Barns, Bins & Birds

Introduction

St Luke is my favorite evangelist. In this I am in good company, for someone has told me that he’s the favorite evangelist also for Pope. I like Luke because he has recorded for us what are perhaps the two greatest of all Jesus’ parables. Parable one: Once upon a time a man is going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he falls in with robbers who waylay him and leave him half-dead. Along come a Jewish priest and Levite who pass him by. Along comes a Good Samaritan who stops and pours the oil of compassion into the poor man’s wounds. Parable two: Once upon a time a man has two sons, and the younger of the two demands his part of the inheritance, and takes off for a foreign lands, squanders his money, and is reduced to feeding pigs for a living. The prodigal son repents and returns home where his father is waiting with open arms.

Today, Luke treats us to another of Jesus’ parables, much shorter and very much to the point. Once upon a time there is a rich man whose land yields for him a bumper crop. He doesn’t know where to store it all, or better yet, where to ”hoard” it all, for the parable is about greed (“Avoid greed in all its form” Lk 12:15). So he says to himself, “I know what I will do. I'll pull down all my buildings and build bigger and better barns and bins. There will I store (or rather “hoard) my abundant harvest. And then shall I say to myself: `Now rich boy, you have blessings in reserve for years to come. Relax! Eat heartily, drink well, and make merry’" (Lk 12:13ff).

Misreading & rereading

Christianity down through the ages has always been charged, rightly or wrongly, with being negative: If it is hard, it must be good; if it hurts, it must be good; if it says no, it must be good. If it says yes, it must be bad; if it’s enjoyable, it must be bad; if it’s pleasurable, it must be bad. Down through the centuries nothing so fell under the spell of that negativity as did sex: If it’s pleasurable, it must be bad. To this very day there are still many who cannot celebrate sex but can only steal it when nobody’s looking. For the longest time I used to misread this parable as simply singing that same old song of negativity: If it’s enjoyable like relaxing, eating, drinking and making merry, it must be bad.

Foolish rational creatures

The parable is not about someone who relaxed, ate, drank, and made merry. It’s about someone who did not relax and turn down the pace of life. It’s about someone who didn’t eat good food or drink fine wine or dance “the dance of life.” It’s all about someone who deferred this all, put it off till “later on.” "Then I shall say to myself: Relax. Eat heartily. Drink well. Make merry" (Lk 12:19). But “later on” never came. Death stepped in, and cried out, “You fool!”

“You fool” for not relaxing. “You fool” for not eating, drinking, and making merry? “You fool” for spending so much time making a living but so little time for living. “You fool” for expending so much energy in building the bins of life but so little time enjoying the life that’s in those bins. Then comes a sobering question: “You fool, to whom, I ask, will all these things which you have prepared go”(Lk 12: 20)? Not a very good translation for a parable on greed. Here’s a better one: “You fool, to whom, I ask, will all this piled up wealth of yours go?”

In our own words

We really don’t have to presume anything terribly gross in the parable. We don’t have to ham it up and turn the rich farmer into some kind of miserly old Scrooge: “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” to use the litany of Charles dickens. This is “A Parable About Every Man and Every Woman.” This is a parable about you or me or about someone we know. It’s a parable we can easily rewrite in our own words and for own times. I always rewrite this parable in this way:

Once upon a time there was a little lady who put her nose to the grind, worked hard all her life, and was thrifty. She didn't grossly deprive herself as old Scrooge did, but neither did she live it up. With religious regularity this spinster lady deposited all her bucks in bins called banks. With time her savings began to pile high. Now a 100,000 dollars is no big bin these days, but it surely represented a mighty mountain of work and worry for her over the many years. As her bin grew bigger and bigger, she grew older and older. Throughout it all she was thinking, she was hoping, she was praying, that one day she would be able to say to herself: "You have blessings in reserve for many years to come. Relax now and enjoy life.” But alas, one night they carried my landlady off to a nursing home, where eventually she died. Now to whom, I ask, did all her piled up wealth go? It went to the nursing home industry!

We all know well how much or rather how little you get for your buck from that industry. As I look back now, there was something terribly foolish about it all. The lady really wasn’t an old Scrooge. She really didn’t want to be foolish. But life, in the grips of “savage capitalism” (to use the Pope’s name for it), forces us to live foolish lives.

Wise “irrational” creatures

The parable of the foolish rich man is from the twelfth chapter of Luke, and it finishes on the 21^st verse. It really should be read together with the next ten verses (22-31). After telling the story of the rich farmer who harvested a bumper crop, and packed it all into bigger barns and bins, Jesus moves on to “to the birds of the air who do not sow and do not reap, and do not have barns or bins but are, instead, fed by the Father in heaven (Lk12: 22-31). It's all really one neat unit: the first part is about God's so-called "rational” creatures (like the rich farmer) who foolishly bank heavily upon their barns and bins. The second part is about God's so-called "irrational” creatures (like the birds of the air) that wisely bank on the Father in heaven.

At the end of it all comes a kind of bottom line from Jesus, which most of us are not ready to put on the bottom or the top of anything: "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 these things" (Lk 12:30). Nice words, but as one preacher, "It's a good gospel, but I don't like it! It's embarrassing. You won't catch me, especially in this capitalist society of ours, telling some father to quite worrying about food, fuel, and medical care for his wife and kids, `because the Father in heaven already knows you need all these things.’"

Conclusion

Bins: a word for autumn

Bins: I like that word. It’s a fall word. It abounds with the images, sensations, and emotions of autumn. Bins smell of apples and onions and grain. Bins burst at the seams with cobs of corn for cows, and with potatoes and pumpkins for farm folk. Bins are the feel of grain flowing fast and freely through your fingers, and sugar-loafing into high mountains, later to be ground into flour, and baked into the staff of life. Bins speak of summer’s abundant blessing and bounty laid away against the long winter night. Bins are what the Pilgrim Fathers banked on with all their might, when the first snows of late fall began to blow. Bins are for storing not our greed but rather the fruits of the earth and the blessings of God. Bins indeed are a marvelous icon, and this parable of Jesus is about a man who prostituted that icon.

Bins: “Rational” creatures foolishly spend their lives building the bins of life but don’t use as much energy drawing life from the bins they build.

Bins: “Rational” creatures foolishly store in them not the fruits of the earth and the blessings of God but rather their greed.

“In them they store

their need for more.”

Bins: God’s rational creatures have them, but God “irrational” creatures don’t have them, and that precisely why Jesus said to us one day, “Look at the birds of the air.” Look at them because, “irrational” creature though they are, they know something that we “rational” creatures don’t know. They know that there is a Father in heaven who cares for them.

Look at the birds of the air, because those “irrational” creatures do something that we “rational” creatures don’t do: they don’t worry! Yes, indeed, precisely because we are rational creatures, we do have to worry about what we will eat and what we will drink and what we will put on. But at the end of the day, when the barns, bins and banks have failed us, when they contain for us no seeable solution to whatever our need or problem might be, then we must do what Jesus tells us to do:

“Look at the birds of the air!”

They fly up high into the sky,

and way up there breathe care-free air,

as they know for sure their Father’s care.