Don't Waste Your Nails

Don't Waste Your Nails--September 26, 2018

And [Jesus] 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." Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I wills aid to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night you life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." [Luke 12:15-21]

Biblically speaking, there should be an asterisk to go along with every use of the word "my" or "mine."  You know, one of those little star-shaped * punctuation marks that hints there's really more to the story than what appears at first at face value.  We need one of those to go along with the word "my" and "mine" while we read biblical texts, and maybe even as we think about our own lives and resources, too.  

We need such a special footnote marker, because at least from the perspective of the Old and New Testaments, everything I want to call "mine" is really first and foremost God's, and at most I am only ever the temporary guardian, steward, and caretaker of things that have been entrusted to my care.  The asterisk could say all that--it could be the unspoken added reminder that there is nothing that is finally, fundamentally, or purely "mine," but rather that all things, including my own body as well as my house, paychecks, talents, time, and abilities, are really God's.  We need such a reminder, it seems.

We need it because we have a way, as a species, of mistakenly assuming that the possessions we acquire in this life are unconditionally and permanently ours.  But they are not, and the Bible has always been clear on this (whether or not we have wanted to listen on this point is another question).  Rather, the biblical writers, including Luke here giving us a teaching of Jesus, all start taking it as a given that all things belong to God, and that therefore holding onto "my stuff" or "my group's stuff" can never be of utmost value to us.

The foolish rich man in Jesus' story has made this mistake.  He assumes that when he gets a windfall of an overly abundant harvest, that it is his to do with as he pleases.  He assumes it is all meant for him, and for his own enjoyment or use, and therefore his plan to build bigger barns to store it all seems to him the height of wisdom.  It does not even appear to enter his mind that if he has been given such a remarkably exorbitant harvest, that perhaps it has been given to him in trust, as a resource to share with others.  He apparently has not given any thought at all to how he could use such abundance to feed his neighbors or help attend to present-tense needs.  No, the only thought he has had is about himself, and so he misses the asterisk. He doesn't remember that the harvest he thinks of as "his" is really his* to steward, not to hoard.  And he apparently doesn't even remember his own Bible lessons from childhood about the manna that was hoarded in the wilderness and which grew maggots and stank to high heaven when you stored it up.

Now, of course, Jesus' story about this man whose life comes to an abrupt end is just that--a story.  No actual humans were harmed in the telling of this parable.  But the point hits home for all of us.  Our stuff--whether our pay from work, our possessions at home, or the investments for our futures--is not worth making the most important value in our life.  It's not reliable, for one--you can't count on it to be there, and you can't count on life proceeding in the way you plan it to in order to use your stuff.  Hoarding your stuff rather than using it for sharing good things all around is a misuse of what our stuff is for in the first place.  It is, very simply not the right way to use what has been entrusted to us.

Let me offer an analogy.  When I buy a box of nails at the hardware store, they are meant to be used.  They are intended to be hammered into lumber of various kinds and sizes for different projects, and they are intended to be used.  Now, it would certainly be a case of poor stewardship of my nails if I carelessly pounded them into boards without precision, bending them and breaking them rather than getting them to go in straight and true.  And so, on the one hand, I want to make sure I am not wasting my nails by hitting them left-handed or carelessly pounding them off center so they go in crooked.  But at the same time, it is also wasting my nails to leave them in the box forever, untouched and unused, because I am so afraid of hitting them in crookedly on a project.  Hoarding a vast supply of nails for some unknown possible future project while other actual projects go unfinished on the workbench is just as much a waste of nails as hitting them in crooked.  They are still meant to be used rather than accumulating dust on my shelf.  I don't want to waste them either way--not by misusing them, but neither by not using them.

Jesus' story reminds us that all of our possessions are like this as well.  We can be so afraid of misusing our "stuff" that we waste it in the opposite direction--we hoard rather than share what has been entrusted to us for the sake of all.  That's the underlying thing here--all of my possessions, all my paychecks, and all my other potential is all really God's, and God retains ultimate ownership of it all.  If I store it all up, whether on shelves in my workshop or piled into bigger barns, I am misusing what is really God's, and I am mistakenly valuing stuff over people.  The Bible never envisions that I get the final word on the stuff I am supposed to be stewarding--I am holding it in trust for a time, to use well and use rightly, rather than to let it get rusty and dusty or bent and broken.  

We have a way of forgetting that it's all really God's.  We have a way of insisting that protecting (and then hoarding) "my" stuff for "me" alone to use is better than letting these things be shared and used all around, as if my possession is the end-goal, rather than blessing other all around.  Today, Jesus calls us to abandon the foolishness of "Me and My Group First" thinking because, well, the stuff we hoard for ourselves just isn't reliable... and it certainly isn't meant to be more important than other faces.

Today, Jesus dares us not to waste our nails.

Lord Jesus, help us in this day to value people and to use things, rather than the other way around.