10th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Ecclesiastes 1: 12-14; 2: 18-231
12I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, 13applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. 14I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. ….
18I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me 19— and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. 20So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun, 21because sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. 22What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? 23For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.
Gospel – Luke 12: 13-212
13Someone in the crowd said to [Jesus], “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” 16Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
“What Do You Want Most in Life?”
Who in the world chose these readings? It’s summer time, when life’s supposed to be easy and laid-back! When the farmers’ markets, as well as our own gardens, are overflowing with low-priced vegetables and fruits, when we can go play golf on Sunday mornings (Well, maybe we felt like today we ought to delay that pleasure a bit in order to get to church!), why all of this gloom and doom? Where’s any word of healing in all of this? Crops are flourishing and ready to be blessed at mid-month in preparation for the harvest to come. Why shouldn’t an intelligent farmer see the wisdom of building a better barn – maybe even an extra silo as well? We’ve partnered with God over the last few months in the growth of all of this food, why now be told that all of it “is vanity and a chasing after wind?”
I don’t like it. Why else has God created all of these opportunities if not for us to enjoy? Anyway, weren’t we told that through Adam and Eve the only curse about all of this is that we would have to earn our bread through hard work and in the sweat off of our faces?3 It doesn’t seem fair. Either give it to us or let us work for it, but when we have worked so hard, don’t just take it away from us! We should be congratulated, not hear such a chilling whisper in our ear, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.” I tell you I don’t like it.
With readings like this no wonder Christians sitting in the pews dream of being out on the golf links with their friends! The church is doing to us exactly what our children accuse us of doing to them. We tell them, “Don’t live for just today. Think about your future! If you work hard enough this year you may put yourself in a more competitive place next year. Get a good job. Someday, maybe (if you haven’t had a coronary!), you’ll be able to enjoy life in your retirement.” The fun, we sagely advise them, isn’t supposed to happen just yet, not yet.
On the other hand, in this first week of August we’re as close as we’re ever likely to be to forgetting our own good advice and embracing the materialistic gospel of the televangelist who’s said to his rapt followers, “Don’t tell me about pie in the sky when I die, you can have it all now!”
It’s at this delicate point in the argument that Luke’s message and cultural religion part ways. Cultural religion, expressed in a variety of television programs and call-in talk-radio shows, says that if we love God enough, we’ll get whatever we want and need. In the meantime we’re to work toward that same end. And in our culture that means the pursuit and the accumulation of wealth.
Think about it. On the one hand hoarding makes so much sense! Here in the United States it’s called a sound investment, complete with estate planning and a shrewd retirement strategy. All of these are considered to be virtuous acts. After all, given the present state of health care, you can’t have too much (most investment counselors would say you can’t ever have enough!) to fiscally fortify ourselves against the costs of physical decay and the medical treatment for it.
And hoarding works so well! Look at how well it works here in America. If you hoard enough, your kids will go to college, your life will be secure, your family will be happy, your reputation will be enhanced – all while you’re kept warm, fed and clothed and with the prospect of that condition simply continuing. It works especially well if you hoard really lots of stuff! You then have more culture, better cars, a finer education, and the kind of prestige that will open doors to the finest restaurants and theaters – and if you have enough just to be able to spread it around a little they name things after you. Stored goods are simply called capital; and our system is based upon them – that’s why it’s called capitalism. The search for capital is practically our way of life. Could we ask for anything more?
But, then, there’s the rub: it’s become the way in which we define our very lives. The cynicism of it shows up in a saying like, “I wouldn’t do that for love nor money,” assuming that those two are, if not equal, at least ultimate motivations. And they are. To the extent that we depend on one, we tend to minimize the other. A prostitute is one who does for money what he or she should do for love. Poverty is doing for love what others would only do for money.
So when Jesus talks about money, he talks about a choice between serving God or serving money – you can’t serve two masters, he said, because you “will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.”4 In that ancient near-eastern context his listeners knew that they could only take one day’s nourishment of manna at a time. So they prayed, “Give us, this day, our daily bread” – not a polite request for an adequate annuity. Jesus knows that hoarding becomes an act of faith – believing that saving money saves you. And it does for quite a while. Hoarding would make sense if it weren’t for what’s been called “the kingdom of God.”
In that “kingdom,” community is the ideal, not self-sufficiency. From God’s perspective, if you hoard for, you also end up hoarding from, and those from whom you hoard are your brothers and your sisters – the family of humanity. Oddly enough, in the “kingdom of God” the penalty for lack of faith is overwork. From God’s perspective, then, there’s already plenty enough to go around – if people would only share from out of their abundance.
Actually, accumulating wealth isn’t nearly so bad as believing in it. Having money can be a function of talent, luck or diligence, just as well as it can be a result of greed. But if we think that it’s going to bring us closer to God, or make us a better person, or even improve the world, we have a faith problem.
What do you want most in life? This eight-year-old girl wants a champion show horse. That upwardly mobile young professional wants a house in the hills with an underground swimming pool. This mother wants good health and happiness for her family. While that lonely teenager simply wants somebody to care. How many of us just want to be a better Christian?
I remember the irony behind the story that a rabbi told me once when I was serving the church in Burlingame. He said that a woman had come by to see him, desperate to convert from Christianity to Judaism. His answer, while maybe not fully appreciated by this woman, was filled with wisdom. He told her, “We don’t need any more Jews. What we need are better Christians.”
Another meaning for the word “vanity” is a mirror. Silvered and shiny, it throws back whatever stands in front of it. Vanity is an echo – a dying sound that will inevitably collapse into silence. Of far, far greater value than a vanity is a window, which in the darkness of night casts back a reflection, but in the clear light of day reveals an entire universe.
If you and I are unable to pursue the things that truly make us happy, then we’ve become enmeshed compulsively in a lifestyle that’s not just unhappy but unchristian. If we’re obsessed with our profits, our sense of prestige, our spiritual reward…or our golf game, we are caught, ironically, in an exercise of futility. We’re running after what we think we want or what we think we should want instead of what we really want. The point is not that God will reward or punish us when we die. The point is that either we keep living in our old preoccupations that make our lives miserable, or we live with our minds and hearts at rest – which is all that it means, finally, to “rest in God.”5
In all of this, then, we are being invited to listen and to hear – in a new way – that other statement of Jesus’ when he said to us:
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
May it be so.
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1 Sometime in the first half of the third century BCE, an unknown wisdom writer called Qoheleth (“teacher” or “preacher” in Hebrew) or Ecclesiastes (“speaker before the assembly” in Greek) looked with a discerning eye at the human condition; and he noticed how many of Israel’s theologians had assumed all too neat equations about a person’s life in relationship to God – if you’re good you’ll prosper; if you’re not you won’t. The word translated as “vanity” here suggests emptiness and futility, but it could also have legitimately been translated as “irony” – even “bitterly ironic.” After everything is said and done, the focal point of his entire writings is the question, “What makes life really worth living?” We’re left to wonder.
2 So here we have, as a kind of counterpoint to Ecclesiastes, a sobering message reminding us all that life is more than just about our secure bank accounts and growing stock portfolios. Life is a divine gift, and wealth alone won’t ever give us any guarantees – either about our future or whether we’ll even have one. In the end it’s about a misplaced love: either you love God with your whole heart, mind and soul, or you’ve come to love something else that you’ve allowed to become your god.
3 Genesis 3: 17-19.
4 From the “Parable of the Dishonest Manager” – Luke 16: 13 (cf. Matthew 6: 24).
5 As in Exodus 33: 14 where Moses is sensing God say to him, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” Then again, in Jeremiah 6: 16, where he senses God saying to him, “Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”