I can sympathize with the characters in these parables Jesus tells us today. Losing things is something I have a knack for doing. Usually it’s pretty trivial stuff, though. I lost my earbuds for my phone some time ago—not sure where they went. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of losing a pair of scissors or nail clippers, and the only way to find them is to buy a new pair. I’ve managed to misplace more pairs of sunglasses than I’d care to count. But there was one time when I lost something really, really important: my car keys.
It was last month when Annie and I were in Milwaukee for the Churchwide Assembly. We drove, but we had no plans (or time, really) to drive anywhere during the week. So, knowing how prone I am to losing things, I put the keys on the nightstand and swore to leave them there so we’d know where they were when we got ready to go at the end of the week. Only, when I was packing up the last day, the keys were nowhere to be found.
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There is a road, a pretty famous road at least regionally, going through the hills of the Great Smoky Mountains in western North Carolina, called “the road to nowhere.” It was meant to replace NC Highway 288 that was flooded when the Fontana Lake Dam was built, but shortly after it got started it hit a few snags. First, WWII was going on. Then, the rock under a significant part of the route was found to be unstable and rerouting it would lead to all kinds of cost overruns. Then, to top it all off, funds were never appropriated to finish it.
So now there’s a road that goes a few miles before abruptly ending in the middle of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Someone probably should’ve looked at what Jesus said about counting the costs before they got to work on that road to nowhere. I might be in a weird age gap here, but does anyone remember MySpace? Before Facebook, MySpace was the social media for middle and high schoolers. But among its many features, one enduring thing that it had was your friends list. And the friends list was important, very important, to the teens who used it, because your friends were ranked, and you could change that ranking any time you wanted.
Let me tell you there was a lot of drama around the MySpace friend ranking. Inexplicably being bumped down someone’s list could easily lead to anxiety about what went wrong in your friendship. Being bumped up was a source of joy and pride. It’s a little weird how much hung on something as simple as a list on a website. It was a lot like the seating arrangement Jesus spoke about in the gospel today. In one of my classes back in seminary, the professor put on a video for us to watch. It was from a psychology experiment. There were five people in a room, and they were passing a ball back and forth. We, the class, were supposed to count how many times the ball was passed in the course of the video. So the professor turned on the video, we all watched and counted, and then when the video ended he turned off the T.V. and asked “raise your hand if you saw the man in the gorilla suit.”
Y’all, I definitely didn’t see a man in a gorilla suit in that video. But when we re-watched the clip—now that I knew he would be there—there was totally a guy in a gorilla suit that walked literally right in between the five people tossing the ball back and forth. It was totally nuts that I didn’t even see him the first time we watched it. Turns out, this is a phenomenon that happens all the time. When we need to focus on one thing—like counting how many times a ball is passed—other things will fade into the background to the point that our brains literally erase them from our awareness. It’s why people who get into car accidents changing lanes claim they didn’t see the car—since the other car was going about the same speed, their brain perceived it as being stationary and therefore not necessary to notice. We actually see the world differently based on what we prioritize noticing. We use the vocabulary of being “blessed” when things go well in our lives. When we have more than enough food on the table. When we land that new job we’ve been wanting. When the crops come in despite a difficult spring. When something good happens regarding our health. Having an abundance is a good thing. It’s a reminder of the goodness of God, and using the vocabulary of “blessed” to describe these good things really helps us reorient toward God in that goodness.
In fact, abundance shows up again and again as a way to describe God’s goodness throughout the Bible. Isaiah’s vision of the world when God makes all things new is pictured as a feast: fine wines, rich food, abundant bread for everyone. Jesus promises us that God will provide abundantly for all of our needs. Having a lot, having an abundance, is part of God’s good will for our lives. So why is the rich man, who has enough abundance to need bigger barns, called a fool? Let’s take a look at this parable. Audio is not available this week due to outdoor worship on Sunday. I had a friend in seminary who attended the Episcopal Church. And part of being in the Episcopal Church involves using the Book of Common Prayer, which is this compendium of prayers and services that serve as the basis of every prayer in the Episcopal Church. He joked about how in their church, no one had to check the page number for a prayer, because they just had to let the book fall open and the well-worn spine would open it right to the page it needed to be.
We might not have a Book of Common Prayer in the Lutheran church, but we do have a set of prayers we use regularly. In fact, we’ve got a lot of prayers that we use outside of church that I’m sure we could all say from memory—whether the bedtime prayer of “now I lay me down to sleep,” or the mealtime “come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” or maybe we even know Luther’s table blessing “bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts.” Memorized prayers are a big part of our collective prayer life as Christians. The way each culture handles greetings is interesting. In Chinese, the way you say “hello” actually means “are you well?” In German the greeting basically means “I wish you a good day!” But in lots of languages, the word used to greet others is “peace.” It’s true in Hawaiian—“aloha”—it’s true in Hindi—“Namaste”—and it’s true in Hebrew—“shalom.” Isn’t it interesting how, across the globe, there’s this common theme that we greet one another with peace?
I think at least part of that is because we really do hope that our words of peace become peace when we say it. We want there to be peace between nations, since war is such a terrible thing. And we wish for peace in our communities, so that everyone can live in safety. And we wish for peace in our families, where we can still come together and love one another. But we also should talk about what we mean when we say “peace.” When I say “peace,” what do you think of? |
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