Just a quickie this week, I promise. Mostly because I am still recovering from an upper respiratory thing (I love the precise medical definitions) that has knocked me for a loop this week. Partly because Pastor Chris is preaching this week and he has put the work into this passage and I haven’t. And a little bit because La Donna is at a UMW meeting since yesterday and I’m nominally in charge of a sick teenager, a dog with an eye infection, a cat with some sort of intestinal thing, and an on-going debate about whether there is enough snow to shovel or to just let it go in this cock-eyed, poor excuse of a winter, predicted to be upper 50's in a couple of days!
Such is life, eh? You’ve got your list, I am sure. What’s piling up on your desk, or your floor, or kitchen counter? What’s screaming to be done, at the top of your to do list? Or at the top of your I wish I had time to do list? Or maybe when we are snowed in and I’m forced to do list? We are pulled in so many directions we hardly know which way is up any more.
And we think the best we can hope for is to squeeze in one more thing, make a little more room, build bigger barns ... I mean calendars. Or barns. For more stuff. Then ... Leave it to Jesus to poke us in the eye with it.
Luke 12:15-21 And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." 16 Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' 18 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. 19 And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' 20 But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' 21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."
Not the same thing, you say? He was talking about amassing stuff. We were talking about being really busy. Doing important ... stuff. Is it really that different? Drowning in stuff or in responsibilities, losing ourselves in the process? Does Jesus just hate stuff, or does he dislike what it is doing to us? We are defined by our stuff, or by our jobs. We don’t gather in professional meetings and show off our latest acquisitions, but we trot out our calendars - electronic and otherwise - just to show how busy we are. How important we are. We can’t turn off our cell phones because we are so indispensable that the world would grind to a halt if we weren’t there to manage it. Or maybe because we are afraid that it would become known just how unimportant we really are, so we keep trying to justify our worth by working ourselves to death.
When I think about it, whether we are talking about stuff or about activity, it seems to me that what Jesus is concerned about is our attempt to define ourselves. He seems to believe that this is God’s job. Our job is to live into that definition. Our worth, our value is determined by God, and it is inestimable. We diminish ourselves when we use any other scale.
In the end, we might still be doing the same things, Jesus isn’t against responsibility, isn’t against activity. He just wants us to keep perspective, to keep hold of our true selves as beloved children of God. Asking “what is our life for,” or “whose life is it anyway” might be a way to keep us on track. Maybe he is asking us to spend a little less time preparing our calendars or our inventories and a little more time preparing our hearts to live the life he has given us. In Him was life. But is it in us?
Shalom,
Derek
Such is life, eh? You’ve got your list, I am sure. What’s piling up on your desk, or your floor, or kitchen counter? What’s screaming to be done, at the top of your to do list? Or at the top of your I wish I had time to do list? Or maybe when we are snowed in and I’m forced to do list? We are pulled in so many directions we hardly know which way is up any more.
And we think the best we can hope for is to squeeze in one more thing, make a little more room, build bigger barns ... I mean calendars. Or barns. For more stuff. Then ... Leave it to Jesus to poke us in the eye with it.
Luke 12:15-21 And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." 16 Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' 18 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. 19 And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' 20 But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' 21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."
Not the same thing, you say? He was talking about amassing stuff. We were talking about being really busy. Doing important ... stuff. Is it really that different? Drowning in stuff or in responsibilities, losing ourselves in the process? Does Jesus just hate stuff, or does he dislike what it is doing to us? We are defined by our stuff, or by our jobs. We don’t gather in professional meetings and show off our latest acquisitions, but we trot out our calendars - electronic and otherwise - just to show how busy we are. How important we are. We can’t turn off our cell phones because we are so indispensable that the world would grind to a halt if we weren’t there to manage it. Or maybe because we are afraid that it would become known just how unimportant we really are, so we keep trying to justify our worth by working ourselves to death.
When I think about it, whether we are talking about stuff or about activity, it seems to me that what Jesus is concerned about is our attempt to define ourselves. He seems to believe that this is God’s job. Our job is to live into that definition. Our worth, our value is determined by God, and it is inestimable. We diminish ourselves when we use any other scale.
In the end, we might still be doing the same things, Jesus isn’t against responsibility, isn’t against activity. He just wants us to keep perspective, to keep hold of our true selves as beloved children of God. Asking “what is our life for,” or “whose life is it anyway” might be a way to keep us on track. Maybe he is asking us to spend a little less time preparing our calendars or our inventories and a little more time preparing our hearts to live the life he has given us. In Him was life. But is it in us?
Shalom,
Derek
No comments:
Post a Comment