RCL Year C, Proper 28

This is the audio of a  sermon given by The Rev. Roger Wharton  who was our guest preacher on November 17, 2013.

RCL Year C, Proper 27

So Jesus is having another argument. Doesn’t it sometimes feel like he’s always arguing? From the time he was twelve in the temple all the way to the end, he keeps getting into these verbal disputes over law and theology with different groups of people. (Some of you might find this a little comforting as you look to family gatherings for the holidays – see, Jesus got into a lot of arguments too.) This one today is happily the last one in Matthew’s gospel – after Jesus finishes his point the scribes come up and congratulate him on his speech, and no one dares after this to ask him another question.

But this argument may seem to us pretty arcane. It’s an argument over a point of theology and ancient customs, and Jesus wins the argument with a bit of verbal rhetoric that leaves me a little cold, I confess – unless it’s just to root again for Jesus’ verbal acuity in debate. Go, Jesus! He won! What’d he win again?

So let’s try to look at it and see if there’s anything it can offer us. The argument is with the Sadducees, defined here simply as those who say there is no resurrection. What they really are is a sect of Judaism that believes God’s revealed truth is found only in the Torah, in the first five books of the Hebrew bible. This sect believes that the prophets and wisdom writings may all be interesting, but they are not scripture – only Torah is. And in Torah, there is no mention of resurrection – so they don’t believe in it. (The Pharisees, however, and of course later the Christians, see the whole of the Hebrew bible as scripture, and there are references to resurrection in those writings which support their belief in it.) At any rate, the Sadducees present a ridiculous situation to Jesus in order to show how absurd they think the idea of resurrection is; Jesus answers back with an appeal to Torah, and the foundational story of Moses and the burning bush. God is the God of the living, not the dead, he says. And the Sadducees are silenced

So that’s the historical fact of the story. Question posed, question answered. Depending on where you are at this point in your life, you might think the answer says a lot, or nothing at all. Then again, you might just be full of more questions.

The question the Sadducees ask Jesus, about a woman who marries seven brothers in succession, is meant to be a ridiculous one. But it is also a revealing one. The practice they are taking about is levirate marriage: a man needs to have offspring in order to continue his name forward, and if he is unable to make that happen with his wife before he dies, his brother must step in to help. The widow has no say in this process of course, because she is the family property and offspring creator at this point, and that is it. Think of being a woman in that culture, a piece of property, and hearing Jesus answer the question this way: in that life there is no marrying or giving in marriage. What an immensely freeing thing to hear Jesus say that none of this will continue after the resurrection – that every human being will be equal before God once freed from the systems of this world. The injustice of this life will not be perpetrated in the next. If you are someone caught in oppression and degradation in this world of whatever kind – because of your gender, or your sexual orientation, or your social class, or the color of your skin – this is a powerful story of hope for the future. A very good answer to the question indeed.

And more than that, Jesus’ answer offers hope for all people, powerful and powerless alike. If this world and this life is all there is, then this is the only sphere where God can act to right wrongs and heal hurts. This stage is all there is to act on. But every day around us we see wrongs going unrighted, terrible crimes and injustices continuing on unpunished and unhealed, people whose lives are suffering from start to finish. If there is no chance of future restoration, it is a depressing prospect indeed – w[...]

RCL Year C, Proper 25

I don’t know if you noticed it, but there’s a trap in that reading. Did you notice it, or did you fall right in it?

It’s such a simple little parable. Two people go to pray. One, the Pharisee, is all self-righteous and high on himself. The other one, the tax collector, throws himself on God’s mercy. The tax collector, Jesus says, did it right. The end.

So what do you think? Who do you identify with in this parable? Do you like the Pharisee and identify with him? Do you feel like he got a bum deal? Probably not – probably your sympathies were with the tax collector…because Jesus praises him and we know he’s the one we’re supposed to like. After all, he’s not like the Pharisee. And thank goodness we’re not like the Pharisee either. But wait – isn’t that exactly what the Pharisee said? Thank goodness I’m not like the tax collector? Aha, Jesus says. Gotcha.

Oohhh, the temptation toward self-justification. It runs so deep for us. How many marital disagreements run aground on that temptation – Well, I’m sorry for being so sharp, but you really did screw up and I have a right to be mad. How many friendships are lost there – It was her fault, not mine! How much time and space in our heads are taken up with it – I can’t believe those people. Boy, are they off base! But not me!

It’s been a basic spiritual problem for a very long time. As soon as Christianity became an established religion, in the 4th century, several Christian men and women left the cities and went out to live alone in the desert, to spend time in prayer and fasting to purify themselves for a life in God. Their path was attractive enough that others followed them out to the desert, seeking their counsel. So, many of their teachings were written down, what we now know of as the sayings of the desert fathers and mothers – most of them short little Zen-like sayings and stories that say a lot in a few words. And no small number of them are about just this problem – judging others and justifying ourselves. Here are a few:

One of the elders said: A monk ought not to inquire how this one acts, or how that one lives. Questions like this take us away from prayer and draw us on to backbiting and chatter. There is nothing better than to keep silent.

Abbott John used to say: We have thrown down a light burden, which is the [reprimanding] of our own selves, and we have chosen instead to bear a heavy burden, by justifying our own selves and condemning others.

[One man asked an elder,] Tell me how I can become a monk. The elder replied: If you want to have rest here in this life and also in the next, in every conflict with another say: Who am I? and judge no one.

One of the brethren had sinned, and the priest told him to leave the community. So then Abbot Bessarion got up and walked out with him, saying: I too am a sinner! (from The Wisdom of the Desert,  Thomas Merton)

There’s lots more, but that gives you a sampling. These were people who had left everything to follow Jesus, who lived on little and owned nothing, and they struggled every day with this same problem – they were all too aware of their own righteousness and all too ready to condemn others. It took them immense effort to grow past this. And it takes us a lot of work too.

Because when it comes down it, we are most of us Pharisees. We are good citizens, we obey the laws and the customs of our country, we come to church, we pledge, we are kind to other people. We do all the right things. We aren’t tax collectors – we don’t shake people down for a cut of the taxes they must pay to the occupying regime, we aren’t despised by others of our society, we don’t do anything that’s obviously morally wrong.  It is easy and understandable for us to feel pretty okay about ourselves. And easy and understandable for us perhaps to be critical and down on others who are more obviously at fault – the people who just burglarized our neighbors, or the political party who’s really causing the problems in our govern[...]

RCL Year C, Proper 24

With this gospel coming right in the midst of stewardship season, I am tempted to draw an allegory: Here I am, the widow, the church who comes back over and over again insisting that you listen to me when I talk about pledging. Here you are, the unjust judge? sick of hearing from me. But in the end, I’m going to wear you down, and you will make your pledge to ECA. Persistence will pay off.

But Jesus didn’t tell this parable about stewardship and pledging to the Episcopal Church in Almaden. He told it about the need to pray always and not to lose heart. So I think I may need to go in a different direction with our sermon today.

The story itself is simple: a widow is seeking justice for some wrong. A widow is the ultimate symbol of powerlessness in the society of Jesus’ time, but this widow isn’t staying powerless. She comes to complain regularly about what’s been done to her. Even so, the judge she seeks justice from ignores her. He’s a bad judge, a person who ‘neither fears God nor has respect for people’ – someone with power and total impunity. But since the widow keeps coming at him over and over again, he gets sick of her – his words are literally ‘this woman is giving me a black eye!’ – and he figures he’d be better off settling her case and getting her off his back. So he does. The judge isn’t changed by the widow’s persistence – he’s as unpleasant at the end as he is at the beginning – but her perseverance pays off and gets her what she wants.

It is certainly a story of the way things are, of powerlessness meets power and what might happen there. But Jesus says it’s about the need to pray always and not to lose heart. And wrapping up the parable, he says, ‘and will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? …when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’ We’re supposed to draw a comparison between God and this judge, it seems. Taken all together, it sounds something like Jesus’ point is, God will seem to be ignoring you just like the bad judge in this story, but if you ask and ask and ask, eventually you’ll get what you want because you’ll wear God out – and that is the definition of faith. Not a comforting thought – but if we’re honest, we’d admit that this is certainly how it feels sometimes.

Will the Son of Man find faith on earth when he comes? What is faith, anyway?

I talk a lot about relationship, about our relationships with God and each other and how we set our priorities around those. But of course in our human relationships, we see some give and take. Sometimes we’re the one reaching out and sometimes others reach out to us. When we find ourselves in relationships where we seem to be doing all the pursuing, we might just wonder whether that relationship is healthy for us. We might try to get the other person to understand our concerns, get them to work on things with us. If it’s bad enough, and if we have a choice about the relationship, we might just end it – cease to be friends, break up, walk away. If it’s family, however, we might stick it out, knowing that the other person just can’t relate the way we want, but we love them anyway.

But with God, relationship is a different thing. Sometimes in our faith journey we really do feel the immensity of God’s giving to us. We have times when the warmth of God’s presence is wonderful, overwhelming, breathing into us fuller and richer life. We pray and we know God is there, just as if we can see God sitting there next to us in the room.

Other times, though, we might not feel much of anything at all. We might be trying hard to pray, but not getting any sense of God being there with us. We might be seeking God’s counsel and direction for our lives, asking for help with a decision, but just feel stuck in our muddle. We might ask and ask and never hear a response.

Spiritual writers through the centuries have named this – the experience of spiritual dryness, what John of the Cross called the dark night of th[...]

RCL Year C, Proper 23

 

At the Family Camp Jim and I help lead every summer, we don’t just read our scriptures, we act them out. The priest who was here a few weeks ago to lead the service, Donald Schell, is especially wonderful at engaging the whole congregation in playing different parts of the story. We had this story this past summer, so we acted out the lepers in a clump over here, staying away and not coming too close to Jesus who was over here, and then taking off joyfully in the other direction as soon as they see they’re healed. But then the one Samaritan leper turned back and came right up to Jesus, falling at his feet and thanking him, hugging his knees. Sometimes when you see the story in front of you, you get it in a whole different way.

Because this story is all about that staying away and coming close, and what those two choices mean.

The ten lepers call out to Jesus for help, but they keep their distance from him. They’re supposed to do that. They’re unclean because of their skin disease, and they’re not allowed close to people who are clean. But they know Jesus can help them, so they raise their voices to bridge the distance between them. Jesus heals them immediately, but all he says to them is, ‘Go show yourselves to the priests.’ Go do the proper ritual so that you can come close again to people, be part of society and restored to the Jewish people. So they set off to do just that. But the Samaritan, the extra-unclean one, the non-Jew, comes back, comes right up to Jesus and grabs hold of him. And it’s him that Jesus delights in – where are the others? he asks. Well, the answer is that they’re off doing what Jesus told them to do – they’re following the rules and performing the ritual they’re supposed to do. But Jesus doesn’t seem to care about that – he’s thrilled instead at the foreigner, the one who didn’t do what he told him, but who instead came back, this time coming close. Your faith has made you well, he tells him. You are more than healed from your skin disease, in other words. You are completely well, restored to full, whole life again. Never mind that ritual – your relationship with God is whole and intact.

Of course there’s an agenda to this story in Luke’s gospel, with the Samaritan again being the hero of the tale, just like in the parable of the Good Samaritan (also in Luke). The enemy isn’t really the enemy after all. Samaritans worshiped the same God, but in a different way, with Mt Gerizim as their center of worship rather than Jerusalem. If this Samaritan leper were to show himself to the priests, it would be on that mount, not in Jerusalem with the other nine. So part of this is like what Jesus says to the Samaritan woman at the well in the Gospel of John: God is greater than our divisions; which ritual and holy place you use isn’t the point. Even Samaritans, and Gentiles, and all those ‘other’ people, are part of the kingdom of God. In our own world of many religions, with Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, and others all part of our community, this is an important point for us too to take from the story.

But it goes deeper than religious tolerance. Jesus doesn’t just tell the Samaritan, that’s fine, you can go to your own priest to do the ritual. He commends him for coming back to say thank you even though he doesn’t do the ritual, and he wonders aloud at the other nine who don’t. The ten lepers ask for something and receive it, no questions asked. Jesus doesn’t give any stipulation before healing them of their disease – the issue isn’t their being worthy of the healing. The issue is what they do with what they’ve been given once they have it. The nine who head off to the priests are consumers of a commodity, of services offered. They get the healing and walk off with it in joy, heading off to the temple to pay in ritual form for what they’ve received. The one who returns, however, comes back to the one who gave that healing to him. Instead of being a consumer of Jesus’ services, he moves [...]

RCL Year C, Proper 22

Sermon by Kimberly Axtell

 

And the disciples said to Jesus, “Increase our faith.”

Hmmm. When I signed up for this preaching assignment and quickly glanced at the readings, I thought to myself, oh goody, I get the reading about having the faith of a mustard seed that grows into a tree and becomes home for all sorts of creatures. What a lovely image.

Then I read the text a week later and realized that instead of the gentle, encouraging Jesus, who wants to supports the disciples in their faith, I got a stern Jesus who chastises the disciples and essentially calls them slaves. Huh? How did we get here and what’s going on?

As you may realize we are approaching the end of the year. Not the end of the calendar year or the school year or the business year. We are approaching the end of the liturgical year. In the larger picture, during the course of a single year, we celebrate Jesus’ birth and Jesus’ death. After Easter, our readings transitioned into the theme of discipleship: parables and stories about how to live out our Easter faith. And that trend will continue through the end of the church year. When we pick up the story today, Jesus is in the northern part of Israel where he has found a receptive audience. He will shortly begin walking slowly down to Jerusalem, to his eventual showdown with the authorities and his execution for sedition.

But we are not there yet. As we pick up the story today, Jesus has finished his ministry in the north and, at least in the way that the author Luke arranges his material, he is teaching his disciples about broader issues, getting them ready for ministry after his death. Last Sunday, we had the lesson about the rich man and the beggar. Prior to that, we had the strange parable about the shrewd manager. And in the brief passage in between, not covered by the gospel reading for today, Jesus instructs his disciples to forgive and to make sure that they do not cause others to sin. With all this going on, no wonder the disciples responded with their cry, “Increase our faith.”

And yet, this is not a cry of desperation, this is a demand. For those of your school teachers out there, this request is in the imperative voice, this is a demand – Increase our faith!

What I love about this demand is that it has an expectation. The disciples, who have walked and talked, and lodged and eaten with Jesus over the last few years, were comfortable enough to have expectations. They didn’t know how their request would be accomplished but they knew enough about Jesus that somehow, he would be able to fulfill their request. So it comes as a surprise, at least to me, is that Jesus would respond as he did. Instead of comforting his disciples, who might be a little freaked out about the ratcheting up of his rhetoric, Jesus seems to take them down a notch.

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed…

If you’ve ever seen a mustard seed, you’d know that it is quite small. And yet both the seeds and the greens pack quite a punch. Jesus, in comparing faith to a mustard seed, is remarking on both the size, the smallness of the seed – we’re not talking about a coconut seed here – and its commonality. If you’ve ever admired our bursts of yellow on the local hills, you are looking at yellow mustard. Rapidly growing, some might even call it a weed. After our spring rains, the plant spills over borders taking advantage of our hills and wasted spaces. In doing some research about this plant, there is even the suggestion that, as a weed, this plant might even be viewed as unclean. Small, insignificant, unclean, and easily overlooked; Perhaps this is how you see your faith at times?

If you have the faith of a mustard seed…

This seems to be quite a contrast in images. When we approach the Bible as a text that is given to us straight from the mind of God, we can miss the point that Jesus and others often use humor, hyperbole, sarcasm, even shocking images to shake us into new ways of thinking.

If you hav[...]

RCL Year C, Proper 20

 

Well, I confess I was tempted to leave that parable right there. Today in our celebration of ministries we’re focusing on pastoral care and fellowship, ways we care for each other and enjoy our community. The beautiful lament in Jeremiah we heard today led us directly into that lovely hymn, ‘Balm in Gilead’ – so I thought of talking about the healing balm those kind of friendships and care are for us, and how we can be balm to others. And we’d all be quite comfortable hearing that.

But that would just be too easy. So instead, let’s face directly into what some people call Jesus’ most confusing parable ever: the parable of the dishonest servant. You all heard it – you got it, right? There’s a servant entrusted as his master’s steward, or manager, and he’s been embezzling money from the accounts. His fellow servants have turned him in, and now he’s in a desperate situation. So he goes to all his master’s debtors and forgives or reduces their debt, meaning his master won’t get all his money paid back. And that way he buys himself friends to watch out for him after he’s fired. The manager gets wind of this and commends him. Great job! he says. And that’s where Jesus ends the story.

So what do you think this means for us? Anybody?

If you’re confused, you’re in good company. Even Luke the gospel writer seems confused about what to do with this parable. He gives no fewer than four interpretations right after it:

The children of the light need to act more shrewdly, and be like the children of this age.

Christians should make friends by “dishonest wealth.”

If you’re not faithful with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with the true riches?

You cannot serve two masters – you can’t serve God and wealth.

Now, Luke has a lot to say in his gospel about wealth and our relationship to wealth. Elsewhere in this gospel – in next week’s parable of Abraham and Lazarus, to pick one example – the message is pretty consistent that rich people may have a problem. Here’s some of what we hear in Luke: Get rid of your possessions, don’t try to increase your salary, blessed are the poor, be on your guard against greed, don’t keep striving for financial security, it’s really hard for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God…etc. etc. Jesus in Luke talks about money far more than we’re comfortable doing, that’s for sure. Dealing ethically with money, and not letting money get in the way of our spiritual life with God, seem to be what a lot of the teachings are about.

But compared with all that teaching, this parable is even more confusing. I suppose money is confusing for all of us, when it comes down to it. What are we supposed to do with it exactly? Save it, spend it, give it away? Well, if we’re looking to scripture for a clue, it’s mostly #3, it seems: give it away. How about loan it to others and expect it back? Well, no.

Here’s one thing that may be hard for us to swallow: scripture is notably less interested in debts being paid off than we are. The Levitical code of ancient Israel provided for a cyclical forgiving of debts: every 50th year was named as a jubilee year, restoring land to its original owners, releasing people from their debt, and wiping the slate clean. And loaning money at interest was expressly forbidden. In the New Testament, Jesus’ prayer in the gospel of Matthew asks God to forgive us our debts, as we forgive the debts of others – still the language our UCC brothers and sisters use in the Lord’s prayer, while we use the more ambiguous ‘trespasses.’ We tend to see a moral dimension to debt, that everyone needs to repay what they owe. The morality even extends to our thinking about public debt and macroeconomics – it seems to rub people the wrong way when there is talk of forgiving the debt of other countries or of people in our own country who are underwater on their mortgages. When I lived in France, I often heard the proverb, ‘good accounts make good friends’ – the idea being that no[...]

RCL Year C, Proper 19

I just returned from an overnight trip to the wilderness, two days of solo backpacking I took as a retreat. When I go by myself into the wilderness, I’m especially aware of God as my companion and guardian – otherwise I get too scared and lonely. So it’s a good way for me to take a spiritual retreat, because I’m thrown a little more into a state of need, less able to fend for myself. Along the way, I was meditating on this gospel reading we just heard, and I found the idea of the lost sheep being found in the wilderness very reassuring. Except that I noticed on further reading that in order to find that one sheep who goes missing, the shepherd leaves the other 99 sheep alone in the wilderness. And then carries the one missing one home and has a party. It doesn’t say what happens to the rest of the flock. Are the other 99 still out there, being eaten by wild animals? Or is the idea that they’re already so righteous that they can take care of themselves? I started to wonder.

The thing is, sometimes we feel like the one lost sheep. But sometimes we feel like the 99 who got left behind. It may be that a big part of it is whom we’re relying on – are we convinced we’re righteous and competent and just fine in the wilderness, thanks? Or do we know we’re lost and in need of saving?

I think that’s the point of Jesus’ stories about the sheep and the coins. He tells them to the grumbling scribes and Pharisees, the ones always busy pointing fingers in the gospel stories. He leads in with, Which of you wouldn’t do this? And then he tells two stories that are nothing like what the Pharisees would do – or probably what any of us would do, either. Leave the 99 sheep alone in the wilderness to find the one who got lost? Throw a big party because you found one missing coin? You’ve got to be kidding.

But Jesus isn’t trying to give them rules and proscriptions for behavior. He’s pointing out something important about how they, and we, are with God. They, the grumbling Pharisees, are sure they’re righteous – they’re doing the right thing and following the law. It’s other people who are clearly notorious sinners, and Jesus is flagrantly consorting with those sinners day and night. So Jesus is trying to explain to them, yet again, that not only are those other sinners welcome back in God’s eyes, but even you Pharisees, grumbling and righteous as you are, are welcome back. All you have to do is acknowledge that you’re lost.

Well, for many of us, this is easier said than done. I’m in the midst of reading the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous – I’ve been familiar with the Twelve Steps for some time, but never read the book. I’m impressed by its absolute frankness, for how straightforward it is about human nature and how we fool ourselves. And one of the very first things it lays out, in the first three steps, is our need for a higher power. The writers go to some lengths to address the atheist and the agnostic, saying look, we used to think like you too. We used to think we were in charge and all this stuff about God and the supernatural was ridiculous. But look where it got us – and look where it’s gotten you. You can’t do anything to help yourself. You need God, in whatever way you want to define God, to get you out of this, because on your own, as you have shown numerous times, you can’t do it.

I know lots of people who ought to read this book. But it’s not just people addicted to alcohol or other substances – it’s all of us addicted to our own competence. Admit it – you don’t know everything. Admit it – you’re not in control. Because once you admit it, God has a chance to work with you and show you the right way, lead you home, throw a party and celebrate.

For some reason that seemed to be what God wanted to show me on my trip this week. I’ve gone out alone a few times; I know what to do, how to find my way, read the weather, feed myself, shelter myself, all of that. The last time I went out alone, it was a relief to reali[...]

RCL Year C, Proper 18

 

Well, this is certainly not the Jesus of church growth. There’s no user-friendly, entry-level, all-are-welcome kind of tone to today’s gospel, is there? If this really matters to you, Jesus says, you’ll sacrifice for it. So consider whether you’re willing to do that before you follow me. And by the way, give up all your possessions.

There’s also no family-friendly tone to Jesus today. This is the Jesus that puts all the talk about ‘family values’ on the shelf. Right there with all the other ideas we cherish but Jesus doesn’t, like ‘wealth is a sign of God’s favor,’ or ‘do the right thing and you’ll be rewarded.’ It’s curious that we keep clinging to these things when Jesus so often throws them out the window, but there you are. Too tempting to keep making God in our own image.

I want to think some more about those family values, though, in part because today at church is meant to be an especially family-friendly day.  Sunday School began today, and Susie made a big effort to send out postcards and emails and reminders to get families to come. And we’re having a BBQ after the service today to welcome all of us in the ECA family back for the fall. We want all you families, of all ages, here. So what’s with this gospel reading?

Well, here’s a family question for you: How many of you raised children to adulthood here at ECA? How many of those children went on to attend church as adults? Not very many. (Doesn’t feel good, does it?) Those kids were perhaps the last wave of kids from families who went to church because that was just what people did – though I’m guessing that even they probably had more peers who didn’t attend church than you did when you were a kid. The culture has shifted, a lot. Most people in our area don’t go to church and don’t see any reason why they should bring their kids to church. It’s completely not a part of their world. Even people who grew up here at ECA are part of that change. Why? What happened that drove them away? What did you do to them?

Well, of course, it’s not really about something you did to them. In most cases it’s not even about something the church did to them. As Elizabeth Drescher taught last spring in her class on the ‘Nones’ (people without any religious affiliation), most people who left mainline churches did so because they just didn’t see any reason why they should stay. They weren’t angry or hurt. They weren’t made to feel guilty. They didn’t even most of them find fault with the beliefs they had been taught. They just had other things to do that were more compelling. And so they left.

So now here we are: the church as a whole is statistically and demographically a group of older folks who have been coming to church forever and don’t see why they should stop, and younger folks who are for some reason making a concerted effort to swim against the tide. Some scholars of religious trends make the point that it was really only in the 1950s and 1960s that church membership grew, people coming to church because it was the socially acceptable thing to do. Their point is that the Christian faith was really never well designed to attract the masses. Teachings like the one we just heard today are not universally appealing. The church was and now is again a community of die-hards and seekers, perennially at odds with the culture around them. There’s probably a lot of truth in that analysis – though to allow that be an excuse for not welcoming new people to church would be taking it the wrong way.

But just why is it that churches all around the country have shrunk? Every kind of church, mainline Protestant and evangelical and Catholic alike. Do churches ask too much? After all, Jesus is saying in today’s gospel, sacrifice your family connections and status, sacrifice your wealth and possessions, sacrifice what makes you comfortable, in order to follow me. Not an easy message. But we sacrifice things all the time. Many parents sacrifice their weekends to their [...]

RCL Year C, Proper 13

What would you do today if God told you would die tonight?

Few of us get that kind of clarity about when we will die. But what if we knew for certain that our time was short? How would we live?

I would guess that most of us wouldn’t go on worrying about what is in our retirement portfolios. We wouldn’t comb the adverts for buy-one-get-one-free deals. We wouldn’t bother buying the next iteration of the smartphone we’ve been eyeing. In fact, we probably wouldn’t spend much time thinking about our money and possessions at all, unless it was to give them away. We’d have much more important things to do with our limited, precious time, like being with loved ones and saying the things we’d put off saying for too long. Or going to places we love one more time, eating something wonderful and really relishing it, doing all those things that mean living life to the fullest. We might even regret all the time we spent doing things that now we realize didn’t really matter.

The parable we just heard is about just that – realizing, perhaps too late, what’s important about life. It’s also about money, yet another story Jesus told that has to do with how we think about our material possessions. Sometimes we gloss over how often Jesus talked about money, because we ourselves don’t like to talk about it so much. We prefer it to be a separate category from what we think of as spiritual concerns. But of course the parable is about more than money. It is not a parable telling us to divest ourselves of our IRAs and fling the money off the cliff, nor is it telling us not to bother with IRAs in the first place. But it is quite clearly telling us to stop worrying about those IRAs, and to renew our emphasis on and priority for what matters more – our love for God, and our responsibility to others.

The rich man in the parable has a problem with money. There are all kinds of clues in the parable as to just what the problem is. For one thing, he is not just your average farmer. Our translation reads, ‘The land of the rich man produced abundantly.’ The word translated ‘land’ could also read ‘country’ or ‘region.’ This man owns a lot of land, not just a little farm. He is the Unilever of his day, CEO and owner of an enormous corporation. And you don’t become that kind of major landowner without pursuing it pretty intently – without greed, to use Jesus’ word. Enough is not enough, because you need more. So this rich man has taken much more than he needs to live. In the words of Isaiah, he has joined field to field until there is room for no one but him, left to live alone in the midst of the land. And now he has a surplus. But rather than consider how to share that, he has a little conversation with himself, which is revealing in its total lack of mention of anyone else. I will build larger barns, and I will have a place to store all this stuff, and I will say to myself, Enjoy! There’s no one else in his world – none of the workers on all of that land, none of his family, certainly no one of the poor in the region, it’s all him. He has more than enough for himself, yet he plans to keep it all for himself. And too late, he gets the word that he will die tonight – unable to enjoy all of the riches he has amassed for himself. You fool, God calls him – you unthinking one. You never thought of anyone but yourself – and now that self will go too.

Nowhere in the man’s understanding of himself is his dependence and reliance on others for all the wealth he has gathered. Others have toiled, others have labored, and he has reaped the profits – but their work means nothing to him. Nowhere in his understanding is the effect of his greed on others, all those who are unable to own land because he owns so much. Nowhere in his understanding is any kind of responsibility for others, or care and concern for them. And nowhere, certainly, is any sense that he owes all this abundance ultimately to God. And so he is a fool.

This rich man isn’t the only ri[...]