Rich

Proper 13 C 2010
(Hosea 11: 1-11; Ps 107: 1-9, 43; Col 3: 1-11; Luke 12: 13-21)


I think of it as the Monday of the road-rage Grandma.

My kids and I were driving along 76th Street on a Monday in July. 76th is residential with speed bumps, and one can barely manage even the 25 mph speed limit.

In my rear-view mirror I saw a car and a face, way too close. By the tail-gating and the agitated, angry look on the driver’s face I knew that their staying behind me was not going to relieve me of harassment, so I pulled over and waved the car on. She passed be, she, because I could make out an aged face and grey hair. She raised one hand in a traditional gesture involving the deliberate use of one chosen finger. The car seemed to proclaim that the driver was a veteran of a former era in which “harmony and understanding, sympathy and love” was supposed to abound—it was an old Japanese make with peeling bumper stickers from the ‘60’s, including a quaint and hopeful “Impeach Nixon.”

We thought it was pretty funny really, as the poor dear never got far ahead of us on that speed-bumped road. My understanding side tried to reason that perhaps she had some good reason to be hurrying and harassing and flipping off people. People are angry and agitated today—the easygoing NW Portland driving style we found here in the 1990’s seems a relic of the past and the local roads feel a lot more like I remember Chicago and NY. It is an anxious age, and you probably do not need my recitation of stalled economy, bitter divisive politics, fouled Gulf beaches, and tense racial and immigration confrontations in Arizona to remember that.

But the question that troubles me about road-rage Grandma and other incidents since then is this—how much of this rage and anxiety are within me? I feel it too, I am not immune to any of it. If our graying refugee from the Age of Aquarius is participating in the pettiness and helpless rage of the era at her point in life, what hope is there for me? The life we profess and live here at Saints Peter and Paul, at any church, is supposed to make us look and act and be different than any of this sort of “spirit of the age.” What can we do?

I acknowledge at this season of my life that I feel my need for God more than ever. I feel the need for God’s cleansing the way I felt the need for a shower after tearing apart our aging kitchen and putting up drywall. At each stage I run into all over again my own rage, my own pettiness, my own disillusionment and temptation to surrender to what is around me, to drug myself with distractions so I do not listen to the wind blowing through the emptiness of my own heart.

“Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church…” That cleansing which we prayed for is not a quaint notion. It is an ongoing felt need, an experience of our own poverty and at the same time a cry of hope in the faithful mercy of God. There is a new chance for transformation, cleansing, and renewal, each and every day.

Hosea shouts this aloud. God’s voice in Hosea screams in pain and longing, pain for the people’s infidelity and yet longing for their companionship and their walking with God in simplicity and faith. Hosea married a woman who cheated on him time and time again, and it is his own cries of betrayal and rage yet longing and hope that echo through his words. God hopes in us, longs for us, will bring us back if we even take one step forward in God’s direction. God will do the rest.

For we are an Easter people. Today the breath of Easter blows through the church and our hearts as we hear one of the Easter Sunday texts. “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above…” Our lives are hid with Christ in God. Because of this promise and this reality, we have infinite hope. There is room for abundant hope in that place where we are hid with Christ. There is no room for anger, envy, messed-up desire, and greed. Live each day in that place where we are hid with Christ, and we shall know hope and renewal, there in the heart of God.

But it takes wisdom. The wisdom of God is not the wisdom of the world.

Our man in today’s Gospel is wise in how a future is built according to the wisdom of the world. He has worked hard, he brought in a great harvest. Now it is time to be sensible, to protect what he has earned by “building bigger barns.” Once he has, he can kick back, not set the alarm in the morning, golf 9 holes on a Monday if he wants, do some touring with the wife.

God’s words land like a brick in this happy peaceful pond: “You fool.”

Why a fool? The poor guy is just taking care of his stock portfolio. Is it wrong to save and plan? I do, as much as our lifestyle has allowed. The parish tries to. No doubt many of us try to.

But a fool according to the Bible “says in his heart there is no God.” One can profess with one’s mouth belief in God and think thoughts of faith, but the heart is what determines what one really does and what one’s life really means. It is an open question for us today—how can we, in Jesus’ words, be “rich toward God”? As Christian folk, as a parish community?

Perhaps that question leads back to road-rage Grandma—how can our lives look and feel and be different in a world that is shot through with anger and anxiety and answers to questions we did not even know we had—how can I get more, look like more, own more, be more, get ahead of others, if even on 76th Street on a Monday?

Instead, here is one question only, “How can I be rich toward God”?