A few months ago, I read a not very convincing attempt at a spiritual biography of former president Richard Nixon. 

At the end of the day, the project involved too much reading between the lines to make its points. 

But I understand what sparked the quest. 

It was Henry Kissinger.

In the days after President Nixon’s resignation, Kissinger gave an interview to TIME magazine’s Hugh Sidey, in which he made this devastating observation. 

Kissinger said, “Can you imagine what this man could have been had somebody loved him?  Had somebody in his life cared for him?  I don’t think anybody ever did.  Not his family, not his peers. He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.”

I don’t know if that’s really true or not, fair or not, but the spiritual biography I read was an attempt to ponder that statement. 

And even if it wasn’t true for Richard Nixon, specifically, I think it names something accurately about a certain kind of modern life story. 

You know the kind I mean.

I’m talking about the story of a remarkably eventful, remarkably successful life, rich in almost every conceivable way, except for one. 

It’s a life that is cripplingly poor in love. 

And so, after a while, all of the attainments and their trappings start to seem shockingly empty…a desperate chase after the one thing that somehow always seems to slip away. 

Yesterday, along these same lines, I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole on where the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” comes from. 

And I discovered that it comes from somewhere not too far from here: from Rhinebeck, New York, where in 1853, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones built a large Romanesque Revival summer mansion overlooking the Hudson River.

If you’re interested, that’s “Jones,” as in Dow Jones, and also as in the author Edith (Jones) Wharton, who visited as a young girl. 

There were tennis courts, carriage houses, boat houses, gardens, Tiffany skylights. A ballroom.

Apparently, this magnificent new house set off a massive wave of sprucing and renovating and expanding among the other summer families—so much so that they gave us the name we use for doing that, wherever we do.   

But the fashionable world did not stay in Rhinebeck, and by the mid 1880s, after the death of Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, the family was quickly off, mostly to Newport.

The house lingered on with a new family through the roaring twenties before settling into a deep quiet, and then finally being abandoned.

All these years later, the house, Wyndyclyffe, is still standing, though only barely.

There’s a chain link fence around it now.  Bricks and other debris all over the place. 

The grounds have been shrunk down to 2.5 acres instead of the original 80. 

Can you imagine what that house would be like now had somebody loved it?

Yet the image of it as an empty ruin seems like a parable in its own right.

So much for “keeping up with the Joneses.” 

I think it also gives us a way into Jesus’ parable in this morning’s gospel. 

Because what are we to make of this man he describes?

Jesus warns us about the guy’s greed, of course, but it’s not just that. 

The man’s lands produce abundantly—so much so that he’s run out of room to store the harvest. 

It’s a gold-medal problem, to be sure. 

But there’s something odd about how he’s inclined to solve his problem.

His idea is to start ripping down his current barns in order to make room for even bigger ones—new barns that will hold what he describes as “all my grain and all my goods.”

And this is where I start thinking about the Joneses.

Because what does this guy really need here? 

Is “need” even the right word? 

Somehow, it isn’t. 

You don’t get the feeling that what he needs is really all this extra food and the extra sense of security that comes with it, although that’s what he seems to tell himself.

Really, though, what I think he needs is something that no amount of food could ever satisfy. 

I think he needs his neighbors to see those new barns going up.

He needs them to see all that hustle and bustle over on his farm, and to see all that grain getting socked away like he’s Joseph preparing the whole land of Egypt for seven years of famine—except (and this is significant) that it’s all for himself.   

He needs farmer Jones across the road to feel jealous.  

Because those are things that tell him he’s worth something.    

Those are the things that tell him he’s alive.

Those are the things that give him hope. 

The man may sound smug and self-satisfied, at least at first, even talking flippantly to his own soul, as Luke suggests with great subtlety. 

Really, though, when you see through the man’s bravado, what you see is how compulsive, desperate, and achingly lonely he must be. 

Imagine what this man could have been had somebody loved him.

Think of what he might have offered. 

Now consider what a ruined soul he’s let himself become.   

It’s an awful picture—awful enough that I have to remind myself that he’s only a made-up person in a parable.

But it gives real urgency to Jesus’ message. 

Because, when you think about it, what are the things that tell us we’re worth something? 

What tells us we’re alive?  

What gives us hope? 

What do our souls need in ample proportion? 

It’s telling, isn’t it, that when the man addresses his soul, he makes it so that he’s the one who does the talking?

He doesn’t give his own soul time and space to speak back to him.

Maybe he doesn’t dare. 

But when we do – when we give our souls that time and space – it shouldn’t surprise us that they talk about very different needs and very different dreams. 

They talk about things that the Joneses almost certainly cannot see, much less keep score on.

They talk about the worries and hopes we have for our families. 

They talk about differences so stark that it seems like they’ll take decades to repair. 

They talk about the exhaustion on the other side of courage, and the pain of carrying blame, no matter how much is or isn’t properly yours to carry.

But they also talk about the gestures of kindness for which we are so grateful. 

They remember the person who found a way to make us laugh, the stranger who stopped to give us a hand, and the friend who found a way to tell us a hard but necessary truth. 

There is the music that never fails to lift us, and that movie that always – always – makes us cry—reminding us how to feel when it seems like we’ve almost started to forget. 

And behind them all, there is the Spirit of the Living God, always in close communion with the soul, speaking of the endlessly creative love that sustains us all. 

Souls don’t need goods.  They need goodness.

Imagine what this man could have been had somebody loved him? 

Imagine what he could have been if he’d been willing to let his soul try.

Not even the Joneses could have kept up with that. 

Amen.