Barns and Brains

Text: Luke 12:13-21

In its literal meaning “productivity” is making product. It is an economic measure. Increased productivity means that workers in a factory can produce more product now with the same amount of effort that they used to expend. Or produce the same product for less effort.

Not wanting to be too industrial, we’ve expanded the definition of productivity to mean useful or effective. A productive person is a person who keep his or her eye on the ball, nose to the grindstone, and ear to the ground. Productive has come to mean good, thrifty, hard-working. Productivity and success have become close cousins. The man who had a lot of stuff to put in his barns was a productive person as anyone could see.

He was effective, a word more in fashion. Maybe he followed the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He got things done, evidently. Getting Things Done is now a copyrighted process, the subject of another how-to book. The book preaches a kind of salvation, a cure for stress in the lives we all lead.

One of the important foundations of Getting Things Done, the book, is the To Do list. I have a To Do list. I’ll bet that you have one, too. Or many ones. Some of mine are on little sheets of paper, and some on real sticky notes, and some on virtual sticky notes in my computer, and some in my calendar program, and some just rampaging around in my head, to pop out at 2:00 in the morning or to distract me when I should be relaxing, or having fun with friends, or when praying. I have all these lists because I need help getting things done. They must provide me some solace—but what?

Part of the pleasure of the story about the man and his barns full of stuff is the irony of it. The man thinks he is set for life. And so he is, but it is a little bit shorter life than he had imagined. So part of the lesson of this passage is that none of his possessions—many as they are—are worth anything in the long run, which happens to be the short run for him. Trusting in possessions is not super helpful, it turns out, because among other things they are not trustworthy. Luke paints a great picture. We can feel how comfortable the man is. How pleased he is with himself. In the story, he talks to himself: Self—which is perhaps a better translation of the word than “soul”—Self, he says, you have plenty of things. Enjoy, enjoy! But he is not able to.

But though the irony is a pleasure to read and to relish, it is not the main thing. If the man died three days later, there would still be a problem. Three weeks later, three years, three decades—it doesn’t matter. Not only is the man self-satisfied, he is also bad. I don’t mean morally bad, but he is meant to be an example of the wrong thing to do. It is not a good idea to grab all that stuff for yourself, to have so much that you have to find whole other storage space for it. The man is a super-consumer, and he has too much wealth, and instead of, for example, sharing it with the poor—which is what his religion told him to do—he got a bigger place.

I love this passage in Luke. I love it because the story itself is so well-constructed. But I love it more because I’m just like that man. I have a ton of stuff, and I worry about where to put it. But none of that stops me from wanting more stuff. I have too much, but I want more.

I’m sure I’m not alone here. It is the nature of our times that a lot of us are like that. And it seems to not matter, within reason, how much you really have. There is not one graph that has “I have too little” at one end and “I have too much” at the other. There are two different, unrelated graphs. It is possible to have too little and too much at the same time. To be hungry and stuffed at the same time. Strange but true.

But you know, this is all old hat. Everyone knows that too much stuff is a problem and that we probably shouldn’t do it, have and keep and get so much. But you know that; you don’t really need a Bible story to tell you that. It’s like “have less stuff” is on a lot of people’s To Do lists.

But it is not only our barns that are overstuffed. It is our brains, too. Our barns are full of things and our brains are full of To Do lists. Plus a bunch of other junk in there. [A parishioner] was amused the other day about a mailing from some Lutheran organization that proclaimed that “the truth is, your To Do list will never be finished.” Wow! Like that was a big discovery.

Our brains are full of what-ifs and worries. What if something bad happens? What can we do to prevent it? (Be sure to put it on the To Do list.) How can we make sure that life goes smoothly? How can we avoid feeling bad or doing bad? And possessions are just another kind of what-if and worry. We have them for lots of reasons, but a big set of reasons is to feel safe and in control. Not worry and not be a victim of what-ifs, of circumstances.

The lilies of the field and the birds that Jesus talks about a few verses on in the Gospel of Luke, they “neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn.” And they don’t have any brains, either. They don’t have insurance. They don’t worry about savings or retirement. They don’t have careers they are starting or relationships that they are developing or nurturing. They just are. God takes care of them, Jesus says. It is not that we can just sit around in the dirt like a lily. God knows you need food and drink, Jesus says. But we’ve replaced a few big basic worries with thousands of little worries, and we are not better for it.

The trouble with this is that it doesn’t work and it’s not fun. Just as gloating didn’t save the man with barns, so worrying, says Jesus, won’t save us. “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” he asks. Can any of you? You might as well ask, “Can any of you by worrying add an inch to your height?” Some things—most things, actually, and a lot of important things—we can’t do much about. It is not going to work, this stuffing our brains with To Do lists. And besides that, it does not give us the joy we seek.

Is the point of life to be effective? Life is a gift given to us by God. It is not something we produced, something we extracted from the clay or carved from the rock and formed into ourselves. God did that.

We hear from Ecclesiastes that all is vanity. The word means “a puff of air.” A better translation might be “absurd” or “garbage.” All is garbage.

But that does not mean that everything we think, have, or do is stupid. We are not lilies, we cannot live on sun and soil, we have to do something to live. But there is no meaning in all the stuff that we stack up in our barns and the stuff we stack up in our brains. In one sense life is fragile and contingent. In another sense it is sturdy and graceful, and in it we may live rich toward God, as Jesus puts it. The meaning comes not from our programs of excellence, but from life itself.