The Culture of More

THE CULTURE OF MORE
Homily on Luke 12: 13-21

Bruce Jennings

Grace Episcopal Church
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
August 1, 2010


Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, `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. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, `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 treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." (Lk 12:13-21)
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Welcome to the first day of August, which increasingly over the years has become, for me at least, the first day of summer! When I was a child growing up in Indiana—a barefoot boy with cheeks of tan, and topsoil between his toes—summer began on Memorial Day and ended on Labor Day. June, July, and August were the in-between time, the time of leisure. Of course, that is the perspective and memory of childhood, but even for adults then summer was an interval of life at a somewhat slower pace, less stress, less stringent demands. Days were longer in summer, and not just in the sense that there were more hours of daylight. Time was slower.

Is your sense of change the same as mine? All these phrases I have just used—slower pace of life, less stress, less stringent demands, slow time—are markers of something that has been lost, or at least seriously eroded in our lives. We are losing summer.

Why? On one level, the answers are not far to seek. We have nowadays a very demanding, competitive, hectic society. Our economy pressures us. If we are in positions where we are responsible for meeting a payroll, we have to work very long and hard to do so. If we are in positions of being on someone else’s payroll, we have to work long and hard to stay on it. In both cases, anxiety and fear of economic failure loom over us constantly.

And our culture pressures us. We are literally, from childhood on, bathed in the powerful symbolism and imagery of MORE. Early in the 20th century (1902) a famous American economist, Thorstein Veblen, wrote about this culture when it was young, and he coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to describe it. We work hard so that we will have the money to provide for ourselves and our families, of course. Indeed, we work harder and harder these days just to stay in the same place and not to fall backward. (I ponder this each morning as I mount the treadmill I have at home to get some exercise.)

But our drive to accumulate does not stop there. It is not just about meeting needs, it is also about self-identity and a sense of self-esteem. It is about putting on a show for others to see, to admire, perhaps to envy. It is, as Veblen says, conspicuous, and that is its point.

But there is more. If this were just a show, only at the surface of our lives, like a masquerade, it might still not be too disturbing. We tell ourselves: It’s a game, a character I play to get along, not really who I am. But it is not just at the surface, is it? Don’t we feel that it penetrates, this Culture of More; that it goes right down into our minds and hearts, our way of being in the world? A philosopher once said: “I think, therefore I am.” I recently saw a tee-shirt that said, “I shop, therefore I am.” It’s not a bad joke; a tad sexist, maybe, but still. Unfortunately it is not merely a joke.

Can there be any better medicine to counteract this mind set than a healthy dose of Ecclesiastes? We get a spoonful this morning: “What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest.” A contemporary Ecclesiastes of sorts, the poet E. E. Cummings, put the point rather more pointedly. Looking all around him and seeing vanity still reigning, he advised: “Pity this busy monster, manunkind,/ not.”

However, our mainstream culture and society in the West (and now increasingly all around the world) has developed an answer to Ecclesiastes, one quite foreign to the furniture of his mind and the temper of his time. The classic exploration of this answer is found in a book entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by the German sociologist Max Weber.

What do people get from all the toil and strain? Weber believed that the Protestant Reformation had introduced into Western culture a new level of anxiety about personal salvation and our status in the eyes of God. Rejecting, as it were, the lessons of today’s readings from Ecclesiastes and Luke, modern society has turned to the outward, material trappings of success in our lives as reassuring signs of God’s favor. What followed was an outbreak of science, technology, economic growth, and what we commonly refer to, perhaps a bit too facilely, as a “rising standard of living,” or “progress.”

What do humans get from all our toil and strain? We get wealth, which is God’s reward.

So what’s not to like? Three basic things, in my opinion.

First, the wealth we produce is wrongly distributed. Our wealth is built amid poverty, inequality, and injustice on a global scale.

Second, the wealth we produce is not sustainable. It depletes natural resources and produces waste products on such a massive scale and so rapidly that the global ecosystem cannot tolerate this stress much longer without breakdowns that will diminish and impoverish all of our lives.

Third, the wealth we produce isn’t really wealth. It is this third problem that is the focus of our text from Luke today.

This passage gives us what is often called the Parable of the Rich Fool. It is pretty straightforward, and it comes amid a series of exhortations and warnings that the 12th and 13th chapters of Luke present.

A voice in the big crowd calls out to Jesus. Summons him, so to speak, for personal gain. Brothers are in dispute over an inheritance. This is a trick question, a trap. Jesus is being told to take on the interpretation of Jewish law, which sets down elaborate rules for most things in life, including the question of how a father should divide up the accumulated spoils of his lifetime.

Jesus deftly sidesteps the quagmire and refuses to take the bait. Such matters are not what he is about. He remarks almost in passing, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."

Well, fine. Can we move on now?

Not quite so fast. The lesson could have stopped there, but instead Jesus brings in the mainstay of his teaching method, the parable. What is going on here, I think, is that it is not enough to flatly contradict a serious moral and spiritual mistake with an assertion of wisdom. Jesus wants to dig more deeply into the roots of that mistake, for it ultimately rests upon a profound misunderstanding of relationship between the human and the divine, a misconception about the nature of our relationship with God and what God intends for us.

The voice in the crowd—remember that this is our voice, and it is not just the voice of our society collectively, but also a voice that calls out from the crowd of desires within each of us—the voice in the crowd wants the wealth that he deserves. He is totally caught up in getting his share. He is the voice of entitlement within the Culture of More.

The mistake seems to be twofold. He has no idea really of what he is looking for, and he is searching for it in the wrong place. He is spiritually disoriented, and the parable of the Rich Fool is a lesson about spiritual disorientation.

I want to highlight three aspects of this disorientation:

1. The parable begins, "The land of a rich man produced abundantly.” I trust that this translation is accurate, for when I read this I lay stress on its striking and deliberate wording. It pointedly does not say “A man produced abundant riches.” The land produces, not the man; the land is the source of abundance, not the rich man.

Disorientation number one: The man is rich and thinks the wealth is his creation. He does not realize that wealth is not something humans create alone, either collectively or individually. Wealth is a gift, a sharing of a fundamental abundance or plenitude, which comes through the natural creation (the land) and is ultimately rooted in God’s active, creative love.

2. The rich man asks, “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?” The rich man does not know what to do with “his” abundance. He can only think in static terms, in terms of storage, gathering up, indeed, hoarding. Once again, the recognition of the gift, this time of making the gift, eludes him.

Disorientation number two: The man who has been given so much surplus, so abundantly thinks only of using his wealth to meet his own needs across time, so he will build only to secure his own future provision. Notice how he relates to wealth only as consumption, not as a occasion for sharing and for forming relations with others. He uses his energy and resources to build, but he does not build anything out of love or concern for the needs of others. His storage bins are temples to his own accomplishment; they do not house his gratitude or sense of responsibility to share, to give forward. He surrounds himself with his surplus, thereby replacing its plenitude with scarcity; its fullness, with lack; something which has been freely given, with something that now must be locked away and guarded against theft.

3. The rich man says: “I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.'” Having thought that he has secured his future material wealth, the man believes that his spiritual wealth is secure as well. He thinks he can relax, now that the anxiety of what do I deserve, and will I find favor in the sight of God, has been allayed. Note that his thinking is pretty much in accord with the Protestant Ethic, except for the part about relaxing and being merry.

Disorientation number three. Jesus closes his parable with a terrifying reversal. (Being a student in his class was not all fun and games.) When God calls you a fool, instead of addressing you benignly as a poor misguided creature, you know you are in deep trouble. “Pity this busy monster manunkind, not” indeed! The Culture of More is transitory. The wealth of having is false wealth; true wealth is the richness of being. The richness of being, in turn, is being in right relationship with the Creator, with God’s active love. This in turn leads to being in right relationship with the rest of creation, in relationships of care and stewardship, of respect and justice, with nature and with each other.

Amen.