The meat in the belly of my brother

A sermon for the congregation of St. Saviour Anglican Church, Penticton BC — The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, August 3^rd  2025 —The Very Rev. Ken Gray

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”

I remember the death of my mother’s parents, my grandparents, Maxwell and Winifred Crockett. Both in their late 80s they died within a couple of weeks of each other. In my mid-teens at the time I had minimal experience of loss or death so the events were impressionable. Everything went according to custom and tradition. I was not prepared however for the fallout arising from their deaths.

They had lived in the same house on Robertson Street in the Fairfield neighbourhood in Victoria for over 40 years. The main floor of their home was modestly decorated and furnished; the basement held the greatest treasures. After such a long residency you never know what might be found under a work bench or at the bottom of a stack of papers.

You see, I inherited my interest in photographic from my grandfather. His father had been a photographer with the Royal Navy in late nineteenth century England. In the Robertson Street basement we found paper negatives, popular before celluloid became popular, which I took home and contact printed. We sent my images with the negatives to the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth where they are now displayed. So very interesting, and so much fun.

If these photographic artifacts were interesting, many of my grandparents’ possessions were not that interesting. There were items of sentimental value to my mother in particular; and other items which belonged at a church jumble sale or local thrift shop. Discernment of the “value” of items became contentious between my mother and one particular brother. My Uncle Denny sold store equipment supplies; he was a successful small business owner. Uncle Dave on the other hand was a machinist, mechanic, woodworker and country boy at heart.

Denny made the suggestion that we should simply bring in an appraiser to value the estate and its contents. The three children could then make a list and ensure that everyone got their fiscal allotment. Well . . . you may guess what happened next. I kinda hid in the TV room of our Harlow Drive home in Victoria’s Oak Bay neighbourhood as passions flared in the kitchen. Audibly, and forcefully. I could only turn up the volume on Hogan’s Heroes and hope for some sort of resolution.

As a priest accompanying families through difficult times, I saw similar scenarios unfold. I tried to remain apart from the emotional action. Not fun, I tell you. Jesus . . . dodged a bullet here:

“Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” 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.”

He next names the problem: greed. Having named the problem, he pointed to the symptom: The accumulation of possessions. He nailed it. And then he told a parable, a story we can all enter and appreciate, especially attending to his final words:

So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

So it is; there is a different way to live, and to act, and yes, to die.

I turn for a moment to one of my favourite authors, Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose first book, Braiding Sweetgrass I have previously cited in my time with you. A subsequent, smaller text, really an extended essay is The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. I plan to use The Serviceberry as foundational material for the late-September pilgrimage I will facilitate with others. You’re all invited.

While RWK is a botanist who sees the world through scientific and Indigenous eyes, her farmer-self is fascinated by economics. She notes that most economic theories are concerned with the management of scarcity. The starting point of most economic textbooks or lectures is that there is not enough — of whatever —  to go around. Scripture, and Jesus himself, tell an opposite story. We are gifted with and through abundance.

Obviously, one’s position in life and geography will temper such a notion; there is a difference between, say, life in the Okanagan and trying to survive in South Sudan. Scripture however returns us again and again to imaginative stories which have led and fed the our spiritual and Indigenous ancestors. She rightly explains how such an understanding of scarcity is not only wrong; it is dangerous and life-destroying. She describes a walk in the fields one day as she collects berries: 

As the berries plunked into my bucket, I was thinking about what I’d do with them all. I’d drop some off for friends and neighbors, and I’d certainly fill the freezer for Juneberry muffins in February. This “problem” of deciding what to do with abundance reminds me of [a story where] a hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. [A] researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store the meat? Why would he do that?

Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t the hunter store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict. “Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.”

So where do you store your meat? Obviously in the frig or the freezer. Dehydration technologies are helpful. There was life before refrigeration. One can live on a daily cycle of food gathering, processing, and sharing. But you have to give up on Costco; shop the fruit stands in season, and go without some foods not in season.

So where do we store our surplus generally? Let’s think for a moment of those things to which we are attached, those accumulated items we think we cannot do without. Personal story: My beautiful camera, a Fuji XT-4 just died. It was the nicest camera I have ever owned and suited my low-vision needs perfectly. I cannot afford to replace it right now given other fiscal challenges. (And no, this is not a crowd-funding appeal.) I have an older camera I tried to sell a couple of years ago. Camera traders would not take it — no real value, they said. Well it’s valuable to me now, and despite some real difficulties for my use, it’s actually kinda fun to work with. My own needs aside, RWK reminds us all:

The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.

And remember, part of the “we” is God, shown us in Jesus, day after day after day.

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