This message was delivered August 3, 2025, at the First Baptist Church of Denver.

A recording of this message is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/FRk4dqpjFCA?si=Y9lUVgvwMs4E6ntK

Stuff… and things.

I really didn’t want to preach this sermon this week. I came back from Wisconsin and from my mother’s with the clear intent to leave all of that behind and bring none of it to this pulpit. But then, of course, this was the passage that logically and narratively followed Nancy’s text last week and there goes that Holy Spirit again. For those that haven’t been following my latest perpetual calamity, I’ve been on a journey alongside my mother, who lives in the area where all of us who grew up in Wisconsin call “up north.” Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, generally only to get to your cabin or to visit your family. It’s a unique place. It looks like this and like this and like this. It also looks like this and like this. Whoops, that last one is Denver. If those all looked the same to you, then you are correct. Those are also all different towns – main street USA. It could be anywhere. Block after block of under utilized buildings, poorly maintained or non-existent sidewalks, and non-existent people to walk upon them. The busiest place is the gas station and Walmart. And outside of town is row after row and mile after mile of this – storage units. “What shall I do, for I have no place to store my stuff?” Then he said, “I will do this: I will rent a storage unit.” Friends, we have a problem with and an attachment to stuff. That is apparent to all of us and even the people who own all the stuff, as I realized this last week. We know we have a problem and yet… here we are. You can’t see it, but there is a deep darkness that is overshadowing this. Hidden beneath the cute fluffy clouds in the sky is a spiritual darkness – dare I even say war – happening on Earth. I can only describe it as aggressive. See, as I was passing between my mother’s and her very own storage unit with a truck full of stuff, I passed storage facility after storage facility after storage facility. I noticed on one particular trip an empty field with a new sign, saying a new storage facility with a clever name was coming soon. I pulled into my storage unit, passing row after row of doors. This one was outside but it could have looked just like the picture on your bulletin cover. Every door was closed except the occasional, with a car parked out front and generally nothing happening inside. But I could see inside, and every single one was exactly the same. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, back to front: stuff. I opened my storage unit, the unit I keep for my mother’s items, and upon opening the door it was… the same, except for the one eighth of the unit that remained swept clean in anticipation of more stuff. “One day, son, this will all be yours,” I thought as I closed the door and went back into the UHaul. Not because I wanted it, but because it would sit there until it eventually was. Later that evening I drove down the road, which could have been any road in America, and I passed storefront after storefront, closed door after closed door. For rent, for sale, for lease, for rent, the signs that were once temporarily posted and were now fading, read. As I continued down the road toward my Motel 6 I took note of the places that had closed since I had last been here, and similarly noted the ones that had been recently opened. Oddly enough, almost all of them were discount stores, overstock stores, Dollar Trees or Dollar Generals. Purveyors of stuff that nobody else wanted or that panders most to the least of these. It is often said that hell is a place on Earth, and I cannot help but be convinced that it looks something like this. It looks something like a place where there is nothing better to do than see what pallet of Amazon returns just rolled in to the warehouse of stuff and then head to the bar afterwards to enjoy the same light beer that we’ve been drinking for fifty years. It looks something like a place where the purpose of everyone’s life has been sucked out of their bodies once the paper or steel mill closed. It looks something like a place where everyone is fighting an internal spiritual war for safety and security in a place where that feeling no longer exists. Why? How? Why and how have we let this happen and why and how do we continue to let it happen? Why, so often, do we cling to stuff when we have lost our sense of security? It is a disease that affects so many, not just my mother, but so many of the people that we know and the people that we love. It affects people of all economic and social statuses, all genders and all races. This hell affects and can be experienced by anyone at any time and in any place. It is a uniquely human disease and a darkness that can affect even the brightest lights. And all of it caused by placing our sense of security in anything that exists here on Earth. Time is a flat circle, as we know. In the first century, storage units were called things like “barns” and “storehouses.” We often say that things aren’t made like they used to be, but as we have said repeatedly in different ways for the last several weeks, whether it’s people or things, they didn’t last long in the first century. People died early. Crops, produced organically not by preference but by a lack of technology, went bad quickly. It was as pointless to keep these things around for any length of time just as it was inappropriate to have any faith in your child living more than a year because that was quite rare. “This very night your life is being demanded of you,” Jesus says. In other words, “you gon’ die.” All of this will fade away and is fading away, and what will be left of your storage units of even the finest grain? Nothing at all. As it sits, your grain will rot and will decompose, starting to smell and will eventually become worthless, only as a burden to someone else who has to clean it up after you’re gone. As your storage unit sits closed, it will head like everything and everyone towards entropy, sinking slowly into the ground from whence it came and returning to the oil that all of this plastic garbage was made from. It, like us when stagnant and sitting, will rot and will fade away into nothing, much like Everytown USA. There is no hidden message in Jesus’ parable. There often is, and we have to dig to find it, it but the purpose and message here is abundantly clear. This rich man is caught up in his own greed, and in his abundance thinks of nobody but himself. What shall I do? I will build larger ones, I will store my things, and my soul will be happy for generations to come. I shall live in security and build my life upon this rock of seeds and grain. I’ve / got / mine. Except, Jesus says, you don’t. You don’t and you never have. Your seeds and your grain are everything to you just as it is to the animals that want to eat it. Just as it is to the humidity and to the environment in which it sits. Mice and rats and roaches, the literal least of the world, will find it, will get into it, and will poop in it. I know this for a fact. Your food, just like your life, is being demanded of you this very night. And these things that you have prepared, whose will they be? Will they be yours? Or will they succumb to the world, being forgotten under layer upon layer of new seed and new garbage and new filth to pile on top, rotting away into nothing until somebody else comes and cleans it up? Jesus has no interest in this. He never has. He is appalled even at the question: dude, why are you even asking me this? Jesus has no interest here in making sure that equality is served because the equality is rooted in a system that will never be equal. There is no such thing as equality in a system that rewards those with more. Jesus has no desire or intention of operating within this system or even entertaining the question of how to make it more fair. Who set me to be the judge before you? The reason for this is not because Jesus wants us to live in poverty. Nobody lives in poverty within the Kingdom of God, friends. There is no such thing as poverty in the life of freedom that Jesus calls us to. It is because there is so much more. There is so much more to be found on Earth than storage units full of garbage. There is so much more to be found than steep discounts on crap that expires tomorrow. There is so much more to be found here and now than a pallet of trash that nobody else wanted but, hey, it’s cheap. There is so much more. This is the whole point of this section of Luke. When he speaks to the Pharisees earlier in chapter 11, Jesus mentions directly to them: “For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God…” You tithe things that do not last out of necessity but you fail to actually live and work towards a world that might. Just after this is one of my favorite passages: If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you? How much more is there in store for us that believe and hope in a world that is not cluttered with trash? How much more is there in store when we clothe ourselves not with endless pairs of $12 pants from Amazon and instead clothe ourselves with the love and faith and trust in a God that provides endless security? How much more is there in store when the store is not Target or Walmart or Dollar General but instead the… Holy Kmart? (That’s what we’ll call the Kingdom) How much more is there in store – pun intended.

Evangelicals like to speak of spiritual warfare, and they’re right to, because it is a real thing. It is a real thing in the hearts and minds of those that have lost the security that was, for some reason and in spite of everything that suggests otherwise, placed in things that we’ve built as humans. We are in a fight against the darkness that can be felt in real places such as Everytown USA. We are in a fight against the manifestation of evil called Temu and Amazon. And as I cleaned up, only temporarily, another victim to these evils this last week, my consistent prayer was that nobody else would have to fight against this evil. I started where I was and where I could: by looking at what was amassed in the storage unit and in the mess, and seeing not where I could use it or where my mother could use it, but where someone else could use it. The landfill was the place that could use most of it, but I tried the best I could to not look at these items as burdens on me but as opportunities to make a difference in someone else’s life. I couldn’t find the use in someone else’s life for this three-dimensional ice bucket, but if we start to approach the idea of improving lives not by acquiring more things but instead using what we have already, perhaps we’ll make progress in this spiritual warfare thing. Perhaps we’ll finally be free to live – and die – in the ways in which we are truly called. Amen.

Hymn #590 The Solid Rock