Sermon — July 31, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
I had a conversation a few years ago with a man who had big plans for a new non-profit he wanted to start. He’d spent a long career working hard in the financial sector, and been able to retire early, so he needed a new project. And he told me about this new organization he’d learned about in the city where he lived. Their plan was to rent unused space in under-subscribed public schools in the city, convert those empty classrooms into squash courts, and then use them to teach squash for free to kids in the neighborhood. It’s a funny variation on the idea that the best urban sports are the ones, like basketball that don’t need much space or grass, and squash certainly qualifies. And it has the kind of side benefit that certain sports, like golf, or tennis, or racquetball, carry a kind of social cachet that could actually boost the careers of kids who went on to college and professional life, at least in some professions.
I’d never heard of this, but the acquaintance who was telling me about it loved the idea. It was right up his alley. There was just one problem. “I don’t play squash,” he said, “but I love golf. So, I want to start the same thing, but teaching golf to inner-city kids!” And—never having really seen the appeal of golf myself, and thinking that a golf course is a little harder to squeeze into an empty classroom than a squash court, I nodded politely. And then he said something I’ll never forget: “I’m all ready to get started. I just need to lower my handicap by a few strokes first, so I have enough cred in the golf world.”
Jesus’ parable today confronts us with the urgency of God’s call to each one of us. “What should I do?” the rich man asks himself. “I have no place to store my crops!” (12:17) Or rather, he has a place to store his crops, it’s just not big enough anymore. It’s as if your bank account were a physical place where you stored your cash, and you became so wealthy that your bank account was full. When you went to make your deposit, you could not cram another hundred-dollar bill into its depths. And instead of thinking to yourself, “Maybe I don’t need all this. Maybe I should share some of this wealth,” you spent your money building a bigger bank. And when you’d built a bank big enough to hold it all, you took a deep breath, and said to yourself, “Eat, drink, and be merry.” (12:19) You could finally relax. “But God said to you: ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you!’” (12:20) What do you have to show for yourself?
Now, let’s be as generous as we can to the rich man in the story. Perhaps he planned to give some of his wealth away one day. Perhaps he had good intentions of feeding the hungry with some of that food, perhaps he had always planned to donate a hospital wing or to renovate the synagogue. Perhaps one day he would, when he was finally comfortable enough that he could give something away without it undermining the lifestyle he’d come to expect.
But if there’s one thing I know about human psychology, it’s that that “one day” is elusive. We set our sights on the future, thinking things will be different then; and then the future arrives, and things feel much the same. The parable is about wealth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that, but the pattern applies to so much more of our lives than that. Have you ever thought to yourself, “Once I X, then I’ll finally be able to Y?” “Once the baby’s sleeping through the night, then I’ll finally take some time for myself.” “Once the kids are out of the house, then we’ll work on our marriage.” “If I just put my head down for a few years of seventy-hour weeks and make partner, then I’ll be able to relax.” “If only he’d try just once to make things better, then I’d let go of this resentment I’ve been carrying.” “If I could just knock a few strokes off my handicap, then I could finally start teaching golf to the kids.”
And then we get there… and we kick the can down the road again, because it feels just as hard now as it ever did then. But there’s an urgency to these things. We can defer them further and further into the future, but we can’t guarantee that the future will ever arrive. We can’t control our own destinies; and we’re not very good at predicting our future actions. All we can do is act now, or not. But “this very night your life is being demanded of you,” God says. What are you leaving undone? (12:20)
Now, I don’t want you to think I’ve come back from vacation full of fire and brimstone. (I was always like this.) No, because alongside this parable of urgency, we have to read a prophecy of mercy: our first lesson, from the prophet Hosea.
You may not quite grasp the historical and geographical and national references, to Israel and Ephraim, Admah and Zeboiim; that’s okay. But you can probably tell that they’re a way of locating the original hearers of the prophecy, a way of addressing them directly. So indulge me for a minute in addressing this prophecy from God to you, as Hosea addresses it to the ancient Israelites: “When you were a child, I loved you; and out of hard times I called you. The more I called you, the more you went from me… it was I who taught you to walk, I took you up in my arms; but you did not know that I healed you. I led you with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I lifted you like an infant to my cheek… You may be bent on turning away from me… But how can I give you up, O my beloved people? How can I hand you over? …My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender… for I am God, and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” (Hosea 11:1-11)
And here’s the thing: if you deferred your humanity, if you put off every act of goodness, if you turned away from God again and again and again and never acted on any of those vaguely good intentions for the future, and if this very night you came face to face with your Maker, this would be God’s response: “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over? From before time, I have loved you, through it all.”
This merciful, unconditional love doesn’t undermine the urgency of God’s call. In fact, it’s the only thing that lets us answer that call. Because, left to our own devices, we will probably never feel like we’ve arrived. We will never have enough to really feel comfortable giving it away. We will never have achieved enough to really feel comfortable relaxing. We will never golf well enough to feel like we’ve earned the respect we need to start that non-profit. No matter what anyone says to us, most of us will never fully feel like we are good enough to be loved; and yet if God loves us so deeply in our imperfection, even in our outright rejection, what risk could there possibly be in just starting now?
So, you may never reach that “one day.” Or, if you do, it may not feel as different as you’d imagined. But this day, “this very night,” you are enough to answer that call. You are enough to tackle that task. You are enough to live your life right now as you wish you could live it then. For—as St. Paul writes in that beautiful but enigmatic phrase, “your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3) So may you indeed be, as he says, “renewed in knowledge according to the image of [your] creator,” (Col. 3:10) who has loved you for so long with such indescribable love. Amen.