“No place makes me feel more in love with this earth, with this here and now, with these treasures right before my eyes, than that warm and bright L’Arche bubble. It is the place I fully believe is a sign of what the kingdom of God could look like here with us now.”
Treasures on Earth: Enoughness
Scripture lesson: Luke 12:13-21
12:13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”
12:14 But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”
12:15 And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
12:16 Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly.
12:17 And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’
12:18 Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.
12:19 And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’
12:20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’
12:21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
Good morning! My name is Liddy Grantland. I’m a writer, a reader, an avid produce enthusiast, and I spend my days working for L’Arche, just outside Washington, D.C. L’Arche is an intentional community of people with and without disabilities sharing life together. I started first as a live-in assistant at Highland House, where I was part of a team that provided care for Core Family Members: folks who live at and receive Medicaid-funded care through L’Arche. I now supervise the team of assistants who share time in our two homes in Arlington, VA.
I started working at L’Arche in May of 2020, in what we would later learn was just the very beginning of a global pandemic. My time at L’Arche has been filled with Zoom celebrations, where we sing “Happy Birthday” at 20 or so different speeds from different rooms in two homes a block away from one another. It has been filled with walks around and around and around the neighborhood, drive-thru milkshake runs, music out on our porch late into the evening, Friday night movie nights, campfires with sticky smores fingers, dinners spread 6 feet apart with most of us eating on tv tray tables, and a lot of disinfectant spray. It has been filled with an abundance of joy and fear. I learned how to care for and be cared for by and with my housemates during a season where my very breath could have been the thing that killed them. My cup ran over with belonging even as it welled up with longing for things to be different, with hope for things to come, and with fear that at any moment, the things and the people I had come to love would leave us because of something none of us could control.
I remember vividly the day we got our first doses of our vaccines. I imagined this bubble encircling our L’Arche homes–a force-field, an invisible wall of protection standing between my community and the forces beyond our control that could part us from one another prematurely.
We’ve since gotten boosted and boosted again. We’ve kept up our dinners on tv-trays, as much as we want to eat at the table together. We’ve kept our masks on in our own homes, as much as we want to see each other’s faces. We’ve celebrated more birthdays, some even outside in the backyard, through rain and wind and snow and heat, as much as we might have wanted to welcome each other inside. We’ve had half a dozen covid exposures and a number of housemates testing positive. This amplifies our existing covid procedures, sending our home into strict quarantines, with core family members stuck, for the most part, in their rooms.
We’ve watched as it seemed like the world around us decided it was done with a pandemic, while the formal and informal forces that govern the lives of those of us with marginalities kept covid an ever-present threat to our lives and well-being. We’ve watched our surrounding global community adopt a narrative about how “only old or sick or disabled people get sick from covid” and we’ve watched as blessed members of our community who fall into that category have suffered from intense and debilitating symptoms because other people have deemed their comfort more important than the protection of the vulnerable.
But every time we’ve had an exposure, every time we’ve had that sinking, sick feeling that accompanies news of positive test results, every time we’ve pulled out our blessed boxes of PPE and shut all the doors in our homes that are usually wide open, I’ve imagined that bubble. The bubble of antibodies and masks and too-far-distances and handwashing and trust and love that encircles us. And I’ve prayed, “God, please, please, please. Not us. Not this.” Every time our core family members have tested negative and quarantines have been lifted and we’ve given each other hugs again I’ve pictured that bubble keeping us safe, together.
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I’ve always had trouble with today’s gospel passage, where Jesus warns against loving this life too much: storing up treasures to relax, eat, drink, and be merry. I am a huge fan of relaxing, eating, drinking, and being merry. That might as well be L’Arche’s motto–you should see what we’re like on vacation. And quite frankly, I am a fan of my treasures! When I think about what I’d say if God showed up at my apartment, in all her splendid glory, the apartment that I’ve filled with warm blankets, sunny windows, and a cat named after Joni Mitchell, who meows at the door every morning at 7 am so I can wake up and feed her her prescription food, I think…nope, I’m actually a big fan of earth, thanks. I have work that I love and a community that makes me feel at home and a lot more books to read and fresh peaches ripening on the windowsill and you know what comes after stone fruit season, right? Apple season, God, that’s what.
No place makes me feel more in love with this earth, with this here and now, with these treasures right before my very eyes, than that warm and bright L’Arche bubble. It is a place that I fully believe is a sign of what the kin-dom of God could look like here, with us, now.
And yet, we do not live in a bubble, or a vacuum, or on a magical cloud in the sky surrounded by rainbows and harp music. We live in the middle of a pandemic that has claimed thousands of disabled lives, that made my friends get so sick even when we desperately tried for over two years to keep each other safe. L’Arche lives in the middle of a society that has actively rejected members of our community simply for being who they are.
A beloved core member in one of our homes is in his eighties, or as he would say, he’s forty-something plus forty-something. Born just before the start of the second world war, his life intersected with one of the most large-scale eugenics campaigns against people with disabilities in recorded history. His lifetime spans the creation, maintenance, and mostly-dismantling of state-run and private institutions, often called asylums, where people with disabilities and other marginalized people were siloed into abject poverty and abominable conditions. In his lifetime, he has watched people just like him suffer tremendous harm, and he has participated in the movement that has brought people just like him tremendous hope.
And he is not done! There is simply too much broken in this world that he would like to make better. On the subject of storing up possessions–did you know that folks who receive funding for their care through Medicaid have an asset limit of $2,000? Yes, in 2022, when gas costs OVER $5/gallon and people with disabilities can still make less than $3/hour at some jobs, L’Arche core family members are not allowed to have more than $2,000 in their bank accounts at one time. And that’s people who are lucky enough to receive funding for their care through Medicaid at all–over 650,000 people nationwide are on the waitlist for Medicaid services. Over 12,000 of those children of God live in North Carolina. Meanwhile, even though I am paid through Medicaid to provide care for core family members, one third of L’Arche’s budget comes from fundraising, because all of us know that we need more than just support brushing our teeth or making our breakfast to make a life worthwhile. When we order a pizza to be delivered to L’Arche, one third of it wouldn’t be there without individual donations from people wealthy enough to give. And trust me when I tell you that our community would be quite upset if one third of a pizza went missing.
Jesus warns against storing up treasures on earth precisely because when we do, we create the imbalance we are all so used to, where few of us have much and most of us have little. Jesus asks, “Okay, so you die tonight, then who gets all that food?” But that food was already more than the rich man needed, it already should have been in the hands of people with hungry bellies. If it had been shared all along by all of us who have more than we need, well, no one would have ever had to be hungry.
The rest of our global community could have made the collective decision to keep people safe the way that L’Arche has–to wear masks and distance and change plans and adjust expectations again and again instead of forcing the world into a normal that was already unlivable for many. If our global community had, we may not have lost one million precious people in this country alone to covid. If we had seen our destiny as wrapped up in the destiny of one another from the beginning, we would never have let each other languish in desperation and fear, isolation and illness. We may have brought the kin-dom of God down to earth a long, long time ago.
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At L’Arche we are still grieving from the things this season has taken from us, from the times we have had to close our doors when all we want is to welcome one another with open arms. The brokenness that forced a distance between each of us sometimes makes me, even me with the stone fruit and Joni the cat, long for something better than this world that we’ve been dealt.
Anthony Doerr writes in his most recent novel, called Cloud Cuckoo Land, about a fictional text that had traveled through hundreds of years, passed through many hands in many empires, to be translated by some ordinary children and their teacher at a public library. Previous translations had assumed that the story ends with the traveling protagonist finally being let into eternal paradise and making his home there.
The children discover, though, that the chapters of the text are out of order. The traveler did go to paradise, yes, but then, he decided to come home. The children translate the man’s reason for returning back to earth: simply, “the world as it is is enough.”
What God wants is not for us to seek our inheritance elsewhere, to live our lives as if the only things of value are in the world to come. But God also does not want for us to build storehouses for our treasures on earth.
God wants us in between, in that holy tension, that enough-ness even when things seem not enough at all. God wants us to live in the world as our home with each other as our family, finding treasure not in stuff or wealth or certainty or rightness or perfection or even righteous anger but in the embrace of one another.
The work that God has called us to do is indeed to find treasures here on earth, in the people we encounter and are called to make community with. This very love is what will keep us from building store rooms full of possessions, because how would we keep all that food locked away when our own family is hungry?
This very love led Jesus, our sibling and teacher, to the cross, to say, I can’t bear to watch you suffer. I can’t bear to imagine you losing someone and not knowing where they have gone. I can’t bear for you not to find so much beauty in one another that the act of parting is almost more than you can bear.
I believe that this very love can transform us, until we make earth look so much like heaven that on some days, we can’t even tell the difference.
Amen.
Song: Holy Spirit, Come
Holy Spirit, Come
Written by Ron Fordyce
(c) 1976, 1982 Birdwing Music
Poem: I am the forest
Prayer: L’Arche Jubilee Prayer (edited)
Loving God, You called us into being and gave us our mission. Thank you for the gift of one another. Thank you for our journey together from the beginning until now. Help us to continue to grow in our response to you, listening to your voice within us, seeing you around us, delighting in our gifts, forgiving one another for our failings, trusting in you, and welcoming tomorrow in Faith, Hope and Love. May it be so.
Note: Liddy’s sermon reflects her beliefs and experience of L’Arche GWDC, and not an official L’Arche GWDC position. All views are her own.
L’Arche GWDC is an interdenominational Christian community, welcoming people of all faith and none and encountering the experience of our humanity daily. Community members are from many different faith and spiritual backgrounds or no faith backgrounds, and everyone is respected in their beliefs.
