You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead

Luke’s gospel brings us some of the most familiar and most compelling parables that Jesus tells, and there are several that only appear in this Gospel. It is also one of the few parables that Jesus tells where the heavens open and God’s own voice is heard. And God has something to say. There is this farmer. His great trouble is how to deal with an abundance; fruitful fields and a great harvest. He is a planner and so he decides to expand his operations and build bigger barns and safely put away today’s produce for tomorrow’s need. And that’s when God intervenes. “You fool,” he says. Harsh words from anyone, but from God? Devastating. You fool.

So how exactly is this person a fool? Certainly not in working the land and carefully planting, tending and nurturing crops. And not in taking stock of what he has and making provision for the future; that is commended more than once in scripture and often provides survival in times of famine. “You fool,” not because of what he had done but because of his complete absorption in himself. Listen to his comical speech: he addresses himself, who else is worth talking to? And the whole conversation never gets outside his little head. What do I have? How can I keep what is mine? This is my plan and now I am secure and nothing need trouble me, aren’t I special? There is no act of gratitude, no taking the first fruits to the temple as a sign that land and life and all is a gift from God. There is no mention of laborers’ wages or interest in the craftsmen who built his barn. Here there is no talk of neighbors or family brought in to rejoice together. Think of other parables Jesus tells. The woman who found the lost coin? She throws a block party to celebrate what she found. The king whose dinner guests beg off? He sends servants into the streets and byways to find someone to come and share his meal. And that other farmer, the father whose younger son crawls home, disgraced and desperate? He kills the fatted calf and throws a party big enough to offend the elder brother. Jesus’ parables are a riot of festival and rejoicing. Not this farmer. No, his plan was carefully laid out for his own comfort and security. He could rest in his own accomplishments and confide in his own plans, and spend no time or money or produce on things like gratitude or compassion or community. He was rich and secure. Until he wasn’t.

“This night, your life will be demanded of you, and then whose will these things be?” Whose will they be? The parable has circled back to the question of how an inheritance is to be divided, and maybe now we see why Jesus was so impatient with the question. Settling an estate can be a point of gratitude for the past and of strengthening the bonds of those who continue. It can also be a point where old resentments and current anxieties press hard against the ties of friendship and family. Here, Jesus wants us to see one thing more. The question that the rich fool couldn’t answer was exactly that, “Whose will they be?” and the implied answer is simple: they never were yours, not in any absolute way. You received them and then held them until you had to put them down. They were yours by the creative goodness of God from the shared work of a community that made your work possible. They were yours to be used for good, your good and others. And they were only yours for a time.

Flannery O’Connor wrote a story, actually one about the aftermath of a death, and its title is enough of a story in itself: “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead.” So the rich fool’s life was demanded of him and the next morning, when those field hands he didn’t mention paying got up, when the craftsmen who’d built the new barns heard about it, when the neighbor’s he’d pretty much ignored saw the hearse driving away, they were all still in possession of whatever little bit they had. There was, we can assume, food on their tables as they shook their heads over the news. But the rich man, he was dead, and that’s as poor as you can be.

Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, Jesus says, because it is greed that cuts us off from life. For life is not the weight of possessions, nor is it secured in bigger barns, and it is not sustained by what we clutch. Wealth (or the overwhelming longing for wealth), overweening ambition, or even just prudent planning empty of gratitude and generosity is like an addiction, and like an addiction it will choke out every competing interest or concern. Greed will blind a person to what is good in the very thing that greed grasps. Money and wealth can do good things, but greed refuses to see the source or the point. Greed makes an idol of its focus and as scriptures insistently reminds us, idols are cold, dead things that can do no one any good. The biggest lie that this idol whispers in our ears is that we are invulnerable, that what we have isolates us from need. Maybe it places us above those who have less in this culture. It means we are secure and in control. And when we hear that, and believe it, we cannot hear God speak. Well, the rich farmer couldn’t until those fearsome words, “Fool, this night your life is demanded of you.” You can’t be poorer than dead.

But that was him, and it was a parable, and so where do we stand? Paul says we have died already, so we are one step ahead of the foolish farmer. We have died and our life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, we will appear with him in glory.

When Christ appears, we will appear with him. When people introduce themselves one of the things we do is give a name and then some identifier: where we are in school, what sort of work we do, where we might be from. We listen and then share our own, quietly sizing each other up in other categories depending on the reason we encountered each other. But Paul insists that all of that – some of it profoundly important and life-enhancing, some of it simply realities of where we fall in the structures of the world, some of it the result of good or bad decisions – the ways we introduce ourselves or size each other up are finally as irrelevant as the rich fool’s wealth. When Christ appears, you will appear with him. After calling on us to live lives that turn away from evil and corruption, from lies and deception and from greed, Paul takes us one step further into poverty: there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, and free. We can no longer claim those identities, either as our privilege or another’s shame. They can no longer hold us back from each other. Christ has gathered all of that up in his incarnation. Nothing human is foreign him who was made “truly man.” The fullness of humanity bridges all of that and the fullness of humanity now in Christ is hid in God. You have died and your life is hid with Christ in God, and when Christ appears, you will appear with him. Anything we do that breaks down suspicions and heals divisions we do because whatever the division, Christ stands on both sides. If we confess and repent our own prejudice or pride or if we stand against the structures of a divided society, we are simply seeking Christ in whom all are one and who is in all. When Christ appears, we will appear with him, and then the beauty of every distinction and the gift in each particularity will be seen in the blessed unity that the Holy Spirit strives to perfect. Christ is all and in all.

Christ’s appearing is never far from hand: a passage of the Gospels, the blessed grace we encounter in the sacraments, the holiness of beauty, the joy of work that matters, the compassion that heals, the cup of water given in his name. Christ appears for those who have eyes and ears to perceive, and when we see and know Christ, we know ourselves. We know ourselves transformed, Paul says, we will appear with him in glory. And there we who are as poor as dead become heirs of a kingdom, and there in Christ’s transfiguring beauty, people like us shine with a glory that no riches and no earthly status can claim.

That is what made the rich farmer so foolish. For all that he had and for all his prudence, this is what he needed: a heart grateful enough to see God’s hand as the source of every good thing, and then a compassionate heart, that in knowing his own poverty he could see in others the needs he could meet, the good he could do, and the gifts he could give. “You fool,” God says, to the one who counts possessions, but not as blessings and gifts; to the one who builds barns and storehouses, but not for the well-being of others. “You fool,” he says to the one who forgets that all of this and even the ways in which we define ourselves is passing away, ours for the day and then to be given back into the hands from whence it came. And yet in baptism, our death is already behind us, drawn into Christ’s own life. Our poverty is enriched with his grace, and our true self remains to be received as gift, to be seen as revelation, to be revealed in glory when Christ who is our life is revealed.

Preached by Father David Cobb

31 July 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Traction and Distraction

I was walking on campus a few days ago, just here behind the chapel, when I saw a small group of people huddled together on the path, looking around anxiously and glancing back and forth at their phones. It looked like a father and two daughters, and as I approached them I could hear the father say, “Well, I don’t know, where is it?” Now I had been at Sewanee for a little less than 48 hours, but when I see someone who looks lost, it’s hard for me not to try to help them. So I began to move towards them, silently praying that they might be looking for one of the three buildings I knew how to find. But as I got closer, I saw one of the daughters grin like a girl on Christmas morning. She beamed up at her father, “It’s the little green one, isn’t it?” she said to him. And it was then that I knew. This wasn’t a prospective student and her family looking for the admissions office; this was a family playing Pokémon Go.             

If you haven’t heard the news this week – like, for example, if you’ve been stuck under a rock or if you’ve been a part of the Sewanee Church Music Conference and therefore spending roughly 17 hours a day singing or registering service music – there’s a new game that’s sweeping the nation. No, check that, there’s a new game that has swept the nation, and it’s called Pokémon Go. Pokémon Go is, according to Wikipedia, a “free-to-play location-based augmented reality mobile game.” Translated that from Silicon Valley speak, that means that this game takes the view through your phone’s camera and superimposes a virtual reality overtop of it. The player’s job, then, is to use their cameras to hunt down virtual creatures in the Pokémon world. So you’re using your phone to look at the bike rack outside of McClurg dining hall, for example, and suddenly there’s a little green one, or a Pikachu, or a whatever-its-called looking back at you. It is, apparently, addictively fun.

It is also, apparently, pretty darn dangerous. People playing this game have been staring at their phones and then walking into stuff all week. Players have been stepping off of curbs and into intersections, ramming into people and even, in at least one case, ramming their car into a tree. On Thursday two Pokémon Go-ers were so intent on capturing the little green guy that they actually walked right off a cliff. The all-consuming pull of the smartphone has reached a whole new level with this new game. Pokémon Go has created an entirely new definition of distraction.

Martha, as far as we know, did not have a smartphone. There were no little green ones lurking in the corners of her house, and she wasn’t looking at anything except the work she had to get done. But she was still hopelessly distracted. She and her sister Mary and her brother Lazarus were friends of Jesus’ – new friends, perhaps, as this is the first time Luke mentions Martha in his Gospel. Jesus and his disciples have just rolled into town, and Jesus needs a place to rest for a while – a soft cushion, a home-cooked meal, a quiet room to pray and sleep. And Martha is a good person, a faithful Jew. She knows the importance of hospitality, and she’s happy to offer it.

And so she gets down to business. There is cleaning to be done, and bread to bake, and blankets and rugs to air out. There is water to draw and a goat to be milked and the fire to stoke and keep hot. She’s working hard; she’s in the zone, firing on all cylinders, and everything is going smoothly…until she notices her sister, Mary, doing absolutely nothing. She’s sitting on the floor with Jesus, doing nothing – just listening. Well, Martha thinks, that’s fine, I can probably get this done faster without her anyway. But the longer Martha sweeps and kneads and milks and sweats, the more animated the conversation becomes in her head. What is Mary doing, she thinks. Has she not noticed me swirling around the house like a cyclone? I mean, it’s kind of obvious that I’m killing myself here – would it be too much to ask for her to pick up on the fact that I need a little help? No, no, it’s fine, she can listen to him, I’ll do it all myself. I always do it all myself. Always me. Always poor Martha, cooking and cleaning and, you know, tending the livestock – as if I wouldn’t mind sitting around with my feet up eating bon bons every once in a while. But no, I’ll just keep working, because if I stop, well, then what happens? The house gets dusty and the milk will turn which is disgusting and who would want to live that way anyway and why, oh why, Lord does it always have to be me that does everything for everybody except for myself?!

Okay. So perhaps I exaggerate just a tiny bit. But we know that in this moment Martha is troubled. She is, as Luke tells us, distracted by her many tasks, so distracted that she finally approaches Jesus and asks for his help in getting Mary to pitch in. Even in the asking, she is so distracted that Jesus, looking up at her flushed face, chooses to say her name aloud. Not once, but twice. Martha, Martha, he says, trying to really get her attention. Martha, Martha, look at yourself. You’re dis-tracted, literally “pulled apart” right now. Take a breath, and take a look. See what is right before your eyes – your sister, Mary. She has chosen the better way.

Now just to be clear, I don’t think Jesus means only that sitting still was the better way. I don’t think that he means doing nothing but listening is the only way to be. This story can easily be read as a recommendation of the contemplative life over and above the active life, but I don’t think that’s entirely what our Lord was getting at. After all, generations of Christians have been pretty darn active and pretty darn faithful at the same time. Ora et labora, St. Benedict reminds us, prayer and work, and those Benedictines seem to be doing just fine.

No, there is more to the story here. The better way that Jesus is talking about is the way of being not-distracted, not pulled apart. It’s about listening and being present no matter what you’re doing. Martha’s problem isn’t that she’s doing something. Martha’s problem is that she’s doing one thing but she’s thinking about something else. She’s looking at the world, but she’s seeing only her own worries superimposed over the view. She’s pulled apart, living in two places at once. Her attention is divided, and so she misses out on seeing the holiness that is all around her. She misses the beauty of the goat’s milk glistening in the bowl like silk. She overlooks the miracle of how a little yeast leavens the whole loaf. She doesn’t smell the sweetness of fresh air as it blows into dusty rooms, doesn’t hear the music in the rise and fall of Jesus’ voice. She is distracted, and anxious, and worried, and she misses the presence of God that is all around her.

I don’t know about you, but there are times when I, too, feel like I’ve just missed it, times when I feel like I’ve spent the entire day looking at one thing but seeing another. I feel pulled apart, by my work or my worries, or by the world’s bad news. You and I can be distracted by many things. You are getting older and your body doesn’t work the same anymore. You have just received a diagnosis that makes your heart beat fast with fear. Your marriage is stuck, or your family is distant, or your faith has gone dry. You live in a world full of dangerous creatures that pop up out of nowhere with terrifying frequency and tragic results. You and I can be distracted by many things. And when we’re distracted, we tend to make bad decisions. We become short-tempered and unforgiving. We act out of fear instead of hope; we look for vengeance instead of mercy. We expect scarcity instead of abundance. We see neighbors as other instead of as sisters and brothers, and we start walking around this world around ramming into each other or stepping off of cliffs. We get pulled apart, and we tend to try to pull the rest of the world apart with us.

But this day, in this still and holy place, hear our Lord speaking to you, Martha. Martha. Choose the better way. Choose me. Look to me, whatever you are doing. See me superimposed over all of the cares of the world. Listen to me with a still, present, and open heart. Find traction for your soul in me. For I am never distracted. You are always first on my mind, when you lay your head down at night and when you blink your eyes open in the morning, and all of the hours when you sing inbetween. You are always mine, and I am always drawn to you. So choose the better way. There is need of only one thing. Look for me with your whole heart. Listen to me, that you may live.   

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

17 July 2016

All Saints' Chapel, Sewanee, Tennessee 

Proving to Be a Neighbor

Priests tell time in an odd way, and part of that is the slow circuit of the lectionary. There were years (maybe not happier years, but they seem less troubled from where we stand now) when it always seemed that this Gospel’s appearance would be matched with an uptick in the numbers of people who rang the parish door bell looking for help. The usual requests: a job three towns over and train fare would make it all alright, or some other more or less plausible crisis that more or less money from the discretionary fund could fix. Probably it was more likely a prick of conscience that made me more aware. Working on this gospel will unsettle you, just as hearing it will.

This time, the parable that asks us to look at the wounded man and ponder what we would do. This parable of danger, avoidance, and mercy played out on the street is read when we have seen too many streets as places where danger, denial, and too little mercy demand our attention. It is a parable of questions that were meant to stump someone, but instead evoke ever more challenging questions and that require answers which come from deeper and deeper in our being.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Luke suggests the question was a test, or a trap (if so, Jesus handles it easily). The answer is on the lawyer’s own lips and we know it: the Summary of the Law. Love God, love your neighbor. And if we don’t hear it as part of the opening rite in the Eucharist as we did once, we are reminded of it every time the deacon calls us to confess our sins against God and our neighbor. Then Lawyer asks a harder question, and though he thinks the answer will give him a framework—a structure within which he can operate, a clear limit that love has to go, but no farther—the answer changes the orientation of the question, because the answer changes anyone who will listen.

Who is my neighbor? Maybe it was a trick question that a clever lawyer threw at a wandering teacher, but I know it’s been my question in earnest. I’ve wondered more than once what my obligation was, what I owed to any number of people. What do I owe the person who shakes a cup at me on the sidewalk? What do I owe a family member whose needs overwhelm me? What claim does my work create between me and colleagues? What am I supposed to give to whom? What must I take into account? Whose flourishing, whose life is affected by how I vote, how I spend money, what I do with my time? Where do I stand, given my reality as white, male, married, reasonably educated, middle class, a father, or any other marker of my identity: chosen, given, or imposed? Each of those puts me in contact and connection with some and distances me from others; and so I have to ask, “Who is my neighbor?” If there is a day when that question demanded an answer in this country, this might be it.

Jesus answers with a story and once the setup is established, he brings on three stock characters. There is of course the disappointing priest; simply a hypocrite? Fearful perhaps, uncertain of what dangers lurked waiting to pounce if he slowed down on the road? Caught in his own troubles and so not registering what was on the road? Quick to blame the victim; writing the man off as drunk or someone who was likely involved in crime and so deserved it? For whatever reason, he passed by and the wounded man lay there. And then there was the Levite, another clerical figure, and he does the same. Clergy: what can you expect? That might have been what the crowd was thinking, and particularly since the Lawyer who raised the question was himself part of the religious establishment.

The crowd knows who’s likely to round out the three characters. If the joke starts, a priest, a Levite, and one more person come down the road, the third person should have been basically a regular guy, an ordinary person, one of us (one of you). You could have watched some folks turn red as this parable began and some folks begin to let a little smirk spread on their face, offended clergy and others thinking they were about to come out on top until Jesus kept going: a Samaritan.

Who were they? Well, without going into the depths of political and religious rivalry of the time, they were half-breeds, heretics, and generally disliked by everyone involved in this encounter with Jesus. Lawyer, religious leaders, towns folk – nobody likes the Samaritans. Just a few passages before this Samaritans had refused to let Jesus and his disciples enter their villages, and James and John had suggested it might be time to call down fire from heaven. Luke carefully places this parable and this question where he does. Here was one of those people who had refused Jesus and whom James and John wanted to blast with fire from heaven.

A Samaritan comes down the road, and you know the rest of the parable. This most unlikely first responder arrives, this unexpected doctor without borders, this unwanted person who is necessary. The wounded man is soothed with wine and oil, placed on a donkey and taken to an inn, given refuge, comfort, and safety. Providing what the wounded man’s future demanded, the Samaritan quietly leaves the scene.

This week, the priest might have an excuse not to notice the single man wounded by the road side. I’ve lost track frankly, but bombs twice in Baghdad? And weren’t the ones in Medina at the Muslim shrines this week? There were a few references in the news back to Orlando and the massacre of 49 people, mostly LGBT and people of color, but troubles and griefs crowd in on us these days, and soon one mass shooting or inexplicable death in police custody replaces another. Baton Rouge was so quickly followed by Minneapolis, with the image of a four year old in the back of a squad car comforting her mother and even that was taken over quickly enough. Dallas: five police men killed, more wounded. Each one of those stories holds the stories of scores of people broken hearted, of lives disrupted. Each time fear and anger burrow deeper into the hearts of countless people.

As individuals grieve and our society and our communities grapple with this, there are those who will quickly and loudly use the moment’s emotions as fodder for yet more division, who will build walls with the bricks of confusion and fear. Watching this, if not caught in demagoguery’s trap, many become cynical and so civic virtue and community decay even further. Last week, parents had to explain to children the deaths of people they knew and loved. And parents and grandparents had to ponder what risk, what danger waited for their children or grandchildren because of their race, the color of their skin. How many parents and family members sending good and decent first responders to work, wondering if they will come back? How many teenagers were thrown out of their homes and onto the streets when they came out to their parents? How many Muslims were attacked and vilified, not for any act of violence or hatred, but in perfect fulfillment of the terrorists’ intentions? There are the stories that captivate the news and there are the human stories that unfold quietly, constantly, and with echoes that will last for decades. Public and private grief and fear, who can see the man lying by the road? It is too much. So this priest on the road from Jerusalem, maybe he was overwhelmed by the violence of what he saw around him and one wounded man just did not register.

There are systemic and cultural, racial and religious roots that give rise to the violence that is all but swamping the roads between our cities and the cities themselves. We can never, never forget what danger, what evil comes quickly to hand from political rhetoric that makes an enemy of some group or the other, that plays on fear rather than work for the well-being of all. And we, in whatever capacity we have to speak, to act, to engage, are responsible for our part in those systems and patterns and assumptions. It matters when systemic racism weighs the scales of justice, of well-being against anyone or any group. And every small action we take to push back or to enable racism matters.

And then we are brought back to this gospel and to Jesus’ question, “Which of these three proved a neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?” At least one point that the parable is trying to make is this: that the priest didn’t even see the man and that the Lawyer is not able even to name the one who proved a neighbor. We easily and thoughtlessly connect “good” and “Samaritan” as if it’s a single term; for the lawyer it was utter nonsense. It struck against all his understanding of national and religious and ethnic identity, his and others. When was the last time you had solid, unexamined preconceptions blown away? When was the last time you faced your own prejudice and saw it for the lie it is? Remember that and you’ll understand where the Lawyer stands as Jesus questions him. Two questions set this parable in motion: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”, “Who is my neighbor?”, and a third one, “Who proved to be a neighbor?” is Jesus’ work to change the Lawyer and us. He didn’t say “the good Samaritan.” He couldn’t. But he had to say this: “The one who showed mercy.” And that was at least a beginning.

We come to this altar this morning, some of us broken hearted and even more fearful because of the flood of events these last weeks and with more than a little unease for what might be next. Some of us come aware of our own participation in privilege and some aware of our exposure to the danger that our culture doles out by race or class, religion or position. Maybe this Gospel catches us unaware of how often we pass by the wounded on the road. Maybe it makes us aware of our own sense of being set upon and attacked and defenseless. “The one who had mercy,” as the lawyer put it, meets all of us here. There is mercy here for burdened hearts and the guilty conscience. Early commentators were much more comfortable with analogy and were able to see in this parable the work of Christ, unexpected and not always welcome, who takes up the wounded and dying, and bathes us and anoints us with oil in baptism and gives us the wine of gladness at this altar and places us within the inn, the community that is his Church. We come this morning and entrust those who have died and those who grieve to the care of the Good Samaritan who gives himself for their healing. But there are also those whose hearts are caught in hate, who are happy to divide and blame, whose hands reach towards violence and whose words are knives. We have to pray for our enemies, that God changes hearts and restrains evil, and so we pray that the Good Samaritan will find those who lie in wait and who take aim by the road and bring healing to them as well.

And we have to hear Jesus’ question address each of us and all of us in this parish and all the communities in which we stand. Who proved neighbor? And each of us needs to understand and know who it is that Jesus would have us see, who lies wounded within the reach of our compassion, who needs our kind words and who it is that we need to stand with as companion or where we need to stand as shield. What we have, and who we are can be the oil and wine that binds wounds. What we have and what we can do can hold someone up. God grant that we know what we should do and have grace to do it. Did you hear the collect that began this Mass? Maybe it and this gospel need to be on our hearts and in our mouths in the days ahead. Priest, Levite, Samaritan: who saw the wounded traveler? Whom do you see? And then, once that is answered, Jesus asks, “Who proved neighbor?”

It is too late to say it now, but probably the only sermon needed on this parable is the one that Jesus gives to the Lawyer and to us: “Go thou and do likewise.” May we go and may the grace and the hope that we find be what we do and say – and may God’s healing flow through our cities and through our world.

Preached by Father David Cobb

10 July 2016, the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia