Have you heard of the reality TV show on a couple of years ago that featured five Amish young people who were removed from their homes and supplanted in the middle of Beverly Hills, the cosmopolitan bipolar opposite of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The show was called Amish in the City, and aired on UPN Thursday night. One reviewer described the show in these words: “In this 10-part series, kicked off with a two-hour opener, five Amish men and women, age 18-24, move into a well-appointed Hollywood Hills house. Their house mates are six “city kids,” seemingly chosen for their cluelessness. Thus, a more accurate description of this series would be to call it a cross between “Big Brother” and “The Waltons.” There’s a gee-whiz reality tone that starts with a breathless voice over teasing viewers to watch the five Amish “experience rumspringa (the Amish rite to examine other lifestyle before being baptized into the stringent Amish clan) in a way no one has before.”

The reviewer continues, “To be sure, there is a certain amount of delight in watching the Amish discover skyscrapers, parking meters and new fruits and vegetables. Mostly, though, the series focuses on the same insipid interpersonal observations (“Randy’s body is banging”), reports of transitory emotions and petty arguments that are a staple of reality shows from “Real World” to “Survivor.” Not surprisingly, an eye-opening visit to an art gallery gets nowhere near the same footage as expeditions for clothes and swimwear. Casting is everything in reality shows, including this one. Mose, a 24-year-old Amish man with a winning smile, a cheerful outlook and a friendly disposition, quickly emerges as the most appealing member of the show. The two Amish women, Miriam, 21, and Ruth, 20, come across as poised and positive. Though they have only an eighth grade education, they are intellectual giants compared to Boston busboy Nick (“When we make fun of Amish people, we’re not making fun of you personally”), annoying vegan Ariel who believes cows are from outer space and Chicago’s hopelessly shallow Meagan (“You guys seriously dress like this? It’s not just a joke?”).”

I suppose that these Amish young people are old enough to choose to leave the sheltered environment of their arcane way of life to experience whatever they so desire, after all they are of legal age, they are consenting adults, they are free Americans. But there is plenty of protest from those who feel like their religion is being exploited. And I don’t like it either. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in free choice, I like modern conveniences, and I like having plenty. I like the complex modern man-made world and what it has to offer, at least on most days. I mean, I am not trading that gas guzzling Yukon for a buggy anytime soon. So why should I object to these same young people the same pleasures? After all, the Amish lifestyle is a restrictive, staunch, simple lifestyle that is overbearing with religion and burdened with responsibility and obligation. No electricity, no TV, no computers, no skyscrapers, no cars, no luxuries and not even most of what we consider necessities. Don’t these folks deserve opportunity? Don’t they have an inaliable right to make themselves better? Certainly. And from the trailer and teasers of the show, they seem to choose not to return to the Amish community. They have seen the outside world, and they can’t get enough. The blinders have been lifted from their eyes, and they have succumbed to the lure of once forbidden fruit. So, Mose, say good-bye to the buggy race and hello to the rat race.

I think we need the Amish. We need the monastics. We need those committed to the simple life. They are stability for the rest of us. Selfish you say? Perhaps. After all, selfishness is a right of the thoroughly modern man. But with all the benefits of the modern era, of the information age, we long for stability and security. Change is forced upon us with amazing rapidity. Think of the changes in communications and transportation alone in the past 20 years. We have seen the invention of personal computers more powerful than all of those on Apollo 11, we all have tiny cell phones in our pockets, and whole libraries are contained on a Mylar plastic disk. We have 200 TV channels on satellite dishes, and we can get news and weather on demand.

But we have not solved our major problems, we have been constantly in war or conflict, the poor are poorer, crime is alarmingly high, and there are people starving to death in the shadow of church steeples. Modern religion continues to fragment into insignificance. Us moderns are stressed-out, burned-out, used-up, have ulcers and T.M.J. We have relationship problems (the most surprising thing to Mose was the divorce rate, he didn’t get it) job problems, and we never seem to have enough. We are wallowing in our own materialism, and tripping over our own stuff. We are mentally ill, and hooked on anything that promises an easy way and freedom from our pain that we necessarily avoid.

I, for one, am glad that there is a small band of pilgrims who stand their ground and resist the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, whose beliefs and commitments fly in the face of the values of modern society, who have found a better way through simplicity. We need people like this, people who are strong where most of us are weak. Tenacious people who are doggedly determined to shape their environment and not let their environment shape them. People who have dominion over their world albeit a small snapshot of the big picture. People whose character and resolve are inspirations to those of us whose core values have been assuaged with the temptresses of comfort and convenience. We are better just because they exist. It gives those of us hopelessly stuck in the human predicament a ray of hope. Do I sound like the grass is greener for the Amish? I am sure that five Amish young people think that the grass is greener for us moderns. I am also sure that we need the Amish more than they need us.

In our lectionary text today, we have a parable of the rich fool as told by Luke. In essence it is a lesson on greed and priorities. A man has a great crop and has to tear down his barns to build bigger ones to hoard the prodigious harvest so that he may live well, to eat, drink and be merry. Sounds like he is living the American dream. But the problem is that he is foolish because his life will be required of him that very night, and all his possessions won’t make one bit of difference. Chaff in the wind as it were, as he is thrashed by the reaper’s sickle. The conclusion is that he should have instead been concerned about being rich spiritually, and the implication that you can’t be both, a common theme of Jesus. After all, you can’t serve God AND Mammon.

We good Christian folk often think otherwise. We have a sense of entitlement because we are Americans, and because of the insipid influence of the prosperity gospel, that if we are good God blesses us materially. We echo with Janis Joplin who penned these words: Oh lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive porsches, I must make amends. Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends. So oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz. Oh lord won’t you buy me a color TV. Dialing for dollars is trying to find me. I wait for delivery each day until 3. So oh lord won’t you buy me a color TV. Oh lord won’t you buy me a night on the town. I’m counting on you lord, please don’t let me down. Prove that you love me and buy the next round. Oh lord won’t you buy me a night on the town. And you of course remember the legendary Joplin she died of a heroin overdose in a motel room in 1970 at the ripe old age of 27. Her life was required of her. Ironically, the song Mercedes Benz was released posthumously.

So what exactly is the danger in greed? Why is it counted amongst the seven deadlies by theologians? After all, excess is reserved for people who have more than us. We are not greedy, we give to the church and to the United Way. We even help out a few poor kids at Christmas. We live simply, at least compared to some. One of my favorite preachers, William Willimon the Chaplain at Duke says It is as if greed, acquisitiveness comes quite naturally. But it is also true that our society has become a vast supermarket where we are trained in desire. We live in a world of manufactured need. Advertising creates, moulds, kindles desire. Not knowing what there is that’s worth wanting, we become pliable victims of advertising’s training in want of everything. We didn’t know that we were suffering from a malady called “heartburn” until TV told us there was a cure for it. Desire seems to be contagious, imitative. I want something because someone else wants it. We want what others have in order to have their approval. Yet such desire, rather than linking us to others, puts us in conflict. Whatever our neighbor has that we don’t have diminishes us. When you build your self-image on what you have, when you lack, you are less of a person.

He goes on to say that needing what our neighbor has in order to be somebody, we feel caught in an endless treadmill of acquisition which can never be satisfied. We must have the “latest new and improved model” but, scarcely before we get it home, “the latest” is already dated and we are diminished.

Frank W. Woolworth’s great contribution, which revolutionized merchandising, was the bright idea to put merchandise out on tables for everyone to see. Before that invention, people entered a store and told a clerk what they wanted. The clerk would go and obtain for them the merchandise from the storage area. His grandfather was the first to lay the merchandise out to be seen, and touched, and the rest is history. His invention was perfect for a people who now no longer know how even to name what we want. Show us everything and we shall invent a desire for it all. The surest way to drive people like us crazy is to ask us, “Well, what do you really want?” We don’t know other than that we want what we want and we want it now.

So what is it that we want, what is it that we can’t get enough of? To figure that out for ourselves is to unlock the key to our character. It has been said that the list of seven deadly sins are an instant personality test, all you do is pick you favorite and it is a quick synopsis of who you really are. But somehow, they are all tied to greed. Can’t get enough to eat? The greed of gluttony. Can’t have the person that you desire? Maybe lust is the greed of desire. The most mortal of sins seem to have the common threads of acquisitiveness and greed.

So I ask again this morning, what do you want, really? There are some religions, Buddhism comes to mind, that teach that the purpose of religion is to get you over your wants, to help you to extinguish desire. Blessed, complete detachment is their goal. So it is surprising to learn that Christianity is not like these other faiths in that we ask you, not to quench all desire, but rather to kindle your desire for the right thing, and that is the point of this parable.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rest in you.” These words begin Augustine’s autobiography of redirected passion, Augustine’s Confessions. Only God can satisfy because we are created by God to love God. Nothing else can ever satisfy the depth of that longing. We are never truly fulfilled until we realize that, and we spin our wheels trying to ease our hunger. Our problem as humans is not that we are full of desire, burning with unfulfillment. Our problem is that we long for that which is unfulfilling. We attempt to be content with that which never satisfies. As C. S. Lewis says we are far too easily pleased.

Our burning desire testifies that God has created us for himself, and we burn to be fulfilled. Our desire is boundless because it is meant to find its rest — that is, its perfect source and object–in God. Without the God for whom we were created, we are insignificant, nothing, therefore we relentlessly grab for this and for that, hoping to insulate ourselves from our nothingness.

Which brings me back to today’s gospel. According to Scripture, about the worst you can call anybody is, “thou fool.” Jesus says, in Matthew 5:22, that any who calls his neighbor “fool” will be in danger of hell. Even though God doesn’t give us permission to call one another fools, there are certain rare occasions in which God doesn’t mind calling us fools. Note whom Jesus calls a “fool” in today’s scripture. In our hearing, the story is about a man who is prudent. He set goals for himself, planned ahead. And he achieved his goals. He gets results so rich that he demolished his barns and built new ones for his overly abundant harvest. Then the man said to himself, “Soul, take ease.” Soul is another name for desire. We would call this man a success, a prudent business person. And yet Jesus calls him “fool.”
“The fool says, ‘There isn’t a God’ (Psalm 53:1).” A fool in Psalm 53 is anybody who lives as if God were not. And Jesus has called this businessman a fool. Is there a connection between the atheistic fool of the Psalms and this materialistic fool in Luke? A link is being made between our atheism and our materialism, our godlessness and our greed. The rich man says, ‘Soul, take ease.’” But ease is precisely what we cannot take in our situation. Our lives are condemned to ceaseless striving, a treadmill of desire. We must have the newest and the latest model or we shall be diminished. No sooner than we get it home, than we realize that we are no longer have the latest model. Even our children become possessions, things to be used by us to cover our insecurity. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” says Emerson. Things are a demanding deity.

And the Christian faith reiterates that the problem is not that we desire but that we desire too little. Having no proper object for our desires, we breathlessly run toward everything. In our state of disordered desire, we transmute love into lust, achievement into acquisitiveness, and vocation into drudgery. Having no Creator tempts us to make our lives our creations, Unable to rest easy in God’s good creation, to see our lives as God’s good creation, we have much to do. (“I know what I will do. I will tear down my barns and fill new ones. I will say to my soul, take ease…”)

To be fulfilled, we have to fill ourselves with worthwhile stuff, and when we find that, there will be no room in our stomachs for more. You see, the real problem is not the acquisition of things, it is that we have no room for God. It becomes a substitute, and we become idolaters.
Leo Tolstoy once wrote a story about a successful peasant farmer who was not satisfied with his lot. He wanted more of everything. One day he received a novel offer. For 1000 rubles, he could buy all the land he could walk around in a day. The only catch in the deal was that he had to be back at his starting point by sundown. Early the next morning he started out walking at a fast pace. By midday he was very tired, but he kept going, covering more and more ground. Well into the afternoon he realized that his greed had taken him far from the starting point. He quickened his pace and as the sun began to sink low in the sky, he began to run, knowing that if he did not make it back by sundown the opportunity to become an even bigger landholder would be lost. As the sun began to sink below the horizon he came within sight of the finish line. Gasping for breath, his heart pounding, he called upon every bit of strength left in his body and staggered across the line just before the sun disappeared. He immediately collapsed, blood streaming from his mouth. In a few minutes he was dead. Afterwards, his servants dug a grave. It was not much over six feet long and three feet wide. The title of Tolstoy’s story was: How Much Land Does a Man Need?

Well, the answer is an obvious “not much” when all is said and done. Because the real problem with greed is that it is the ultimate lack of faith in the hereafter, as we cling to the illusion of security in the comfort of the here and now. So how much is enough, how much Land does a man need? Maybe no more than 40 acres and a mule, and perhaps a covered black buggy in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, who knows. However much we need, or regardless of how much we have, and for most of us that is plenty, may it never replace our need for God. Because if it does, we are the king of fools. May it never be so. Amen.