August 5, 2007 - TENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST - FATHER ANDREW GREEN


FIRST READING: Ecclesiastes: 1:2, 12-14; 2: 18-23
PSALM: 49: 1-11
SECOND READING: Colossians: 3: 1-11
GOSPEL: Luke 12:13-21

Ecclesiastes: 1:2, 12-14; 2: 18-23

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied 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. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me - 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. So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun, because 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. What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For 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.
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I don't know if anybody felt like I did upon hearing the reading from Ecclesiastes, but part of me said, "Bring the razor blades!" I thought it was fairly depressing. You work, and you work, and then it all goes to somebody else, who may be an idiot - it is all vanity and the chasing after wind. Thank God that is not the end of Ecclesiastes, even though the author continues in somewhat of a skeptical kind of voice. Do you remember some of the other passages? "There is a time for everything. There is a time for war and a time for peace. There is a time for love and a time for hate". There is a lot more to Ecclesiastes than that, but, because it tags with one part of the Gospel today, they chose this section as the Hebrew Scripture reading to go with this Gospel.

Underlying all of it is this sense, in Ecclesiastes, that there has to be something more than just what we do, and the Gospel tells us there has to be something more than what we have. Now, Jesus is walking in a crowd, and I kind of envision the crowd as bustling along. Out of the crowd, somebody . . . . not a person coming up and raising her hand and saying, "Jesus, I have a question", but just a voice out of the crowd says (in a loud, strident voice), "Hey Jesus! Why don't you tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me?! That would be helpful!" I can see something like that coming out of the crowd. I think I have heard people kind of harass like that in modern days, so I don't think it is too much away from what Jesus might have encountered. Now, I have to say that when Jesus turns to the guy and says, "Who made Me judge over you?", well I am thinking, "God! God made You judge over him!" In our family, we used to have a phrase - or Susan would say when I would get a little too pushy about something - "Who died and left you in charge?" And if I was feeling a little snotty, I would say, "Your Dad! He put me in charge!" Indeed, we know that Jesus is to be our judge, but we tend to think about this from 2,000 years down the road and not in the midst of things, as Jesus was dealing with.
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Jesus really has a different point here. Jesus tells us a story about a fellow who has such a good crop that he has to tear down his old barns and build his new ones. That is probably not the biggest problem in there, but his attitude about it is. He had the barns built, and he filled them up; and then he said, "Now, I have it made! Now, everything is fine!" That is where the tag line in here, "Beware of all kinds of greed", tells us, really, what Jesus is aiming at in this particular Scripture. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't see myself as greedy in a money-sense. I am not envious of people who make a few dollars more than I do, and I am not really envious of people who make a lot more than I do. But, I have to tell you that there are other kinds of greed around. I was thinking about this, and sometimes clergy are susceptible to a unique kind of greed, and it has to do with who does the most things right or in the most correct way in a liturgy. You can check with us by watching our heads bobbing at various times; for example, during the Nicene Creed, there will be either one, two, or three times when you see priests bow. There are all sorts of reasons for this, and all of them are good; but they all come from different places, and nobody learns the same things. So, what happens is that we sometimes begin to think that our way of doing it is the only way, but those folks who came from that Seminary on the East Coast - the name of which will not be spoken - that those people do it wrong because they don't have the right training! Well, the reality is that that is kind of like clerical greed. We are trying to think that we have the most points built up because of the way that we do things. Ah, just a note - despite the fact that I am sure the way I do it is always the right way, I don't honestly think that it gets me any further in God's sight! It is just a personal thing! But I do have to admit to other kinds of greed. I don't know if you have ever heard of gadget-greed, but I tend to have gadget-greed. As I was getting ready to go on my Sabbatical last year, I had a perfectly wonderful Nokia 3120 cell phone. It was relatively small; but I could hear people on it, and they could hear me. It had one great feature in that I could set it, and it would turn the phone off for a set amount of time, like an hour, an hour and a half, or two hours. So I could enter a meeting or an appointment and could set the phone to turn off, and it would turn back on in exactly an hour; because, for me, if I turn the phone off, I forget for the next two days, and then I have all those calls to do. So, it was a perfectly acceptable phone, but I had this desire for, and convinced myself that I needed, a Blackberry, in order to go on my Sabbatical. That way, I could check my e-mail from the Blackberry, and it would do all sorts of interesting things. But, I have to tell you that really, at the heart of it, I had received e-mails from folks, and, at the bottom of their emails, it said it had been sent from their Blackberry; and I so much wanted to have the ability to send emails that, at the bottom, would say, "Sent from Andrew's Blackberry", that I got it. It performed admirably, and it was wonderful throughout the Sabbatical and after. But then, along about the springtime, I began to be very disappointed, because I learned that, even though I could get on the Internet with this and do e-mail, it was really kind of like dial-up - it was very slow. It was not broadband speed, and Singular had come out with a phone called the Blackjack! This had broadband speed! It would be just like being in the office, and I could surf the web from my phone! And I was so excited that I had to have it! And I got it, and, indeed, it was good! It was good! And then I upgraded my computer and found that, when you upgrade a computer nowadays, you have to get Microsoft Vista, and Blackjack does not talk with Vista. So, I had this wonderfully-featured, completely fantastic phone that would no longer talk with the computer, where all the information that I needed was. So, now, I kind of have a phone that is certainly no better than the Blackjack and only slightly better than the Nokia 3120 that I used to have, and the key here is that, for people like me, we always think that the new age is coming with the next bit of technology. That is the problem. We build ourselves up, and, just like in Ecclesiastes . . . then you change your telephone server, you change your computer, and then what good is that phone going to be for you anymore? It is basically a very expensive paperweight, so that is the kind of greed that I will admit to.
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Jesus is trying to explain to us that all of these different kinds of greed are very destructive for us, not necessarily because God doesn't want us to have cell phones. He just doesn't want them on in Church! O.K.? Remember that! It is not that we can't have cell phones, and it is not that people shouldn't have an abundance. It is that, when we believe that having those things means that we have it made, and that we have hit the end of the road, and that everything is now fine, then that is the problem, because what we have done is that we have begun to put our trust and our hope and our faith, even about very silly things, into stuff instead of into God.

In the reading from Colossians - and this is the only reference that I will make to it here because there are about 20 sermons in that one - it lists all of those things, starting with fornication and ending with greed, and says, "But this is idolatry". It reminds us that what is wrong about so many of these things is that they begin to turn our hearts away from God and toward other things.

So, Ecclesiastes, Colossians, and Jesus' lesson today remind us that what is really important is not the things that we build up, not the stuff that we have, and not how many right ways we do the liturgy, but what is important is that we build up our richness toward God. I didn't see anything in the Scripture today that gave us great examples of how one can be rich toward God. I think most of the examples were about how you can really be idolatrous and warning against that, so I want to give you a couple of ideas about how we might become richer toward God.

Luke goes on to explain this in a variety of different ways, and one of the ways is shown in the young man who comes up to Jesus and says, "How do I get into heaven?" Jesus says, "Well, how do you read the Law?" And he says, "Love God first and your neighbor as yourself". Jesus answers him and says, "Great! Do it, and you will live". So, loving God first and loving our neighbors as ourselves - that is one significant way to be rich toward God. Then, there was the Good Samaritan. You have already heard that this summer, and I am sure Stephanie or Tom or Fred already preached on it. In this story, we have the shift in that lesson, where the person asks, in order to justify himself, "Well, which one of them is a neighbor? So I will know which ones I can be caring about". And, in His story, Jesus turns to him and says, "It is not about identifying neighbors; it is about how you behave like a neighbor to everyone".

So, here are two ways of practicing being rich toward God. How do we use the things that we have so that they benefit others? - which is one of the only ways that we can actually practice generosity toward God. If we have money, we can use our money for the needs of and the caring for others, especially those who have the least. If we have cell phones, we use them in ways that help us to communicate but don't get in the way of building real relationships. In fact, being neighbors to people is really about making connections and being in relationship, and in significant kinds of relationships, with them. It is not just about writing a check and sending it off, and then I am covered. There was an NPR story - I don't know when the story actually came out, but I discovered it on-line when I was looking through this thing called Driveway Stories. Driveway stories are stories where people are listening to something on NPR, and the story is so interesting that, while they are in their driveway, they keep the car running until the story is over, because they don't want to miss the end of it. So, there are these Driveway Stories in there that people have written them about, and one was about a couple that went around the country after 9-11, and they decided that they needed to make more contacts and connections with people and would go into restaurants in various places.
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The author of the story met them in a restaurant in New York, where the people looked at the plate of food that he had and said to him, "Oh my gosh! That looks marvelous! I bet it is delicious!" And the guy said, "Well, yes, thank you, it really is". And they said, "Can I have a bite?" And he didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything for a minute. They continued the conversation, and he admits later on in the article that, by the end of the meal, he had given them a bite of his Crème Brule. They went around the country and encountered people in restaurants, and, with a goal of making a connection, they said, "Would you share your food with me?" They ended up with 60 different encounters across the country, and, out of those encounters, do you know how many people shared food with them? 59! 59! There were 45 that they called willing and enthusiastic; there were 14, including the author of the article, that were kind of talked into it; and there was evidently one that said, "No way; get away from me; don't touch!" But here was an interesting part - out of those folks who did share their food, 25 of them used their own fork to share the food - they didn't even say, "Here, use your own fork", but they just gave them the fork and then continued eating themselves, with their own fork. Barriers started to be broken down, and they still have relationships and keep in correspondence with a number of people whom they encountered by saying, "Can I have a bite?"

So, I think that the way that we might be most rich toward God is by practicing very caring behaviors toward the neighbors that God has put in our paths, that we might behave as neighbors, and that we might be honoring God and building up riches in Heaven by caring for those who are around us, and especially those who are most in need.

AMEN