11 Pentecost C/Lectionary 18 August 4, 2013
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Guengerich Hutson
Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14, 2: 18-23 + Psalm 49: 1-12 +
Colossians 3: 1-11 + Luke 12: 13-21
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
When my children were young they used to enjoy going to the county fair. One of the attractions that always led them to fits of laughter was the Fun House. I don’t know why they ever named it the Fun House. To me, a Fun House would be a house that cleaned itself. But the Fun House at a fair was a place where the floors swayed from side to side and blasts of air surprised you from the walls and the music was loud and in order to exit you had to be able to walk through a spinning tube. I would re-name it the “Motion Sickness House.” But in one of the Fun House rooms there were “the mirrors”. Not just any mirrors, these mirrors made you look either veeeeeery tall and skinny or as broad as you were tall, or disjointed – with your upper torso not quite meeting your lower torso. Greg, Robert, and Taylor would stand in front of those mirrors and laugh and laugh at those amusing, distorted versions of themselves.
Of course, as their mother, I knew that no mirror could adequately portray who they were as people. No mirror could tell with any degree of clarity who they were in their very centers….their core selves.
In the Gospel reading from Luke today, we English readers and speakers miss an important part of this parable. Jesus tells of the man who has so much grain that he doesn’t know what to do with it all. In an odd conversation with himself, the man debates the wisdom of building bigger barns. But there is literally something missing in our translation. The word that is used by Jesus in this parable is psyche, which is either translated as soul or life. But neither of those words is completely adequate. Psyche means our very selves…our essence….what makes us uniquely who we are. What makes me me and you you. Then, if we look back at this text, it takes on a slightly different – a slightly deeper meaning. Read with me from verse 15 on, if you will:
And Jesus said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s psyche/very self/essence 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 psyche/very self/essence, Psyche/Very Self/Essence, 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 pyche/very self/essence 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.”
Who are we…. our truest selves…deep down in our core, in our very essence who are we? This seems one of those dark night of the soul sorts of questions, or perhaps a question for the end of this life, but in truth it is a question asked of us many times each day in many different ways. Because every choice that we make and every word that we speak and every interaction we have is an unveiling of our truest selves. Every time. Who are we….who is our psyche, then is actually a question worth considering in light of the readings assigned in the lectionary today.
The writer of Ecclesiastes is clearly in need of some sort of career counseling. He has determined that his work, his vocation, is simply….as the word is in our translation…vanity. It means, that it is useless, pointless, without ultimate meaning….this work of his. He notes that in some cases the work of one person does not benefit that person at all, but it is left for the next person to reap the rewards.
Many, many people are self defined by the work they do. They are doctors, lawyers, engineers, dancers, dentists, social workers, artists. They are pastors. It can be hard, especially when your work is not a 9-5 clearly definable job, to separate professional and personal lives and the danger is that we risk becoming our vocation. For pastors and others who work in the church it is even trickier because our faith is all mixed up in our vocation. But no matter how much we love our vocations, our truest selves, our psyche, is not found in them. And this is good news for those who do not love their jobs. For those who work only for the paycheck or because it is what was expected of them or because they started working there and they cannot seem to find anything else. For some people the work that they do is not a way to make a living, but it is a way that slowly kills their sense of fulfillment and joy. And the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds them that their work is pointless in the end.
Whenever I read this lesson I am sorely tempted to leave it out of the day’s readings. I wonder how this book and how this passage ever made the cut for the canon of Scripture. The writer is telling us that our work is in vain, that it won’t ultimately matter. But here’s how I think this reading is useful for us….when we tie our truest selves, our psyche, to our work, then the work, while still fleeting, perhaps, from an eternal perspective, becomes significant in our lives on this earth.
I was reminded of that this week on two occasions. I read the story of Anthony Cymerys, an eighty two year old barber in Hartford Connecticut. The writer of Ecclesiastes or others like him might argue that cutting the hair of countless customers for years on end is just pointless…it grows back again and they may or may not appreciate the care with which you approach the task. But every Wednesday, Anthony takes his chair, his clippers, and a car battery to a local park. He powers the clippers with the battery and gives haircuts to the homeless folks in the park free of charge. Anthony’s truest self shines forth in that moment….compassion and mercy and respect are given along with a good haircut.
I also saw a photo on Facebook this week of my 8th grade science teacher, Mrs. Thompson, celebrating her 96th birthday. If there was ever a time that her job seemed pointless, I’d guess it was when she tried to teach our very unruly class the finer points of science. I remember that science class was the class period when we went to lunch, and every day before we went, we stood beside our desks and sang a blessing prayer. One day, one of my most difficult classmates was angry with Mrs. Thompson, and when we stood to sing and bowed our heads, he began to throw things at her from where he stood. His book and his pencils and his notebook flew to the front of the room. She dodged them without ever missing a beat of that prayer song. When we sang the Amen, rather than file out to lunch we stood motionless and quiet beside our desks. She called that angry classmate to the front of the room and he slunk forward with a chip on his shoulder the size of a boulder. And when he stood before her, she reached out with both of her arms and hugged him….hard. Tears coursed down his cheeks and we all knew that we had witnessed grace whether we could name it or not. Sara Thompson had connected who she was as her truest self, her psyche, to her work.
Too often we are like the rich man in Jesus’ story – we have so much stuff that we need bigger barns, or houses, or storage units. It’s hard to part with our stuff because we believe that it is representative of who we are. But our truest selves, according to Paul’s letter to the Colossians in our second reading, our truest selves are found in Christ. Paul’s list of unacceptable behaviors are based on what Paul has witnessed from the Colossian people. I wonder what he might say of us, of each of us and us as a society? What behaviors do not reflect the light of Christ shining from within us, illuminating our psyche? And at the end of this reading, when Paul notes that there is no longer Greek and jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythinan, slave and free…what categories of division might he do away with in our society? Would he write there is no longer male and female (he actually writes that elsewhere), gay or straight, rich or poor, Muslim or Christian, Republican or Democrat? The point he makes is clear…..division and separation are not a part of our truest selves, the psyche selves.
Our truest selves reflect the cleansing of our baptisms, the freedom that we have in Christ to live with mercy and grace shown toward others. To actively share Christ’s love in community in whatever ways we have the chance.
Our true selves are water washed and fed at a table that is prepared for all people. When we gather there we bring our truest selves and our most broken selves, and we receive in water and bread and wine the ultimate gifts of grace and mercy. This is the good news, the Gospel news, for this and every day. Thanks be to God. Amen.
0 Comments