To Worry and Not to Worry
Ecclesiastes 1:2;
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.” Jesus replied, “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; but rather he plans to store his greed in them!
Beware
of greed
In the second
reading today Paul bids us to “put to death greed which is a form of idolatry“(
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.
In 2003 Richard
Grasso, chairman and CEO of the NYSE, negotiated
a new contract giving him a staggering $140 million payout. He readily agreed to
greedily scoop it up as his just deserts. In the wake of such
corporate scandal as Enron, public outcry over Grasso’s pay mushroomed, and the
exchange's board (which approved his paycheck just 41 days earlier) turned
against him and fired him. 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 be 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.
A rereading of the parable
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 of the parable
Parables are
literary instruments which give a reader a lot of freedom. One take on this parable gives it a hammed-up
reading; the rich farmer is painted as a miserly old Scrooge—“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. Another take on this parable
gives it a calm and unremarkable reading; it 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 blessings
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. Gangrene set in, her 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 a calm and unremarkable reading of
the parable. 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 message: 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 them 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 fools. 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
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
That full
gospel sends us forth into our weekday 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, and the gospel bids us to join them.