“What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.”
So said the rich man in the parable of Jesus we just hear this morning. He’s really working the first person pronoun, which reminds me of the old joke, “if God is your copilot, the wrong person is on the driver’s seat.” In this case of this character, he’s so independent in his decision-making that it’s not clear whether God is even on the plane he’s flying. Consider the context. He’s already rich, he’s just harvested a bumper crop, and he’s not wasting a moment to consult with anyone before deciding what to do with it. He’s just going to tear down perfectly serviceable barns and build bigger ones. Ostensibly so that he can relax and be merry.
That wasn’t the way it played out, however. That very night his life was demanded of him, and he died with all his wealth in storage. His seemingly proactive decisions, rather than helping him to achieve that good life he was saving up for, earned him the title of “fool.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous sermon on this very Gospel, rhetorically asked why.
“The rich man was a fool,” preached Dr. King, “because he permitted the ends for which he lived to become confused with the means by which he lived. The economic structure of his life absorbed his destiny.” If he had a wife or children or any skills or passions or avocations beside his harvest, this parable mentions nothing of them. “The richer this man became materially, the poorer he became intellectually and spiritually,” speculated Dr. King
Likewise he preached, “The rich man was a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on others; that wealth always comes as a result of the commonwealth. He talked as though he could plough the fields and build the barns alone,” said Dr. King. “He failed to realize that he was an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead had contributed.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, is a slightly more contemporary rendering of that same argument, has said that “nobody in this country got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, you moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for, you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate, you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.”
I’d like to think that I don’t do it that way; I’d like to think that I’m thankful to God and my fellow human beings for many blessings that come my way due to our shared social contract. But I don’t always live up to my ideals. And I know that’s true because I too have been known to fill up my own barns beyond their capacity. I’m not much of a farmer—ask my husband about my brown thumb—but I have barns or at least their equivalent. I can scarce find any room in my closet. I fill every waking hour of my time. I eat when I’m not even hungry.
So what are we to learn from this parable? First, when our literal or metaphorical barns get too full we can just stop filling them. We can take notice when we are tempted to fill every moment or square inch or satisfy every desire, and let that noticing be our conscience and our invitation to do something different with our excess. We can give things away. We can consume less. We can say “no” to one more meeting on the calendar. We can leave some grain in the fields of our own productivity for others to glean.
Similarly, when we feel the need to increase our storage capacity or maximize our savings or investments or whatever, we might pause to ask ourselves what is being lost when we augment rather than appreciate. What if we were to forego the building of bigger barns and their equivalent, and pay attention to what else is going on in the space that we might have filled up with storage structures?
When I was a small child, my grandmother had a beautiful house with gardens that were lush in an particular well-watered southern California way. They grew sweet smelling gardenias and spicy lavender and potted citrus trees that produced these huge glossy lemons that seemed like magical objects to a girl growing up in Massachusetts. No matter what other wandering or pondering that I might have been doing in the gardens, I always ended up with my hands smelling like the bright oily rind of those lemons.
As a child I was not aware that my grandma was wealthy like the man in the parable, and in my naiveté I probably assumed that everyone’s grandmother had a house and gardens like hers. But I learned a costly lesson about the temptations of wealth when she died and the executor sold the house. You see in addition to being beautiful and richly landscaped, the house had two lots’ worth of beach frontage. So the buyer—a developer—tore it all down and in its place built two architectural masterpieces that maximized lot coverage and ocean views.
I know that the developer and architect did an excellent job of optimizing the habitable square footage, but I often wonder if they knew anything about the smell of lemons. Or of the gardenias or lavender, or of the texture and color of the brick patio which had no view-optimizing buildings on it. There’s something lost when we fill up the in-between spaces where lemon tress might grow.
Your grandmother—or you—may be poor or rich. Interestingly, Jesus’ parable offers no judgment on that; it assumes that some people are rich and some have bumper crops. Which is congruent with the Biblical witness. God’s judgment is not about what you have, but rather about what you do with it. And what I’m curious about is what you have growing in the in-between spaces where you might otherwise build houses or barns or their metaphorical equivalent. What is lost when you fill everything up?
I can’t answer that question for you, but I can ask it for Jesus. Because I think this parable is not only about ends and means and interdependence, but also about leaving space. Leaving valuable space un-built, attractive products unconsumed, and precious time unscheduled. Its about keeping Sabbath. Not only as a day of the week, but as space and time to return thanks to God, who longs to lead us out of our attachments to excess with cords of human kindness and bands of love. Time and space to meet anew the God who longs to bend down and feed us, if we would but pause and pay attention to what we’re really hungry for. Time and space to set our minds on things above, and discover anew that our lives that are hidden with Christ. Shining like bright yellow lemons growing in the in-between spaces, camouflaged by foliage, but redolant in the aroma of Christ.
