August 5, 2007: 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23 Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11 Luke 12:13-21
To the church in the diaspora[1]
& to the church of the unchurched[2]
Alleluia, alleluia.
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke.
Glory to you, Lord.
Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” He replied to him, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Then he said to the crowd, “Beware of greed in all its forms. Life that is real and meaningful doesn’t depend on a person’s possessions. Then he told them a parable.
“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’ And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and bins, and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and all my other possessions. Then I shall say to myself, `Now good man, you have possessions stored up for you for many years to come. Rest, eat, drink, be merry!’ But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and then to whom will all your piled up wealth go?’ This is what happens to the man who hoards things for himself and is not rich in the eyes of God.”
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Introduction
The first signs
Here it is the fifth of August already, and in this neck of the woods by the fifteenth the first signs of fall begin to appear. Soon we’ll see spotty swaths of gold and red on a herd of maple trees grazing on the countryside. Soon we’ll be breathing in cool wafts of autumn air streaming through opened windows at night as we sleep under an added layer of blanket. And soon we’ll be gathering the fruits of the harvest into our barns and bins. The imagery of today’s gospel of a farmer planning to build bigger barns and bins to store a rich harvest is timely.
Bins: a fall word
That word `bins’ resonates mostly with us senior citizens who remember the days when food came from bins and not from supermarkets. For senior citizens bins are sacred repositories of the images, sensations and emotions of fall. Bins bear the blessed scent of apples, onions and grain. Bins burst at the seams with cobs of corn for cattle, and with potatoes and pumpkins for people. For senior citizens bins are filled with sugar loafs of grains to be ground into flour and baked into the staff of life. Bins suggest the crispness of fall drying up the sweat of summer toil and toning life down to winter’s pace. Bins speak of autumn’s bounty snuggly stored away against the long sparse winter night ahead. For a senior generation `bins' bears a stark but snug ethos. For a younger generation, who has no idea of the hard-earned bins of the harvest, there are only supermarkets filled with an easy abundance.
When the first snows started blowing in late fall, the Pilgrim Fathers, grateful for their bursting bins, declared a feast day of thanksgiving. Their bins were full of God’s blessings and were filled also with their thanks. One take on today’s parable is that of a greedy rich farmer who desecrates the sacred image of bins. In them he plans to store not God’s blessings and his thanks for those blessing; in them he plans to store his greed!
Beware of greed
In the second reading today Paul bids us to “put to death greed which is a form of idolatry“(Col 3:5). In the gospel Jesus warns us to,”Beware of greed in all its form” (Lk 12:15). You can satisfy hunger and thirst and even sex, but you can’t satisfy greed.
The fall of Enron was the largest scandal in the history of American business and politics. A major corporation went bankrupt because executives hid losses and inflated profit reports with the full blessing of the firm’s outside auditors. Lawyers pretended to investigate reports of wrongdoing and found none. While workers lost their jobs and their life savings, executives got rid of company stock at a huge profit. Beware of greed in all its form. You can satisfy hunger and thirst and even sex, but you can’t satisfy greed.
Some years ago Richard Grasso, chairman of the NYSE, and his board were fired because they decided to give the CEO 180 million dollars for services rendered, and he readily agreed to greedily scoop it all up as his just deserts. Beware of greed in all its form. You can satisfy hunger and thirst and even sex, but you can’t satisfy greed.
Michael Vick, quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, was born, June 26, 1980, in financially-disadvantaged circumstances, living in a public housing project in a neighborhood community (nicknamed "Bad Newz”) in Newport News, Virginia. In 2004 he signed a 10-year contract with the Falcons worth $130 million with a $37 million signing bonus. That made him the highest paid player in NFL history at that time and one of the highest paid ever in sports. Vick was soon earning lucrative commercial product endorsements as well.
On July 17, 2007, Vick and three other men were indicted by a federal grand jury on felony and misdemeanor charges involving a 6-year long interstate dog fighting venture called “Bad Newz Kennels.” The charges also involved tens of thousands of dollars in gambling based at Vick's 15-acre estate in a rural area of southeastern Virginia. Following a hearing on July 26, Vick was released on bail. On November 26, the Monday after Thanksgiving Day (when Vick should have been giving thanks for his barns and bins overflowing with God’s bounty) he will go on trial. Beware of greed in all its form. You can satisfy hunger and thirst and even sex, but you can’t satisfy greed.
The freedom of parables
Parables are literary instruments which give a reader a lot of freedom. There is no one right way to interpret a parable. The truth of a parable seems to simply lie in how one hears it. I used to think today’s parable frowned on those who relax, eat, and make merry. As I reread it now with a more mature heart and mind, I see the parable as frowning on those don’t relax, eat, drink and make merry. I see it now as frowning on those who spend so much time and effort in building the bins of life that they don’t have any time to enjoy the life that’s in those bins. I see the parable now as frowning on those who spend so much time at making a living that they don’t have time to live. I see the parable now as frowning on a poor rich farmer who died before he lived.
A hammed up or unremarkable reading
Parables are literary instruments which give a reader a lot of freedom. Sometimes, maybe often, this parable is given a hammed up reading which turns the rich farmer into a miserly old Scrooge— into “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” When so hammed up, the parable doesn’t bear much of a message for most of us who aren’t miserly old Scrooges at all. Or the parable can be given an unremarkable reading which presupposes nothing gross at all. Then it becomes A Parable for Everyman—a parable about and for all of us ordinary people.
An unremarkable reading
The house I have been living in for a good twenty five years was at one time owned by a nice little maiden lady named Anna. She, her sister and niece lived upstairs. I rented the downstairs flat. Because I shoveled the snow in the winter, cut the grass in the summer and ran various errands (the most important of which was the fetching with religious fidelity the Milwaukee Journal every evening) I was offered a very reasonable rent--100 dollars a month, and even that wasn’t chicken feed in those days.
Anna was a hairdresser by trade. She was also a German by nationality, and that tells you a lot about her temperament. She put her nose to the grind, worked hard and was very thrifty. She didn't grossly deprive herself but neither did she live it up. With religious regularity she deposited all her bucks in bins called banks. I never saw her bankbook, but I suspect she amassed a good 100,000 dollars. In these days that is no big bin at all, but in those days it did, indeed, represent a mighty mountain of work and thrift over the years.
As her bin grew bigger and bigger she grew older and older. All the while, she had in mind the day when she would be able to say to herself: "Now Anna, you have blessing in reserve for many years to come. Relax! Eat heartily, drink well and make merry." But alas, one day the circulation in her foot stopped, it became gangrenous, the leg was amputated, and she was carried off to a nursing home where eventually she died. To whom did all her piled up wealth go? It went to the nursing home industry, which ate up her life-long savings in a very short time. What was left went to her well-off nephew. There was something sadly foolish about this dear rational creature. She didn’t want to be foolish, but society made her so. That’s an unremarkable reading of the parable, and it hits home more than a hammed up one.
These two rational creatures, the farmer and my landlady, were foolish not because they ate, drank, and made merry but because they didn't! They were foolish not because they tasted life, but because they didn't. They were foolish not because they believed in and lived for today (which is the only sure thing there is), but because they believed in and lived for tomorrow which never really comes. They were foolish not because they grew rich for themselves but for their inheritors or for the nursing home industry.
The other half of the gospel: verses 22-30
This parable from the 12th chapter of Luke ends with verse 21, but it really should be read together with the next 10 verses. Only in conjunction with the verses do we get one complete message. After telling the story about the rich farmer (a foolish rational creature) who worried about building bigger barns and bins in which to store his wealth, Jesus moves on to the other side of the spectrum. He points to the birds of the air (wise non-rational creatures) who do not worry about sowing and reaping and gathering into barns but are fed by the Father in heaven. He points to the lilies in the field (again wise non-rational creatures) who do not worry about toiling and spinning but who nevertheless are more splendidly robed than King Solomon himself, for the Father in heaven cares for them. Then Jesus comes to the bottom line and to the one complete message of the whole passage: "So stop worrying! Stop worrying about what you're going to eat or drink, or what you’re going to put on. The Father in heaven already knows you need all these things" (Lk12: 22-31).
Nice but not so nice
“Nice gospel,” said one preacher, “but I don’t like it! It’s embarrassing. In this capitalistic society of ours I feel like a fool telling some father to stop worrying about food, fuel and pharmaceuticals for his wife, his kids and himself, because `the Father in heaven already knows you need all these things.’”
Here my mystic friend writes, "It seems there have always been a few people who don’t mind feeling like a fool. There have always been a few people, some of them canonized and some not, who have taken the words of the Lord literally, at their undiluted face value, like St. Francis of Assisi [who renounced his father's commercial world of bins and banks, and who choose instead to join up with the lilies of the field and the larks of Umbria]. To these few fools,” she adds, “is contrasted the reasonable majority. That's you and me (our name is legion). We go about interpreting the Sermon on the Mount or the Birds of the Air and the Lilies of the Field in such a way that there is not much to get excited about."
Conclusion
To worry and not to worry
The full gospel does not challenge us to choose between worrying and not worrying. Rather, it challenges us to both worry and not to worry, to both care and not to care. The full gospel challenges us to worry like the rich farmer and my landlady, and at the same time not to worry like the birds of the air, the lilies of the field and St. Francis of Assisi. The full gospel challenges us to both worry and not worry about what we shall eat and put on and how we shall pay the bills. The full gospel challenges us to be rational like the rich farmer and my landlady, and at the same time not to be rational like the birds of the air who don’t gather into bins but are fed by God, and like the lilies of the field who don’t spin but are clothed more splendidly than King Solomon himself.
That full gospel sends us forth into our week-day world and bids us to keep one eye focused on our barns, bins and bank statements, and the other eye peeled upon the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. It’s the only mix that makes sense. That full gospel also sends us forth to be mindful that the rich farmer and the landlady are nervous people, but the birds of the air and the lilies of the field are God’s happy creatures. The full gospel bids us to join those happy creatures.
[1] Diaspora is a Greek word meaning dispersion. Originally it referred to the settling of scattered colonies of Jews outside Palestine after the Babylonian exile. It’s now come to mean the migration or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland or parish!
[2] By “the unchurched” is especially meant not those who have left the church but those whom the church has left!
