August 2, 2007
Stuff
Pent 10/13C [Eccles 1.12ff,2.18-23; Lk 12.13-21]
A few years ago when CP and I remodeled a major part of our home, one of the things that had to go was the garage. It never was much of a garage anyway when it came to cars, but when it came to stuff and getting things out of sight and out of mind, it was a splendid example of ingenious irresponsibility
It’s now a handsome kitchen and library of which we’re also irresponsibly proud. But then, without the old garage, there was still all that stuff which it had previously contained quite handsomely.
The rich man in the parable this morning brings all this to mind. Certainly not because of his wealth, but mainly because he got rid of his stuff by building a barn, and we got rid of ours by building a shed. Not really…
He stored his plentiful crops. We stored our plentiful stuff. You know — the mower, the backhoe, the old paint cans and plant food, the Christmas tree stand, assorted old tools, and, of course, the left overs of my once upon a time career as a geologist, ie, the box of my favorite rocks. It’s the one the movers always ask, “do they go?”
The propers this morning are altogether discomforting for pack rats. That old cynic who wrote Ecclesiastes thought everything is just blowing in the wind. But still, he’s accumulated a lot that’s very valuable to him, and he’s anguishing over whether it will be inherited by a wise person or a fool. He knows surely that it’ll be a fool and got by somebody who didn’t work for it at all, let alone work as hard as he did. I worry like that. But I figure that most of our stuff will just be thrown out.
It’s not all that easy to get rid of stuff and even harder to think that somebody else might not appreciate it at all and might not want it around as much as we do. We churchers can learn a lot from that, not just about our own personal rat-packing, but about the incessant need some of us have to live in the past and to turn the church into a kind of religious and institutional warehouse with a St Whosit Storage Pod on every corner complete with Mission Statement.
All this is not to belittle the past. Far from it. John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath has a character ask an important question, “How will we know it’s us without our past?” We need to remember and to be reminded always that we are the spiritual children of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, of Isaac and Rebekah, and of Jacob and Leah. There is no way to live into, appreciate, and understand our Christian heritage without that past, no way to keep track of who we are. But neither is there any healthy way merely to live only with the past, for to do so is to lose track not only of who we are but of who we can become.
Paradoxically, if all we do is live in the past, of course, there will be no past for us. It will merely turn in on itself in a kind of moebius strip of being, one of those two-dimensional bands with no beginning and no end — and no depth. We’ll not be creating our past. Our past will be recreating us.
Our faith tradition says of human being that we are imagined by God to be free to choose: to love, to create, to reason, to live in harmony with all of creation and with God. Such imaginative choosing creates the past. But such imagination, as well, opens us to the future. That perceptive Roman Catholic nun Sister Joan Chittister put it this way, “Nothing we do changes the past. Everything we do changes the future.”
The church will only die if, like the cynic in Ecclesiastes, it doesn’t live in the present and trust the future. And like the rich man storing up his past, it will simply commit suicide from overdosing and suffocating on itself. Rather must the we see in these stories today the truth also seen by the Zen poet who wrote: “I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of those of old. I seek the things they sought.”
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