Proper 13 C To Be or Not To Be

 

To Be or Not To Be

"Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed;

for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." [i]

 

For six years, I have been watching the Harford County Register of Wills probate a will that involves a dispute among surviving children of an estate. It is excruciatingly slow and tedious work. Jesus is asked to settle a similar dispute among siblings and says, in effect,

 

“I am not a probate judge. What I do is announce the Good News and tell stories. The good news is that God forgives you and loves you. Equally good news is that life is more important than who gets the cup and who gets the saucer. It’s not that greed is right or wrong – greed and the accumulation and consumption of more and more stuff is just not healthy. Not for you. Not for your neighbor. Not for the common good.

 

“Here’s is a story about a man, his abundant crops and his barns – but note well, it is really a story about his self, his soul, and his life. He has a bumper crop and nowhere to put it. I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger barns, he says to himself. He fills them with all his crops and all his goods. Then he says, ‘Self, look what we have done! We have enough stuff for years to come! Let’s eat, drink and be merry!’ He has a party! With himself. He has no friends, no neighbors. He gives no thanks to God for his good fortune.

 

“From off-stage comes the voice of God. ‘Self? You are no Self. You have no Soul. You are a fool! Look at you. All this abundance of stuff and no friends, no neighbors, no one to share it all with. Keeping it all for your supposed ‘self,’ while tonight your life will end. Who will enjoy your barns and barns full of stuff now? All is vanity and a chasing after wind!’” [ii]

 

We are to think of that moment in Genesis 2 when YHWH takes a handful of dust, some of the morning dew, and forms the first creature before anything else. It’s a handful of mud really until YHWH breathes into it. That is the moment it lives. Life begins with that first breath. Each time the first creature breathes in it is the creation of life all-over again. As it breathes out, it participates in creation, giving life to so much of the greening and teeming of life on Earth. It is a dance, the circle of life. A giving back of what has been given. A sharing of abundance with all the rest of life. It is to be this way with all that we are and all that we have. We receive, we give back. Barn-man has forgotten all of this. [iii]

 

Barn-man forgets to breathe out – to share. When you don’t breathe out you die. And you contribute to the dying of the world. The common good suffers. Your neighbor suffers. You suffer.

 

“So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” [iv]

 

For ages some have devoted whole lives to finding out what it means to be “rich toward God.” They create all kinds of acts of devotion, all kinds of rituals, all kinds of dos and don’ts. Forgetting that we are all already “rich toward God.” We are all already created in the image of God. A God who breathes in and breathes out. A life giving, life sustaining God who loves all of creation right down to the tiniest gluon quark! A God who loves each and every one of us.

 

Evelyn Underhill, a woman who has chronicled so much of the mysteries of life itself suggests that we tend to spend much, if not all, of our lives conjugating just three verbs: To Want, to Have, and to Do. “Craving, clutching and fussing, on the material, social, emotional, intellectual – even on the religious - plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance except so far as they are transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.” [v]

 

So it is, one day a week at Noonday Prayer we pray:

 

It is when we are still that we know

It is when we listen that we hear

It is when we remember that we see your light, O God.

From your stillness we come

With your sound all life quivers with Being

From you the light of this moment shines

Grant us to remember you at the heart of each moment

Grant us to remember [vi]

 

Remember to breathe in AND to breathe out is life.

 

To Be, or not To Be – that is the question. [vii]

Amen.

 

 

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[i] Luke 12:13-21

[ii] Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14

[iii] Swanson, Richard, Provoking the Gospel of Luke (The Pilgrim Press, Cleveland, OH: 2006) p.174.

[iv] Ibid Luke 12: 13-21

[v] Underhill, Evelyn, The Spiritual Life (Harper & Row, NY: 1936) p.20.

[vi] Newell, John Philip, Praying with the Earth (Wm. R. Eerdmans, Cambridge, UK:2011) p.44.

[vii] Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1