Praising God in Tough Times (Part 2)

March 29, 2009

Psalm 8  &  Luke 12:15-21

This just in from our country’s best-known and most influential commentator on matters social, political and financial – Jay Leno.  He reminds us that,

AIG, received a hundred and seventy billion dollars in taxpayer money to save them from economic collapse.  What’d they do?  They turned around and paid $165 million in bonuses to the very same executives that got them into that mess.  Lots of people think that’s outrageous.  But (according to Leno) AIG officials say the bonuses are well-deserved.  After all, the company made an extra one hundred and seventy billion dollars last year.                                                                     (paraphrased from an online source)

It’s practically impossible not to compare the rich man in today’s parable with those AIG executives. Or their counterparts at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Circuit City … or some other company that didn’t get a government bailout.

In fact, archeologists in the Holy Land just discovered the name of the guy Jesus was talking about.  Turns out, this isn’t a parable at all, but a true story.  The guy’s name was … Bernie Madoff.

These are tough times.  We aren’t sure whether to laugh or cry.  Heaviness hangs in the air more than usual for us this Lent.  A gloomy cloud has settled in, and no one knows how long before it lifts.

We went to bed in 2007, feeling like that rich man in the parable.  We dreamed of “ample goods laid up for many years,” and made plans for more to come.  We assumed we could “eat, drink, and be merry” forever after.

Corporations published annual reports showing that their metaphorical barns were full and ripe for expansion.  Common folks like you and me enjoyed being along for the ride.

But in ‘08 and ‘09 we are waking up to the ominous words: “tonight your life is demanded of you.”

Home buyers from a few years ago are in over their heads, facing foreclosure.  Heads of household who once could afford a mortgage, now are laid off and scrambling to make ends meet, threatening a second wave of foreclosures.  Others got sick and needed hospitalizations, and lacked health insurance to stave off bankruptcy.  Retirees, as we all know, have seen their nest eggs “go from a 401(k) to a 201(k).”

John Buchanan, writing in The Christian Century, sums it up nicely when he says, “We had come to assume uninterrupted economic growth and the safety and stability of our investments …” (4/7/09, p. 3).

So, who’s to blame?  We all are.  We all are guilty of being unprepared when the old barns of our former security were torn down, and having nothing even remotely ready to replace them.

To mix the parable with a childhood euphemism – it’s as if the rich man discovered too late that his “barn door” was open, and that he was embarrassingly, and publicly … exposed.

The scary thing is, he’s not alone.  As the old “Pogo” comic strip said, “We’ve seen the enemy, and he is us.”

* *

It’s easy get cynical or despondent in tough times like this.  Or to voice outrage.  We want to vent.  And we want a scapegoat.

Indeed, the hate leveled against AIG executives and others has been stunning.  The urge to blame someone is ancient and real.  I used to think it saved us from blaming ourselves.  But now I wonder if it also helps in a “positive” way, so that we can avoid our fears.  It keeps our minds focused on other matters.

* *

The guy in the parable could have used a little focus on other matters.  Every sentence he speaks has the words “I” and “my.”  He can’t think outside himself.

It’s the Old Testament Psalm that paints a different (and I’d say better) example today.

Instead of looking inward, at himself, like the rich man does, the psalmist looks outward.  She attributes everything to God.  Instead of scapegoating or pouting about the way things are, she sings a majestic song of praise.

She praises God, not for anything we humans have made, or what we possess, but for all that God has given.  The cascade of verbs is astounding:

·         You have set your glory … [she says]

·         You have founded a bulwark …

·         [You have] silence[d] the enemy and the avenger …

·         You have established [the moon and the stars] …

·         You have made [mortal beings] little lower than God …

·         [You have] crowned them with glory and honor.

·         You have given them dominion …

·         You have put all things under their feet …

And it’s not just the verbs, but the subject of those verbs: “You … You … You …”

God … God … God!

The poet knows she has done nothing to form the world or to provide for herself.  She recognizes that all of life is a gift.  Big and small, near or far, wild or domestic, celetial or earthy – it all comes from a hand other than her own.

* *

What a different view of life that is!  How completely unorthodox, to look at things that way!  It frees her from anxiety about the present predicament, and opens up an opportunity for grateful living!

Fear is brushed aside.  We are pinched, yes, but not impoverished.  The “enemy and the avenger” will not prevail.  Nor will the wild things devour us, for God has given us “dominion” over them all – not to extort and exhaust the natural world till nothing is left, but to enjoy and enhance it, and live gratefully in it.

The poet sings that God is “mindful” of us … that God “cares for us.”

We are not alone.  We don’t live for ourselves or unto ourselves.

* *

I can only imagine the rich man’s shock in the parable at his midnight awakening.  But he never gets a last word to declare his feelings.  God interrupts his “I” and “my” monologue in the middle of the night, breaking into that interior conversation and intruding on the farmer’s autonomy.

Imagine God tiptoeing to the man’s bedside, the way God walked up to Adam and Eve in the Garden in the cool of the day, and suddenly shouting, “BOO!”

“You fool!” God says, “This very night your life is being demanded of you.”

* *

The rich man’s life is over.  That is probably literally and physically true for him.  But it is absolutely and undeniably true that his life of autonomous privilege is ending.  His mortal existence is over.

We’ve seen bumper stickers that say, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.”  But God lays another bumper sticker over that one, which says, “The things you’ve prepared, whose now will they be?” – which is another way of saying, “You can’t take it with you.”

It would be nice to imagine that this parable is about someone else – someone, somewhere far away and long ago.

But the uncomfortable truth is that our life, our way of life, is ending too.

The life we cultivated for ourselves, fertilized with massive debt, provided us with bursting barns for a while.  It gave the illusion that we can have it all, that we can live beyond our means, that we can use more than our share of earth’s resources, and that the only limitation is in the size of the barns we plan to build.

We have lived a life that is artificially inflated and falsely sustained.  But now the debt has come due.  And it comes due at such a cost that we aren’t sure it will be paid off even in our children’s lifetime, or grandchildren’s, or our great-grandchildren’s lifetime.

In the opening of his press conference Tuesday night, President Obama spoke almost biblically.  (And I don’t say that about many Presidents!)  He could have been referencing today’s Gospel reading when he said that,

… an economy built on reckless speculation, inflated home prices, and maxed-out credit cards does not create lasting wealth.  It creates the illusion of prosperity, and it’s endangering us all …

[He went on to say that we cannot continue] the very same policies that have led us to narrow prosperity and massive debt …

[But, he added,] we will recover from this recession … when each of us looks beyond our own short-term interest to the wider set of obligations we have towards each other …

He might have said, and he almost said, that the recession will end when we wake up to the fact that our former attempts at private enrichment are dead.  That’s what God told the rich man in the parable.  That old life is dead and gone.

But because God is God, our story doesn’t end there.  Where one life is dying, a new life is rising.  A resurrection is offered … if we will take it.  A new and better life is presented to us – a life that remembers God’s gifts and rejoices in them.  A life built not on self, but on selflessness.  A life consisting not only of barns, but blessings.

* *

If we have learned anything up to and into this season of Lent, it is that bigger barns do not and can not hold for us the meaning or purpose of life.

But we are also learning (painfully at times) that life does indeed have purpose.  We sometimes forget it.  But life – for richer or poorer – does have purpose.  It is “to glorify and enjoy God forever.”  We fulfill that purpose by daring – against all evidence to the contrary – to sing our praise …

To the glory of God.