Friday of the Twenty-First Week in Ordinary Time

Brothers and sisters,

we earnestly ask and exhort you in the Lord Jesus that,
as you received from us
how you should conduct yourselves to please God?
and as you are conducting yourselves?
you do so even more.
For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus.

This is the will of God, your holiness:

I have occasionally written about sexuality and marriage in this blog; let me address a different issue today: how you should conduct yourselves to please God. I take a cue from the parable in today’s gospel, the wise and foolish virgins.

I suppose we’re all watching the economic news of the United States and the world with the same concern we might bring to a massive military event. The future looks bleak – or shall we say sparse? – and I don’t think that’s just my own moralistic preacher side that sees that coming. (Preachers have been prophesying gloom and doom since this country was founded, but this time they might be right.)

The parable of the wise and foolish virgins recalls another story in scripture, Joseph and his interpretation of the pharaoh’s dream. You’ll remember the pharaoh saw ten healthy cows come out of the Nile River, and ten emaciated cows. He wondered what to make of it and Joseph told him, “We will have ten years of abundance and ten years of famine.”

The wise Pharaoh then put Joseph in charge of the entire Egyptian economy. He built huge warehouses and prudently stored away grain year after year, throughout the boom years. When the famine struck, the Egyptians survived by drawing from their storehouses until it passed. They were even able to sell grain to foreigners, such as Joseph’s family, who came from Asia.

Lots of people like to think people of the ancient world were not half so clever as we moderns are, but we should take a lesson from the Egyptians.

It seems that, even in the boom times here in the United States, when there is plenty, many people live on the edge. Some do it because they have no choice, but many do it because they’re foolish.

Economists have been warning us for years that Americans don’t have enough personal savings. Wealth was not how much you saved but how much credit you had; i.e. how much you could borrow! We built an economy on credit and consumption, rather than on savings and investment.

Suddenly, as they told us twenty years ago, our infrastructure is crumbling. We didn’t want to pay the taxes to maintain the roads and bridges and now they’re collapsing – when we can’t afford to rebuild them.

I once wrote a mini-column in a Louisiana newspaper – the weekly contribution from the ministerial alliance – about paying taxes. I asked, “What’s the point of buying an expensive car with the money you saved on lower taxes, when you don’t have a road to drive it on? Why do you build a big house outside of town when you won’t pay the taxes to maintain your electrical, gas, water and sewer lines?”

The next day a woman said to me, “I never thought of that!”

So now the Great Recession is upon us, and another Great Depression threatens the entire world.

Perhaps the next time, we’ll take a tip from the wise virgins and from Joseph the Patriarch. When the boom years return we’ll prepare for the bleak ones. In the meantime, we’ll suffer this together.