August 4, Ordinary 18C (Luke 12:13-21)
This is a funny story. We laugh. But we're laughing at ourselves.
The late comedian George Carlin had a reputation for profanity, but his stand-up performances were also characterized by brilliant social satire and an acute sense of the power of language to create and to distort reality. Humor, exaggeration, and mockery work together as a contemporary technique—as well as an ancient one—for insight and moral instruction.
In one monologue, Carlin depicts the obsessive accumulation of material things, and the modern anxiety for which it is both the cause and the result:
You got your stuff with you? I’ll bet you do. Guys have stuff in their pockets; women have stuff in their purses. . . . Stuff is important. You gotta take care of your stuff. You gotta have a place for your stuff. That’s what life is all about, tryin’ to find a place for your stuff! That’s all your house is; a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time.
