We are meeting today in a beautifully decorated church to give thanks for the Lord’s generosity, to celebrate the season of harvest and to rejoice in our abundant blessings. The slight spanner in the works is that the Bible would not have been the Bible if it was a sweet lovely book that just told us about joys and blessings, if it never taught us about difficult things and never challenged our choices and behaviours. So I am afraid that, as well as reflecting on the goodness of everything we receive from the Lord, we have two rather big challenges before us today and I am going to dive straight in.
Our readings today, from Deuteronomy and the Gospel of Luke, are essentially warnings. They warn us against two particular things: against arrogance and greed. You and I may think this should not concern us very much. After all, we live our lives trying to be good people and we do not deliberately choose to be greedy or arrogant. Does this mean then that our readings are essentially preaching to the converted? What is the point of talking about arrogance and greed if this is not among the lessons we ought to learn?
But there is a twist. The readings do not speak of arrogance and greed as stand-alone vices or behaviours we choose to adopt and live by, but rather beliefs that creep upon us unnoticeably, arising out of very innocent things we all do. Let us look at the two texts separately, starting with Deuteronomy.
The Lord is bringing the Israelites into the promised land, where there would be plenty of everything: flowing streams and springs, valleys and hills, wheat and barley, olive trees and honey, iron and copper. But this is happening after a long period of slavery in Egypt followed by 40 years in the wilderness where Israel experienced such hunger, scarcity and deprivation that they were complaining to the Lord, saying they had had it better in captivity. They complain, having forgotten how they cried to the Lord to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians, how they begged Moses to lead them to the promised land, how they had bread and water provided in the wilderness when there was nothing. They complain because they have had it very hard and because they are certain that in the circumstances they were mere victims.
They are of course not wrong but there is more to it. At times of hardship, it is easy to adopt a mentality of victimhood, but once it is there, even when things change, it may not go away. It is easy to define oneself by one’s suffering, to give up any agency and to feel entitled to more than you have. I think this is what Deuteronomy 8 is concerned about. Once things change, it is then easy, as the reading says, to become proud and feel like you have achieved it all yourself or that it is somehow owed to you. And if good things are owed and you are still a victim, what is there to be grateful for? It is not so much about arrogance as a lifestyle choice but rather a gradually increasing entitlement dictated by interpretation of circumstances.
Gratitude is fragile, and victimhood and entitlement are among the things that stop us from being grateful. Once we have the feeling that we are owed by God or other people either because we have had it hard or because we are somehow better than others and deserve more, it is very difficult to abandon it. I am observing, with a degree of concern, that our society in the recent years has started to lean towards both of these behaviours and away from gratitude, and we are doing this not because we are evil somehow but because it is easy and emotionally rewarding. And that, as I have said, does not come from a sudden behavioural shift, not from a choice, but is a result of a slow societal change that none of us are immune from.
So how about greed then? Let us have a look at the reading from Luke. Verses 22-30 are very similar to ones appearing in Matthew, in the middle of the sermon on the mount, but here these verses about the Lord providing everything we need are preceded by the parable of a rich man. What then would have been a more spiritual message about God’s generosity, paired up like this, becomes a warning to all of us about how we view what we receive from the Lord. The challenge the parable throws at us is in fact quite similar to the challenge the Israelites faced in the wilderness: they were given manna to eat but they could not store it for the future – it just would not keep. In the same way, the rich man is warned against storing his crops. I find this whole passage personally difficult: I am that person who needs to be prepared, I have plans B, C and D. I have some money stashed away for a rainy day and some tinned food and water ‘just in case’. To me, and I am sure to many of you, being prepared for the future like this is just sensible. Well, I don’t think Jesus is saying it is not, I think he is concerned about two slightly different things: our desire to control the future and our mindset of scarcity. Living in a constant expectation that something is going to go wrong and we will have no one to rely on but ourselves and our own stocks does not exactly encourage trust. Worrying about tomorrow means you don’t believe in God’s ability to provide and don’t trust your neighbour to help either. There is a growing sense in which each is out to fend for themselves. We have for a long time lived in the environment where the more we have, the more we feel we need, the more we worry about not having anything tomorrow, the more we focus on the scarcity of resources, the more of them we want for ourselves and the cycle starts again. Just like with arrogance, the greed this creates is not a conscious lifestyle choice, it is a panicky and in fact understandable consequence of our mindset. This is what Jesus is warning against.
Can you see how arrogance and greed do in fact become our concern, how no one is immune against them, how a little bit of self-pity and some worrying pave the way to both? But why talk about them today?
I think the time of harvest and the season of late summer and autumn, when nature also offers its wild fruit without us putting any effort in at all, is a good time to be reminded of how little we can do ourselves and how much is given to us by God. The whole world is designed in such a way that living organisms can function using its resources and none of those resources are made by us: just look at the birds and the lilies of the field. Sure, we can build whole cities and create exciting technology but none of it is critical for our survival. The critical things – food and water, – exactly the things that God gave the Israelites in the wilderness, are not of our own making. And the further away we move from these basic things and live in taller buildings and use newer tablets and smartphones, complain about car parks (like I do), the government and the banking system and then start wars just because someone is bored even with these things and feels entitled to more, the more we forget our own smallness and dependence on God, the more we forget to be grateful, feeding instead our greed and our arrogance. Harvest is the time to remember that nothing in our lives is given to us because we deserve it, nothing is owed to us, and so nothing must be taken from others so we can cope with our own anxiety. Perhaps this is preaching to the converted after all, but I hope this at least helps us to see how we are in this together and it should be our collective prayer of gratitude to the Lord and our collective effort to turn away from all that separates us from Him and creates injustice. So let us not worry and learn to trust Him – and each other – a bit more. Amen.
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