Good Morning Emmanuel!

Reverend Ginger Solaqua, August Priest-In-Charge, Sunday, August 3, 2025

This is a VERY good morning for me and for all of our family. Being with you today and this month is a gift and a privilege. We are very grateful and very much looking forward to getting to know each one of you.

Now I have to admit I felt a little less grateful when I saw our Gospel text for this morning – a difficult text for a first Sunday in a parish, as we are just coming to know one another. But unfortunately, the Sunday readings were not chosen with my schedule in mind so here we go…

A rich man’s fields have an abundant harvest. And being a responsible sort, the man makes a responsible plan to store his grain. His current barns aren’t big enough, so he sits down to carefully plan a building project. We can presume that he plans carefully, using the ancient equivalent of many spreadsheets and paying due attention to the ancient equivalent of the zoning board. And when done, looks at his plan and says happily, “soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”

Even if you don’t own any barns full of grain, perhaps you can sympathize with this man. Whatever our financial state, rich or just trying to stay afloat or somewhere in between, we all want security. And so often we say to ourselves, if I can just build these barns, if I can just make a little bit more, if I can just save this much every month, if I can just get to where I can afford this or that…then, I won’t have to worry.

To want to feel safe from want, to want to be able to care for our families, to want to have enough, to be able to say to ourselves, “soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” What could be more understandable, more human?

And yet God says to the man, You fool! You spent all your time all your energy on protecting this harvest. But you are going to die, all of that will be gone in a second, worthless. You’ve stored up goods for yourself and you have not been rich toward God.

Jesus sets up a harsh contrast: our focus in life can be on storing up treasures for ourselves, or on being rich toward God.

Of course, the scripture teaches us that God’s will is for every person to live free of hunger and fear. Of course, we need money to live. That’s not the issue – rather the issue is that the rich man in the story wants his money to do something that it fundamentally cannot do. He is not content for his wealth to be simply a blessing to be enjoyed and shared. He wants it to be more. He wants his prosperity to make him safe, to be the foundation for his happiness and a source of security.

And money can’t do that. It cannot make us safe.

That’s where we get in trouble – when we ask money to do something for us that it can’t. Wealth can’t protect us from tragedy. It can’t make us feel loved and accepted. It can’t give our lives meaning. Only God can do that.

The spiritual work of letting go of trusting in money and possessions for our security is the work of a whole lifetime. It is hard, it is slow, and it involves lessons we often have to learn over and over again.

At the end of the parable, in what seems like a throwaway line, Jesus gives us a beautiful image of how we might begin – or continue – to do this work of seeking freedom from the disproportionate power that money has for us: he says that instead of storing up treasures on earth, we should instead be “rich toward God.”

 What does it look like to be rich toward God?

If you’ll permit me a small digression: I am a very eager and very bad gardener. Please don’t ask me questions at coffee hour or tell me about the Latin names of your plants because I cannot overstate how bad I am at this, how many beautiful plants that the previous owners planted that I have failed to nurture. But I am trying.

And this summer, I have tried my hand at growing some fruits and vegetables. I planted seedings in two different beds: one is this beautiful raised bed that Anthony gave me for our anniversary. I did a lot of research. I lined the bed, carefully collected sticks of just the right size to lay in the bottom to aerate the soil, developed just the right soil mix, discussed fertilizer and angles of light with my neighbor who was raised on a farm. I planted the best seedlings from our neighbor’s organic farm share. I watered the seedlings carefully every morning, guided the green beans to climb up the trellis just right, spaced the squash carefully, pruned the bell peppers. I’ve gotten a bit obsessive.

Now we also have a second raised bed –on the far side of our shed. The light isn’t great, and I didn’t really have time to do much more than loosen up the soil and add a bit extra. We didn’t have enough chicken wire for the second bed, so I improvised a kind of net to keep the bunnies out but it pulled up at the edges. But I planted some leftover things and hoped for the best.

Now, if this were a really good story there would be a fun twist where the bed that I neglected grew a beautiful carpet of wildflowers and the sweetest strawberries and best vegetables I’ve ever eaten.

But that’s not what happened. The tomato plants that grew in the garden bed that I neglected were sickly and never blossomed. The rabbits got to the strawberries and the okra never put down roots.

But the bed that I nurtured and cared for, the bed that I carefully tended to – the plants in that bed thrived, and my family has been eating squash and green beans and bell peppers every day even though they don’t want to.

What we tend to grows. Every message we get from the world around us tells us to store up treasures in our barns, to centering our time and emotional energy and worry on the things of this world. We can put our energy in that garden bed. We can tend to our finances at the expense of other things in hope that they will give us the safety and happiness we seek. But as Jesus warns us in this parable today, to do that is to ask money to do something it cannot do.

But the paradox is, I don’t think we can turn away from the pressure to tend to our treasure at the expense of God just by telling ourselves we should, or just by feeling guilty.

The only way to move away from trying to find security in riches is -  in Jesus’ beautiful phrase - to “be rich toward God.” If we turn our attention to the garden bed that is our spiritual life: our life of prayer, of service, of love for friend and stranger, of care for the orphan, the widow the refugee, that garden will respond to our attention richly. That garden will flourish. We turn away from one unfruitful garden bed by tending to the other. To tend to our spiritual life to tend to that garden is to be rich toward God, and to experience the richness of life in Christ.

What we tend to grows. Or as Jesus says, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The great church reformer Martin Luther said that being a Christian requires three kinds of conversion: conversion of the heart, conversion of the mind, and conversion of the wallet.

That last one might well be the hardest. But it’s the only way to freedom and joy. Amen.