The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
August 5, 2007

Proper 13 – C
Ecclesiastes 1:12-14, 2:8-232
Colossians 3:5-17
Luke 12:13-21

In his novel The Collector, John Fowles tells the story of 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 man wins a bundle of money in the lottery, and he begins to dream of bigger game. He quits his job and buys a house in a remote area of England, a house with a basement room he thinks will be just right for his new collection, his new prize.

Then he kidnaps a young woman, a particular and lovely young woman named Miranda, who is a fine specimen that he has long watched and desired. He takes Miranda to his basement and locks her in. He plans to keep her. He doesn’t plan to rape her or murder her or hold her for ransom. He just plans to keep her in his basement, to have her, to observe her, to possess her.

By this time in the story, of course, the reader begins to realize that the man is really quite mad. And lonely. He has no friends, no one to love and no one who loves him. He is a man 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 to possess and observe the way he possesses and observes butterflies.

His plan fails, of course. The young woman dies, emotionally suffocated in his basement, the life wrung out of her like the butterflies in his bottle. 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, with the teacher in Ecclesiastes and with Jesus, you just want to say to the man, “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.”

“Life is like that,” 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 plenty of 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!”

Now it’s important to hear God’s tone of voice in saying this. God does not call the man a fool in anger. He is simply being descriptive of who the man is, a fool, the one the psalmist speaks of, a man who says in his heart, “There is no God.” So it’s with a touch of sadness that God says, “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?”

The New Oxford Annotated Bible notes that the literal translation of this message from God is, ”Fool! In this night your soul they demand from you,” and suggests that the plural “they” does not refer to God, but to all the things the man has stored up for his future, things which the man thinks he has produced and possesses, but which, ironically, have turned and possess the man, and now own his soul.

This man in Jesus’ story is the man Simon Tugwell talks about, the one who, even if he manages to preserve his goods from the inroads of moths and rust and burglars, cannot preserve them very long for himself, because he cannot preserve himself to enjoy them. This is the man Fannie Hurst describes, the man who thinks he is he worth a lot of money just because he has it, but who does not realize that in God’s economy he is as mortal as any of God’s creatures and that time will catch up with him despite all his stuff, because time catches up with all in this world, rich and poor alike. This is the man Jesus tells us about on virtually every page of the New Testament, the man who gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul.

“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 teacher 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 will have to give it all up to some fool who didn’t even work for it and doesn’t deserve it. Why have I done all this? It is all vanity, meaningless, a mere puff of wind, here one moment, gone the next. All my collecting has provided no lasting life, no security in the end, no salvation. It’s all mere vanity.”

Men and women do it. Parishes do it. Nations do it. And in every instance it is as dead and fleeting as a butterfly in a corked bottle!

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 bottles. Sin limits life to my vision of myself.

“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 forty-two years old, one of the ablest big-city lawyers in Chicago, 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.”

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 three o’clock some morning.

Why does Jesus refuse to answer the question of the man who just wanted some help with his dispute with his brother over their inheritance? Jesus refuses to mediate their property dispute because Jesus has bigger fish to fry. He wants to show us that while we are arguing over who gets what in this world we stand in danger of losing our lives. Both Jesus and the teacher in Ecclesiastes confront us with who we are – fools – when we make the stuff of this world the focus of our lives. Fools because, in our neglect of God, in our sin, in our insecurity and self-centeredness, in our failure to realize who we really are, beloved but mortal children of God, we are unable to keep straight what are the ends of life and what are mere means to life.

Jesus and the teacher in Ecclesiastes are not saying that things of this life are bad. They are not saying that harvests and wealth and money are bad. They are not saying that pleasure is bad. The truth they are reminding us of is that none of these things is the measure of our lives, and in the end, in the emergency room at three o’clock in the morning, none of them can save. They are reminding us that if we make these things, or any other thing except God, the end or purpose of our lives, then we can count on it that they will fail us, because they are puffs of wind, mere vanity. There is no security in them, no more life in them than there is life 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 returned and shared, 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 limited vision, 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 not created by us.

Even if one has more than he needs, no material thing can give life, no matter how many of them he has. Clothes and cars and CDs cannot do it. Neither can furniture or boats or computers or machines or books or prestige or power or popularity. Grain stored in a barn cannot do it. Neither can money stored in a bank, nor anything else under the sun.

“So be on your guard against all kinds of greed,” Jesus warns. One of the seven deadly sins, greed kills. It kills because it is an extreme desire to possess – to have, to have, and to have, as if having were the measure of our lives. Like gluttony, another of the seven sins that kill, greed is a great maw, a great stomach that receives everything that comes its way but that does not release anything in exchange. Nothing goes out. Greed stops the cycle of exchange, the inhalation and exhalation of spirit upon which everything 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 then to hoard and withhold what they produce, to receive but to give nothing back, the life of both would be threatened. Greed threatens the free exchange that is the dynamic of all life.

The rich man’s problem is not with his wealth. His problem is with his barns, his bottles. His problem is with his hoarding, his stockpiling, his desire to possess and not release. Men and women do it. Parishes do it. Nations do it. And in every instance, it is deadly.

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

But what about non-material things? What about affection? What about knowledge? These, too, can be stockpiled and not shared, threatening the shared exchange that is the very dynamic of all life. Just as grain stockpiled in a barn cannot feed people, so affection felt but held inside, rather than expressed and shared, cannot nourish the spirits of others, who might then 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 might then find that place in themselves from which to grow. Wisdom gained but kept to one’s self, rather than expressed and shared, cannot strengthen the hearts of others, who might then find that place in themselves from which to serve.

Resentment, too, if held and not let go of, sours into bitterness. Anger, envy, pride – three more of the seven sins that kill – if stockpiled and not let go of, can sour into spiritual death, just as surely as food ingested without being digested 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 lets nothing out.

We treat God as though God exists to meet our desires, and in doing so we subtly reverse Creation. In doing this, 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 Ecclesiastes is about; it’s about the failure of the idol gods of our own making. “I have seen everything that is done under the sun,” the old teacher tells us, “and behold, it is all vanity and a striving after wind.” Money, power, popularity, resentment, envy, pride, success, pleasure, even religion – it is all vanity; none of them means anything there in the emergency room at three o’clock in the morning.

Vanity, too, a mere meaningless striving after the wind, is the building of bigger barns, Jesus warns. It is the vanity of living out a vision of life centered on ourselves, the creation of an idol god that we think we possess, but that, ironically, turns to possesses us, And there is no way out. No way, that is, of our own devising.

Chief Seattle, echoing Jesus, had it right: “The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.” And the God of the earth will not be possessed. The limits of my vision are not the limits of the world. 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 we call God. And when we remember that, we recall how Jesus always points beyond himself to the mystery we call God, to the One we call Father, to the One who will not be possessed, but who provides all the bread we need for our souls. When we remember Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, we recall how Jesus always points to the mystery of the Cross and the empty tomb, to the mystery of life freely offered, and of life freely given.

St. Paul has it right as well. 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 for God and each other, meaningful life, is near at hand.

It is there, as Paul says, on that hill outside Jerusalem, with its terrible Cross and its empty tomb. It is there, 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 three o’clock in the morning, but also the joy and peace of the realization that our lives have been given back to us, the realization that we do not have to go back to the way we used to live.

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

Our Scripture readings today are God’s way of calling us to focus our vision of life before we end up in the emergency room at three o’clock some morning, and by this time you’ve probably realized that they are a rerun of the story we heard a few weeks ago, the story of the man who went to visit a famous rabbi. The visitor was shocked at the spareness, the bareness, the emptiness of the rabbi’s little one-room house. “Why don’t you have any furniture?” the visitor asked. “Why don’t you?” the rabbi replied. “Because I’m only passing through,” said the visitor. “Well, so am I,” the rabbi replied.


We are not the center of the universe. God is. Here, we are only passing through. And that vision can change us, and give us life.

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