Year C
Luke 12:13-21
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
Singing the Song of Thankfulness
Our texts today offer us a contrast in the quality of life between those who forget what God has done, and those who live mindful of the goodness of God. Recognizing the goodness of God is sometimes not easy as it can be counterintuitive of what the world says is goodness. Recognizing God’s goodness requires the habit of recalling the ways in which God has blessed and continues to bless us. It seems from the scriptures that those who are wise are able to discern the ways God has been faithful. In 2010, following the traumatic, devastating earthquake in Haiti, there were many people from all over the world who went to help the residents and what they saw stunned them.
These Haitian people had lost everything. Their city lay in rubble. Many of them had lost family members and many had lost limbs to the crush of rock. What stunned the volunteers was that they did not see angry and depressed people. Rather, over and over again they heard joyful singing. The people were singing praises to God in thanks for being saved. They were grateful God had spared them and they were still alive. The volunteers wondered how they could sing having lost everything. What they came to understand was that the people could sing because they knew what was important.
It wasn’t big houses or the abundance of things. They could recall the ways in which God had blessed them. They could sing because they felt rich in God’s love. They saw this love in each other and in all the hundreds of people who came to help. They could give “thanks to the Lord” because they knew God was with them and they would find the strength to carry on. They had every reason to give thanks to God despite their tragedy. Yet, for many, this was very difficult to understand.
I suspect God must get very frustrated with our slowness and sometimes inability to be thankful for all that God does for us. I include myself in this forgetfulness. Hosea today reminds us how quickly the Israelites forgot what God had done for them. There is no more moving portrayal of the agony of God than in the O T text today. The text portrays a God who is torn between the demands of judgement and of grace. The images of both parent and spouse are used to emphasize the love of God, a love that is continually spurned by a sinful people. Yet, the God of Israel cannot come to the point of destroying the people, for such a step would violate God’s essential nature.
God had vowed you may remember after the flood to never destroy God’s people again. When justice and grace are weighed in God’s balances, grace always wins. At the core, this is one of the oldest stories there is. It gets told in a thousand different ways throughout the pages of the Bible. God loves us entirely. God creates us, delivers us, and tends us. The more God pursues, the more we turn away. It’s a story of our sin and God’s grace. It’s a story of God never giving up. Using wonderful images in Hosea God reminds us that God is our loving, long-suffering, faithful parent. The sin of the people has brought suffering on them, but God suffers too! The suffering God of Hosea anticipates the suffering Christ on the cross.
The saving work of Christ breaks the bond of sin and we are freed from the bondage to whatever enslaves us. We are empowered to resist and then to give in to what truly satisfies and makes us mindful of the goodness of God which brings gratitude. Gratitude and thankfulness help us to become “rich toward God” and rich toward others. Unfortunately, for those of us who enjoy economic, educational, and other forms of privilege, we are often lulled into complacency and can forget that the good things we have ultimately come from the hand of God. We can fall prey to the “pride of life,” where we not only take for granted our ability to provide for our basic needs, but we begin to believe that we are the ultimate source of our success.
Because of this we may find that we have confused the abundant life, which Christ came to offer, with the accumulation of an abundance of things, which can never truly satisfy us. Jesus’s parable today in the gospel speaks to this temptation to focus on ourselves, our abilities and on the accumulation of things. Ouch! This is a gospel passage that hurts. The centerpiece of this passage is the parable of the rich fool, a person who is more concerned with storing excess riches than with striving for being rich toward God. We are given a vivid image of the dangers of wealth for its own sake. Greed is a problem primarily because its focus is on the self. “I, me, and mine” matter more than anybody else and there is never enough.
Those of us reading this parable might ask, what is so wrong with storing the overrun of crops? Frugal-minded people have long stashed away excess food and saved funds for retirement. To be sure, saving for future material needs is one part of a proper stewardship of God’s bounty. But appropriate concern for the future should be balanced with the desire to give thanks to God and to care for one’s neighbor, to provide for the poor and for those who don’t have access to the basic needs of survival. The man in the parable demonstrates neither of these twin aspects of stewardship-return to God and care for neighbor, mainly because he has become so focused on himself that he has forgotten the God who provided the earth’s bounty.
The rich man had already decided what is important, and he had lived his life by that decision. Jesus wants his listeners to understand that we decide day by day what to value, what to give our heart to. Our spending, our saving and our general attitude toward material wealth are all invested with emotion and memories. The brothers had a chance to listen to Jesus and choose the kingdom, or to allow the squabble about money to distract them. When we are not anchored in God, we are left to drift in ways that can lead us away from God’s ways. Only when we can put aside the world’s distractions and put our trust God’s goodness, can these other matters lessen their grip in our lives.
Today our gospel text offers us a chance to reflect on our own readiness to be “rich toward God.” When it comes to money and worldly treasures, what values do we place our trust in? Paul tells us that we are to “Set our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” We are challenged to put aside the way we were and live into our new being. With the garment of baptism, we have been clothed with our new self that recognizes the goodness of God. A new being that seeks to become “rich toward God.”
And the good news today is that despite our lack of steadfastness, God remains constant. The world was made by God, and is utterly loved by God. God woos and pursues us despite our repeated turning away because abundant life is not had by the possessions one has. Life and possessions are a gift of God to be used to further God’s agenda of care and compassion. It is only when we live in Christ, can we live a life of thanksgiving, gratitude, and caring for others. Only when we choose to set our minds on Jesus, will we be able to sing with thankfulness in all seasons of our lives.