Giving Our Full Allegiance To God
Commentary
Today’s scriptures talk about what it means to love God and follow Christ. The passages we have are difficult, demanding and jostle our comfortable hopes. We see God being portrayed as an angry, disappointed Father, by turns throwing us out of the house, so to speak, and then drawing us close as one would an infant or toddler. We have one of Jesus’ parables that confounds our understanding of how to provide for our old age. And we have Paul, who is always good for a solid push back into the fold, confronting those who will not trust God, but will seek out an angel or two for help. Anything to avoid giving our full allegiance to God.
Hosea 11:1-11
This passage is a bit garbled, the Hebrew uncertain to the translators in several places, and an idiom that doesn’t usually apply to humans, but animals (v. 3-4). In addition, in v. 7 Hosea quotes God as saying that Israel calls to “the Most High … but he does not raise them up at all.” This is particularly strange since ‘the Most High’ was one of the names commonly used by the people in that time and place. ‘El’ was one of the names used generically for God in that part of the world. ‘Elohim,’ the plural form of ‘El,’ was used rather as it was used in European royal courts, as the Royal We (“we are not amused” as Queen Victoria apparently said of herself). It could, in addition, be used to set the God of Israel above all other gods.
So who is this ‘Most High’ if he is not the God of Israel? It may be that it’s rather like ‘Ba’al,’ who is the Babylonian deity; yet the word means simply “Lord” and it is translated like this in several places in later Old Testament writings. We do know that there are several worship sites that have been uncovered by archaeologists that feature a “wife” (Asherah) next to the altar. It is undoubtedly this juxtaposition of Canaanite religion next to Abrahamic customs that the prophet is speaking of.
These difficulties of the text ought not to obscure the fact that this passage is a bit like a parent writing to a child who has left home and does not stay in contact with his or her parents. Parents never stop being parents, and in fact may worry more about their offspring who are away at college or working in a new city hours away from home. Jesus understood this also – it is the basis for ‘The Prodigal Son,’ where the father throws aside his dignity, running down the driveway to embrace his son who has been gone so long, and who has been the subject of gossip about what he is doing with his share of the inheritance he shouldn’t have been given.
These passages tell us how God loves us and how God wants us to respond. We are like teenagers, one and all – we want what we want when we want it, and push God aside in our headlong pursuit of baubles like teenagers push their parents away. We want to rule over our own lives, not follow God’s rules. We think we alone know what we need, that God cannot know our interior struggles. We live as though God knows nothing about our ultimate possibilities, but we do.
I remember a youth group session when I had invited them to the parsonage to watch some videos I had about the business of stretching to understand the possible futures they might have. In the middle of our time watching the videos, I asked what each of them wanted to do when they were done with high school. One of the boys said he wanted to be a doctor. Half the group laughed at him. “A doctor, right!” one of the other boys said.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked, and turned to the boy and said, “How are your grades?” He said he got all As and Bs. “Do you have a lot of stamina?” I asked. After explaining what I meant by that, he said “Yeah, I think so. I’ve played baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter.” Perseverance? Yes, he could set goals and usually met them.
I again asked the group, “So why are you laughing at him? Does he drink?” No. “Do drugs?” No. “So what’s so funny about him wanting to be a doctor?”
“Nobody from this town goes away. Nobody ever accomplishes that kind of stuff.” And most of the kids nodded. It’s their thinking that kept them tied down to low expectations. And yes, it was the mindset of the town. Men and women were working long hours with no overtime pay, no health insurance, no pensions, no hope that they might improve anything. Like the citizens of Israel, they were stuck, following gods who were not God, and suffering for their choices.
We laugh at those who say that they look to God to lead them; that God has talked to them and saved them from the mess they used to be. As Lilly Tomlin so famously said, “If we talk to God, that’s prayer; if God talks to us, that’s schizophrenia.” There are plenty of people who will make us feel diminished, if we talk about our experiences of God’s touch or Voice.
In that state of doubt, we try, willy-nilly, the ways of those who seem to be smart, who ‘have it all.’ We strive to have the very best material goods available. Like the Israelites, we call out to other gods – the car that will make us look good, the perfume that the opposite sex cannot resist, the toothpaste that makes us look as though our teeth were porcelain, the undergarment that will compress the fat we apparently cannot remove.
That mind set leads us to all sorts of foolishness. For many, the Secret 1 to gaining everything we want is to focus on obtaining that thing – from good health for our children to a diamond necklace, just concentrate on it, picture it, set your heart on getting it, and you’ll win. And if that doesn’t work, your subconscious must be doing something that undermines your focus. “You might not even know that you subconsciously are undermining yourself, these speakers and writers say, but that has to be the reason the Secret isn’t working for you.”
We have evidence that the people simply could not worship an invisible God. They wanted a figure to bow down to, just like all their neighbors. After all, Israel was a tiny nation in an area where all the small nations were being swallowed up by the Big Guys – Babylon (where their main god, called ‘Baal’ wanted children sacrificed in fire); Egypt (who did not practice human sacrifice, but had multiple gods for all kinds of purposes) and Assyria (who did both). “Who knows” they apparently said to themselves, “maybe if we worship their gods, we too will become one of the Big Guys?”
God’s feelings, as with any parent, are mixed, according to Hosea. First, like any parent grieving over the choices their children are making, God reminisces – “When Israel was a child, I loved him and called him to leave Egypt.” But it took only a few weeks for the former slaves were accusing God (and his representative, Moses) of leading them into a trackless desert, where they were bound to die of starvation, even if they could find all the springs of water they needed. They may have been slaves in Egypt, but at least they had meat, and not just meat but onions to make it savory! Who wants more manna?
Then God swings toward anger: “They shall return to Egypt, or I’ll let Assyria run amok over them. I’ll let Babylon slaughter every one of them. Let their blood be spilled in the streets! If they want some other god, I’ll let them – but they’ll be sorry! There is no one else to respond to their prayers. Let them find out the hard way!”
But like any parent who has been infuriated enough to tell their child to find someone else to take care of them if they can’t live by the family rules, God breaks down. Can we hear the anguish that Hosea heard? God cries out, “How can I hand you over? You’re my child! My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” We can’t stand to let our children ruin their lives. God is the same, saying he will call his children to return home, and hearing that call, the scattered remnants of the Children of Abraham will gladly fly to him.
Most Christians have the idea that God is emotionless. The idea that God can cry over the breakdown of all his/her hopes and plans for Israel is hard to handle – repugnant, even. So we deny that God has anything but love for us. Just as we deny that we have ever hit a child in anger, we refuse to believe that God might get angry enough that s/he needs to repent. But the Old Testament has many of these passages, and even in the New Testament, we have Jesus angry enough to take the cords off the curtains in the Temple courtyard and to snap them like a whip to drive out the merchants, overturning their money-changing booths and calling the Temple a den of thieves. One of the reasons the Revelation had such a hard time being included in the canon (aside from some very confusing narrative) was the portrayal of such a vast amount of carnage poured out on the earth.
But to focus only on the God who wants to lift us, like infants, to his cheeks, feeding us and comforting us, is to miss the other side of the coin – the necessity to listen, to God, to obey his command to love one another as God loves us, even to the point of loving our enemies. How’s that working in your life?
Colossians 3:1-11
Colossae was one of the cities of Asia Minor (known today as Turkey) along the Lycus River. Ephesus was the port city on the western coast, and Colossae, Laodicea and Hierapolis were a cluster of upstream ports. Paul was not the founder of the congregation, Epaphras was. (1:3) Paul had probably been alerted by Epaphras that the Christians there were still following the angel cult that dominated the city and parts of Asia Minor.
These angels are probably those referred to in the first chapter: “thrones or dominions or rulers or powers” (1:16); or chapter two: “elemental spirits of the universe” (2:8). These angels were said to impart ‘true knowledge’ to those who sought it, and it was this knowledge that saved the seeker, not faith in Christ/God. This was a conflation of Gnosticism with Christianity.. Paul saw that Gnosticism was a direct threat to the spiritual welfare of new Christians.2 Dependence on angels rather than Christ is still rife today, with many books purporting to teach the reader how to reach a variety of angels for specific needs, such as good health, wealth and esoteric knowledge. Go into any “Spiritual” shops or browse any bookstore, online or on the street, and you will find enough reading to last through the summer.
Actually, verses 5 through 10 resonate with the Gnostic belief that all material things in our life are evil, bringing on evil desires like those Paul lists in verses 8 and 9. The ‘earthly’ parts of us are reflected, Paul says, by an impure lifestyle, marked by our dishonesty about ourselves (v. 9) and our need to make others less than we pretend to be. Our reliance in this world is on our ability to accumulate all the status symbols we can – a trophy wife or a mistress or two, and the money to live in an upscale neighborhood in our fine home, where we can entertain the very best people we can find, especially those who can help us climb the social ladder.
Paul also points to our inability to control ourselves, reflected in our hate speech, our adoption of language that is abusive, our anger that we give full power when we speak. All of these things point to our unsanctified way of thinking, for all of our actions tell the world the state of our hearts. As long as we give full vent to the anger that drives us (v.8) and grasp for the power that allows us to lord it over others, disregarding what God has told us, we are in trouble spiritually. The divisions that we perpetuate by segregating ourselves from one another ought to be a thing of the past, no matter how important our differences seem to be. He lists the major divisions that divide the church even today: hatred of those who come from other countries or cultures (Greek and Jew in Paul’s world; brown and white in ours); those who hold different ideas about how we show our faith in Jesus (circumcised and uncircumcised in the early church, choices of music and how to dress in the church today, not to mention our hatred of those who follow other religions); those who are of a different social status (slave and free in Paul’s day, rich and poor and yes, slaves today); and those who have been or done something shameful in their past (barbarian to Paul, to us perhaps those who have been in jail). It’s interesting that he specifies Scythians as a category. The Scythians were nomads tied to the Iranian culture. We know little about them, but they probably had a reputation for being dishonest or violent, since that is a traditional attitude among settled peoples vs. the nomads of their area (e.g., Gypsies).
The main difference in Paul’s vision of Christianity vs. Gnosticism is that Christians must rely on our faith in Christ, rather than intermediaries such as angels. Nothing can justify us but the love and power of God as demonstrated by Jesus Christ. All else we leave behind when we set out to follow Jesus. He alone can wipe out who we were before our conversion. God alone can grant us happiness and peace. On the other side of that belief is the necessity that we need to be open to those people who come to us seeking for hope, regardless of their appearance or background. How else are we to carry out the Great Commandment to make disciples of all nations? That cannot happen as long as we treat strangers as enemies.
Luke 12:13-21
As we turn to the Gospel reading, we need to take the lesson Paul is preaching to the Colossians with us. “Our lives do not consist in the abundance of possessions,” Jesus says to a young man who demands that Jesus solve a family dispute over an inheritance. We might ask, “Is the brother who will not share present in the crowd?” Surely Jesus is not telling the young man who has asked for his help that he’s being greedy? Isn’t he simply demanding justice? Well, yes… But he’s talking to a traveling rabbi who depends on the generosity of strangers. At one point, Jesus had told a potential student (disciple) that “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20 and Luke 9:58) So it sounds as though Jesus knows that it takes two (at least) to fight.
A couple in a congregation I served had announced that they were moving Georgia. The husband had been offered a job at a higher salary. He and his wife had had several discussions on the matter, and she had given in and started packing. But she wasn’t happy about the move. Their married daughter had announced that she was pregnant, and her mother wanted to be there for her. Her daughter was disappointed that her parents wouldn’t be living nearby, knowing that it would be a problem for them to come north for the birth and baptism.
I had an opportunity to talk with the husband a week or so after the big announcement.
“So, tell me about your new job,” I said. He replied only, “Well, it’s a lot more money. I’ve got to take it. June doesn’t understand that.” “Really?” I said, “You have to take it?” “Well, you’ve got to follow the money!” he said.
I asked how his wife and children were taking the move. “Well,” he said, “women don’t understand the business world. You’ve got to keep moving up, or you get left behind.” I said that I hadn’t known that his job was like that. I knew that professors, for example, had to get published or they’d lose their positions, but was his job like that?
“No,” he said with impatience. “But you’ve got to go where the money is.”
“But what about you wife? Your children? Don’t their feelings figure into your plans? If they’re unhappy, don’t you have to figure that in your equation?”
“Well, of course you wouldn’t understand. You are, after all, a woman.”
No surprise, his wife was back in church just before Christmas. “Is Chrissy expecting the baby soon?” I asked June. She beamed. Yes, indeed, it was due any day. “Was your husband able to come up for this visit?”
“No,” she said flatly. Uh-oh.
“Well, he’s pretty new to his job…” I started to say, but she interrupted. “He didn’t want to come. He’s mad at me that I feel I need to be here.” She paused. “I don’t think I’ll be going back there. He has his life, he’s busy all the time. And I miss our daughters.”
What could I say? “I’m so sorry. I know he didn’t think he could pass up the promotion.”
“Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
But the parable that has been paired with that comment is even harder. It concerns a man who had a bumper crop, but no place to store so much. So he plans to pull down his barns and build larger ones to accommodate his crops. He plans to live off this largesse, to be able to “relax, eat, drink and be merry.” “But God says to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”
Let’s leave off the last sentence for the moment, because the actual punch line is right here: “All the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
We live in a society that is very different from the Judea Jesus lived in. We have banks, pensions, insurance policies, annuities, Social Security – all so that the overabundance we have at some point in our early lives can be put away somewhere safe – even insured, so we can relax, feeling guaranteed to have an easy old age.
But what about those who have never had a job that supplied them with a pension? It takes a large number of employees to support a pension fund. Anyone who works for a small business doesn’t have that protection. These people may not even have had health insurance – insurance companies insist on a minimum number of employees before they’ll even talk to the owner about a health policy. Anyone who was an adult in 2008 knows that banks can fail no matter how large; happily, there is the Federal Deposit Insurance Company, insuring all of those deposits. Until they don’t, because if too many banks – or even just a few Really Big Banks fail, paying out that insurance to the depositors can deplete even FDIC resources.
In other words, we have here a parable that says “And what if you die tonight? You haven’t even had time to build those new barns, let alone store away all that food. Who will benefit from your abundance then?” Jesus tells many impossible parables, and this is one of them. If we don’t put away money to live on when we are sick or feeble, disabled or old, how can we hope to afford to pay health professionals to come and take care of us? We don’t want to be a burden to our children or grandchildren; and many of us have never had children, so there is no one to look after us in any event. It takes a huge amount of faith to think “God will see to it that we will have the help when the need presents itself.”
Now let’s look at that last sentence in the reading: “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” We can suspect that Jesus did not say this. He had a way of flinging our faith into the deep water and making us learn to swim, after all.
But what if these are Jesus’ actual words, what does it mean to ‘be rich toward God.’?
Let’s not spiritualize a parable that has a concrete meaning. The understanding of the Jewish faith is and has been that when we care for the poor, we are really giving to God. The laws of the Old Testament have some very specific things to say about caring for the poor. For example, when a farmer gathers the crops, he is not allowed to go back over the field. What you have harvested, you have for yourself; the leavings are to be left for the poor to gather.3 Likewise, one may not harvest the corners of the field. That, too, is to be left for the poor. In addition, 10% of the crop was to be taken to the Temple, where it was stored for the use of the priests, and the poor.
Jesus is always pushing us to be more giving. If we see a person without a coat in the cold, we ought to give him or her one of the coats that we have. Because most of us have more than one, don’t we? Last year’s coat? Or one that is the wrong size and so has been put away?
Because being rich toward God, according to Jesus, is being rich toward one another, generous with what we have, caring for the poor, homeless, sick and lonely. When we are rich in these ways, we are also rich toward God. So Jesus insists that we not store up, but that we spread the wealth. That we not build bigger barns, or ‘follow the money,’ or strive for the bigger job, but that we look for new ways to share what God has given us, that we live in loving ways, rather than thinking only of ourselves. We all would prefer to live a long, happy life where we can eat, drink and be merry. Jesus asks us to go the other way, to live today to its fullest, and to trust to God for the future.
But when we have our eyes on the trophy, the reward, the money, we become more and more base. We’ve sold our eternal treasure for the hope of being comfortable for a few years. This is not an easy thing to do. It goes against our society. It probably frightens most of us just to think about it. But as Paul says, it frees us from our idolatry. It moves the meaning of our life from our ego to God’s loving care.
1 Authored by Rhonda Byrne, Atria Books (Simon and Schuster) March, 2012.
2 The doctrine of Gnosticism is the subject of a good deal of writing, both online and in reference books. It is much too complex an idea to be treated here in any depth. Browse the internet for further information.
3 This is what Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, had to do to survive; it is also how Ruth came to the attention of Naomi’s relative Boaz, and led to him marrying her, which led her to becoming the grandmother of David the King.
Hosea 11:1-11
This passage is a bit garbled, the Hebrew uncertain to the translators in several places, and an idiom that doesn’t usually apply to humans, but animals (v. 3-4). In addition, in v. 7 Hosea quotes God as saying that Israel calls to “the Most High … but he does not raise them up at all.” This is particularly strange since ‘the Most High’ was one of the names commonly used by the people in that time and place. ‘El’ was one of the names used generically for God in that part of the world. ‘Elohim,’ the plural form of ‘El,’ was used rather as it was used in European royal courts, as the Royal We (“we are not amused” as Queen Victoria apparently said of herself). It could, in addition, be used to set the God of Israel above all other gods.
So who is this ‘Most High’ if he is not the God of Israel? It may be that it’s rather like ‘Ba’al,’ who is the Babylonian deity; yet the word means simply “Lord” and it is translated like this in several places in later Old Testament writings. We do know that there are several worship sites that have been uncovered by archaeologists that feature a “wife” (Asherah) next to the altar. It is undoubtedly this juxtaposition of Canaanite religion next to Abrahamic customs that the prophet is speaking of.
These difficulties of the text ought not to obscure the fact that this passage is a bit like a parent writing to a child who has left home and does not stay in contact with his or her parents. Parents never stop being parents, and in fact may worry more about their offspring who are away at college or working in a new city hours away from home. Jesus understood this also – it is the basis for ‘The Prodigal Son,’ where the father throws aside his dignity, running down the driveway to embrace his son who has been gone so long, and who has been the subject of gossip about what he is doing with his share of the inheritance he shouldn’t have been given.
These passages tell us how God loves us and how God wants us to respond. We are like teenagers, one and all – we want what we want when we want it, and push God aside in our headlong pursuit of baubles like teenagers push their parents away. We want to rule over our own lives, not follow God’s rules. We think we alone know what we need, that God cannot know our interior struggles. We live as though God knows nothing about our ultimate possibilities, but we do.
I remember a youth group session when I had invited them to the parsonage to watch some videos I had about the business of stretching to understand the possible futures they might have. In the middle of our time watching the videos, I asked what each of them wanted to do when they were done with high school. One of the boys said he wanted to be a doctor. Half the group laughed at him. “A doctor, right!” one of the other boys said.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked, and turned to the boy and said, “How are your grades?” He said he got all As and Bs. “Do you have a lot of stamina?” I asked. After explaining what I meant by that, he said “Yeah, I think so. I’ve played baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter.” Perseverance? Yes, he could set goals and usually met them.
I again asked the group, “So why are you laughing at him? Does he drink?” No. “Do drugs?” No. “So what’s so funny about him wanting to be a doctor?”
“Nobody from this town goes away. Nobody ever accomplishes that kind of stuff.” And most of the kids nodded. It’s their thinking that kept them tied down to low expectations. And yes, it was the mindset of the town. Men and women were working long hours with no overtime pay, no health insurance, no pensions, no hope that they might improve anything. Like the citizens of Israel, they were stuck, following gods who were not God, and suffering for their choices.
We laugh at those who say that they look to God to lead them; that God has talked to them and saved them from the mess they used to be. As Lilly Tomlin so famously said, “If we talk to God, that’s prayer; if God talks to us, that’s schizophrenia.” There are plenty of people who will make us feel diminished, if we talk about our experiences of God’s touch or Voice.
In that state of doubt, we try, willy-nilly, the ways of those who seem to be smart, who ‘have it all.’ We strive to have the very best material goods available. Like the Israelites, we call out to other gods – the car that will make us look good, the perfume that the opposite sex cannot resist, the toothpaste that makes us look as though our teeth were porcelain, the undergarment that will compress the fat we apparently cannot remove.
That mind set leads us to all sorts of foolishness. For many, the Secret 1 to gaining everything we want is to focus on obtaining that thing – from good health for our children to a diamond necklace, just concentrate on it, picture it, set your heart on getting it, and you’ll win. And if that doesn’t work, your subconscious must be doing something that undermines your focus. “You might not even know that you subconsciously are undermining yourself, these speakers and writers say, but that has to be the reason the Secret isn’t working for you.”
We have evidence that the people simply could not worship an invisible God. They wanted a figure to bow down to, just like all their neighbors. After all, Israel was a tiny nation in an area where all the small nations were being swallowed up by the Big Guys – Babylon (where their main god, called ‘Baal’ wanted children sacrificed in fire); Egypt (who did not practice human sacrifice, but had multiple gods for all kinds of purposes) and Assyria (who did both). “Who knows” they apparently said to themselves, “maybe if we worship their gods, we too will become one of the Big Guys?”
God’s feelings, as with any parent, are mixed, according to Hosea. First, like any parent grieving over the choices their children are making, God reminisces – “When Israel was a child, I loved him and called him to leave Egypt.” But it took only a few weeks for the former slaves were accusing God (and his representative, Moses) of leading them into a trackless desert, where they were bound to die of starvation, even if they could find all the springs of water they needed. They may have been slaves in Egypt, but at least they had meat, and not just meat but onions to make it savory! Who wants more manna?
Then God swings toward anger: “They shall return to Egypt, or I’ll let Assyria run amok over them. I’ll let Babylon slaughter every one of them. Let their blood be spilled in the streets! If they want some other god, I’ll let them – but they’ll be sorry! There is no one else to respond to their prayers. Let them find out the hard way!”
But like any parent who has been infuriated enough to tell their child to find someone else to take care of them if they can’t live by the family rules, God breaks down. Can we hear the anguish that Hosea heard? God cries out, “How can I hand you over? You’re my child! My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” We can’t stand to let our children ruin their lives. God is the same, saying he will call his children to return home, and hearing that call, the scattered remnants of the Children of Abraham will gladly fly to him.
Most Christians have the idea that God is emotionless. The idea that God can cry over the breakdown of all his/her hopes and plans for Israel is hard to handle – repugnant, even. So we deny that God has anything but love for us. Just as we deny that we have ever hit a child in anger, we refuse to believe that God might get angry enough that s/he needs to repent. But the Old Testament has many of these passages, and even in the New Testament, we have Jesus angry enough to take the cords off the curtains in the Temple courtyard and to snap them like a whip to drive out the merchants, overturning their money-changing booths and calling the Temple a den of thieves. One of the reasons the Revelation had such a hard time being included in the canon (aside from some very confusing narrative) was the portrayal of such a vast amount of carnage poured out on the earth.
But to focus only on the God who wants to lift us, like infants, to his cheeks, feeding us and comforting us, is to miss the other side of the coin – the necessity to listen, to God, to obey his command to love one another as God loves us, even to the point of loving our enemies. How’s that working in your life?
Colossians 3:1-11
Colossae was one of the cities of Asia Minor (known today as Turkey) along the Lycus River. Ephesus was the port city on the western coast, and Colossae, Laodicea and Hierapolis were a cluster of upstream ports. Paul was not the founder of the congregation, Epaphras was. (1:3) Paul had probably been alerted by Epaphras that the Christians there were still following the angel cult that dominated the city and parts of Asia Minor.
These angels are probably those referred to in the first chapter: “thrones or dominions or rulers or powers” (1:16); or chapter two: “elemental spirits of the universe” (2:8). These angels were said to impart ‘true knowledge’ to those who sought it, and it was this knowledge that saved the seeker, not faith in Christ/God. This was a conflation of Gnosticism with Christianity.. Paul saw that Gnosticism was a direct threat to the spiritual welfare of new Christians.2 Dependence on angels rather than Christ is still rife today, with many books purporting to teach the reader how to reach a variety of angels for specific needs, such as good health, wealth and esoteric knowledge. Go into any “Spiritual” shops or browse any bookstore, online or on the street, and you will find enough reading to last through the summer.
Actually, verses 5 through 10 resonate with the Gnostic belief that all material things in our life are evil, bringing on evil desires like those Paul lists in verses 8 and 9. The ‘earthly’ parts of us are reflected, Paul says, by an impure lifestyle, marked by our dishonesty about ourselves (v. 9) and our need to make others less than we pretend to be. Our reliance in this world is on our ability to accumulate all the status symbols we can – a trophy wife or a mistress or two, and the money to live in an upscale neighborhood in our fine home, where we can entertain the very best people we can find, especially those who can help us climb the social ladder.
Paul also points to our inability to control ourselves, reflected in our hate speech, our adoption of language that is abusive, our anger that we give full power when we speak. All of these things point to our unsanctified way of thinking, for all of our actions tell the world the state of our hearts. As long as we give full vent to the anger that drives us (v.8) and grasp for the power that allows us to lord it over others, disregarding what God has told us, we are in trouble spiritually. The divisions that we perpetuate by segregating ourselves from one another ought to be a thing of the past, no matter how important our differences seem to be. He lists the major divisions that divide the church even today: hatred of those who come from other countries or cultures (Greek and Jew in Paul’s world; brown and white in ours); those who hold different ideas about how we show our faith in Jesus (circumcised and uncircumcised in the early church, choices of music and how to dress in the church today, not to mention our hatred of those who follow other religions); those who are of a different social status (slave and free in Paul’s day, rich and poor and yes, slaves today); and those who have been or done something shameful in their past (barbarian to Paul, to us perhaps those who have been in jail). It’s interesting that he specifies Scythians as a category. The Scythians were nomads tied to the Iranian culture. We know little about them, but they probably had a reputation for being dishonest or violent, since that is a traditional attitude among settled peoples vs. the nomads of their area (e.g., Gypsies).
The main difference in Paul’s vision of Christianity vs. Gnosticism is that Christians must rely on our faith in Christ, rather than intermediaries such as angels. Nothing can justify us but the love and power of God as demonstrated by Jesus Christ. All else we leave behind when we set out to follow Jesus. He alone can wipe out who we were before our conversion. God alone can grant us happiness and peace. On the other side of that belief is the necessity that we need to be open to those people who come to us seeking for hope, regardless of their appearance or background. How else are we to carry out the Great Commandment to make disciples of all nations? That cannot happen as long as we treat strangers as enemies.
Luke 12:13-21
As we turn to the Gospel reading, we need to take the lesson Paul is preaching to the Colossians with us. “Our lives do not consist in the abundance of possessions,” Jesus says to a young man who demands that Jesus solve a family dispute over an inheritance. We might ask, “Is the brother who will not share present in the crowd?” Surely Jesus is not telling the young man who has asked for his help that he’s being greedy? Isn’t he simply demanding justice? Well, yes… But he’s talking to a traveling rabbi who depends on the generosity of strangers. At one point, Jesus had told a potential student (disciple) that “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20 and Luke 9:58) So it sounds as though Jesus knows that it takes two (at least) to fight.
A couple in a congregation I served had announced that they were moving Georgia. The husband had been offered a job at a higher salary. He and his wife had had several discussions on the matter, and she had given in and started packing. But she wasn’t happy about the move. Their married daughter had announced that she was pregnant, and her mother wanted to be there for her. Her daughter was disappointed that her parents wouldn’t be living nearby, knowing that it would be a problem for them to come north for the birth and baptism.
I had an opportunity to talk with the husband a week or so after the big announcement.
“So, tell me about your new job,” I said. He replied only, “Well, it’s a lot more money. I’ve got to take it. June doesn’t understand that.” “Really?” I said, “You have to take it?” “Well, you’ve got to follow the money!” he said.
I asked how his wife and children were taking the move. “Well,” he said, “women don’t understand the business world. You’ve got to keep moving up, or you get left behind.” I said that I hadn’t known that his job was like that. I knew that professors, for example, had to get published or they’d lose their positions, but was his job like that?
“No,” he said with impatience. “But you’ve got to go where the money is.”
“But what about you wife? Your children? Don’t their feelings figure into your plans? If they’re unhappy, don’t you have to figure that in your equation?”
“Well, of course you wouldn’t understand. You are, after all, a woman.”
No surprise, his wife was back in church just before Christmas. “Is Chrissy expecting the baby soon?” I asked June. She beamed. Yes, indeed, it was due any day. “Was your husband able to come up for this visit?”
“No,” she said flatly. Uh-oh.
“Well, he’s pretty new to his job…” I started to say, but she interrupted. “He didn’t want to come. He’s mad at me that I feel I need to be here.” She paused. “I don’t think I’ll be going back there. He has his life, he’s busy all the time. And I miss our daughters.”
What could I say? “I’m so sorry. I know he didn’t think he could pass up the promotion.”
“Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
But the parable that has been paired with that comment is even harder. It concerns a man who had a bumper crop, but no place to store so much. So he plans to pull down his barns and build larger ones to accommodate his crops. He plans to live off this largesse, to be able to “relax, eat, drink and be merry.” “But God says to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”
Let’s leave off the last sentence for the moment, because the actual punch line is right here: “All the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
We live in a society that is very different from the Judea Jesus lived in. We have banks, pensions, insurance policies, annuities, Social Security – all so that the overabundance we have at some point in our early lives can be put away somewhere safe – even insured, so we can relax, feeling guaranteed to have an easy old age.
But what about those who have never had a job that supplied them with a pension? It takes a large number of employees to support a pension fund. Anyone who works for a small business doesn’t have that protection. These people may not even have had health insurance – insurance companies insist on a minimum number of employees before they’ll even talk to the owner about a health policy. Anyone who was an adult in 2008 knows that banks can fail no matter how large; happily, there is the Federal Deposit Insurance Company, insuring all of those deposits. Until they don’t, because if too many banks – or even just a few Really Big Banks fail, paying out that insurance to the depositors can deplete even FDIC resources.
In other words, we have here a parable that says “And what if you die tonight? You haven’t even had time to build those new barns, let alone store away all that food. Who will benefit from your abundance then?” Jesus tells many impossible parables, and this is one of them. If we don’t put away money to live on when we are sick or feeble, disabled or old, how can we hope to afford to pay health professionals to come and take care of us? We don’t want to be a burden to our children or grandchildren; and many of us have never had children, so there is no one to look after us in any event. It takes a huge amount of faith to think “God will see to it that we will have the help when the need presents itself.”
Now let’s look at that last sentence in the reading: “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” We can suspect that Jesus did not say this. He had a way of flinging our faith into the deep water and making us learn to swim, after all.
But what if these are Jesus’ actual words, what does it mean to ‘be rich toward God.’?
Let’s not spiritualize a parable that has a concrete meaning. The understanding of the Jewish faith is and has been that when we care for the poor, we are really giving to God. The laws of the Old Testament have some very specific things to say about caring for the poor. For example, when a farmer gathers the crops, he is not allowed to go back over the field. What you have harvested, you have for yourself; the leavings are to be left for the poor to gather.3 Likewise, one may not harvest the corners of the field. That, too, is to be left for the poor. In addition, 10% of the crop was to be taken to the Temple, where it was stored for the use of the priests, and the poor.
Jesus is always pushing us to be more giving. If we see a person without a coat in the cold, we ought to give him or her one of the coats that we have. Because most of us have more than one, don’t we? Last year’s coat? Or one that is the wrong size and so has been put away?
Because being rich toward God, according to Jesus, is being rich toward one another, generous with what we have, caring for the poor, homeless, sick and lonely. When we are rich in these ways, we are also rich toward God. So Jesus insists that we not store up, but that we spread the wealth. That we not build bigger barns, or ‘follow the money,’ or strive for the bigger job, but that we look for new ways to share what God has given us, that we live in loving ways, rather than thinking only of ourselves. We all would prefer to live a long, happy life where we can eat, drink and be merry. Jesus asks us to go the other way, to live today to its fullest, and to trust to God for the future.
But when we have our eyes on the trophy, the reward, the money, we become more and more base. We’ve sold our eternal treasure for the hope of being comfortable for a few years. This is not an easy thing to do. It goes against our society. It probably frightens most of us just to think about it. But as Paul says, it frees us from our idolatry. It moves the meaning of our life from our ego to God’s loving care.
1 Authored by Rhonda Byrne, Atria Books (Simon and Schuster) March, 2012.
2 The doctrine of Gnosticism is the subject of a good deal of writing, both online and in reference books. It is much too complex an idea to be treated here in any depth. Browse the internet for further information.
3 This is what Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, had to do to survive; it is also how Ruth came to the attention of Naomi’s relative Boaz, and led to him marrying her, which led her to becoming the grandmother of David the King.
