Karen Hollis | August 3, 2025 Pentecost 8
Luke 12:13-21 (NLT) Then someone called from the crowd, “Teacher, please tell my brother to divide our father’s estate with me.” Jesus replied, “Friend, who made me a judge over you to decide such things as that?” Then he said, “Beware! Guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own.” Then he told them a story: “A rich man had a fertile farm that produced fine crops. He said to himself, ‘What should I do? I don’t have room for all my crops.’ Then he said, ‘I know! I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll have room enough to store all my wheat and other goods. And I’ll sit back and say to myself, ‘My friend, you have enough stored away for years to come. Now take it easy! Eat, drink, and be merry!’ “But God said to him, ‘You fool! You will die this very night. Then who will get everything you worked for?’ Jesus said, “Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God.”
from Braiding Sweetgrass
This is a story about “the years when the corn harvests were so plentiful that the caches were full. The fields had been so generous with the villagers that the people scarcely needed to work. So they didn’t. Hoes leaned against a tree, idle. The people became so lazy that they let the time for corn ceremonies go by without a single song of gratitude. They began to use the corn in ways the Three Sisters had not intended when they gave the people corn as a sacred gift of food. They burned it for fuel when they couldn’t be bothered to cut firewood. The dogs dragged it off from the untidy heaps the people made instead of storing the harvest in the secure granaries. No one stopped the kids when they kicked ears around the village in their games.
Saddened by the lack of respect, the Corn Spirit decided to leave, to go where she would be appreciated. At first the people didn’t even notice. But the next year, the cornfields were nothing but weeds. The caches were nearly empty and the grain that had been left untended was moldy and mouse-chewed. There was nothing to eat. The people sat about in despair, growing thinner and thinner. When they abandoned gratitude, the gifts abandoned them.
One small child walked out from the village and wandered for hungry days until he found the Corn Spirit in a sunlit clearing in the woods. He begged her to return to his people. She smiled kindly at him and instructed him to teach his people the gratitude and respect that they had forgotten. Only then would she return. He did as she asked and after a hard winter without corn, to remind them of the cost, she returned to them in the spring.”1
I pray this morning that in this time of reflection, we honour the stories we have heard. I pray that my words are well chosen for this morning, that they show the appropriate respect, and reflect your word to us. If we miss the mark in our collective reflection this morning, teach us a better way, O God. In Christ Jesus we pray, Amen.
So, let’s look at these two stories side by side and notice the similarities and differences. In one hand, we have a traditional story from the first peoples of Turtle Island, a story that has been passed down over thousands of years.
In the other hand is a parable from Jesus from first century Palestine. This story is at least two thousand years old, the roots of which may be older.
The object of the traditional story is corn, one of the crops known as the 3 sisters (corn, beans, and squash). It’s a story about a community and their relationship with the corn.
The object in the parable is grain and crops, and we learn about the wealthy land owner’s relationship with them. The community in the parable is implied. The landowner certainly doesn’t harvest his own crops, and doesn’t build his own barns. We can read into this story that there is a neighbouring village of peasant workers who do not share in his abundance.
In the teaching story, the bounty offered to the people comes not just from the land, it comes from the Corn Spirit. She is not there to just give people what they need and want . . . she is there for relationship . . . gratitude is enough . . . and when that is missing, the Corn Spirit puts distance between herself and them.
Parables are set in the context of daily life, so we can understand that this setting of a landowner with an abundance harvest was common . . . but there is always a twist in the story, a moment in the parable where we say, wait, what? That moment comes for me when the landowner makes plans to build larger barns and invites his very essence, his highest self, to take a holiday, to relax his connection with the holy and just enjoy himself. In the Jewish tradition, the first bits of the harvest are always dedicated to God in gratitude for the gifts of the earth . . . but he seems to have forgotten that part. Before the man can act on his plans, God responds with harsh words: you will die this very night, and who will get everything you have worked for?
We have 2 stories from different cultures, probably different times, different societal structures, different images of the Divine, talking about different crops . . . still, so similar. In their own way, each one teaches about the interdependence of the gifts of the earth with the holy source of those gifts. When we forget our gratitude, we lose the connection with the source of our very lives and wellbeing.
These stories are powerful, because they show us how human we are. I keep thinking about cooking dinner. You go to make rice and have to open a new bag. It’s so full that when you dip in the measuring cup, a little spills onto the counter. When you close the bag and put it away, you brush the loose rice into your palm and what do you do with it? Pop it into the sink or garbage, or into the pot. Perhaps whatever’s closest. Doesn’t really matter, it’s a few grains of rice. A few months later, you go to make rice and the bag is almost empty. You carefully pour the grains of rice into the cup, making sure you get every last one. The last few go everywhere, because they bounce off of the sides of the bag and are impossible to guide. Even if you make the mouth of the opening really small, it’s still so difficult to direct them. So, you chase them down, putting every last precious grain into the cup and have a little moment of gratitude that there’s enough for dinner. Why do we behave differently, depending on how much we have? In the midst of all that we need to do to exist in the world today – and there’s a lot – where do we connect with our authentic gratitude? What would it be like to cultivate a practice of gratitude so that it just flowed from us?
When we lived on Gabriola we had a woodstove to heat our home. As new residents, we had a significant learning curve to figure out how to keep enough wood in rotation to keep us warm through the winter. While wood has to dry for 2 years before it burns well, we found that not all sources of wood were reliably dry. But if it’s all you have and there is no room to store any more, you make do. After a couple of seasons of moderately dry wood, we bought a chainsaw and kept our eyes out for people clearing dead trees from their property. One could spend a day cutting up and clearing trees that people just wanted gone for free or cheap. At one point, we accumulated so much wood that every covered space we had was packed with chopped wood, rounds, big branches, sticks, bark, and a huge pile of odds and ends. When I was in the mode of finding wood, every piece of wood suddenly had value. I would be walking through the forest and see dry branches next to the trail, thinking “oh, that’s a great branch, I could use that, I think I need that . . . but how would I even get it home?”
And then we suddenly hit capacity. Wood became something I had to navigate through when coming and going from the house, and I felt burdened with keeping it dry. I found myself navigating the line between gratitude for this abundance, resentment of all this stuff that took up so much space and required so much of my time and attention, and anxiety that I didn’t have the capacity to make use of every bit of this resource that was available to me. Fortunately, I also found another way.
It was during COVID lockdown, actually. I was at home for a year, working, leading worship online, and doing the dailyness of life. Because we were home, I could really lean into the daily flow that seemed to be required, because instead of simply turning on the thermostat, we had to put time and energy into heating our home. It wasn’t just about sourcing wood, it was chopping, rotating, and stacking it. Preparing boxes of firewood to bring in, cutting kindling, sweeping the floor all the time. Then, I had to learn about fire, how to organize the wood in the stove so that it would burn, and how to tend a fire so that my time was efficient.
I came to love the dailyness of it, of meeting the basic needs of our household. While it was a lot of work, I took a monastic approach of layering my day with study and physical activity. We would build a fire in the morning, I would start my workday of communicating, reading and writing, then I might spend the better part of an hour chopping kindling, have lunch, do some more ministry work, then pack boxes of wood – some I set aside on the porch and others I brought in next to the woodstove. The physical activity actually helps the mind and emotions process, so the chores not only get done, but are used for a broader purpose. I came to find gratitude – not only in having the resources to stay warm – but in the little cycle of living-in-abundance that was available for me there. I came to find gratitude in the cycle of living, itself. It’s difficult to put words to, but hopefully that makes sense.
I don’t chop wood to stay warm anymore . . . I have a thermostat that for some reason reads in Fahrenheit. Our world is set up in such a way that for most of us, there is a gap between us and the gifts of the earth. Still, we can intentionally identify and lean into moments and offer gratitude, there’s lots of opportunity, especially during harvest season – when picking berries, putting produce in the car at Sieffert’s, or sitting down to dinner and remembering the chain of people who brought our food from the soil to our table. We can find moments to make connections between the abundance of our lives and the source of those gifts. Without that gratitude, where are we? God calls us to practice gratitude, to strengthen the relationship with that which brings life and sustains life. This season we’re living through shows us that life can change in an instant – so, we are invited to open our eyes to our connections with the rest of creation, with God at the center, and give thanks! May our gratitude be a firm foundation on which we can stand. Thanks be to God.
1 Braiding Sweetgrass p. 187-188.