Possessions

A sermon for the second Sunday of Lent

Fr. Tim Jones, St. Lawrence's, York

(10th February 2010)

Luke 14.27-33

Possessions - or at least the right attitude towards them - clearly matters a great deal to Jesus. In our reading from St. Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells us to think about it hard. We must consider and plan ahead. He uses a couple of vivid illustrations, one of which is of someone who starts to build a tower, but part way through the project runs out of money and cannot complete, and so is subject to the ridicule of his neighbours.

When I was on holiday in Egypt last summer, I was amazed to see so many unfinished buildings everywhere. I discovered that one only starts paying tax on a building when it is completed, so no one ever completely finishes a building, in order to avoid paying the tax!

Whether you are careful, in Jesus’ day, to make sure that you can finish, or careful nowadays to make sure that you don’t finish, it is clear that there is a need to think about it and be careful. We need to be prepared.

“Be Prepared” is, of course, the motto of the Boy Scouts. When I was a cub scout, I used to look with envy at the older boys who were senior scouts or Queen’s Scouts. They were so prepared that many of them had, in a little pouch on their belts, a Swiss Army penknife.  My grandfather had one, and as a young teenager I would be allowed to investigate it and handle it. How I wanted a Swiss Army penknife of my very own! My granddad died the day before my 19th birthday, and I later inherited my grandfather’s penknife. I never use it. It lives in my bedroom drawer, perhaps my most treasured possession.

At the end of that passage from St. Luke, almost out of the blue, comes a phrase that should be altogether startling.

“So, therefore, none of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.”

I have possessions! I have possessions, and I want to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. I have possessions and I want to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and he says that I cannot be unless I give up all of my possessions. This is not, frankly, something that warms my heart! So what am I to do? I need possessions! I can’t cope without things. I need socks. I need shampoo. I need my knife and fork. I need my duvet. I need my pens and pencils, and I think I can make a good case for needing my laptop computer (both of them!). I need a good coat.

But hold on. Before I start to argue that I need everything that I have, let me, in the interest of full disclosure to myself, let alone everyone else, acknowledge that when I look around my house, most of what I see I know that I don’t really need. I have far more than what I need. I don’t have just one coat: I have several coats. I have pictures on my walls, lampshades, and very many music CDs. I have an awful lot just to make my life comfortable, and an awful lot just because I can’t make the physical or emotional effort to throw it away or donate it to a charity shop. Most of my possessions I just do not need.

Jesus said, “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.”

What we are to do in response to Jesus’ teachings about material possessions has preoccupied Christians through the ages. In the very early days of Christianity, for a while, the Christian community in Jerusalem lived a life of holding all things in common. There was no personal wealth; the Christians considered that all that they had was to be shared with each other.

That determination to share inspired the early monastic communities. To this day, on this very street, there are those who publicly renounce any claim to own personal possessions, and hold any property only as members of a religious community. That example teaches all of us something about the kind of attitude we each need to hold as Christians, irrespective of whether we are a monk or a nun.

Monks and nuns don’t hold things communally because they have some kind of communist tendency. Monks and nuns hold things in common because they recognize that all things, ultimately, belong to God. And that is something that we recognize too - or at least I hope we do, because every week in this church we gather the collection of money and food, and we pray together,

“Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the splendour and the majesty. Everything in heaven and on earth is yours. All things come from you, and of your own do we give you.”

If we don’t believe that, then we shouldn’t be saying it. I may have all kinds of thing in my legal possession, but I have them in trust. They are not really my possessions, but belong to God, and God trusts me to use them for God’s glory and for his mission.

If that is our attitude, then we have taken a great step towards spiritual health. So often we define ourselves by our possessions. We don’t just think that we have legal possession of a Rolls Royce, or a Land Rover, or a Va Va Voom. We think that we are the kind of person who has a Rolls or a Land Rover or a Va Va Voom. Or whatever brand, whatever thing it happens to be; that is who we think that we are. We can be extremely territorial about our identity.

Sometimes I would like in theory to help other people more. But in practice, one of the reasons that I don’t is that to do so would risk diminishing the level of comfort, the lifestyle, that I have. My possessions have become a massive barrier between me and my discipleship.

While we’ve got that attitude, we cannot see who we really are, not clearly anyway. We should define ourselves first and foremost as the children of the Living God, formed in His image. St. Francis of Assisi once said, I think, that he was glad that he didn’t have any possessions because if he did he would have to waste his time defending them. We should be spending our lives following Jesus Christ. Possessions can, it seems, get in the way of all that, unless we truly see them as belonging to God and entrusted to us so that we can serve God and our neighbour.

So maybe I can tell myself I’m OK. I have possessions, but even the ones that are there for my comfort I might reasonably say that they help create an ambience for my home, helping to give me strength for my service. They are IN my possession, but they BELONG to God. When my bicycle gets stolen, well, it’s God’s bicycle, and was never really mine.  That's what I tell myself.  That's my fig leaf.

But what about my penknife? If someone steals my penknife, in truth, I would mind. I would mind a great deal. My insurance company might give me the money for a new penknife, but that would make no difference. How can I possibly give up my penknife?

What I possess here is not a penknife. It is a physical reminder of a deep love, a love which helped form me, and helped forge me. It is a love which was - is - a gift from God, and is not dependant upon this penknife, and will exist whether or not I own this penknife. For a while, God gives me this reminder. How can I possibly use this penknife to God’s glory? I can keep in mind the love, for one thing. And for, another, I can use it in a sermon, to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. But one day this too, like all things, will be rust and dust. It would be wise to base my life on something else.