Prayer School

Bishop Scott Bullock
The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 3, 2025

In this season of summer vacations, I was thinking about a summer vacation, a trip a couple of years ago to my native state of Michigan, where I was born, which included a stay at my parents’ vacation cottage near Traverse City Michigan and then later a visit with my family. Along the way from Traverse City to the family home, we drove through Saginaw Michigan, where I had once lived and worked as an engineer, before I “saw the light.” As we drove across the massive Tittabawassee Bridge that spans the Saginaw River on Interstate 75, I asked my friend to take the Veterans Memorial Parkway exit and head into Saginaw for a brief tour. Not having been back there for maybe 20 or so years, I felt immediately disoriented. Nonetheless, in a flash moment of recognition, I asked my friend to pull over before the crumbling remains of an old security gate in the front of a large, overgrown field. At its height, this location had been one of the largest industrial facilities of its type in the world, employing well over 2000 men and women at one time, including me. It was on this location that I had served as an enthusiastic engineer, some 30 years before. Today, there stood an empty field.  

If I’m looking for an illustration from my life’s experiences of the haunting words that begin today’s scripture readings, “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!”, I can’t find a more vivid one than this empty field.

From a brochure printed around the time of my employment there, hear the words of pride over this astonishment of technology that was once there: “General Motors has a long, industrious history as an industrial citizen of Saginaw (MI).  Our plant has been called a ‘Monument to Modern Technology.’ It contains the latest electronically controlled material handling and process equipment, as well as the latest in emission control and ventilation facilities. Originally designed as the most modern casting plant at its inception, the plant has not only grown in size, but in its innovation, its processes and its controls.” 

An indication of the importance of this plant, not only to Saginaw, but the whole nation, included these statistics: In 1970, this plant shipped 10 percent of all this type of metal to the United States. At the time of the printing almost 15 percent. Methods, equipment, and materials employed at this plant are constantly being improved, contributing to the Chevrolet’s reputation for safety, quality, reliability, efficiency, and performance. 

Though operations in this “Miracle of Modern Technology” that began 21 years later, Chevrolet announced its closing, just a year after I left employment. The greatest is now gone. The connection to the scriptures — I hope it’s obvious.

What to make of this depressing tale?  For most of us could look at the efforts of our hands, our work, the things we have collected up, our achievements we have accomplished, and wonder, “Vanity of vanities,” because it all passes away. For the word vanity suggests emptiness, vainglory, aimlessness, emptiness. It is a deception when something is actually just a void. 

So, are we to despair that all the things of our lives or our accomplishments seem to have no lasting importance? Well, Jesus has something important to say about this in today’s Gospel, when someone in the crowd, disputing with his brother over their possessions, shouts out to Jesus asking for justice. Jesus reminds the plaintive of the emptiness and vanity of his plea when he responds, “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.” 

Most of us spend quite a bit of our days chasing after possessions, don’t we? Surely, this quest is to support the lives of our families, but Jesus’ merciful teaching does challenge us to consider: has our attachment to these things gone beyond caring for our loved ones? Have our possessions become things that possess us, instead of supporting us and have begun to suck the life out of us?

The way out of this conundrum of vanity is offered by Jesus in his moral to today’s parable of the rich man with his bountiful harvest, who seeks to pile up his harvest in larger barns, only to end his life that very night, after when the Lord concludes, “Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.”

In this, Jesus offers us the essential tool of discerning the proper place for possessions in our lives. Their measure of their true worth comes by considering if they are treasure for ourselves or are they what matters to God? And what matters to God? Our faith would say, “God and the things of God.” Those are things that last: God and our relationships with those created in God’s eternal image with immortal souls. Relationships with other people.  

So, how can we use Jesus’ measure to test if we have been captured by vain things? The measure is how free we are to give them away. For what we have has first been given to us is meant to be shared with others. Or are we just piling them up in stylish “barns,” larger and larger? Oh, probably not barns of timber or steel, but barns with bank accounts, investment portfolios, and IRA accounts — modern barns nonetheless. 

That empty field in Saginaw MI ought to speak to all of us, that industrial “barn” in which so much effort and resources were dedicated and stored up. Now gone like so many urgent efforts of our lives, we can wonder: Are our things all just “vanity of vanities?” They could be, unless they are dedicated to God and God’s people. And the primary barometer of whether we do this is this: How willing are we to empty our barns of our possessions and give them away to serve others? Others need us to do this in order that they can live more fully. And until we do, Jesus today warns us, our possessions are likely possessing us and keeping us from life as well.