Pentecost 10
Year C
August 1, 2010
Ecclesiastes 1:2; 1:12-14; 2:18-23
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21
When I was a kid, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was one of my favorite movies. (I don’t think the recent version with Johnny Depp is nearly as good.)
If you haven’t seen the movie for a while, it’s about Willy Wonka, a man who lives and works in his top secret chocolate factory.
Willy Wonka announces he is going to invite five lucky children for a tour of his factory.
Four of the children are horrible. The fifth, Charlie, comes from a very poor family which lives in the shadow of the great factory.
In the end, Willy Wonka picks Charlie to inherit the factory and invites Charlie and his whole family to come and live with him.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that Willy Wonka is a parable which offers a fairly pointed critique of modern life.
The four horrible children all represent the excesses of modern life:
Augustus Gloop represents gluttony – always stuffing his face with food.
Violet Beauregarde represents any number of modern addictions or obsessions – hers just happens to be chewing gum.
Mike TeeVee represents our fascination with and fixation on the media.
And Veruca Salt (pictured here) represents our insatiable consumer appetites – and the reality of greed.
It is only Charlie – who at the beginning of the story seems to have nothing – who proves, in the end, to have everything:
A kind, loving and honest heart.
And the care of a loving and supportive family – particularly embodied by his Grandpa Joe.
I still love this film.
Not because of the fantastic chocolate factory or the odd little Umpa Loompas and their strange songs (which is why I loved it when I was a kid) but because it speaks a profound truth.
It reminds us that all the things the world tells us are important, or life-giving or desirable…
…in the end will disappoint us, or worse, destroy us.
Not much has changed in the world since Willy Wonka first debuted in 1971.
If anything, things have gotten worse.
Our insatiable appetite for stuff hasn’t changed, fueled by an advertising industry who continues to try to convince us that we need more and more, bigger and bigger, better and better.
Veruca’s cry in Willy Wonka is all too frequently heard on the lips of all too many people: “But, Daddy, I want it!”
Many are drowning in a sea of consumer debt.
And, while I am no economist, it is my understanding that the economic downturn we are in was (at least in part) the result of home buyers overextending themselves, and lenders willingly letting them – all to get that “dream house” that they thought they needed.
Our desire for more and more, bigger and bigger, better and better has left many simply worn out, depressed and ultimately unsatisfied – I see it all the time.
And, to all of this the Teacher in our first lesson says, “vanity!” Or, to use a more modern expression, “Complete foolishness!”
Jesus himself regularly warned against the dangers of greed and putting our confidence in things.
In fact, he speaks about that subject a lot more that than he does about most other ethical subjects!
The scripture’s consistent indictment against humanity’s greed, and our lust for power and possessions should make most if not all of us a little uncomfortable.
I know it does me.
But, those who believe and trust in Jesus know the answer to our foolish desire for more and more.
We need to become more like Charlie!
And Jesus, and Paul after him, tell us how to accomplish that:
Jesus invites us to be “rich toward God.”
Paul teaches us to “put to death that which is earthly in you.”
What they are saying is this: if we put God in the center of our lives, and let God set our priorities, guide our paths and motivate our actions, then we will gain a whole new perspective on all our stuff and our desire to have more.
And to put God at the center means that we will have to allow God to permeate everything about how we live our lives.
It means letting our relationship with God define who we are and how we conduct ourselves in all our other relationships – in our homes, at work, in our communities, and in how we think about things like our wealth and possessions.
When we center our lives in God – instead of all the other things that might define us as human beings – we will develop a whole new attitude about things like wealth and possessions and power and what we want.
When God is at the center of our lives we will come to look at the world more through God’s eyes – and become more like Charlie: loving, caring and honest in dealing with others… and ourselves.
You see, wealth, possessions, power and property are not, in and of themselves evil, or foolish. That’s not what the Teacher of Ecclesiastes nor Jesus are trying to tell us in these lessons.
What they are telling us that that they become foolish and evil when they begin to take over the center of our lives, when they become the things that define who we are and what we are about, when they become the focus of all our efforts and our energy.
And when they do get control over us they are tyrannical overlords. They will truly suck the life out of us.
What Jesus wants us to understand, is that when we become rich toward God, we are freed from that tyranny.
We are freed to live more fully the life God intended us to live in the first place.
We are freed to care and be cared for; to love, and to be loved.
And that’s Good News! Really Good News for us and for the whole world!
Because, in the end, isn’t that what we all really want anyway?
Amen.