Payday Someday

Lectionary Reflections for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (C)

By Louie Crew

Readings for Pentecost 9, Proper 13, Year C, August 1, 2004

Hosea 11:1-11 or Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
Psalm 107:1-9, 43 or Psalm 49:1-11
Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21

It’s dangerous to relegate the social justice concerns so powerfully addressed in this Sunday’s readings to the middle of summer. I wish we could use this gospel as the main one for Christmas or Easter when we have our largest crowds, and save the sweeter news of Christmas and Easter for now, as a better draw.

More need to hear and heed what Jesus tells us in this gospel story from Luke. Our culture measures success by our “net worth,” by our “bottom line,” by how much we own, by how much we "have in the bank.” But what does it profit us to gain the whole world and lose our soul?

"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; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life 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." (Luke 12:18-21)

When I was in the third or fourth grade in a small town in Alabama, one Friday night my father handed me his watch with a second hand, turned out the lights, and told me to time how long it would take our neighbors the Whites to shut and lock every window in their house. Dad routinely supplemented my school work with such assignments. The Whites’ house was no more than thirty feet away. We had often watched their nightly ritual; they always began in their dining room, opposite our den, and made their way all around their house until they reached their living room, which we could observe from our same perch.

When I had timed them, Dad said, “Good. Tomorrow morning, I want you to visit Mrs. White. Take along a note pad, and when she leaves to fetch Coca-Colas and cookies, write down the names of every item of worth that you see that could easily be poked into a sack and taken away. Then tomorrow afternoon I want you to shop in town to price how much it would cost to replace all of those items. Then using the minimum wage (then only 25 cents an hour) I want you to calculate the value of the time that the Whites will spend closing and locking and then opening and unlocking all their windows over a 40-year adulthood. Use this arithmetic to tell me whether the Whites have enough portable property to be worth protection from what one or two thieves might hope to steal.

Like the Whites, many of us spend far more time guarding and protecting our belongings than our belongings would be worth should anyone want to steal them.

Small wonder that were we to find ourselves suddenly without any cash or credit cards and isolated in a place where we knew absolutely no one, we would far more likely be given food and a place to sleep by strangers who were poor than by strangers concerned about what we might steal.

Over what specific economic injustices is God calling Episcopalians to prophesy "Jedgment! Jedgment!"?

I vividly remember a wizened black woman who foraged for scraps in the garbage cans of our alley, muttering (for nobody in particular, we thought), “Jedgment! Jedgment!” Now I see that she was muttering that for us. She saw us watching. She was no fool. That nameless prophet continues to minister to me sixty years later.

Payday someday!

I do not usually like thrillers but found one scene delightful in Day After Tomorrow, a film in which a new ice age descends on North America. In a matter of a few days, New York City has been hit with a tidal wave and a huge ship edges its way down Fifth Avenue past the Public Library in which some of the main characters are barricaded. As the entire country is being wiped out, some try to flee to warmer Mexico, but are stopped at the border. Thousands become wet-backs swimming the Rio Grande, while Mexican guards shoot into the crowded water. At one point the vexed U. S. president brokers passage for U.S. citizens by offering to cancel Mexico’s international debt.

Mexicans are quite numerous in New Jersey's Oranges (a group of four urban towns where I live), and while watching that film at a local cinema I have never heard laughter more vigorous or sustained.

Rich Toward God

Justice is not optional for Christians. Justice is essential. Jesus tells us that at Judgment Day we will be judged not by how nice we are to those like ourselves, but by how generous we are to those we deem to be the least among us. If we want to see Jesus, we have to see him in them, to serve him in them.

Justice is not separate from spirituality. Justice is spirituality. Spirituality is not sentimentality, but hard work. Unlike material wealth, spirituality cannot be hoarded. We cannot freeze-dry manna. God supplies it in ample quantity, but only one day at a time.

Louie Crew is a writer and a well-known collector and disseminator of statistics and little-known facts about the Anglican Communion, which may be found on his website. He is a contributing editor to The Witness and publishes a regular column on "A Globe of Witnesses." Louie may be reached by email at lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu.