Is it worth it?

Sermon by Pr. Craig Mueller on the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Lectionary 18 + Sunday, August 3, 2025.

Warning! From our gospel: don’t store up treasures for yourselves. You may lose it all. Instead, be rich toward God. If only. If only, it were that simple.

Our president and others use economics alone to gauge the quality of our lives. And if the jobs report isn’t flattering, fire the person who delivered it.

A recent report states that 40% of Americans aren’t saving enough for retirement. And we’ve heard the warnings about the vulnerability of our country’s social safety net and the likelihood that the social security trust fund is expected to run out of cash in the next decade.

For those who work with a financial planner, you know that you need to enter all your assets into an online form which eventually provides your net worth. It’s easy to define our self-worth as our net worth. If we have investments, and if the stock market cooperates, we have at least have some confidence that our future will be okay.

Like the rich man in today’s gospel, for many the bottom line is their personal wealth. Not the common good. With little concern for strangers at our doors. The livelihood of immigrants, the ones who do menial yet crucial work in our country. Those starving in Gaza. The plight of the poor. And growing wealth inequity. 

Even if I have a healthy net worth, I know that life often doesn’t turn out the way we expect it to. All it takes is an unexpected illness. A job loss. A tragedy. A global crisis. A deep depression. And we wonder if it is all worth it.

Whether it is finances, or our abundant possessions, or the meaning of life, we are always dealing with stuff. As one of my friends often says, “it’s always something.”

The so-called Teacher in Ecclesiastes is dealing with existential stuff. What’s it all for? It’s all vanity, he says. All the business of life. You toil, you work your butt off. You have plenty, but you always want more. And then you leave it for someone else to enjoy. What do we gain from all our toil? And what an answer! All our days are full of pain, and our work is a vexation; even at night our minds do not rest.

 Does life ever feel that way to you? Vanity. Chasing the wind. Futile. Today’s political, economic, and ecological context can seem overwhelming and hopeless. Ecclesiastes is considered the most pessimistic book in the Bible. I’m glad we have a book that doesn’t sugar coat things and deals with this aspect of being human.

 So what is of worth, of true value, to you? Not only does our society hold up our net worth, all around us we get messages that tell us not what we truly need, but what we should want.

 Maybe you’ve been in this scenario. You are shopping with your kid for a phone. Your young teen-ager says they want the latest iPhone and no other model will do! You say something like we can’t afford that now, or you need to wait until you are sixteen. “But Daaad,” is the response. “Everyone has this phone.” I don’t know what your response is, but the Dad in the story I read about said, “That’s it, we’re leaving.” And you can imagine the silence at the dinner table that night.

 Why does Jesus call the prosperous man in our gospel a fool? It doesn’t say that he was greedy. He simply needs more barns for his bumper crops. The economy has been good to him. What’s wrong with that?

 Maybe the eleven pronouns are a clue. Listen for the trinity of me, myself and I in the man’s soliloquy. “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops. I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grains and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul you have saved for the future. Relax, eat, drink and be merry.’”

 But life can be cut short at any time. A country-music song puts it this way:
You don’t bring nothing with you here
And you can’t take nothing back.
I ain’t never seen a hearse, with a luggage rack.

One article goes deeper than mere external economics. The author suggests
we have “inner” self-regulation problems. Our control and restraint settings are out of whack. After decades of extreme affluence, a growing sense of entitlement, and instant gratification, our self-regulatory systems have come unwired. We’ve been living an orgy of self-indulgence states the author of a book called: American Mania: When More Is Not Enough.

Our sense of true worth seems out of whack. We are filled. Stuffed. Insatiable. We have endless content online, scrolling that never ends. We have more than we could ever dream of, at our fingertips. And yet why do we feel so empty?

 Maybe that emptiness is the beginning of our healing. To know our hunger and our deep spiritual need. We come to this place, eager to learn the ways of Jesus who in his living and dying was rich toward God. In baptism, we have died with Christ, and our inheritance is the abundant life that he gives.

At the end of life what matters is not our net worth but lives marked by gratitude and generosity. Or as one writer adds, at death “who I was in the ultimate depths of my heart—a heart that was either full of love, or full of spite and hidden selfishness.” (Karl Rahner)

So come. Gather at this table. Learn little by little, Sunday by Sunday, year by year, what is of true value, of true worth. Leave your stuff behind. Leave your worries behind. Leave your striving behind. Leave your obsession about the future behind. 

None of our stuff matters. Here we gather around the treasures of word and sacrament. The treasure of community. And the gifts that the poor and needy give to us that reveal our spiritual emptiness.

I don’t know for sure what it means to be rich toward God. But together we will be lifelong learners. Together we will discover what is enough. What it means to be generous. And what is truly worth it. Amen.