Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“They will give back the fruit of their toil, and will not swallow it down; from the profit of their trading they will get no enjoyment. For they have crushed and abandoned the poor, they have seized a house that they did not build.”
NL Daily Devotion for Saturday, June 27, 2020
by R. Fergus Moir, Clergy Stuff
Once again, Job’s friends trot out the old saw that people who continue to do what is evil in the sight of God will be punished. This version has a slightly different spin. Zophar says that people who do these things—abandon the poor, take what is not theirs, hoard their wealth, etc.—will be tormented by remorse and get no enjoyment out of all their “stuff.”
I gotta be honest. As a person of privilege, I have lots of “stuff” because directly or indirectly my actions contribute to the systems that abandon the poor, in which people seize houses they did not build, so to speak. And, yeah, sometimes I struggle with my enjoyment of that “stuff.” But I think most people don’t think about it at all. And at least on the surface, it looks like the people with the most “stuff” are the happiest, so why shouldn’t everyone push to accumulate as much as possible?
I know I can’t compare other people’s outsides to my insides, but I think the writer of Job was right to point out the ridiculousness of this notion. In a culture where the accumulation of wealth has replaced God, few people will have any misgivings about reveling in their “stuff.”
Do I focus my energy on accumulating wealth? Does it bother me?
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