“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” said the Lord. And don’t we store up treasures on earth to the point that we’re making the earth inhabitable for ourselves. Tomorrow all our lives will be demanded of us. But that does not mean we shouldn’t eat drink and be merry, just not in the way we usually think of eating drinking and being merry.
Outside the
context of the Bible, I’ve heard “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”
used to mean a couple things: One is basically party like there’s no tomorrow,
another is let’s celebrate now, while we have a respite before facing something
rather gloomy. I’m not advocating it in either of those ways. I believe both of
those ways betray a specifically American outlook on consumption. Consume with
abandon, and consume to make ourselves feel better.
We consume
to an alarming degree here in the U.S.
Some time ago, it was calculated that if the rest of the world consumed
at the level we do here, it would take the resources of 5 and a half earths to
fulfil the demand. We are using a criminal amount of our fair share of God’s
bounty. I rather imagine this statistic is even higher now.
George
Romero’s second “living dead movie,” Dawn of the Dead, is deliberate social
commentary on consumerism. Most of the film takes place in a shopping mall. The
living dead, who are commonly referred to as zombies in later films of this
type, hover around a mall due to -as one character muses- “some kind of
instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their
lives.”
The small
band of folks who are not dead manage to hold up in the mall, thinking
initially that it’s a great place to hold out in. All the mod cons are
available to them, and they set up house. But soon the emptiness of an
existence of pure consuming begins to dawn on our protagonists. One says, “I'm
afraid. You're hypnotized by this place. All of you! You don't see that it's
not a sanctuary, it's a prison!”
This movie
came out in 1978, when Carter was president. This president became hated by
many the next year, because he warned us that we were overconsuming and
rationed gasoline. There was such a strong reaction against slowing our
consumption that people flocked to Reagan’s unsustainable economic theories.
And the mad consumption continued.
And one of the
most frightening things about consumerism is how easily it absorbs any
resistance to it. A while back I started hearing of a movement to simplify.
Clearly some folks were reacting to our overconsumption and like the folks in
the movie, saw it for the prison it is. Shortly after the people who were
promoting this lifestyle got public attention, a magazine showed up in the
supermarkets, called “Simplify.” The magazine was full of things you could BUY
in order to simply your life. It’s insidious!
So, let us
ask ourselves, where are we a little mad in our consumption? What are the
earthly treasures we store? My weakness is books, yours of course may be entirely
different, but let’s use books as an example. At the community we have 16 floor
to ceiling bookcases full of books, plus a few smaller bookcases and boxes of
books in the closet and down in the storage locker. We’re actually going to
have library hours soon. And while I do believe books are good things and
valuable, I know also that I horde them.
Now a great
many of these books are religious books and I genuinely believe they help me to
store treasure in heaven; they help me know and love Jesus better. And
certainly while I need to cut down on my book consumption, I wouldn’t eliminate
books entirely. The question is where is my treasure? In the books themselves,
or in the knowledge they bring? Or even in the joy they bring? I’ve seen how
joy can be contagious. When I’m sharing with joy about a story I read or say, a
horror movie I watched, I’ve seen others find joy in my joy.
Which brings
me back to enjoyment of earthly things and how that can be different than
storing up treasures on earth. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”
Which is a combination of two phrases in Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes
is a rather gloomy cynical book, as we heard tonight. The first is the one that
mentions being merry, “Therefore I praised joy, because there is nothing better
for mortals under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be joyful; this will
accompany them in their toil through the limited days of life God gives them
under the sun.”
You see the
author of Ecclesiastes sees the emptiness in toil and labor for the production
of abundance, what the rich man in Jesus’ story fails to see. The rich man sees
eating, drinking and being merry as something to be done after abundance has
been achieved. The author of Ecclesiastes sees it as taking joy in things. Joy
in fact that carries over into the labor itself. This is a joy independent of
results. Results are transitory, they do not last.
Paul in
First Corinthians quotes the other saying from Ecclesiastes, the one without
merry in it. He quotes it while talking to people who are doubting the
resurrection of the dead. “If the dead are not raised,” Paul says (and here he
quotes) “‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” The author of
Ecclesiastes asserts that there is no joy in the land of the dead. Paul insists
there is joy that abides, because Christ has proved the resurrection of the
dead.
I personally
cannot doubt the resurrection because Christ is always present for me in the
breaking of the bread. Though I must admit, that assurance of the resurrection
doesn’t always bring me joy, for we are now still toiling through the limited
days of life God gives us under the sun. And as I’ve put forth rather strongly
tonight, the world is a mess, and we keep making it worse. But I will tell you
this, without joy we are our toil is vanity.
I’ve said
before that I believe Hope is a virtue because it does not come easily. As
Christians, we attach Hope to the implications of the resurrection. That Hope
also includes a belief in the promised coming of the kingdom here on earth. And
we should rejoice in that. But more than that, I believe in these dark times of
trouble and despair, we have a responsibility to lift each other up. We are the
body of Christ here now under the sun. In that way the resurrection is here now
and present. Let’s find our joy in each others company. Soon we will eat and drink God’s very self, let’s be merry
doing so.
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