I love this Hosea passage.  I love the
parental vision of God, one that I think many would call maternal.  I
love the imagery of holding a child, teaching a child to walk,
snuggling a baby, kneeling to feed a toddler.  Hearing of God as one
who cares for us like that has immense healing power.

And, actually, I love hearing God’s
frustration that the people are missing the mark.  Because the mark
is peace – not violence, and justice – not wealth accumulation,
and compassion.

And then, too, I love God’s
self-restraint.  God’s anger that upon examination turns to sadness,
that the nurturing love didn’t create the society of justice God
envisioned, YET that God’s love isn’t impaired by the people turning
away.  God is still defined by compassion – warm and tender, for
the people.  The anger melts away, the love holds strong, and God
returns to hope that the people might be transformed by being loved.

God dreams of the people returning to
the Divine, and the Ways of Living that are compassionate, and the
passage ends with affirmation of God’s expectations those hopes would
be fulfilled.

I’d really, really like to preach on
this wonderful passage, but two things stand in my way:  1.  I’m not
really that great at preaching at passages I agree with.  I mean,
what more is there to say than what I just said?  and 2. the gospel
has its claws in me.

The story of the bigger barns is
uncomfortable in a multitude of ways.  It forces us to face questions
of security, consumption, capitalism, greed, and existential anxiety.
Which, as 21^st century Americans, are things we spend a
whole lot of energy avoiding as hard as we can.

Oh, and it feels judgy.  That’s
uncomfortable too.  And quite often when we read it, we feel judgy,
and, well, judged.  I’m all for ignoring it, except that the degree
to which I want to look away from it suggests that I probably
shouldn’t.

I feel for the man in the parable.
He’s worked hard, he happened to luck out and have a good harvest,
and he FINALLY feels like he can stop fighting for security and just
relax a little.  He can live life and enjoy it, without
fear of hunger.  And then he gets slammed for it, and he dies
without being able to enjoy that security, and judged for doing it
all wrong.

And this, as my first response, is
real, and I suspect involves a whole lot of projection from the 21^st
century to the 1^st, and an awareness of the many, many
people who struggle to have enough food to survive.

But this initial, instinctual response
to the parable also required that I ignore the actual details
of the parable.  Because the set up Jesus gives isn’t the one I
heard.  Jesus says, “The LAND of a rich man produced abundantly.”
Which creates two immediate distinctions:  the man was ALREADY rich
when the story began, AND he didn’t actually do the labor for this
harvest.  In fact, I think maybe it is set up to make us aware that
OTHERS did the labor.  From the man’s perspective, maybe “the land”
produced, but land doesn’t farm itself.  The laborers do.  But the
rich man doesn’t even acknowledge them.  Nor, clearly, does he share
the bounty their work produced with THEM.  Because he owns the land,
he owns the harvest, and seeks to secure it, probably AGAINST the
laborers themselves.

That is, he wasn’t lacking security to
begin with, but he kept others from having enough to survive.
According to the Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels,
in ancient Mediterranean culture,  it was assumed that “all good
existed in finite, limited supply and were already
distributed…Because a pie could not grow larger, a larger piece for
anyone automatically meant a smaller piece for someone else.”¹
Now, we don’t share that assumption in the same way anymore.  We
tend to think of most goods as producible, so more can be produced if
more is needed.  The truth, I suspect, is somewhere in the middle.

By thinking there can always be more
produced, we end up taking unhealthy quantities of raw materials from
the earth, and we also don’t pay as much attention to when some
people acquire more than
their fair share.  When the pie is assumed to be fixed, taking
the biggest slice is UNFAIR.  But when there are several pies, even
taking a whole one for one’s self doesn’t create the same outrage.

The authors remind us that in that
culture, “An honorable man would thus be interested only in what
was rightfully his, meaning what he already had.  He would not want
‘more.’  Anyone with a surplus  would normally feel shame unless he
gave liberally to clients or the community.”²
Furthermore, “Anxiety about the future was not a peasant outlook;
anxiety about daily bread certainly was.”³

So.  My first reading of this passage
involved identifying with and feeling compassion for the rich man
who was taking an unfair share of the community’s resources, and
feeling bad for him that he got judged for it.  Just in case anyone
was wondering how “internalized capitalism” is going with me.  😉

I keep getting shocked by these
parables.  I keep noticing, as I read the parables of Jesus, how much
they illuminate the economic systems of TODAY, and how much I buy
into them. John Dominic Crossan helps make sense of this by pointing
out that Jesus lived in a pre-industrial agricultural domination
system while we live in a post-industrial non-agricultural domination
system. I keep noticing that I don’t naturally have a 1^st
century peasant outlook on life, which seems pretty obvious, but also
maybe important.

For those who believed that goods were
all limited resources, and a zero sum game, it was then really
obvious to conclude that those who take too much aren’t being good
neighbors, or fair participants in the game.  But in the USA in 2022,
there are other narratives that counter that simple fact.  We live in
a society that believes that winners have a right to take what they
win, and that means that everyone else just has to deal with less.
Which means that we have taken away the moral assumption that people
shouldn’t build bigger barns.

Now, let’s get to the REALLY hard part
of this story.  The rich man dies in the end.  A la Steve Jobs,
having all the money didn’t make him immune to death.  

While the poor people were worried
about if they could eat TODAY, the rich man was worried about the
future, and mortality was about come calling.  Not even the security
of wealth and abundance changed that outcome.

But, whenever people build bigger barns
(physically or metaphorically), I think they are doing so to try to
create more security, and in doing so prevent death from coming for
them.  Or at least coming for them as soon.  Which
in our society is FAIR, because having more resources DOES
increase a lifespan, until a certain point.  Because we live in a
society that says you have to fight with others for resources, and
some will get them and some won’t, our shared narrative as a county
is that those who are poor “haven’t worked hard enough” and we
shouldn’t help them and take away their motivation for work.  Taken
to its logical end, our form of capitalism says some people “win”
a right to a longer life, and others… don’t.

I hate this narrative.  And I’m not at
this point very fond of this parable.  Why is Jesus always sticking
his nose in stuff?

But, anyway.  I’m most struck in this
story by the ways it reflects our own existential angst, and I want
to talk about that today not just in the personal but also in the
communal.

In my 9 years with this church I’ve
heard a lot about awareness of decline, and questions of
sustainability.  Looking back on old records and minutes, these
are conversations that date back a few decades as well.  Because
this church is attentive to numerical trends, there has long been
awareness that the trend is one of decline.

But I don’t know how much of that
awareness has happened along side the emotional and spiritual work
that would make sense of it.  My fear is that for many in this
community, it feels like if the church dies – OR CHANGES – it
means that the effort and energy they’ve given to the church didn’t
matter.  And inside one’s emotional system that could easily
translate to, “my life didn’t matter because I gave my resources to
a church and it didn’t matter.”  (Internal emotional systems aren’t
known for logic, nor for refusals to take flying leaps.)

And I want to say again, I think this
applies to EITHER the church DYING OR the church CHANGING.  For those
who have given of time, energy, passion, prayers, presence, or money
in the past to see the parts of the church life they gave themselves
to CHANCE is HARD.  I believe it is often experienced as rejection.
I believe it is often experienced as a rejection of the person
themselves.  🙁

Which is awful.

And, just to be clear, untrue.
Churches are a lot like living organisms.  We need different things
at different times, and a ministry or group that is IMPERATIVE to the
well-being of the church in one season will not necessarily be in
another season.  But that doesn’t change the fact that it was
imperative in its own season.  And it doesn’t mean that the gifts a
person gave to that ministry or group didn’t matter.

Let me try to say this a different way.
If you would, think about a person who helped you along your way –
someone who made a difference for you.  A teacher or mentor who
believed in you, or someone who helped you get a resource or
connection you couldn’t have gotten, or someone who had the time to
listen when you had something that needed to be heard.  Got it?
Great.

Now, does it negate that action if it
didn’t continue forever?  Of course not!  

Our church isn’t going to live forever,
because nothing ever does.  

But while it is here, and alive, I hope
we will spend our energy enjoying ministry together and being a gift
to our communities.  I hope we won’t spend all of our energy trying
not to die, at the expense of actually living while we can.

And I hope we can remember, each of us
when it applies to us, that the gifts we’ve given to make this church
what it is are of great value.  And, it is OK that seasons change.

Friends, we are in a new season, one
we’ve never been in before.  As we let go of the past, I invite you
into some reflection.  We aren’t going to build bigger barns (heavens
we do not need a BIGGER barn), but we do have a choice of what to put
in the one we have.  When you think about the past, and what was
wonderful and life giving about it, what qualities should we keep?
What might they look like now, which is likely quite different from
how they looked then?  What matters most from the past to find a new
way to have it in the present?  

And, then we get to do some wondering
about how we make sure those gifts we value immensely get to the
“workers in the field” and not just the rich land owner.  

Oh these parables.  They don’t ever
just let things be, do they?  Thanks be to God!  Amen

1“Rich,
Poor, and Limited Good.”  p. 400.

2Luke
12: 13-34 commentary, 278

3ibid

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

July 31, 2022