Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, August 3, 2025
Proper 13, Year C
The Rev. Jeannie Martz
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Irvine CA
Whatever Episcopal church we’ve been worshiping in, over the past three Sundays, the Gospel readings from Luke that we’ve all been hearing have given us an outline of the Christian life, an outline of life lived faithfully.
Three weeks ago, we heard the story of the Good Samaritan. At the conclusion of the story, the injured man’s neighbor is correctly identified as “the one who showed him mercy,” who treated him compassionately, and Jesus tells his listeners to “Go and do likewise”; so the first point in the outline is DO: do have, and do act, with compassion and mercy.
Two weeks ago, our reading was about Mary and Martha of Bethany, and this story provides a balance for the instruction to do. Live a life of active compassion, but balance that doing with sitting, with spending time simply be-ing in the presence of God, open and attentive and listening. Point one, DO; point two, SIT.
We heard point three last week when Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them how to pray like John had taught his disciples, and Jesus responded with what we know today as the Lord’s Prayer. Point three is PRAY, and as a fellow clergyperson once pointed out, the disciples made this request, “teach us to pray,” because they wanted what Jesus had – they wanted that same intimacy with God that they saw in Jesus…and so as a way into this intimacy, he taught them this prayer.
Far more than rote words we can all recite in our sleep, this prayer is actually a leap of radical trust. To pray the Lord’s Prayer is to put ourselves voluntarily and of our own choosing into God’s hands, acknowledging our complete dependence on God alone, not only for our salvation, but also for our daily existence and wellbeing.
DO act with compassion; SIT attentively in the presence of God; and PRAY to have a deep and abiding trust in God.
Why this emphasis on a faithful lifestyle? Because as we also hear Jesus say today, “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions“ – or, in the words of The Message translation of Scripture, “Life is not defined by what [we] have, even when [we] have a lot.”
The world, of course, argues otherwise, and says that we are very much defined by what we have. It argued otherwise in Jesus’ day too, because at that time material wealth was seen as being a sign of God’s favor, as tangible evidence that the wealthy person was already doing and sitting and praying, was already in a right relationship with God; and Jesus’ listeners would have said that rather than being a fool, this morning’s farmer was both wise and prudent to stockpile his bumper crop, and to plan for his future as he did.
The world argued for the defining importance of material wealth then, and the world continues to argue for the defining importance of material wealth now. Here in our day both smart money and our culture tell us that more is better, that more will keep us safe from economic downturns and financial surprises, that more will keep the unpredictable chaos of life at bay; and the world tells us that what we have, and how much of it we have, and certainly whose label is on what we have, that this is what defines us; this is what determines our real value in the world around us.
The old clichés and bumper stickers have long told us that when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping; and that he or she who dies with the most toys wins; and as a culture, we’ve taken these clichés so much to heart and learned this lesson of material accumulation so well that as a result, some years ago author and lifestyle consultant Marie Kondo built a whole consumer industry around helping us to de-clutter our lives and our homes, around helping us get rid of our stuff; and I’m sure that if asked, she would encourage the rich farmer to go through his crops one by one and keep only those that bring him joy.
(This is one of Kondo’s signature pieces of advice about how to identify what to keep and what to pitch in one’s own home.)
As one commentator says of today’s Gospel reading, “This inordinate craving to hoard as a guarantee against insecurity is not only an act of disregard for those in need but [it] puts goods in the place of God,” and of course, putting anything in the place of God is, by its very definition, idolatry. (Craddock, pp. 360-361)
Paul also identifies hoarding and greed as idolatry, as “seeking” not “where Christ is” – and he’s right. We are idolatrous; we worship a false god any time our seeking for more and more siphons off the energy, the adoration, and the devotion – or the doing, sitting, and praying – that belong to God alone.
We worship a false god any time that we think the object of our seeking is also the definer of who we are – and our false god doesn’t even have to be money or things or accomplishments.
Sadly, idolatry can also focus on painful things, on wounds or emotions or experiences that we choose to cling to and savor and identify with in an unhealthy way, never moving through them, but instead hoarding them and running our fingers through them, keeping them in the storehouses of our hearts and living out of them or lashing out of them again and again and again.
The ancient Greeks were correct to say that it is as easy to satisfy the hunger of greed as it is to fill a bucket that has a hole in it. Whatever we try to fill the bucket with, whatever we try to satisfy the hunger with, there’s never going to be enough…and the Christian life is not defined by what we have, even when we have a lot.
All our old behaviors, all our old priorities are now obsolete, says Paul; the things we clutch at and garner and hoard in our barns as we “set our minds…on things that are on earth” -- these are all illusions, they’re not part of the action going on around Christ. Our new life, our real life is “with Christ in God”, and so these practices that we thought brought joy to the “old self” can be set aside and discarded. They are illusions, and we need to become dis-illusioned.
Back in the early 1900’s, Scottish evangelical Oswald Chambers wrote, “Many of the cruel things in life spring from the fact that we suffer from illusions. We are not true to one another as facts; we are true only to our ideas of one another….It works in this way,” he went on to say. “[I]f we love a human being and do not love God, we demand of [the one we love] every perfection and every rectitude, and when we do not get [what we want] we become cruel and vindictive; we are demanding of a human being that which he or she cannot give. There is only one Being Who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.” (in My Utmost for His Highest)
As the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, the one who in today’s reading calls himself “the Teacher;” the Teacher writes – and here I’m reading from the contemporary Message translation again – “Oh, I did great things: built houses, planted vineyards, designed gardens and parks and planted a variety of fruit trees in them, made pools of water to irrigate the groves of trees….I piled up silver and gold, loot from kings and kingdoms….Oh, how I prospered! I left all my predecessors in Jerusalem far behind, left them all in the dust. What’s more, I kept a clear head through it all. Everything I wanted I took – I never said no to myself. I gave in to every impulse, held back nothing. I sucked the marrow of pleasure out of every task – my reward to myself for a hard day’s work! Then…[then] I took a good look at everything I’d done, looked at all the sweat and hard work. But when I looked, I saw nothing but smoke. Smoke and spitting into the wind. There was nothing to any of it. Nothing.” (Eccles. 2:4-10, selected)
The life of faith is not defined by what we have, even when we have a lot; the life of faith is a life shaped by God, not by things and impulses and feelings. The life of faith is a dis-illusioned life, it’s a life that recognizes, as Paul says, that in our renewal in Christ, “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.” (Col. 3:11)
And as Oswald Chambers reminds us, only Christ can sate our hunger for more, only Christ can “satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart”; only God in Christ can “give us THIS DAY our daily bread” – and yet admitting this, admitting to ourselves the deep need we have that we can’t fill ourselves can be really scary.
I once heard someone say that “Fear not” or “Don’t be afraid” appears in Scripture 365 times, this person’s theory being that God knew we’d need to hear it every day. Well, let’s go for leap year and make it 366 – and this is point four of our faithful life outline: don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid to let go of storing up and of seeking more; don’t be afraid to let go of toys, to let go of wounds, to let go of the fear of letting go.
Don’t be afraid to stand empty handed before God, because at that moment of our greatest dis-illusionment, no illusions or self-protections or self-deceptions left, at that moment we will find our true identity, our new life, our real life; our life with God in Christ. Don’t be afraid to stand empty handed before God, because that’s where our new life is, and we can’t take advantage of it without being empty handed, without being honest with ourselves about our total dependence on God.
And why not be afraid? Because no less than all of creation, we too belong to God: we are the adopted sons and daughters of the God who loved all things into being; we are the baptized, and as the baptismal rubrics in the Prayer Book make clear, “The bond which God establishes in baptism is indissoluble.” Indissoluble; permanent. A bond of relationship initiated by God that cannot be broken, ever – no matter what we do, think, say, wish, or feel; and no matter what anyone else does, thinks, says, wishes, or feels. By God’s own choice, God sticks with us, and God sticks to us, in a bond more solid than Gorilla Glue.
Some of us may remember that expression that Rudyard Kipling used to introduce his Just So Stories for children, “O best beloved”; more recently – although still 18 years ago – others among us might remember how in the 2007 book The Shack, the character of God would invariably say, when someone’s name was mentioned, that she, God, was “particularly fond” of that person. Each of us is God’s best beloved, and God is particularly fond of each and every one of us. And so we can be brave, not afraid; we can dis-illusion ourselves; we can allow our lives to be shaped by God.
At one point in the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” the humble milkman Tevye, the main character, sings about what his life would be like if he suddenly became rich. He’d get a big house, he says, with a tin roof and wood floors. He’d get flocks of chickens and ducks and turkeys and geese, his wife would have a double chin and lots of servants, and he’d have the admiration and respect of all the townspeople. Finally, at the end of the song, he says longingly, “If I were rich, I’d have the time that I lack to sit in the synagogue and pray, and maybe have a seat by the eastern wall. And I’d discuss the holy books with the learned men several hours every day. That would be the sweetest thing of all.”
Do, sit, pray, let go – and don’t be afraid, because you are loved; and because this love will never let you go, this love that God has for you and for me and for everyone else and always will – don’t be afraid, because this is the sweetest thing of all.
Amen.