18th Sunday in Ordinary Time C. August 1, 2010 Our
Lady of Grace 9:30, 6PM. Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:21-23.
Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11. Luke 12:13-21.
God appeared to a woman in a dream. She was 40 years
old and beginning to sag a bit in the places we all do as we grow older.
God said to her, “I am going to give you another 40 years of life.”
The woman thought to herself. “If I am going to live another 40 years I
should get some work done on this wonderful body of mine. A nip and tuck
here and there and nobody will be able to guess my age.” A few weeks later
she was driving home from a night on the town celebrating her new look. A
drunken driver ran a red light and she was dead in an instant. When she
appeared before God in heaven she said, “I don’t understand this, God.
I thought that you promised me another 40 years of life.” God
looked at the woman and said, “I am sorry, but you don’t look like yourself
and I didn’t recognize you.”
No matter how hard we try, there are certain facts of life
that we cannot change. Life in this world is temporary. We are all
getting older and the world as we now know it is passing away. The Bible
is filled with wisdom to help us live a good life. The teacher Qoheleth said, “Vanity of vanities! All things are
vanity! What profit comes to a person from all the toil and anxiety of his
heart and his labor under the sun … for he must leave his property to someone
who has not labored for it.” Have you ever seen a hearse headed for
the cemetery with a u-haul trailer behind it? We spend our whole lives
accumulating possessions and power of various kinds only to find that
everything is stripped away at the moment of our death. We may try to
push death off into the future, with some success. In
Jesus knew that disagreements about splitting a family
inheritance after the death of a parent are common... A man said to him, “Teacher,
tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Jesus used this
request to tell a story about the foolishness of building our lives on
greed. Jesus said: There was a rich man whose land produced a great
harvest, a harvest too big to be stored in his barns. The man built even
bigger barns and then he said to himself, “You have so many good things
stored up for years to come, therefore rest, eat, drink and be merry!”
But God said, “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and
the things you have, to whom will they belong then?” The rich
man’s problem is that he sees life as being totally about him... He
worked. He stored. He decided to eat, drink and be merry. In
the end everything is about God. No matter how hard we have worked, in the
end we will find ourselves totally in the hands of
God. It is not that hard work or riches are bad things. The problem
is that riches can deceive us and make fools out of us.
The purpose of the story that Jesus tells is to keep us from
being fools. It should be obvious to us that it is foolish to build
our lives on things that are passing away. It should be obvious to us
that we are going to die and that all the material things we have will then
belong to somebody else. The point of the parable is to teach us to be
rich in what matters to God.
Tomorrow we will have the funeral of Charles Nichols.
His wife asked that we sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” before we close
the casket. They have been married for 58 years and it is their
song. Yesterday I had the wedding of a young couple. At the reception the
bride and groom stepped onto the floor for the first dance. Their song
was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Time moves on. A marriage
ends and a new marriage begins. The world as we know it is passing away.
I listened with tears in my eyes.
At the end of our lives most of us will not be sorry
that we didn’t spend more time at work. We will not be sorry that we
didn’t have more things when we already had enough. We probably will not
be sorry that we didn’t know more people, have our names in the newspaper and
on TV, or have more power over other people’s lives. I have a brother who
was crowded into retirement by the current economic situation. He now
spends four days a week doing child care for two of his grand children. He says
that he didn’t have a chance to spend extra time with his children because he
had to work. Is he richer or poorer now?
The Apostle Paul challenges us to live our lofty Christian
vocation. He says, “If you were raised up with Christ, seek what is
above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is
above, not of what is on earth… Put to death, then, the parts of you that are
earthly; immorality, impurity, passion, evil desires and the greed that is the
worship of false gods… since you have taken off the old self with its practices
and have put on the new self which is being renewed… in the image of its
creator.”
Once there was a
rabbi who was so well known for his wisdom that many people came to him looking
for the secret of a good life. A very rich man came to visit him out of
curiosity, having heard so much about him. When the rabbi invited the rich man
into his home the rich man was surprised that this very famous rabbi lived in
one room with almost no furniture, only a bed, a desk and a few books.
The rich man said, “Rabbi, where is your furniture?” The rabbi
answered, “Where is your furniture?” The rich man said, “I
am only a visitor here – I don’t have any furniture.” The rabbi
smiled and said, “I am only a visitor here too. On the day that
I realized that I am only a visitor in this world I became a rich man. On that
day people started to come to me to learn how to live well and how to be
happy. It is all very simple. Remember that you are only a
visitor here and you will be wise and rich in the things of God.”
Happiness is not
about how much we have. Happiness is about seeking to be rich in
what matters to God. Everything else is passing away. For the wisdom to
understand this and to live this we give God thanks and praise.