Greed - "Havesycke" the sickness of having - do you mean me?

The WCC's general secretary preached an interesting homily on sharing at St Mary's Episcopalian Cathedral on Sunday morning, the full text is here.
Ever since I've been thinking about how easy it is to not feel personally challenged by what we hear from the pulpit, perhaps I should change that first person plural to a first person singular - how easy it is for me to not feel challenged by what I hear ...
Yet as a rich woman with a very a large waistline and even larger hips any sermon on greed and sharing ought surely to strike a note with me somewhere. Yet it's so easy to think it must be about someone else, but it is also about me, very much also about me. Because I simply take, eat, stock, buy, pile up, want, "need", have more and more - not only does my body expand, but sometimes I am also less and less able to see and name my own greed and what drives it. Interestingly I only began to have these thoughts as I reflected on the sermon while getting into a taxi outside the church to get back to the press room - and realised quite what I had managed to both eat and drink in the space since listening to words about sharing rather than accumulating. So much for the spirituality of resistance - only the mind and not the body Rev. Ms. Stranz? Hmmm ...

Olav Fykse Tveit was preaching on Luke 12: 13-21 - the landowner who decides to tear down all his barns because the harvest is so good he can then stockpile even more:

There is a saying in my country that you do not know your family until you have to divide the family inheritance with them. The sharp analysis in this saying corresponds very well to the parable of Jesus, told to people who were not able to divide their inheritance fairly. The deep need and desire to accumulate, to make the barns bigger, to acquire more and more, much more than you need, is in the end so very - human. We see it everywhere, in all places in the world. You have a good word for this in English: Greed. In Norwegian we have another word: “Havesyke” – literally: the sickness of having ever more. And we see more and more ugly examples of this, the more money and riches that we see.

As I reflected on my own personal participation in society's "sickness of having" - with my usual guilt around food and eating I realised that the first food I had eaten in response to the sermon had been the bread and wine of the eucharist - symbols and realities speaking of liberation, forgiveness, love and the transformed values of God's reign. So can the bread and wine of Christ's supper give me a taste for overcoming my guilt about food and teach me to go on sharing and do it better? Of course, of course communion should simply "be" and not be instrumentalised in this way, but any thinking about greed and food has to think about the ritual meal of the church too.
Towards the end of his sermon Tveit said this, which offers some succour to the greedy, yet reiterrates the challenge to share and to be rich towards God:

To witness to Christ is to preach the Gospel of forgiveness of sins, even of greed, and, therefore also to address greed as an obstacle to justice, to peace and therefore an obstacle to being one. There are differences in this world that God does not want. There are more and bigger barns – literally speaking – than are needed, and can ever be needed.

Reuters, Protest info and more

Olav Fykse Tveit, who has now been in post at the WCC for six weeks held a press briefing this week prior to his official installation as general secretary on Tuesday evening.
I attended the briefing to interpret which was fun and also a privilege (it was also work of course!). You can listen to what Dr Tveit had to say about his ecumenical vision, about Haiti and debt cancellation, about the Middle East and about Climate change by clicking on the audio links here.
It's been good to see that we had some pick up on Reuters Faith World blog. epd in Germany and some of the Francophone Swiss media have also written pieces following the press briefing.
It's good when interpretation can serve communication, I almost feel useful!
Meanwhile the sermon on the ecumenical movement of the cross preached by Tveit during the installation service is available in English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, though not yet in Tveit's mother tongue Norwegian. Perhaps we'll have to add some new translators to our lists.

Future ecumenical leaders encouraged to read poetry, for blessing the going out and the coming in

Towards the end of the day today two colleagues drove me out to the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey to interpret. Today was graduation day for the more than 30 students who have been living and studying together there for the past semester. It's alway a very moving and joyful event. The students come from an amazing diversity of countries and church backgrounds. There's always lots of good natured cheering and clapping as each student goes forward to get their certificate - though this part is a bit of a nightmare for the interpreter as the clapping oftens drowns out the name of the church and country!

Olav Fykse Tveit, the new WCC general secretary attended the graduation for the first time this evening and gave a humorous and heartfelt "sending out" to the students after they had received their diplomas. "You are ecumenical leaders" Tveit said to the students and mentioned that he felt he had very similar advice to share with them as he had just a week before with a very different group of leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There he took part in a panel discussion on what leaders read. This evening Tveit spoke passionately not only about reading but about re-reading - encouraging all of us to recognise what a huge resource we continue to have in reading and re-reading the Bible, not just reading it as individuals but reading and re-reading it with people in contexts very different from our own, listening to and being challenged by their readings and re-readings. As well as this multiple reading and re-reading of the Bible, he also mentioned reading biography and particularly emphasised the reading of poetry. there is something compelling in the brevity of poetry, it leaves you wanting more, formulating your own thoughts.
He closed by sharing two poems, the first one extremely short went something like this "Remember the enormous possibilities that lie within just a single second". The second poem was better known to his audience, fortunately the interpreter (me!) despite having come to the booth without a Bible also knew it well. The Psalms are indeed perfect poetry and Psalm 121 particularly good words with which to wish ecumenical leaders well on their homewards journeys.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time on and for evermore.

Later in the evening we celebrated the endowment of two new scholarships for Bossey and a Swiss pastor from Interlaken paying homage to Elisabeth Oerlemans quoted the French hymn "A toi la gloire" in various languages including Norwegian. Hymns of course are a good example of poetry in translation.