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August 05, 2007
Beth Foote - Aug 5, 2007
Beth Foote, August 5, 2007 Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21
I don’t know about your home, but ours often seems like a “possession farm.” Things come home with us and then seem to multiply. Backpacks, athletic shoes, CD’s, notebooks, cords for electronic devices, and tennis rackets, are the most prominent things in our entry hall these days. Before that it was soccer cleats and swim goggles. And before that it was Fisher-Price plastic toys, Playmobile figures, Barbies, and legos which always seemed to be under foot. If you’ve ever gotten up in the middle of the night and stepped on a lego piece, you know how painful that can be.
But I can’t blame it all on the kids. I am a famous collector of magazines, books, and other items that feather my nest wherever I go. My son calls the interior of my car “the lost and found.”
I often wonder…why do we have so much stuff?
I think a lot of people are asking the same thing these days. With our awareness of Global Warming, we’ve become more conscious of our wasteful consumption habits. The bumper sticker, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins,” doesn’t seem quite so funny anymore. But then, why do we have so much STUFF?
Acquisition has become the cultural norm. We also live in a society so focused on our individual’s “needs” that shopping has become a sport, and we approach the world from a “What’s in it for me? perspective. We think, “I need THIS for my child, or to fulfill my desires” or “That thing will make me feel complete, and will add to my security.” We need to have more and more money to keep this up and to make us feel secure. Perhaps that is the crux of it really. Things, and the accumulation of wealth make us feel more secure.
This seems to be part of human nature. Jesus often talks about how wealth can get in the way of our relationship to God, and our reading from Luke today contains one of those passages, the parable that’s known as “the Folly of the Rich Man.” I’d like to look a little more closely at it this morning.
Notice that the rich man starts out already rich even before his land yields abundantly.
But he wants more. Notice how Jesus, the master storyteller, brings us right into the thought process of the rich man; we’re in his head as he thinks through what to do with his bumper crop. Notice also, that he is having a monologue. No one else is included in the decision-making. He’s the center of it all.
What does he not do? He doesn’t consider other people. He doesn’t consider that perhaps he could store some of the harvest in the existing barns and share with the poor. He doesn’t think of what good he could do for other people or his community with this windfall. Instead, he sees one path: to build a bigger storage system---bigger barns---to store it all securely for himself so that he can sit back and keep it all to himself and feel more secure. This sounds familiar. People my age are bombarded with advertising about saving for retirement. …the message is, there can never be enough in the bank.
Certainly, we need to do our best to provide for ourselves. However, just like the rich man in our parable, the societal dream is to be able to sit back and “relax, eat, drink, be merry.” It sounds good, but is it? Should it all be about my security? What about those less fortunate in our community? The Epicopal Church has championed the Millenium Development Goals to challenge us to share our wealth with the extremely poor of the world. And I think we’re on the right track there.
At what point do wealth and the quest for security equal “greed”? Greed is a pretty strong word, but Jesus uses it here. He says, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed.” As Christians living in our extremely affluent American culture in one of the most affluent areas of the country, I think we need to ask ourselves: are we like the rich man in the parable?
Well, what happens next to the rich man? He meets up with God and faces his own mortality. It reminds me of Ebenezer Scrooge in Dicken’s Christmas Carol. God calls the rich man a fool because he’s spent his lifetime accumulating the wrong kind of wealth, and building bigger and bigger storage units for it. It’s a sobering moment.
We’ve had our own sobering moments here at Trinity lately as we begin to travel the road toward healing with Father Mike, his family, and with our beloved office manager, Alecia MacDowell. We’ve also been confronted with our own sense of mortality and vulnerability, and how we love much Father Mike, his family, and Alecia.
And maybe that has some connection with today’s readings. Out of confronting this unexpected suffering, I think we as a parish have already experienced a sense of becoming richer toward God. On Wednesday we gathered together in prayer at a healing service in the chapel, and many people came forward for anointing. We’ll have this service every Wednesday at noon and there will be labyrinth walks also. God is at work here, teaching us to pray, to practice our faith and learn to live leaning on God rather than ourselves. We are beginning the process of growing together in faith.
How else are we going to do this? We are moving forward with our new Sunday morning services and programs for the fall. We ask for your support and participation as we walk in faith together. This week I had lunch with Kris Goodrich, who founded Child and Family Institute which shares our campus, and we are going to start a Faithfull Families group especially for young families at Trinity. CFI has another program that helps Moms discern their “heart voice” in the midst of the loud voice of the culture that is so focused on consuming. Small groups who gather to pray and discern God’s movement in their lives. This is something we could do at Trinity as well, and not just for Moms.
St. Ignatius called whatever brings us closer to God “consolation,” and whatever takes us away from God, “desolation.” As we move together into the fall, I hope that we can open our hearts to the “heart voice” more, and share our faith journeys, including our sobering moments, with each other. We have lined up several speakers this fall who have written about their faith journey or explored it through art. I hope that together we can continue to move toward consolation and away from desolation.
Our faith journey with Mike and Alecia these past weeks has brought home to me that living is a risky business and that living with security as our highest goal is not how Jesus calls us to live. He calls us to risk for the sake of love.
Our reading from the letter to the Colossians gives us a hint of how to do this:
“If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” In other words, we are no longer the center of it all…”Christ is all in all!”
Instead of building bigger barns, bigger storage units for our earthly wealth, Jesus asks us to build BIGGER HEARTS and trust that we are secure in God’s love.
Jesus asks us to build bigger hearts that can accept his love, be thankful, and then give it away. Perhaps we could look at it as a paradigm shift, changing from storage units and into distribution centers. From desolation to consolation. From collecting to sharing.
As we grow together as a community of faith, let us to risk becoming richer in God’s love and risk letting God’s love flow through us. Amen.
