The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee
So- how about these readings today? A little depressing, right? We have vanity (and vanity, and vanity) and greed and dying unaware, all in spades.
We are warned again and again in Ecclesiastes and the psalm of the sin of greed, of the risk of prizing things over relationships with each other and with God. We are shown, in the teacher character form Ecclesiastes, exactly how gloomy and fixated and anxious one can become when getting is all that we think about. Everything else loses meaning, and we find ourselves, bitter and jealous, sitting alone on a pile of money, terrified of who might get it once we die. That, truly, is vanity!
But then in Colossians, we are reminded that behind the sin of greed, there is an even greater sin- the sin of self-sufficiency, of believing that we can ever have so much stuff that we no longer need each other. In Jesus, we are reminded, God offers us another way.
I have a confession to make. I am a saver. For me, saving money is like a sport- when most of my friends were buying their first new cars, I was starting an IRA, I buy things for full price so rarely that I can pretty much remember each occasion in the last five years, and I get a thrill when I find a bargain online. Even as a little girl, when I came into money, whether a dollar from the Tooth Fairy or $5 in a birthday card or a quarter I found in the sofa, I squirreled it away somewhere, and saved it. My mother tells stories of finding little pockets of change and dollar bills folded ever smaller around my room, and my older brother constantly coming to me with “investment opportunities.”
All of that back story is to explain why, when I got a statement from the Social Security office in the mail earlier this week, it had the impact on me that it did. I was pretty excited to find out that I’ve finally worked enough units or whatever they call it to be a part of the program. I felt good about that, I liked the idea of having some security in that murky, hazy future, still so many decades off, when I am told I get to retire.
And then I read the sheet called: What young workers should know about social security. After detailing all the reasons the program will be vital in my eventual old age, it posed the question so many folks in my generation have been asking for a while now: will social security be around when I retire? I don’t think I will spoil it for you when I tell you the official answer was somewhere between probably and maybe.
Anxiety took hold as I looked at the graphs of how saving x amount of dollars now at y % would mean z in savings in forty years, and my chest got a little tight and I eventually had to just go do something else altogether because I was getting a little freaked out.
We all carry our false gods with us in life, and I realized, once again, that I had made something of an idol out of financial security. I know that I am not alone when I identify with the man in today’s Gospel who has worked hard and focused on the future and pinched and planned to insure his comfort and security, and in the process has lost sight, a little, of all those other important aspects of life.
We have felt the false peace of the farmer in Luke, relaxing, finally, with the feeling that we have saved enough, we have done enough, we have made the right decisions, and now we are assured of happiness and security. Except, like the farmer, we can too easily lose sight of the bigger picture. Because just as we say to our souls, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years, [now] relax, eat, drink and be merry!”, we realize that life is unpredictable, and none of us knows when its final day might come, and if we’ve staked our entire being on having enough, we have very little support when we find that we are lacking.
To quote Walter Brueggeman, theologian, we have been caught in the foolish destructiveness of self-sufficiency. Luke’s parable, Brueggeman says, portrays a fool who is a great accumulator and who imagines that his vast possessiveness adds to his well being. In the end he is talking only to himself, he is isolated, and his self-satisfaction is interrupted by death.
The message, as always, is that balance is key. Of course we should all live with an eye towards the future, we should all save and practice sound financial stewardship, but we cannot let that future security become an obsession- we must also live in the present moment, not become so attached to things and money that we squirrel them away, like my young self with my tiny folded bills, without enjoying them - we have to come to a place where we recognize that those bills are a means to an end, and that end is a life that includes the joy of charity, the pleasure of pleasures, and keeping ourselves open to the community we live in.
We know that greed is a way of worshipping the wrong gods, but it is easier to forget that security itself can be a false god, an attempt to wrest control from the hands of the God who made us.
To quote Brueggeman once more, this teaching is urgent in our society, not only because of the perennial seduction of greed, but because we live in an era in which credit and tax law and advertisements all seek to make greed into a civic virtue. We know better! We may choose against preoccupation with getting and having, and instead choose a life centered on compassion, on kindness, on humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness- we can choose a life centered on a new self, the one baptized into Christ.
Let us pray:
Lord, help us to relax.
Take from us the tension that makes peace impossible,
Take from us the fears that do not allow us to venture,
Take from us the worries that blind our sight,
Take from us the distress that hides our joy,
Help us to know that we are with you,
That we are in your care,
That we are in your love,
That you and we are one.
AMEN.
