9th Sunday after Pentecost

One of John Fowles' novels is entitled, The Collector. It's about a man who collects butterflies. The man catches butterflies, puts them into a bottle, corks up the bottle, and suffocates them. Then, when the butterflies are dead, he takes them out, spreads their wings, and pins them onto boards to view them from time to time, to possess them.

The story begins with the man's dreaming of collecting something bigger than butterflies. He wins a bundle of money in a lottery, and with his new-found wealth as his security, the man quits his job. He buys a house in a remote area, a house with a solid basement room. And he renovates the house and the basement, making the basement room a secure place for his new collection, his new prize.

When the room is ready, he goes out and kidnaps a young woman, a particular and lovely young woman named Miranda, who is a fine specimen that he has long watched and admired and desired. He takes the young woman to his basement room and locks her in. He plans to keep her. He doesn't plan to rape her or rob her or murder her or hold her for ransom. He just plans to keep her in this basement bottle of his, to have her, to watch her, to possess her.

By this time in the story, of course, one begins to realize that the man is really quite mad. And lonely. He is a man with no friends, with no one to love and no one who loves him, a man who has utterly failed at living, one who does not know how to live because he does not know how to love. And in his despair, he thinks he can find life and love by collecting a person the way he has collected butterflies, by collecting a person to possess and observe the way he possesses and observes butterflies.

It fails, of course. The girl dies, suffocated in his bottle, the life wrung out of her. And the story ends with the man making plans for the capture of another specimen.

It's a sad story, a story right out of the Bible because it's a story right out of life, and you just want to say to the man with the preacher in Ecclesiastes and with Jesus, "You fool, be on your guard against greed of every kind, for even when someone has more than enough, his possessions do not give him life. All the collecting in the world cannot provide you with what you seek."

"It's like this," says Jesus. "There once was a very rich man who had a huge harvest one year. And the man thought to himself, 'What should I do with all this? I don't have enough room in my barn to keep all the grain I've harvested.' And then the man said to himself, 'I know what I'll do. I will pull down my barns and build bigger barns, and then I'll have much more room to store all my property and goods in. I will say to myself, "Self, all is well. You have collected enough to make life secure for years to come, so take things easy. Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself."'

"But God said to him, 'You fool, this very night you must surrender your life, and the money you have made, and all this stuff you have collected, what will happen to it now?' 'So it is,' says Jesus, 'with someone who piles up treasure for himself but is not rich towards God. For a person's life is not made secure by what he owns, even when he has more than he needs.'"

It's a story as old as sin and as contemporary as today. The preacher in Ecclesiastes told it long, long ago, even before Jesus and John Fowles. "Lord," he said, "look at all I have! I have been king of all the land. I have amassed more silver and gold than I could ever spend. I have collected men and women of every kind, servants and slaves for every purpose and pleasure. I have pursued every human pleasure, even the pleasure of good hard work, which helped me get all this. And what has it got me in the end? Only this -- that soon I will die and have to give it all up to some fool who didn't even work for it and who doesn't deserve it.

"Why have I done all this? Why have I striven so hard to collect all this wealth and power and all these people and all this position and status? It is all vanity, meaningless, a mere puff of wind, here one moment, gone the next. It provides no lasting life, no security in the end, no salvation. It's mere vanity, as dead and fleeting as a butterfly in a corked bottle!"

"The doctors say I will be able to resume a normal active life," the man told a priest friend of mine who was visiting him. The man was 42 years old, one of the ablest big-city lawyers in town, and he had just come home after hospitalization for a heart attack. "The doctors say I'll be able to go back to the way I used to live. But I'm not going to do that. It's as Dr. Johnson said to Boswell he continued, 'There's nothing like the prospect of hanging to focus a man's thoughts.' It was a terrifying experience. I've stood before death, and I've received life back as a gift. I don't know just how I'll live out that gift, but I do know my life will never be the same."

Perhaps our Scripture readings today are God's way of calling us to focus our vision of life before we end up in the hospital at one o'clock some morning.

Both Jesus and the preacher in Ecclesiastes confront us with who we are, or at least who we often are, fools. Fools who chase the wind rather than life. Fools because, in our sin, in our self-centeredness, in our insecurity about ourselves as children of God, we are so often unable to keep straight what are the ends of life and what are mere means to life. That, I think, is what these stories are about.

Jesus and the preacher in Ecclesiastes are not saying that things are bad. They are not saying that harvests and wealth and money are bad. They are not saying that pleasure is bad. What they say to me is that, in the end, in the emergency room at one o'clock in the morning, none of these things can save, and that if we make these things, or any other thing, the end or purpose of our lives, then we can count on it that they will fail us, because they are mere vanity, puffs of wind. There is no security in them, no more life than in a butterfly in a corked bottle.

The problem for the collector was not his desire for a woman's love or companionship. His problem was that, in his sickness, he did not understand that love and companionship are gifts which must be given, not merely taken and possessed.

The problem for the man in Jesus' parable was not his desire to earn a living. His problem was that, in his sickness, he did not see that grain is a gift because life itself, in all its richness, is gift, a gift offered by the Giver of all gifts, and by no other.

Even if one has more than he needs, no material thing can give life, no matter how many of them he has. Clothes or cars or CDs cannot do it. Neither can furniture or boats or machines or books or prestige or power or popularity. Neither can barns or money or anything else under the sun.

"So be on your guard against all kinds of greed," Jesus warns. This is interesting wording. One usually thinks of greed in terms of wealth. And on the surface that seems to be the point of Jesus' story. No matter how many barns we have, they cannot give life, or save.

But what would "all kinds of greed" be? Perhaps it's a way of suggesting that it's not just material things that deceive us.

One of the seven deadly sins, greed kills. It kills because it is an extreme desire to have, to have, to have. Like gluttony, another of the seven sins that are deadly, greed is a great maw, a great stomach that receives all that comes its way but that does not release anything in exchange. Nothing goes out. It stops the cycle of exchange, the inhalation and exhalation of spirit upon which all that lives depends.

Plants produce oxygen needed by animals. Animals produce carbon dioxide needed by plants. If either plants or animals were to decide to receive and to hoard and withhold, to receive but to give nothing back, the life of both would be threatened. Greed threatens the free flow of exchange that is the dynamic of existence, the dynamic of life and creation.

The rich man's problem is not with his wealth. His problem is with his barns, his bottles. His problem is with his hoarding, with his stockpiling, with his need to possess and not release. And it is deadly.

But there are all kinds of things, aren't there, that we can choose to hoard and not let go of. Possessions, surely. Wealth, surely. How many coins are hoarded for golden years in the sun that never come?

But what about time or talent? What about affection? What about knowledge? All these, too, can be stockpiled and not used, threatening the free flow of shared exchange that is the dynamic of existence, threatening the very power of life and creation. Just as grain stockpiled in a barn cannot feed people, so affection felt, but held rather than expressed and shared, cannot nourish the spirits of others, who then might find that place in themselves from which to love. Knowledge accumulated, but stockpiled rather than expressed and shared, cannot nourish the minds of others, who then might find that place in themselves from which to grow. Wisdom gained, but kept to one's self rather than expressed and shared, cannot nourish the hearts of others, who then might find that place in themselves from which to serve.

Resentment, if held and not let go of, sours into bitterness. Anger, envy, pride -- some more of the seven sins that are deadly -- if stockpiled and not let go of, can sour into spiritual death just as surely as food ingested without being digested and used and voided can result in physical death.

All of them are deadly for the same reason, for the reason that all sin is deadly. Every sin is some form of that preoccupation with self which creates the one-way traffic of spiritual black holes, a spiritual gravity that would suck everything in but let nothing out.

And there is no way out of it. No way, that is, of our own devising.

Arthur Schopenhauer said that "everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." That's a good definition of sin, a good description of death. Sin limits the world to the limits of my own vision, my own desires, my own need. Sin limits the world to my vision of my own barns, my own bottle. Sin limits life to my vision of myself.

We treat God as though he exists to meet our needs, and in doing so we subtlely reverse Creation. The God we would seek, the God of life, becomes a god we create, a god of death. And the gods we create are what the Bible calls idols. They are the gods that fail us. That's what the Book of Ecclesiastes is about, the failure of the idol gods of our own making. "I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. Money, power, popularity, pleasure, even religion: they mean nothing there in the emergency room at one o'clock in the morning.

Vanity, too, a mere striving after wind, meaninglessness, is the building of more barns, Jesus warns us. It is the vanity of living out a vision of life centered on ourselves, the creation of an idol god that we possess and that we think will save us, rather than reliance on the God of life for our daily bread, on bread, that is, that is sufficient for our daily needs.

But the limits of my vision are not the limits of the world. The God of life will not be possessed. God cares for my needs and provides for them, but God does not exist to meet my needs. The center of the universe is not us, but some point outside ourselves called God. And when we remember that, we recall how Jesus always points beyond himself to the Father, beyond himself to the mystery we call God, to the mystery of the Cross and the empty tomb, to the mystery of life freely offered, and of life freely given.

St. Paul was right. It is all grace. A vision of life that is more than a puff of wind is available. A vision of life lived not in vain, but in kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, a vision of life lived in compassion and love is near at hand.

It is there, as Paul says, on that hill outside Jerusalem, with its terrible Cross and its empty tomb two days later. It is there, at the Cross and the empty tomb, that God offers us a place to stand where we can find a vision of life that is not limited by our own vision. It is there that we can experience not only the terror of death, the terror of the emergency room at one o'clock in the morning, but also the joy and peace of the realization that our lives have been given back to us. And the realization that we do not have to go back to the way we used to live.

That, it seems to me, is the point of it all. Barns or no barns, it is all gift, grace. Not only after the Cross, but from eternity. Not only after the emergency room, but from before birth and forever.

We are not the center of the universe. God is. And that vision can change us and give us life.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.