Reflection for 8th Sunday after Pentecost – goods and the mortal coil
You may have read in the news this week of a religious leader who, while live-streaming a worship service and preaching on the subject of keeping faith in the face of grave adversity, was robbed at gunpoint.
The robbers removed almost $1million in jewelry from the leader and his wife before escaping in a Mercedes Benz.
Only in New York, you might say.
When I read the parable in Luke’s gospel of the rich landowner (Luke 12:16-20), called a fool by God, for accumulating an abundance of wealth, unknowingly facing the end of his life that night, I wondered…
Did the religious leader robbed this week, who fell to the ground behind his golden lectern, hands over his head, wonder if his life was going to end at that moment?
Did he have a split second to wonder what was the point of his very ‘flashy’ lifestyle? Did he hear a quiet voice say ‘you fool!’? In a terrible and traumatic moment was there a moment where the grace of God might have been present and offered?
For the rich landowner in Luke’s parable, the moment of grace is offered by God’s land that produced so abundantly that the man had nowhere to store the excess.
‘What shall I do?’ he asks his soul.
The grace of God’s abundance is not accepted by the rich man. He does the inexplicable – tearing down his current barns to build bigger ones rather than adding to the barns already there – an outpouring of voracious gluttony.
We know not the exact moment of our death, but the words of Luke’s Jesus ask us to recognize that the wealth we call our own is a gift from God – and in its abundance we are called to turn to the Spirit to ask for it to be used as a blessing, not a curse.
Blessings
Ceri
