The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14), August 3, 2025

One gift of a process-relational view of God and life is a sense that the voice of the divine — the voice of love and goodness and beauty and justice, which we see so profoundly in Jesus — is always calling to us, in every moment. German social theorist Hartmut Rosa, in Democracy Needs Religion, suggests “call-ability” (a “listening heart”, a la 1 Kings 3:9) as a salve for our time, in which (a) collective democratic commitments to listening have atrophied, and (b) any priority one might personally give to listening is crowded further and further out of life by the exhausting demands of keeping up in our ever-accelerating global economy.
Jesus’ parable of the rich fool in today’s Luke 12 passage illustrates memorably a man who has lost “call-ability”. Our English translations read almost comically as he thinks only to himself and speaks only to himself, “Self, this is what I will do…” There is no seeking council from others, there is no opening to the wisdom of tradition (like the wisdom of today’s Psalm 49, which anticipates the situation of the rich fool), and there is certainly no listening for an in-the-moment call from God. From a process-relational view, Jesus’ warning about “being on guard against all kinds of greed” is because an abundance of possessions seems to challenge call-ability. Too much stuff seems to block our perception of the divine.
To be sure, “build bigger barns” does have something like a “call” to it, in that it seems to exert a pull on us. But it’s a “call in disguise” — it’s a sales pitch, or, even worse, a false determinism that over-promises and under-delivers. Sales pitches do not open us up like calls from God do; they close us down. (You need this to be happy!) The inevitable failures of false determinisms (Follow these steps and you will be happy!) are what birth the book of Ecclesiastes, with its refrain of “Vanity, all is vanity!” (Or “Meaningless, all is meaningless!” according to some translations.)
I’ve heard it said that the average American encounters four to ten thousand advertisements a day! Increasingly, the advertisements I come across on the Internet, or hear on podcasts, or see on streaming services are not only consumeristic but workaholistic — they are no longer only directed toward our “weekend selves”, in service of our more hedonistic desires; they are more and more directed toward our “weekday selves”, in service of our more austere desires to prove ourselves productive and worthy. Now, the modern individual’s week can feel, start-to-finish, totally consumed by sales pitches and supposedly deterministic promises for a fulfilled future.
We need the lament of today’s Ecclesiastes passage as a tunnel to help us escape from a world of advertisements into a world of call-ability. The words of Ecclesiastes’ “Teacher” are despairing and difficult, but they are like Andy Dufresne’s necessary crawl through the prison sewer system to get to freedom in The Shawshank Redemption.
The God on the other side of the tunnel will never lie to us with a sales pitch or a false determinism about wealth or productivity being able to protect us from harm or uncertainty. The God on the other side of the tunnel treats us like adults, acknowledges the openness and uncertainty of the future, and commits to staying present with us as we step into that open, uncertain future.
From our Colossians 3 passage, we might borrow the language of stripping off the “old self” to be clothed with the “new self” — dying to our perceived needs for determinist promises that emptily claim to guarantee fulfillment for us (idolatry, as the passage specifically names), and being renewed to life with Christ — who shows us the God who doesn’t over-promise and under-deliver.
Unfortunately, the writer of Colossians (whether Paul or someone using Paul’s name) does entertain an image of a controlling God of punishment and wrath (3:6) that should be criticized from a process-relational perspective, but we can still benefit from the intensity with which the writer exhorts us to strip off the “old self” and clothe ourselves with the “new self”. This is important!
Why? Because Jesus’ parable in Luke 12 is not merely a matter of saving one rich man’s unfulfilled life. One’s call-ability (or lack thereof) has significant social and material consequences beyond just one’s own life! The rich man — whose call-ability has been crowded out by the “calls in disguise” of wealth and productivity promising a future they can’t guarantee — regards the crops his land has produced as his. There is no mention of the laborers who actually worked the land, and there is no accounting for the exploitation of people and land it takes to tear down old barns and build larger ones. This injustice is the worst tragedy of the parable of the rich fool.

Vince Brackett pastors Brown Line Church, a progressive Christian community with a healthy sense of humor and humility, named for Chicago’s Northside “L” train. His background is in education and he is especially interested in the intersection of theology and sociology. Things that bring him joy include: playing guitar and singing with his wife, following the NBA and English Premier League, diving deep into “hero’s journey” stories, and working with audio/visual technology. He and his wife (and their four kids) have enjoyed living communally with housemates for the last 12 years.