Sunday: 10th Sunday after Pentecost 13C
Reading: Luke 12:13-21
Preacher: S. James Steen

Naomi Shihab Nye, an Arab-American poet, writes of an experience she had while wandering around the Albuquerque Airport:

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: "If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately."

Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. "Help," said the flight service person. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this."

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly [in Arabic]. The minute she heard my words...she stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely.

She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day.
I said "no, no, we're fine, you'll get there, just late, who is picking you up?
Let's call him and tell him." We called her son and I spoke with him in English.

I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her -- Southwest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends.

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions.

She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers -- non-alcoholic -- and the two little girls for our flight, one African-American, one Mexican-American -- ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar, too.

I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were holding hands -- had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, "this is the world I want to live in. The shared world."

Not a single person in this gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped -- has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen, anywhere.

Not everything is lost.¹

We find a harsh contrast to this lovely story in today's Gospel, where we find Jesus warning his audience to avoid the temptation to become greedy.

In the Parable of the Rich Fool, Jesus tells of a man who has amassed great wealth, believing that it will provide him with security and wellbeing. It is as if he says, "Finally, I have found the secret to the good life, and it's green." But God has a different view: ""You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.""

Gregory Jenks claims that "in a world where so many of [the rich fool's] fellow citizens were falling into debt [and being reduced to slavery], his response to the amazing good fortune that had befallen him seems incompatible with the generosity of [the Kingdom] that Jesus celebrated in his actions and his teachings. Rather than proclaiming a messianic banquet and inviting to the feast those unable to repay his hospitality, this farmer wishes to hoard it away for his own benefit in the times to come."²

This Parable of the Rich Fool is sandwiched between two passages we didn't read this morning in which Jesus is concerned with larger spiritual issues that are related to greed: fear and anxiety. To those who are afraid of the consequences they may face as followers of Jesus, he has just said, in essence, "As long as your soul is in order, you have nothing to fear." And if we were to continue reading beyond today's passage, we would immediately find Jesus saying, "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing."

Jenks ends his article with a question: "And how different [from the rich fool] are we with our response to global need in the face of our amazing and undeserved prosperity?"

If the faith we profess is to have integrity, we can't avoid that question; for the one we call Savior was so convinced that we become whole to the extent that we are in solidarity with the poor that he was willing to face execution rather than compromise that belief. So there is a very concrete dimension to all this. Simply put, as Christians and as a society, we need to reevaluate our financial response to Jesus' teaching.

But we also need to examine how greed affects us as spiritual beings. Greed is one response to our fear and anxiety: that there isn't enough for me, that I won't measure up unless I have more than everyone else, that I have to insulate myself from the dangers of a hostile world, that the good life is found in acquiring all the comforts money can buy, including a residence in a gated community.

Jesus clearly didn't want people to be poor; but neither did he want some to amass wealth in ways that keep others poor. I think this is what he meant when, much earlier in Luke, he said, "Woe to you rich; for you have had your reward." Greed isolates us and excludes us from God's kingdom of justice and generosity. God doesn't have to deny us entry. We exclude ourselves because greed makes us wary of others with whom we might, instead, share a banquet and who might even offer us a feast of mamool cookies.

In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg speaks of the hope in Jesus' message: "The good news of Jesus'...is that...the path of transformation...leads from a life of requirements and measuring up...to a life of relationship with God. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from the bondage of self-pre-occupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness."³

Amen.

¹This story by Naomi Shihab Nye appeared on several blog sites during March and April, 2007. I first saw it on the Listserv Integrity Lightspeed, August 3, 2007.
²Gregory Jenks, FaithFutures, Tenth Sunday after Pentecost 2007 (http://wiki.faithfutures.org/index.php/ Proper_18C#The_Rich_Farmer)
³Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, (New York, NY:HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), pp. 86,88.