The Gospel of Luke, y’all. It is no surprise that our gospel lectionary text gets into wealth today. The writer of Luke is so very concerned about wealth contrasted with the folks who don’t have what they need to exist. In Matthew’s version of the sermon of the mount, we hear “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and in Luke’s version of it, it’s just:
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”
And instead of blessed are those who hunger for justice, in Matthew, Luke just says: “Blessed are you who are hungry now.”
Those are two very different slants.
And no doubt, this story that Jesus shared in response to this brother’s request for arbitration is absolutely addressing the economic crisis of Jesus’ day.
In 1st century antiquity, Jesus lived during a full blown agrarian crisis in Galilee on lands controlled by the Roman empire. The Galileans were caught in a spiderweb of debt in the exploitative Roman economic system. It was a bleak time for the Galileans, many of whom farmed or fished for a living. Farmers were being forced to move out of rural farms into the city for service jobs due to their economic circumstances.
Wealthy money lenders and politicians were forming a new urban elite and were scooping up the best arable land that had been nurtured for centuries by generational farmers in order to establish plantations for olives and spices to be exported to Rome. The farmers were losing the land because they could not pay the unfair taxes on it.
These elite also took over the harbors and bridges and taxed their usage as well as the fish that fishermen caught to sell. The taxes due each year often meant that fishermen would have no choice but to sell their boats to moneylenders at high rates of interest and then lease them back to use. If they could not pay off their loans, they would lose their boats and have to become indentured servants to the elites.
So this is what the Roman system did, it forced the Galilean peasantry to overfish, depleting the fish stocks they relied on for their own survival because they needed more and more fish to pay their taxes.
So if you think about this in relation to stories like Luke 5, just a few chapters before our story today, it really puts these Gospel stories into context. In that story, the fishermen had been on the Sea of Galilee all night long. They were exhausted because they were not able to catch a single fish that night. Jesus comes aboard with these tired fishermen and gives fishing instructions that didn’t make any sense because the fish they were hoping to catch was a type of tilapia, Oreochromis aurea, locally called musht. These particular fish could see the nets during the daylight, so that’s why fishermen fished at night when the darkness hid the nets and hopefully yielded more fish. Going out in the daylight, as Jesus suggested, made no sense. Simon is like: “Jesus, we have worked all night long and we haven’t caught one thing, but if you say so, I will go out and let down the nets.” So they lowered the nets and waited. When the time came to check the nets, they were so filled with musht they were difficult to pull up! They signaled for help from the other boat who came. The boats became so heavy with the catch they nearly sank! As they began to pull these flopping fish up onto the boat’s deck, this was probably more fish than they had seen in months.
Remember that they are in an agrarian and economic crisis, with scarcity everywhere, and this was a big deal. It surely meant that they, their families, and community had enough to eat for a while. Maybe it also meant that the debtors did not win that day.
Let us look at our lectionary story today through the eyes of the desperate fishermen and farmers in 1st century Galilee. Jesus responds to this inheritance arbitration request by saying: “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions,” Jesus tells a story a rich farmer, right who had such abundance, he didn’t think for a second … who is suffering around me (and there were clearly folks suffering around him) — he only thought, how can I save all of this for me?
Jesus has strong words for this rich farmer. He says: “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 their treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
This greed did not work for Jesus. And we know it doesn’t work for us either.
Possessions can actually start to possess us. If our hands are so tightly hoarding stuff then we live like misers, like Ebenezer Scrooge, missing so much beauty and joy and love around this place. And if our eyes are not open to the suffering around us, then friends, we will not see God.
But there is also something else going on here more than the critique of hoarding and wealth.
This text is also just as much about scarcity.
Jesus tells a parable about a farmer who had a huge, plentiful harvest and instead of seeing it as plenty, he saw it as not enough and built bigger barns to hold it all!
Scarcity can literally suck the life out of us. Even when there is so much beauty in front of you, you can’t see it. It’s not enough. Even when there is abundance everywhere, it’s not enough. It’s not enough. Not enough love. Not enough money. We’ve got to hoard it all because there just isn’t enough.
We are seeing so much of this going on in our country right now.
But it’s exactly the opposite in God’s economy.
Our economy would like grace to be a scarce, rare commodity that we, the few, are getting to exclusively experience. But grace is actually given for all.
There is nothing scarce about God’s grace.
It is like this at this Eucharist table too.
You don’t need a ticket or the right documentation to come to the table.
You don’t have to believe every word of the Nicene Creed to come to the table.
You don’t even have to have all your stuff together to meet some sort of holiness requirement to come to this table.
You just need to be hungry.
God’s economy is so different from the one we live in right now.
I was walking with Rev. Becca Stevens a few months ago, and as she is likely to do, she nonchalantly said this thing that changed me.
It was so simple. She said: “If I can just get back to gratitude, I’ll be OK.”
Gratitude takes us out of the hoarding. It gets the scales to come off our eyes so we can see the abundance, the beauty, the relationships, the love all around us. When we operate from gratitude and not greed, we can be powerful healers in the world. But when we operate from greed and not gratitude, we can act in harmful and dangerous ways.
So when it is tempting in this world’s economy to give into a scarcity mentality and start hoarding your money, your time, your stuff, and most dangerously, your heart, if you can just get back to gratitude, and if you can make it a regular practice, you will be OK. You will have chosen the economy of love where there is more than enough, everyone is fed, and if the table isn’t big enough for everyone — we’ll build a bigger one.
In all of the choices you have today, choose love.
Lori McKenna says it best in her song “Grateful” and I would like to close with her beautiful words as a blessing over each of us this week.
“So, in this life that I’ve been given
Hope I get close to who I’m supposed to be
Cause there isn’t one ungrateful bone in my body
There isn’t one ungrateful bone in my body.”
May it be so.
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