Homily for the Fifth
Sunday after Pentecost 31 July 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
Luke 12:13-21 (Jesus’
TED Talk on Wealth Management)
The
land of a rich man produced abundantly. Luke 12:16a
In a shout-out to Picasso’s blistering indictment of the Blitzkrieg unleashed on the village of Guernica
in April 1937, this slaughter occurred on Black Friday, the day after
Thanksgiving 2008.
In the freezing dawn at a Long Island Walmart, 2,000
shoppers trampled underfoot a store employee who stood between them and the bargains
they were feverishly determined to snatch up. These shoppers, terrified they
would walk away empty-handed, threw themselves headlong into the feeding frenzy,
apparently oblivious to the man who lay dying under their feet.
What drove them to such extremes? Black Friday, the cash-bonanza marketing gimmick that ─ according
to Peter S. Goodman of The New York Times
─ creates a “sense of shortage amid abundance, an
anxiety that one must act now or miss out.”
There’s a name for a marketing gimmick like Black
Friday: “manufactured scarcity.”
Now, it’s ironic that the farmer in today's Gospel, of all people, succumbs
to the gimmick of manufactured scarcity. Ironic that he acts out of a sense of shortage
amid his abundance.
What’s that all about?
The farmer has just stumbled upon a windfall. It’s
been a record-breaking harvest. His grain storage facilities are bursting at
the seams. Actually, he’s running out of space altogether.
His solution? Head to the market and unload the surplus?
Wrong!
Enlarge his storage capacity? Right!
And then do nothing … except, “relax, eat, drink,
be merry.” Or as Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospel puts it: “Recline, dine, wine, and
shine!”
The perfect retirement. We should all live so long
and so well … well-off, that is. Because the farmer doesn’t. No sooner is the expansion
deal sealed with the contractor, the man gets dinged by death.
That’s got to hurt! But aside from the death
factor, was expanding storage capacity such a bad strategy?
Well, chances are the farmer isn’t alone in reaping
a bumper crop. His neighbors have probably been equally successful, maybe even
more. Let’s say they all flood the market. Upshot? Grain prices tank. Supply
and demand.
To maximize profits in the long run, the farmer
reasons, “Better to store the surplus for the time-being.” Maybe next year or
the year after ─ when
crops might fail, supplies shrink, and demand goes up ─ maybe then he’ll get an optimum ROI (return on his
investment) ─ an ROI that will more than cover the cost of the
new storage facility amortized over a few years.
Whatever the farmer’s motives ─ the way Jesus tells the story ─ we can’t escape the nagging suspicion that the farmer’s
motives are rooted in foreboding ─ a foreboding
(but false) sense of scarcity amid abundance … the fear that security is
fleeting … always just beyond his
grasp.
It appears, too, the farmer has another fear: fear
of others, fear of less-well-off neighbors. These neighbors might destabilize the
farmer’s security. They might make demands on him, invoking the “love your
neighbor as yourself” imperative that has the unsettling knack of forcing us to
tap resources today we might be holding on to for a rainy day. There goes security.
Here comes scarcity.
So, to cover his assets, as it were, the farmer chooses
isolation. He chooses to go solo. And he begins to look a bit like Hello Dolly’s Horace Vandergelder. “And
on those cold winter nights,” Dolly Levi baits Horace, “you can snuggle up to
your cash register. It’s a little lumpy, but it rings!”
So, how isolated is the farmer?
Here’s a clue: his “it’s all about me” language. That
is, Jesus presents a relatively short parable — compared to others, like “The
Prodigal Son” — but the man in this brief parable refers to himself 11 times: most glaringly, “I
alone can fix it.” Oh, wait, he doesn’t say that. I must be thinking of another
narcissist on a similar, forced march to disaster.
But the farmer does say, “I will do this … I will
pull down my barns … I will build … I will store … my grain … my goods … my
soul.” And that’s just a sample.
The result? There is no “we” … no “our” … not even
“them,” “theirs,” or “yours” in the man’s sparsely-populated universe.
Does that matter?
You bet!
The data we have for that part of the world at that
time suggest that 90 percent of the man’s neighbors — and probably most of his
workers — live at the level of bare subsistence. That means everywhere he
looks, the farmer can’t avoid witnessing rampant destitution, homelessness, unemployment
and underemployment, and their negative consequences: health crises, class resentment, and social
unrest.
In other words, for his neighbors-on-the-edge, there
isn’t a false sense of scarcity, there’s
real scarcity grinding against the
farmer’s obscene abundance.
That’s why God calls the man a fool … not just
because he’s clueless about the itching, fickle finger of fate (“This very night your
life is being demanded of you!”), but because he creates a false
sense of personal scarcity while ignoring real scarcity all around him.
And this is where the parable pivots: How do you
avoid the negative-for-neighbor consequences … or at least reduce them, without
let-up, until they are history?
Put another way, what could the farmer have done to
turn those neighbor-negative consequences
into neighbor-positive benefits?
As suggested, he could have brought his surplus goods
to market and kept food prices reasonable. Or offered them to his struggling neighbors
at below-market rates. Or given them away altogether.
Meaning: He could have manufactured abundance for his neighbors. He could
even have been like Jason Trigg.
At 28, Jason Trigg believes he has taken Wall
Street by storm. That’s because he is chasing after money ─ as much money as he can possibly get his hands on.
What’s his plan? He writes software for a
high-frequency trading firm. What’s “high-frequency trading”? Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
And Jason is very good at what he does. He
turns a lot of other people’s money into even more money. For a person his age,
Jason is raking-in money hand-over-fist.
Complication: Like the farmer in the parable ─ by his own admission ─ Jason doesn’t know what to do with it all. “I wouldn’t
know how to spend a large amount of money,” he says. “But I plan to make more,
as much as I possibly can!”
Does that make Jason Trigg a Wall Street monster?
Or, to temper that a bit, does that make Jason as clueless as the farmer in the
parable? Hardly.
Why? It’s his strategy. Unlike the farmer, Jason
has a neighbor-centric business plan to use the bulk of the money he makes. He
reasons, “The more I make, the more good I can do.” It’s a strategy called
“earning to give.”
And what is the good Jason does? It’s primarily
through the Against Malaria Foundation, similar to The Episcopal Church’s
“Nets for Life” program.
Like Nets for Life, the Against Malaria Foundation
estimates that a $2,500 donation can save one life. That means, a person like
Jason, by making certain lifestyle choices ─ choosing, for example, to live on $30,000 a year ─ can afford to give away the rest to the foundation.
The result? Jason figures he saves over 20 lives a year.
The point, using another example: While some ─ comparatively few ─ go to far-flung regions of the world to dig wells to
generate drinkable water, others ─ more
people ─ unabashedly
pursuing higher and higher salaries, while committed to living on a modest,
fixed income ─ might
have greater impact by providing the cash
to ensure more wells are dug.
Which is better? Dig one well? Or give to dig
multiple wells?
Which is better? That’s the wrong question! The
right question? Which is more realistic for a person in your situation … with
your gifts, income, and calling (which likely is not a calling to dig wells
for the rest of your earning-potential life)? Which is better?
Put another way: Outside, perhaps, a career in
healthcare, related research, or public safety, how many of us can say we save
20 lives a year … or even one? Provide drinkable water to scores of villages …
or even one?
We know the rich-but-foolish farmer’s answers: Not
even one. No, not one. Not a whiff of earning-to-give. Foolish, indeed!
And chances are, learning of his sudden death, a smattering
of the curious played out a scene closely resembling the funeral for, in his
time, one of the wealthiest and ostentatiously
wealthy persons in the world: Aristotle Onassis.
One of the mourners turned to another and asked,
“How much did he leave?”
The reply? “Everything. He left … everything.”
Amen.
