Proper 13, Year C – August 3, 2025
In a video interview shortly before he died, one of my favorite authors, Reynolds Price, offered an important piece of life advice he once received from a friend. Neville Coggehill received an urgent message from England informing him his mother had taken sick and was not expected to live very long. Neville travelled home as quickly as he could. But by the time he arrived, his mother had lapsed into unconsciousness. He sat there with her for several hours. Finally, after a time, he had to get up and leave. He kissed her on the forehead, then turned to go. As he walked to the door, he heard a sound behind him. He turned, and his mother was sitting up, looking at him. She said quietly, “Neville, never forget, I only regret my economies.” They were Lady Coggehill’s last words.
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…” But God said to him, “You Fool.”
There is an important detail in today’s Gospel. I wonder if you caught it. Anyone?
The rich man is talking to himself. He asks himself what he should do. Then, he speaks to his own soul, and tells his own soul what to do.
As Western type folks who place a high value upon individuality, individual privacy, individual space, this wealthy man talking to himself doesn’t seem terribly strange to us. Drive in a little traffic sometime and notice how many people talk to themselves alone in their cars. If you ever encountered me on the highway somewhere driving my truck, or if you encounter me on my morning walks sometime, you might just hear me talking to myself. Is it just me? Do you recognize yourself perhaps? It’s not all that odd to us. Not exactly abnormal.
But in the world of the ancient middle east, this is the strangest part of the story. Jesus’ first listeners would have noticed right away.
Middle Eastern culture is a very gregarious, very extroverted, very talkative culture. Men and women, separately mind you, sit on benches, and in stores, in public squares, and most importantly, coffee shops, for hours, talking and talking and talking. The ancient kings and judges would never make decisions in private “chambers” after private reflection, as ours do. Decisions were made in public, sitting at the city gate, in forums, after debate and discussion and argument. The world of Jesus was a world in which the notion of “privacy” simply did not exist. Everything was done publicly, communally, visibly, audibly. The worst possible imaginable thing in the world of the Bible was to be alone. Talking to yourself.
So, what we don’t see right off in this story is what a TRAGIC picture Jesus is painting. First, we hear about two brothers fighting over the family property. Their relationship is so far gone that the one brother is demanding the unthinkable – dividing the family patrimony. This same unthinkable action is what drives the more familiar story of two brothers, the story of the Prodigal Son just a few verses away in Luke’s Gospel.
Jesus refuses to pick a side in this fight, and instead tells a story about a man who has accumulated vast wealth, but no community. As wealthy as he is, the man has no one to talk to but himself. He has great piles of stuff, but he appears to have no friends, no family, no one to eat drink and be merry with, no one with whom his soul can talk. And when God calls him a fool, the point is simple. As much stuff as this man has, he is utterly destitute in the things that truly matter. He is alone, counting his stuff, muttering to himself.
The answer Jesus is giving to the brothers fighting over the family inheritance is clear. Boys, he says, you better forget about that property and pay attention to the priceless relationship you share, the bond of brotherhood. Don’t be that man; don’t lose yourself a family over obsession with who gets what.
Of course, this is where the story begins to hit home with us, where it becomes uncomfortably familiar. Jesus is not here condemning the principled pursuit of wealth. Jesus is not commanding you not to work hard, or save for your kids’ education or your own retirement. Nothing wrong at all with any of that. But his warning is clear: Be on your guard against all kinds of greed. The unbridled pursuit of wealth, or the unbridled pursuit of almost anything: fame, power, status, whatever, above all else, particularly at the expense of God, family and friends, one’s wider community and humanity, is a fool’s errand. Greed is tricky. Greed can fool us into all kinds of self-justifications. The unbridled pursuit of virtually anything can leave us very alone. And very poor in the things that, on the day of our death, will truly matter.
At the moment you were born you were as rich as you ever needed to be. If you ate a meal this morning, and woke up with a roof over your head, you are privileged to be among the wealthiest humans in all history. Are you properly overwhelmed with an embarrassed gratitude for that?
I bet not, because you and I are also burdened to live in a culture that constantly tells us we can NEVER have enough. Not enough to be safe. Not enough to be happy. Not enough to be loved or successful. A culture that simultaneously seduces and frightens us into a life obsessed with economies; that sets us one against another, and tribe against tribe, and nation against nation because what you have is what I want and don’t have, and vice-versa.
And it should be obvious to all of us that these economies and accumulations on the personal scale, magnified, multiplied and intensified on the macrosocial scale, lie at the root of our worst social dysfunctions. It’s not rocket science, or even Economics 101. It is basic biblical wisdom, ratified over and over again for 3000 plus years. Even old King Solomon knew this as he sat on his couch near the end of life, looking around at the world, and at all the stuff he had managed to accumulate in his illustrious royal career, and muttered to himself: it’s all vanity, and a chasing after wind (which, in gutter Hebrew, as in gutter English, can mean also chasing after a fart).
For Solomon, for the two brothers and the rich man in today’s gospel, for Lady Coggehill, for all of us, at the end of our lives it will be our economies, they ways we acquired, hoarded and held back, that will comprise our foolish regrets, our vanities and our chasing after gas.
The Gospel today offers to us God’s firm but gentle divine repudiation of these excessive economies and accumulations. Instead, Jesus invites us, embodies for us, the way to be rich in the same way he was rich: to stretch wide our arms of love as he did on the cross, and to gather all the world in a loving embrace. We are children of God, full heirs of the Kingdom. If we can grab hold to that claim, if we can begin to form our lives around that claim, our oppressive isolating anxieties and economies might begin to ease. Some of the terrible pressure we put upon ourselves and upon others might begin to dissipate, and we can enjoy what is with us right now, and more importantly WHO is with us right now, in this, the only moment we are guaranteed to enjoy.
The Rev. Keith Owen
The Chapel of St. James the Fisherman, Wellfleet, MA