August 1, 2010
(Tenth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 13)
(From The Lectionary Page)
A Vocation of Anxiety
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
When you drive back to Kansas City from northern Michigan in July, you find yourself contemplating a lot of corn and soybeans. In fact, I’d estimate around 5 hours and 47 minutes’ worth of corn and soybeans along I-80 in Illinois and Iowa alone, not that I checked my watch or anything. The crops this year are gorgeous. Tall, uniform stands of corn, rolling fields of soybeans with nary a weed to be seen. At some point east of Des Moines, Cady took a break from listening to her music, and we all found ourselves talking farming. We talked about how God arranges it such that a single seed produces hundreds and hundreds of seeds, on cobs of field corn or in pods of soybeans. And we talked about how stressful it is to be a farmer, to be always at the mercy of two things no farmer can control – the weather, and commodity prices at the Board of Trade. Farming is a vocation of anxiety. So when you have a good year, you rejoice. If your good year was the exception rather than the rule, you rejoice even more because the price per bushel will likely be higher if production is lower. And if you manage to make a profit, you either bank it or invest in some way because there’s no telling what the next year will bring. That’s certainly what a prudent farmer does if he or she ever wants to retire.
I share all this, because if farming is part of your heritage, you might find – as I do – that the parable Jesus tells in today’s gospel passage is a teensy bit irritating. The landowner has had a fabulous harvest, and he needs a place to store the surplus, so that he can maybe take an early retirement. Makes sense to me. I don’t know of many farmers who wouldn’t jump at the chance to lay a lifetime of stress aside and enjoy the good life. For God to denounce him as a fool seems unduly harsh. I mean, come on! Are we really to understand that we are fools for laying aside a surplus, either for a rainy day or for a comfortable retirement?[1]
We’re in the 12th chapter of Luke, and Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. Many would-be disciples are following along and Jesus is becoming increasingly candid about the challenges that true discipleship brings, and what some of the barriers to true discipleship are. When we take a closer look, we see that chapter 12 focuses on two important barriers to discipleship: anxiety and impatience. In the verses immediately preceding our reading for today, Jesus has been teaching about God’s tender care for his children, how the very hairs of our heads are counted by God, and of how the Spirit will guide us in moments of great peril. And the very first response to his teaching out of the mouth of one of his would-be followers is, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” Huh. So here we have Example A of how impatient we are to fix the thing that is causing anxiety. And, here we have Example A of some of the things that make us anxious: money, family dynamics, power struggles, issues of fairness or lack thereof.
Jesus neatly sidesteps the role of arbiter, and – like good teachers everywhere – comes at the same lesson from a different angle. The primary task of discipleship is to center our hearts on God. When we focus on that task -- and it is by no means easy—we can begin to see that what emerges uppermost in our minds and on our hearts is very different from what emerges when we instead set our hearts first upon the things that are causing us anxiety or impatience. And we begin to see, as one writer cogently observed, that the landowner is not foolish because he makes provision for the future; he is foolish because he believes that he can secure his future by his own efforts – a future presumably free from incessant worry about what the next harvest will bring.
Farmers are not the only ones who practice a vocation of anxiety. All of us, to one extent or another, share in that vocation. The content of our daily concerns vary according to particularity. But to be human in a complex society, such as first century Palestine or 21st century America, is necessarily to be aware of the shortness and uncertainty of our mortal lives. That’s a given.
But along with our mortality and finite vision and feet of clay, God gives us each something else. God gives each of us the present moment. This is not to deny the importance of learning from our past and planning prudently for our future, but it is to recognize that the gift of the present moment is what we have been given. We are invited, as followers of Jesus Christ, to offer that precious gift back to God. How? By living most fully, prayerfully, and thank-fully, in the present moment, centering our lives on God’s most gracious love.
[1] Actually, I suppose the answer to that may depend on whether our portfolios include stock in BP…but I digress.
