8th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 13: Hosea 11:1-11; Psalm 107:1-9, 43;
Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21
In today’s parable, Jesus tells us of the rich man, who has to build new barns to hold the produce of his land. The rich man tells his soul to “relax, eat, drink and be merry“. Yet he is about to die, and God tells him he is a fool, for he has not prepared what is important. Jesus tells his followers, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God“.
What does it mean to be “rich toward God“? Paul is concerned with much the same in today’s reading from Colossians. In their new life in Christ, his followers need to leave off “whatever in you is earthly“. That includes not just the usual suspects of fornication and greed, but also “anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language“. Christians have “stripped off the old self. . .and have clothed yourselves with the new self“. In this new self, Paul asserts, “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all in all.”
So being rich toward God is not about just thinking about heaven; it is about how we live on earth. And Paul is worried not just about sex and money, but also about temperament and speech.
Most of it seems manageable to me, until I get to that bit about getting rid of anger and abusive language. I can manage pretty easily avoiding slander and malice. I don’t feel the need to slander people. I try to avoid being malicious. But there is so much in the world that makes me angry: people starving in Gaza, being bombed in Ukraine, being grabbed off the street in immigration raids. That’s just a start. Get me going and I might start muttering about people who think they need a 20,000 square foot house for one person (plus of course staff who care for them) or who build yachts so big they can’t enter most harbors. Somewhere along the line there will be a colleague who annoys me, or an officious bureaucrat I need to deal with.
We live in a society that embraces anger as a response to all of these issues. At the extreme, young men decide the solution to their anger is to kill a bunch of people, whether kids at a school or people at a mall. So much politics right now is fueled by anger and righteous indignation. There are people angry on all sides, about many things. Some issues–war, famine, imprisonment–are issues of proper concern for us as Christians. But the response is not anger, it is action.
What Paul and Jesus ask of us is to find a way to seek justice, to be the good Samaritan. The good Samaritan does not spend time being anry at those who left the man on the road; he just helps. In the renewed world that Paul describes, we are not divided from other Christians. We focus on the positive. We are rich toward God.
May we strive always to leave behind earthly drives, and make ourselves rich toward God.
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