Ecclesiastes 1:2
Ecclesiastes 1:12–14
Ecclesiastes 2:18–23
Psalm 49:1–12
Colossians 3:1–11
Luke 12:13–21
When the last Austin Powers movie was released there was a lot commercials and hype around the movie. Hearing or reading about it seemed unavoidable.
One of Mike Meyers’ co-stars commented on what the actor was like as he portrayed a particular character in the film series, a loathesome Scotsman with a fierce temper, murderous intentions, and a profane name. While “in character,” the co-stars reported, Myers is hateful, abusive, and insufferable. When he took on this character he acted that way when the camera was off It affected him.
Richard Dreyfus said years ago about his experience while playing the lead in the romantic comedy, The Goodbye Girl. Unlike Myers’ Scotsman, that character was a basically fun and a considerate human being. Dreyfus reported that throughout the filming of The Goodbye Girl, he enjoyed life, loved people, and liked himself.
The experiences of these two actors tells us something about life that God knew a long long time ago.
Our frame of mind and the thoughts we choose to think–positive or negative–will have an impact on how we feel and behave and on how we relate to other human beings. In a very real sense, we are what we think.
What we think about is important! It can change us. This change will impact others too. Don’t believe me? Listen to this:
New York state sociologists studied two families-the Max Jukes family and the family of Puritan Pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards.
The head of the Max Jukes family (not his real name), was a man who did what he wanted. It is reported that this man lived life the way he wanted to and had many many children, some from his wife and some from others.
Among the known descendants of the Jukes family (a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards), over 1200 of them were studied. Of those:
280 were hobos going from one town to another to beg-
130 spent time in jail for an average of 13 years,
7 of them were murderers-
100 struggled with addiction issues
128 were women who had to sell their bodies to make a living.
Of the 20 who learned a skill in order to work, 10 learned it in prison. The family didn’t do much in terms of making the world a better place–……..And after some digging around the researchers figured out that this family cost the state of New York $1,308,000.
What about the pastor- Jonathan Edwards family? He came from a Christian family and married a Christian woman. Among their descendants:
100 became clergy men, missionaries, or theological professors-
over 100 became college professors-
over 100 became lawyers,
30 of them judges-
over 60 became physicians-and
over 60 became authors.
There were 75 army or navy officers-
13 presidents of universities.
There were numerous giants of industry, several members of congress, 3 senators and one became vice president of the united states.
All of this from Johnathon and Sarah Edwards, who intentionally thought about how they would act towards God and to others.[1]
Our scriptures today, teach us what is necessary to think and do in response to God, to what God has done, does and will do. They teach us what God did, does and will do for us, in Christ Jesus.
Often, for myself, I don’t see as clearly the connection between each of the scripture readings on a given Sunday. I would love to say that I am always able to see a connection between the Old Testament and New, Gospel or Psalm. It wouldn’t surprise me that this happens to some of you also. That being said, today’s readings I do see a common thread through each reading.
We are told that the toil of labors, storing up, all that is toiled for, even in seeking all the wisdom of the world is nothing but vanity. Vanity to think we can even have knowledge outside of what God gives, knowledge that somehow we can take with us, yet in the end, we leave it all behind.
It is the Psalm that makes it clear that our riches, our wealth will do our soul no good. Can we really expect to buy our soul when Jesus has ransomed himself for our soul? What more could we do as mere humans that God can and already has done in God’s Son?
It is the things of heaven that matter not those that we have or can obtain here on earth. Besides, is not everything we have already, belong to God and it is only ours because God grants us this? It is the old self that is the only thing that prevents us from being with God. Jesus has broken these barriers. Those that were once considered ungodly, the sinners, the unclean will be cleansed of their sins and made righteous before God.
We have the old-self sitting here in this world, how is it that we can become a new-self? What does the new-self look like? We are told in Luke, “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” One might say that abundance is vanity, abundance is vanity, but what is meant by vanity? The Hebrew term Hebel is translated as vanity or vain, which much more concretely means, mist, vapor or mere breath. How little then is all the knowledge of the world? What good are earthly riches?
In the gospel of Luke, there is a man who has plenty in his harvest. So much so he removes his old barns to make bigger barns to not only store all of the grain but also other goods as well. Yes, not some but all the grain, not part or much but ALL. The grain will do no good in heaven, it will not get him to heaven, he cannot take it to heaven and will be forfeited to another that very night because his soul will be required by God.
It is our stuff, our old self, my old self, your old self and our abundance that can do us harm not good. These distractions can cause us to ignore Jesus. They become not a filter that helps us focus on Christ but instead one that filters out Jesus.
When we filter out Jesus, how in the world can we respond to the gift that Jesus has freely given us in Himself? Jesus came down to be the one and only thing we need and this cannot be taken away from us unless we refuse him, we filter him out. It is in Matthew that we are told, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” Mt 6:26
All this stuff that the world tells us we need, we should do, does nothing for the kingdom of God. We cannot use any of it to build up our tower to reach heaven. We cannot use any of it to earn anything at all that buys our soul, because it has already been done, if we choose to accept what has been already been done. Instead of a tower, it becomes a mountain upon us, not one that we climb but one that blocks out God, one that weighs us down and suffocates us.
God asks us to believe in what God has done in God’s Son and in return, we respond out of gratitude for what is done for us.
What we think about has the potential to spill out into the real world. Not only the good stuff but the bad stuff too.
Some of you may be like me in that my mind wanders a lot. I never know where I may find myself. I think about stuff I have to do later and not the stuff I should be doing now. All sorts of things keep me away from responding to God the way I should.
I sometimes feel like Doug the Dog from the movie Up where he is talking to Carl and Russell and Doug the dog is talking with his special collar and in the middle of what he is sayinghe goes- SQUIRREL! I’m like that. I also like shinny objects too.
Fortunately God is patient with us humans. God’s love surpasses all understanding and God keeps reaching for us, keeps prompting us to be what God intends us to be. Today, tomorrow and always.
[1] Previous content adapted from Pr. Ben Bergren’s Sermon at Leadership Lab 2013, Saturday July 27th, 2013
Interesting bit of information regarding the Jukes & Edwards respective progeny. It reminds me of a story shared by another acquaintance of mine, though it involves nobody famous.
My acquaintance was sitting next to an older gentleman on a plane recently and as they conversed the gentleman revealed how he was raised in a faith tradition and practiced it for a while but had abandoned it in adulthood. Nothing bad happened to him; the gentleman remained a decent fellow.
As their discourse continued, it was revealed that the gentleman’s offspring were not raised in any faith tradition, and while they weren’t terrbile people, he wished they were better people. And when it came to his grandkids, the gentleman lamented over the direction their lives had taken. For in his view they had completely fallen from grace – abusers of drugs and in general, just plain derelicts.
By now the flight was over and as they prepared to go their separate ways my acquaintence gently asked the gentleman, with regards to his grandkids, “What else should he expect?”
The gentleman had seen faith as irrelevant and unneccessary; in essence that God was unneccessary. And early on there was nothing to suggest to him otherwise. He remained a decent fellow, after all. But he had sown bad seed and only now, in the wake of the question posed to him by my acquaintance, did he the recognize the natural and regrettable harvest.
It doesn’t take long for a faithless family to deteriorate. In this case, within two generations. (Now extrapolate that to society as a whole.)
I thought some of the message had Pastor Ben in there.
Sunday he set the plate on attitude. If thats not the truth.
A negative attitude can really cause problems. love ya
How How How true. I had been thinking about my sermon, which was two weeks away, when he preached part of this at Leadership Lab. I thought, how perfect is that. I believe it totally relates to what the text was trying to get across to us that Sunday. Funny thing is, I spoke with another who was preaching that day, she and someone she knows took the text another direction each and then there is mine. I think this took me this way because I so often have to much stuff in the way of seeing Jesus.