What are we hungry for?
Greed is a tricky thing. When we dare to pause and pay attention to where we invest ourselves, we begin to learn where we truly place our trust. The Spirit challenges us to see where our deepest yearnings lie –and to take the first steps toward true freedom.
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Transcript
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
So we continue during this summer season, this ordinary time, that’s not so ordinary for any of us. But this series of readings that are chosen by our lectionary passages are in cycles. So I just want to stress once more for those who may be newer to the Episcopal Church or to Grace, that we don’t choose these texts. This is kind of my pressure valve to step over here and say, I didn’t pick these texts this morning. They’re chosen for us. They’re in a three year cycle that really started with Pope Paul the Sixth. So they go that far back and they’ve been tweaked in different ways. They’re meant to make us uncomfortable and they very much succeed so many times.
So to start this morning, a few lines from the poet Rumi. Rumi writes this:
“Give up the known, give up your life
for the mystery of Love’s eternal wine.”
“But before I die,” I said, “I would like to know you.”
“Once you know me there will be no more dying.”
That poem hits on this crucial core of our practice around where do we place our true hope? Where do we find our truth? Our deepest sense of trust.
So this morning, what I want to look at just a little bit with you is this dynamic, this very complex and pinchy dynamic around greed. Greed is a very pronounced piece of this morning’s text. And again, we didn’t choose ‘em. Don’t blame me. Blame the Pope. That’s always a useful thing.
So if you look at the Colossians text first just to highlight a piece in here, the Colossians text, the writer of that book, who followed in the school of Saint Paul, highlights this series of things in his view that we should resist, that we should turn our back toward, turn away from. And he has the list of them there, he says, “put to death therefore whatever in you is earthly; fornication, impurity, passion, evil, desire, and greed, which is idolatry. “And greed, which is idolatry.” We’re going to come back to that.
This theme around greed, of course, is picked up in the Gospel text, this fascinating and very pointed story of Jesus teaching those who were gathered around him that day. Jesus is standing there, the story goes, and of course, one brother, and as you know, Cynthia says, any time there’s a story and it says, “and there were two brothers,” it’s never going to end well. So there were at least two, and one of them comes to Jesus and says, “fix my family issues.” Raise your hand if that’s been a prayer in your life.
They come and say, “tell my family to divide the family inheritance with me.” And Jesus says, “why do you think I’m an arbitrator for you and this is my job to fix your family’s struggle?” And then instead of just sticking with that on that level, he does what Jesus does. He goes to a much deeper level, and he tells them a story and lays it out.
A man who did well by society’s standards, earned a lot, had excess crops, and struggled because he didn’t know what to do with them. Sharing apparently wasn’t an option, so he comes up with this plan and says, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll just build bigger barns.” We see that in our world today with some build bigger –whatever, must build bigger, whatever, because that’s what we find ultimate meaning as that narrative goes.
So he builds bigger barns, and then after he builds these barns, he sits back and he’s very content. He thinks with his life and says to the soul, “Soul, now you can rest. Now you can be content, now you can as the text says ‘eat, drink and be merry.’” But the story says that’s not how it ends. That night, that very night, it says, God comes to him and says, “you fool, you fool! Here you thought this was where you would ultimately find meaning and hope, and this very night your life is being demanded of you. And what do you have to stand on with your big barns full of all the things that you think you’ve earned and that you deserve?” It’s a very pointed story. I suspect everyone in here is thinking of some pertinent contemporary example from family, or from nation, or from the world’s life right now.
It’s the brilliance of Jesus and the brilliance of the Gospel. Boy, it makes us squirm. It made me think of a story from my childhood back in Arkansas. I was an awkward child. I know that’s shocking. I was an awkward child and part of my childhood life was I was the caretaker in many ways for our family, for our house. So, not in a Cinderella way, although I thought it was very much like a Cinderella way, but I would cook a lot of the time and I would clean most of the time, and I somehow ended up doing the family’s laundry. But what I would do when my parents came home is anything that was loose change or money in their pockets, I took as a laundry tax. They didn’t know I did this for years. They just thought there was no loose change in the house. There was loose change in the house, it was just squirreled away and stored in a large pickle jar in my room. So any time I did the laundry, I would shake out my dad’s jeans when he came home from the mill. All of my mom’s clothes, my sister’s clothes, if by chance she had any change. Anything that fell out on the floor, I took and I squirreled away in my own version of “bigger barns.” In my case it was a pickle jar. But I did this for years, and I didn’t tell any of them that I was doing it. They just knew I always had money. When we would go to the concession stand, somehow I did buy things and no one knew how. I had a job. I stole it from them. That’s how I got it.
So I would gather this up and put it in the jar, until when I finished the seventh grade, we moved. And so we were getting to this point where I was concerned that my sister was going to get this money. So I did the only logical thing: I buried it in the backyard. The only logical thing that made sense at the time. So when they weren’t home one day, I went to the backyard, buried it in the backyard, and didn’t tell anyone where it was.
But then I forgot where it was. When we moved. We moved to the new house, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell my family that I had stored all of this up, and I’ve lost it somewhere in that yard. Lucy Mondragon bought our house with her family, and a couple of years later, I guess it came up and I told my mother “by the way, if Lucy ever mentions this, there’s a hoard of cash buried in the backyard of that house.” I don’t know if Lucy ever found it, but that’s what stirred up in me from this childhood story. I did what I thought made sense, what made the most sense. Where I found my deepest worth, if you will, at that point. I hoarded the cash in a pickle jar with my childhood self and buried it where nobody else would get it. “You fool! This very day your life is demanded of you.” Or in my case, this very day you’ve forgotten where you buried it. And what good did it do? How did that help you make meaning in your own sense of self-worth?
Greed is a tricky thing. It can be so subtle and sneak into our lives in so many ways, and then it hooks us. It’s also a tricky thing in the sense of it’s easy to become overly moralized, if you will, and then to compare ourselves to someone else and say, “well, I’m not as greedy as they are, so I can cut myself some slack.” At least I’m not burying it in pickle jars in the backyard. It could be worse. Here’s the thing about the text this morning, though. If you look at the word “greed” and you track it back with its etymology, you find something fascinating. The root of the word greed, all the way back to its Sanskrit roots is “hunger.” Now something curious happens if you take all of these texts and you replace the word “greed” with the word “hunger.” Suddenly it moves it to a different energetic place, doesn’t it? Suddenly the question becomes not about how greedy I am compared with how greedy you are, but it shifts it into a much deeper space within our hearts to ask ourselves, “what are we hungry for?”
Saint Augustine, who Brandon mentioned last week, had a line, this wonderful phrase that is attributed to him that said, “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, O God.” translated another way, “our souls are hungry. Our souls, our hearts are hungry until that hunger is satisfied by you, O God.” That’s the deeper work. Not to stay on a superficial, comparative level of greed, but to dare to ask ourselves within our heart, maybe in moments where we can dare to be honest and say, “what is it that we really yearn for? What is it that we truly hunger for?” That’s where our deep practice comes in. That’s where this matters in the sense of how we structure our lives, our rules of life. How do we make sense of the choices that we make, where we orient? The piece I put in the op ed for the Times: “What we worship, we become.”
What we pay attention to shapes our life. That’s our deep work. And this is a space where we do it.
I’ll close with a poem. This poem came from a dream.
In the dream, the voice said:
Follow the green star
that travels through time,
as I turn your face towards mine
and whisper of things unknown
until now.
The next day you ask me if I believe
in God and I wish
you had asked me
about the last time
I swam in her eyes,
or the first time I tasted wine.
We pour water in a silver bowl,
make the sign of the cross,
and call it holy.
But what is holiness
and where does it begin?
In the prayers or the pouring?
In the tears that feed the river?
In the rain that washes your face?
In the awareness that your presence
flows in my veins like time,
slick and silent through my body?
We only see you when you move
and you are always moving,
turning, seducing us.
In our hunger we yearn
to taste you.
So I listen to the dream again,
holding the words like warm stones
and feeling the weight of them,
the weight of things most true.
I know one day I will understand.
Amen.