Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” He replied to him, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Then he said to the crowd, “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.”
Then he told them a parable. “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
“He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’ And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’ But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’ Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God.”
Preparation / Centering
If done in a group setting, the prompts are read aloud by the leader; otherwise a silent meditation.
Adapted from Sacred Space: The Prayer Book 2025
Presence of God:
Jesus, As I come to you today, fill my heart, my whole being, with the wonder of your sacred presence. Help me to become more aware of your presence in my life, and more receptive to that presence. I desire to love you as you love me. May nothing ever separate me from you.
[1-2 minutes of silence]
Freedom:
Jesus, Grant me the grace to have freedom of spirit. Keep me from being bound by desires and actions that are not good for me or others. Cleanse my heart and soul that I may live joyously in your love.
[1-2 minutes of silence]
Consciousness:
Where am I with God? With others in my life? What am I grateful for? Is there something I am sorry for, words or actions that have hurt others, and which I now regret? I take a moment to ask forgiveness of God and of those whom I have hurt. God, I give you thanks for your constant love and care for me. Keep me always aware of your presence in my life.
[2-3 minutes of silence]
Opening Prayer
Lord, you are my Good Shepherd. Keep me from wanting what I do not need. Help me to be generous with my. Time and my worldy possession, for they are only here on loan. I am only here on loan.
Companions for the Journey
From a homily delivered at Memorial Church 2004:
My name is Nancy Greenfield, and I am a shoe-a-holic.
This is my sick little secret.
Well, not so secret—one of the priests I worked with a number of years ago used to refer to me as Imelda—as do my children. I just loooove shoes, and I keep them in little plastic boxes so they won’t get dirty. These boxes are organized in my closet by color. And AND when I had too many shoes to fit in those cute little boxes, I went out and got more boxes
Do see any parallels here between me and the guy in the parable?
I don’t think we Americans fully understand why Luke inserted this parable as an example of a bad person. To us, this farmer seems like a reasonable and prudent man. Enterprising. Successful. Almost American.
We are told to save for a rainy day, to be careful in monitoring our expenses so that we won’t run out of money.
We are told that when the “baby boomers” start to retire, there won’t be enough to go around, so we’d better make sure our IRA’s and our savings will provide a relatively comfortable retirement.
Whole magazines are devoted to the art of making our money grow and preserving our assets from the rapacious hands of the government.
We lionize those rugged individualists who have struck out on their own and created companies, amassing millions for themselves.
This is the American way.
Just what did this guy do that was so wrong?
First we need to understand that this parable is found only in Luke, and underscores one his great themes: that there is a definite link between discipleship and use of possessions. Luke is full of admonitions about the dangers of wealth. In this gospel passage, when Jesus is approached to adjudicate an intra-family dispute about inheritance, he refuses to do so but does use the opportunity to admonish the crowds listening to guard against greed. Greed is seen by the culture of Jesus’ day as the most dangerous of vices because it threatens family and village solidarity. That is not so say that riches are necessarily deplored—it is what we do with them that reveals the heart’s true allegiances (Reid: Parables for Preachers Year C, p.137).
The rich man’s soliloquy is a dead giveaway to his character, but because of our particular culture, we may not realize the problem. A modern day Western notion of individuality did not exist in the culture of Jesus’ world. Every decision was hammered out in a community of family and village; all sides of the issue were looked at and argued over. The process of decision –making was as important as the decision itself. Understanding this, it is shocking to look at the isolation of this man—his self-absorption. Where are his family, his tenants, his clients, his peers?
He asked Himself,
what shall I do,
I do not have space,
This is what I shall do,
I shall tear down and build,
I shall store,
I shall say to myself—eat drink and be merry
And now that he has this wealth, with whom will he share it? His greed seems to have kept him from meaningful relationships, so the first problem of his wealth is that it isolates him from everyone else.
And how did he get all this land? Did he wrest it from his tenants who borrowed money in bad years, money which they could not pay back?
Did he produce this abundance with the sweat of his own brow, or was it the toil of his hired hands that was responsible? Did he allow his employees who worked so hard to produce this harvest a piece of his success? Since he doesn’t speak of others sharing his wealth, the assumption is that he doesn’t share it. With anyone. So, obsession with money and possessions blinds him to the needs of others, especially the poor.
Has he forgotten that the land ultimately belongs to God, and he is merely its steward? Has he exhausted the land in order to wring every possible profit from it? His greed has kept him from a sense of perspective toward creation, and his place in it. Egotism and arrogance have taken over his soul. He forgets to thank the God of all gifts who created the conditions for his bountiful harvest. He acts as if his success was all his doing. This is idolatry. And the biggie—he forgets that only God controls life and death--—until it is too late.
What about us? Is it too late? Here’s a provocative statement I read this week: The one single, most reliable, most accurate practical measure of our spiritual lives, of how we stand with God, is our use of money. Money is necessary to live. We work for it, spend it, save it. We need it, want it, and spend most of our human energy, most of our time acquiring it. And yet, with money being such a hugely proportionate part of our lives, we still claim that it is neutral, private, and totally irrelevant to who we are as Christians. That doesn’t make sense. (Bausch, Sixty More Seasonal Homilies, pp177, 178) The gospel writers understood this—sixteen of the 38 parables in the gospels deal with money; one verse in ten discusses money. The whole bible offers 500 verses on prayer, fewer than 500 verses on faith, but more than 2000 verses on money and possessions (adapted from IBID)
It would seem that money, or particularly the obsession with it, can cause all sorts of spiritual dislocation.
This obsession, which we can call greed, is present when we have a drive to keep accumulating more and more when we already have what is “sufficient and reasonable.”
Let us acknowledge, however, that the term “sufficient and reasonable” is an ever- moving target.
Prodded by what Pope John Paul calls a ”civilization of consumption”, we begin to believe that we are what we own—and that the bigger house, or fancy car which once was a luxury now is a necessity to support our “lifestyle”.
Our spouses and our kids take a distant second or third place in our time and attention as we go about “building our careers” or “building for our future”.
And then we build ever-bigger houses where more rooms and more walls and more television sets keep us from interacting as a family. So one fallout from greediness is isolation and pride—just like the rich fool. A tycoon was once visited by the chairman of a local fund drive : ”Our records show that you have not yet contributed to the building of our local hospital”. “Oh,” says the tycoon, “ And do your records show that my mother died penniless, my brother is disabled, and my sister was abandoned and left to support four kids?” The chairman was ashamed: “Oh, I didn’t know that. I’m so sorry.” Well, responded the tycoon: “If I didn’t help my own family, why should I help you?”
The Jesus of the gospels is telling us that money is not something we earn for our private use, but a lucky gift for the use of public good. If you don’t believe me, sit down and read Luke from beginning to end. Someone once said that a good spiritual exercise was to look at one’s checkbook and credit card bills for the last three months. A quick perusal will give us a picture of how we spent our time and our money. How much of our time was spent in stores or restaurants? How much was spent with our families? What did we spend our money on? How do we as Catholics spend our money? How much of it do we earmark for the poor? for the church? In a recent year, American Catholics gave 1.3 percent of their income to their parish and to charities. In that same time span, Protestants gave 2.4 percent and Jews 3.8 percent. (Bausch, 60 More Seasonal Homilies, p179)
(Just a statistic—but interesting).
Sadly, the greedy increase the needy. (Burghardt: Let Justice Roll Down Like Water, p106)
90% of the world’s goods are consumed by 10% of the world’s population.
Food stamps now sustain one American in 10—a lot of them the elderly who have to choose between food and medicine. And some of this is going to be ending in the next few years
The poverty rate for children in our country is one in five. One in five!
In the wealthiest country in the world, 14.6 million children grow up poor, hungry, ill-housed.
The world’s sixth largest economy is California, and it has a state school system that is near the bottom of the 50 states.
It is helpful to remember that money used for others—for feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the cold and the naked—are precisely those works of mercy that, according to Jesus, form the basis –the only basis-- of our judgment when we die. (Bausch 179)
How has our own version of greed kept us spending so much of our lives acquiring, working. making money, building our egos through possessions that we no longer have time to spend with those we love—our families and our friends? Are we generous with our time and money? Are we too busy building for a better life down the road that we miss life itself as it unfolds before our eyes?
Anna Quindlen had some advice for college graduates several years ago which I have excerpted or adapted from her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life:
So here's what I wanted to tell you today:
Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast?
Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the Golden Gate Bridge, a life in which you stop and watch the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.
It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of the azaleas, or the color of our kids' eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live.
Get a life in which you stop to consider the lilies of the field—a homily for another day
Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you.
And remember that love is not leisure; it is work. Each time you think of your accomplishments, your successes, remember that you are still a student, still learning how to best treasure your connection to others. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Kiss your dad. Hug your nieces and nephews.
Get a life in which you are generous.
Care so deeply about life’s goodness that you want to spread it around. Take money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister.
All of us want to do well.
But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.
* Oh, as to those shoes? Bad knees required that I stop wearing many of them. A gave a third of them away this week, but I kept the boxes……
Weekly Memorization
Taken from the gospel for today’s session…
Thus will it be for the one who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich in what matters to God.
Living the Good News
What action can you take in the next week as a response to today’s reading and discussion?
Keep a private journal of your prayer/actions responses this week. Feel free to use the personal reflection questions or the meditations which follow:
Reflection Questions
Have I ever had a family squabble about money?
What are my particular money issues?
Do I come from a mentality of scarcity”
Do I ever fear that I will not have enough, and does this worry consume a lot of my thoughts?
How much is enough?
What does our culture tell us about how much is enough?
How has the internet influenced our cultural attitudes about shopping and spending on stuff?
Is money a problem only for the rich?
What sorts of anxieties are caused by money issues?
Warren Buffet once said that what causes unhappiness in contemporary times is not really greed, it is envy.
How does our culture foster envy and competitiveness?
Does my family thrive on envy?
Greed, the excessive desire for more wealth, had shaped our economic landscape. Is this a problem for me?
What feeds my greed?
How has my attitude toward money and possessions been shaped by my childhood?
How has my attitude toward money and possessions changed as my circumstances have changed?
Is wealth itself a problem?
What was the rich man’s basic problem about his riches?
What is mine?
Is our culture fascinated by wealth?
How can I work to overcome this?
How does wealth give someone a sense of empowerment and control?
How can this sense of empowerment and control be a false one?
How does wealth give someone a sense of value?
How does wealth give someone a false sense of value?
In what ways can money make someone fearful?
In what ways can money isolate someone?
In what ways can money help the world?
Meditations
A Meditation in the Franciscan Style:
(source unknown)
Here’s the problem: it’s too easy for you and me to read this parable and think, Oh, that doesn’t apply to me, because I’m not rich.
Let me give you some statistics on wealth and poverty in the world today. If you make 25,000 dollars a year, you are in the top ten per cent of the world’s most wealthy. If you own a house or a car, if you never have to worry where the next meal is coming from, if you have clean water, you’re in the top ten per cent. Did you know that there are over one billion people in the world who live on less than one dollar a day, and two billion who live on less than two dollars a day? Over 20,000 children die every day of starvation or preventable disease. If you’re not worried about your kids starving to death and you’re able to get them basic medical care, you are rich according to the standards of today.
So this does apply to us, and this is not an isolated saying of Jesus. Jesus actually says a lot about wealth, a lot about riches. This is found over and over again, especially in the Gospel of Luke.
So, the challenge for each of us is to determine what in our lives is truly necessary, what is comfortable, and what is downright excessive. Where can I loosen my grip on stuff, and tighten my grip on compassion and service?
A Meditation in the Dominican Style/Asking Questions:
I reflect on the dangers of wealth, how it can insulate us from the cares of this world, but also from caring about others. It can make us arrogant, callous, and cruel. It can make us anxious, selfish and greedy. No one who has money never has enough (Eccelsiastes). It can lead us to believe that we live by a different set of rules than the hoi polloi around us. It can lead us to put our happiness in things we acquire; getting and spending we lay waste our lives. How does the desire for wealth square with Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom?
(from Songs of Life: Psalm Meditations from the Catholic Community at Stanford p.94, by Anne Greenfield)
Meditation in the Auagustinian Style/Relationship:
I read Psalm 49: “In their riches, people lack wisdom; they are like beasts that are destroyed.” Do any of the verses in this psalm possibly refer to me? Rewrite this psalm in the first person and meditate on what needs to change in your life.
Literary Reflection:
Did you know there’s a character in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress named Little Faith? Little Faith was from the town of Sincere, and on his journey to the Celestial City he took a nap in a place called Dead Man’s Lane, which was the haunt of thieves and murderers. While napping there he was robbed by three thieves whose names were Faintheart, Mistrust, and Guilt. It was only through a man named Great Grace that Little Faith was rescued. Great Grace came and he chased the thieves away, the robbers who had stolen Little Faith’s spending money. They’d taken his money, but they didn’t get his most valuable jewels or his certificate for entering through the Celestial gate. But Little Faith was so discouraged by his losses that he failed to draw comfort from his most valuable assets.
Are you like Little Faith? Are you more anxious about financial needs than you are grateful for spiritual blessings? Do losses of temporal wealth so distress you that you’re unable to draw comfort from the Scriptures’ assurances of God’s love and care and faithfulness? Have faintheartedness and mistrust or unbelief or guilt robbed you of peace of mind? If so, then Jesus’ exhortations for you, little faith. He’s saying, don’t fret. Don’t be anxious. Your Father knows what you need; he cares for you; he will take care of you.
(By Brian Hedges, the lead pastor of Redeemer Church in Niles, Michigan)
Poetic Reflection:
How does this poem by Donald Justice reflect the theme of this gospel?
Incident in a Rose Garden (2)
The gardener came running,
An old man, out of breath.
Fear had given him legs.
Sir, I encountered Death
Just now among our roses.
Thin as a scythe he stood there.
I knew him by his pictures.
He had his black coat on,
Black gloves, a broad black hat.
I think he would have spoken,
Seeing his mouth stood open.
Big it was, with white teeth.
As soon as he beckoned, I ran.
I ran until I found you.
Sir, I am quitting my job.
I want to see my sons
Once more before I die.
I want to see California.
We shook hands; he was off.
And there stood Death in the garden,
Dressed like a Spanish waiter.
He had the air of someone
Who, because he likes arriving
At all appointments early,
Learns to think himself patient.
I watched him pinch one bloom off
And hold it to his nose–
A connoisseur of roses–
One bloom and then another.
They strewed the earth around him.
Sir, you must be that stranger
Who threatened my gardener.
This is my property, sir.
I welcome only friends here.
Death grinned, and his eyes lit up
With the pale glow of those lanterns
That workmen carry sometimes
To light their way through the dusk.
Now with great care he slid
The glove from his right hand
And held that out in greeting,
A little cage of bone.
Sir, I knew your father,
And we were friends at the end.
As for your gardener,
I did not threaten him.
Old men mistake my gestures.
I only meant to ask him
To show me to his master.
I take it you are he?
Closing Prayer
Jesus, help us to keep our priorities straight. Help us keep our eyes focused on you and on the needs of the kingdom, which are far beyond our own. Teach us to be content with the things we have, especially our relationship with you and our relationships with our friends and family. Even in times of financial distress or uncertainty, let us know that you will always be there for us, that you will not leave us to fend for ourselves alone. Give us gratitude for the good things we have and give us the wisdom not to seek that which is in excess or that which is ultimately not good for us. Teach us to be generous.
