From my grandparents, I inherited a few kitchen items I use all the time, including some dinner plates I call “tree plates.” They are chipped and worn, and not particularly valuable. They wouldn’t be special to anyone else. I just happen to love their green leafy design and the memories they hold. The tree plates come to mind when I consider Jesus’ exchange with the person in the crowd about the “family inheritance.” I appreciate the tree plates as an inheritance because they’re something I can happily continue to use. Inheritances get trickier when they involve stuff we don’t know what to do with or when they create strife among loved ones. Receiving a sum of money or a piece of property or a valuable heirloom can be amazing, and it can bring up all sorts of ethical and practical issues too. I bet there are lots of stories in this room about how inheritance can make life more complicated.
In today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus pivoted in that genius way of his. Someone in the crowd pressed him to intervene in a dispute between siblings. “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” He refused to intervene in this conflict, instead using the moment as an opportunity to address the issues underneath this family’s strife: the danger of greed—all kinds of greed—the temptation to believe that life is about possessing and accumulating. To illustrate his point, he told a story. “The man of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”
Listen to Jesus’ introductory line again. “The land of a rich man produced abundantly.” Jesus did not attribute the large harvest to human effort but to the land itself. In contrast, the man’s monologue contains no respect or gratitude for the soil, sun, and rain, for the Creator, or for the labors of his workers. His inner conversation is entirely self-focused. He makes decisions in complete isolation. There’s no sense of relationship here, no thought for the needs of neighbors. He does not even consider the opportunity to share.
The Jesus we meet in the Gospel of Luke is particularly focused on economic matters. He repeatedly points to a disconnect between being wealthy and being his follower, being rich and entering God’s kin-dom. The spiritual and practical dangers of wealth, in Jesus’ mind, boil down to the sort of isolation and lack of accountability the farmer experienced. An excess of money, possessions and status (or the desire for them) cuts us off from God, and when I say “God” I’m not talking about a man in the sky. I mean the love and connection that literally holds our social and physical world together.
Of course Jesus calls each of us to consider whether the pursuit of wealth is driving us away from God. However, much more is at stake in this self-examination than the state of our individual “soul.” What we’re really talking about when we talk about money and possessions is how we treat each other, how we relate to all our relatives and share the gifts of the earth. Our very tendency to view this discernment as a private matter is deeply problematic. Our reluctance to reflect together and support each other as we struggle to handle money and material goods with integrity and justice is a hallmark of the larger culture in which we live.
From the generations that came before us, we have all received a set of values and assumptions that determine how we understand what life is, why we are here. I’m reading the book So We and Our Children May Live by Sarah Augustine and Sheri Hostetler, who are co-founders of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. The authors write:
The dominant culture is embedded in the logic of extraction, a logic with self-interest at the center. This logic says that progress is linear in time and is evidenced by accumulation. In other words, a successful life is one where an individual amasses as many resources as possible. (p. 60)
Today, I’m reading Jesus’ parable as a warning on a global scale. I believe that we are collectively, like the rich farmer in Jesus’ story, completely imprisoned by the logic of extraction. Augustine and Hostetler put it this way:
After centuries of extraction, consumption, and pollution, we are now reaching the point where we have ecologically overshot the earth’s carrying capacity, resulting in what some have called a polycrisis: simultaneous crises that often reinforce each other. (p. 74)
One of the most important points that Augustine and Hostetler make is that it’s impossible to address climate change without a fundamental shift in our consciousness, a complete transformation of our culture and behavior. The philosophy of “green growth,” they argue, relies on the same old extractive paradigm.
Even if we transition away from fossil fuels, we cannot continue expanding our use of resources. Swapping out gas cars for electric cars, for example, is not a realistic or just solution. Mining for their batteries is hugely resource-intensive, and continues colonial patterns, leaving indigenous communities to bear the consequences—pollution, sickness, and death. We need to create new systems that are not built around each of us having a car, systems that allow us to travel less and to rely more on public transportation. And of course that’s just one aspect of the fundamental change of heart and life we need. Augustine and Hostetler put it simply: we must live in reality, live according to life’s own principles, which they articulate as “the principles of gathering carefully, leaving plenty, [and] acknowledging our mutual dependence.” (p. 61) They remind us that “living in balance and right relationship is generative. It makes our lives better.”
Lately, I’ve been feeling the heaviness of where we find ourselves as a planet in this moment. The bad air quality this week, the longest stretch of it in state history, illustrates our global interconnection, the fact that we are all affected by the spiraling consequences of this path we’re on. I know that the plight of people in Gaza and other war-torn places is also linked to our global culture of extraction, which is unavoidably violent. In these times it’s easy to get caught up in reacting to symptoms and byproducts even as we fail to address root causes. Of course we must resist the dismantling of our democracy, the deportation and dehumanization of our immigrant neighbors, the theft of healthcare from vulnerable people, the persecution of trans people, and so much more. And yet, Jesus calls us to go deeper, to work for true liberation, to transform our culture, to embrace a way of being that is sustainable. And in order to do that, we’ll need to see through the forces that are bent on keeping us powerless by polarizing us, by drawing exaggerated lines between “republican” and “democrat,” “conservative” and “progressive,” “urban and rural,” and getting us to demonize anyone on the other side. In this way, they aim to keep us stuck where we are, keep us from working together with diverse people with whom we have both disagreement and common cause.
Friends, Jesus calls us to resist greed of all kinds and to stop acting as if accumulation is the point of life. Not out of fear of death or punishment, but for our own good. Being “rich toward God” means orienting our lives and systems around the love and connection that is reality, the interdependence that literally holds our world together. Such a shift of culture is the only viable way we have toward well-being, health, happiness and wholeness. Together, may we find this path. Amen.