide and handsome.

Yet somewhere beneath the surface, other things were expanding as well: our debt, our waistlines, our oil addiction, these were all symptoms of our greed, measurements of how completely we had abandoned the truth that we knew: one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.

This is one of those stories, those parables that Jesus taught with, that we have heard so many times that we lose track of some of the details, some of the nuances and shadings in his words, both the words he uses and the ones he doesn’t use.

Most of the time we jump right to the end of the story and we casually beat up the farmer who kept building barns and filling them and building more, storing up treasure for tomorrow rather than being rich toward God and then he dies and doesn’t get to enjoy it.

And we’ve probably all known people like that, some are workaholics and can’t let go, others are so obsessed with stuff that it all ends owning them instead of the other way around. And there is nothing wrong with that reminder. It is important to remember that life is meant to be lived, and that we are created for joy and for laughter and for companionship, and that each day is a non-repeatable opportunity to meet and be met by Christ, and that God has things for us to do with the wealth that he has entrusted to us.

However, I’ve come to understand that there is something else in this parable, something that we don’t always catch because we are so eager to get to the end of the story and the bottom line of the story.

It is there at the top line of the story.

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

All kinds of greed . . .

Did you know that there was more than one kind of greed? Most of us only think of getting and hoarding wealth. The greed of Gordan Gekko, in the 1987 movie “Wall Street”, who said, “Greed . . . is good”

And yet Christ cautions us to beware of All kinds of greed . . .

I have mentioned before an article I read a few years ago by Craig Satterlee, a professor at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. He wrote about this parable and the fact that, at that time – and it may be worse today - 53% of Americans had less than $1000 in savings. He said:

“Economists wish that we would put a little more energy into filling up our barns. In all honesty, we’re worse off than the rich man in Jesus’ parable. He was storing for the future, saving for a rainy day, providing for his old age. Our greed is different. We want to “relax, eat, drink and be merry” now, despite the fact that we don’t “have ample good laid up for many years.” . . . Our greed isn’t about hoarding for tomorrow, it’s about having it all today.”

I think he nailed it, ours is a different kind of greed.

It caught my attention that in the parable, God does not say “I demand your life this night” but he says “your life is being demanded of you”.

You see, this is a warning, not a judgment.

If we are obsessed with filling and building barns or if we are obsessed with spending everything we have today, in either case we are exhibiting a greed, an obsession, that demands our attention, our emotions, our energy, our lives.

You can look around your neighborhood or your family or your Church or you can look in the mirror and you can see people whose abundance ends up demanding their whole lives.

People who live in big houses that never become homes because they are always at work.

People whose kids have everything, except time to be together as a family.

That is how our life is demanded by our possessions; this is how life is sucked out of us by our greed of all kinds.

And we don’t even notice the parenting love of God that Hosea describes, the love that is like when we hold an infant up to our cheeks, tender and fragile and wordlessly eloquent and infinitely precious to us, that is what we are to God.

When we ignore that love in our lives we wind up dead, not because God strikes us dead or turns away from us, but because we have neglected and drained from ourselves all of that which constitutes real life.

And that is the third and greatest thing of value in your life, whether you know it or not.

In addition to your relationships and your health, there is your faith, your ability to see God’s presence in small and every day miracles. That’s what we proclaim in every baptism, this living promise from God that life will go on and that we have a responsibility for life, our own and the life of this child and all of his peers.

And we need to see that presence every day in this crazy culture of fear and anxiety that we live in.

One example of the fear and anxiety that the culture produces, from my own current experience: I am constantly bombarded with communications from financial companies urging me to set aside more money for retirement and assuring me that I will not be able to be happy unless I invest with them. They base their advertising on me being terrified of poverty and homelessness in my old age. They want me to build the equivalent of bigger and bigger barns while I can, or else.

But the question that Jesus raises is not about prudent savings or excessive accumulation, the question that Jesus raises is about what is it that is demanding our lives in the first place and it can’t be our possessions.

“Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Christ is not telling us to abandon our barns or neglect our possessions; he is telling us to do something far more difficult than that, he is telling us to commit our quality of life today, as well as our security for the future, into the hands of God.

He is telling us to live with a focus on how we live, rather than what we need to live.

What are you doing with your possessions?

That’s the question that Christ is asking of each of us and of us as a Church together.

Are we giving our lives to our possessions, or are we using our possessions to give life to our relationships and to receive and live the life that God created us for?

And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”