02 August 1998
All is vanity! I worked hard all my life and what does it get me? I make beautiful things, I have wonderful possessions, I have great people around me, wonderful parties to go to, but it is worthless. What a depressing lesson!
Koheleth, the preacher, the speaker in the Book of Ecclesiastes, goes through an entire litany of all the things that he considers to be blessings, things any good Hebrew would understand to be gifts from God. He says, "but what is it worth? It is all vanity! I hate everything I have ever done."
Ecclesiastes is not one of the easier books to understand or to appreciate in the light of the Gospel. He seems to come to the conclusion that he who pleases God gets. You do good things, God gives you good things. But if you look around, unfortunately, you will see lots of scoundrels who have lots of good things too. Then you wonder if in fact God is the giver of gifts, or if that is just happenstance and therefore vanity. So it leaves us with this kind of aching void as we read this lesson.
Jesus does not come to the same conclusion, of course. In today's Gospel, we have someone who is a whiner come up to him and say, "Jesus, my parents died and my oldest brother is keeping everything to himself. Make him share." Jesus says, "I am not your kindergarten teacher. Settle this yourself, but beware of any or every kind of greed." Jesus does not come to the same conclusion that possessions are a sign of God's favor or that possessions are what is important about life. Jesus, who had nowhere to lay his head, would not come to that conclusion. Jesus, who had an HMO directed tomb (he stayed there three days and left); Jesus, whose only coat was lost in a dice game as he was being executed, would not come to the same conclusion — that, if you do God's will you get lots of stuff. Instead, he tells a parable and makes the point that richness is found first and foremost in God.
He also does not come to the conclusion that it is a good thing
to have to struggle or that it is a good thing to be impoverished.
After all, this is the same Jesus who said, "I come to bring
life and life abundant." The same Jesus whose first miracle
at that wedding in Cana in Galilee, towards the end of the party
when everybody else would have pulled out the Thunderbird to serve
because it would not have made any difference since everybody
was pretty well lubricated already and they wouldn't have tasted
that nasty wine. It was this Jesus who turned 120 gallons of water
into the finest wine at the end of the party to make it last longer
and to gladden peoples' hearts even further. So Jesus doesn't
come in and say go into poverty, but he also doesn't say chase
after wealth. And it is in that middle ground between poverty
and wealth, that we find the point that Jesus is making to us.
That is, it is in God that we find our richness.
The confusion of the priest Koheleth in Ecclesiastes is fairly common. One of the things he was looking for was for life to explain itself, to be able to look at the events of life and the circumstances of life and say this is where God is working; this is where God is not working; obviously this person is a good person because he received benefits; this person is a bad person and he is being punished. Life does not do that. It doesn't define itself. It only confuses if we start out with the premise that the events of life are based upon God's pleasure.
Instead, life is understood in the final basic acceptance of mystery in the theological sense of that word, not the Erle Stanley Gardner sense of that word. Mystery is revealed truth, truth too profound for words. Like Paul, struggling with how it is that Christ loved the church so much, in Ephesians writes that passage about Christ's relationship to the church being like a husband's relationship to the wife. (One our fundamental friends love to point out when they are passing resolutions that woman should be submissive.) But Paul doesn't come to that conclusion. If you read his letter, he gets through that description and then he says how would you describe this, which says quite clearly that doesn't do it. That description didn't do it. But you know papyrus is very expensive. You do not just throw it away, you live with what you have written. And so he says this didn't quite do it because behold, it is too profound, too deep for words, this love of Christ for his church.
Mystery. Mystery is that revealed truth in which we say finally, aha, I know what it is for Jesus Christ to love me more than anything! I know what that is but I cannot express it in words. Art, poetry, and music help, but even they do not do it adequately. And so, Jesus is turning us to a much deeper understanding of God in this parable he tells us today in response to the question.
The danger continues to lurk, though. The danger is that the things we possess will turn on us and possess us. The things we possess will take so much of our time and our effort to tend to them that we lose sight of the very things that are important to us, and vital to us, and ultimate in our lives. It can be our family, it can be our cars, it can be our houses or our bank accounts, or our stock portfolios, or our hobbies. It can be almost anything that, put out of balance, and put in the wrong priority, can begin to possess us and take us away from single minded devotion to Christ Jesus.
St. Paul comes to our rescue in Colossians today when he says, "Put on the love of Christ." Put it on like you put on your clothes. Or, better yet, put it on like the skin you wear, in which we are housed. Let the love of Christ cling that closely to you so that your absolute undying commitment to your possessions can be the next layer out. If you put on Christ, then the peace of Christ will rule in your heart, St. Paul says to us. Give up idolatry, give up all that.
But there is a problem, and we all know what it is, the problem of submitting whole heartedly to Christ is much harder than it seems. It is easy to say that Christ is my first devotion, but so often in my life the priesthood has been my first devotion. Being the rector of a parish has been my first devotion and sometimes Christ takes second place or maybe even third place behind family or some other thing that is taking my attention.
You know how hard it is if you look at your own life and see the things that start out as blessings but begin to be your keepers, your jailers, and begin to tie you in knots as you try to maintain them. When you find yourself in the place in Ecclesiastes of looking at things, possessions and saying what is it all worth — back away and say it is worth nothing unless the love of Christ is in the midst of it. Then replace Christ in our center, then those things again become important, become blessings, become things in which we can rejoice.
Jesus never pretends that acceptance in faith of the mystery of God, that acceptance in faith of redemption or the love of God can be accomplished without hurt or anguish. It is hard work. It is simple work, but it is very hard. Instead, Jesus tells us in this parable today and in so many like it that the challenging life of faith will be filled with risk and disappointment. If we are going to go into the world and proclaim the love of Christ to the world around us, we must risk being laughed at. We must risk being ignored. We must risk having the conversation stop around us because somebody heard us talk about how much the Lord loves us.
If we are going to establish the Kingdom of God on this earth through the grace of Almighty God, we need to take that risk and that challenge. And yes, we will be disappointed when people reject the word of God. Yes, we will be disappointed when the thing we value the most is not valued by somebody we love. But, but some will accept. Some will value what we say and some will enter the kingdom of God because of your efforts and mine.
Giving up our possessions does not mean giving up. It means giving up enslavement to those possessions. It means taking them out of the center of our lives and putting them where they belong, so that Christ can fill the center. And as Christ fills the center, everything else begins to make clear sense in the world. The things that we have been given and the things that we share with others. The things that others give to us and the people who share our lives with us. Giving up greed, giving up grasping to the possessions that we have and the careers that we have and the family that we have and the faith that we have. Giving up that grasping means that we open our hands and when we open our hands we find them filled with overflowing joy, as Christ comes into our hearts. And then that joy overflows out of our hands to the people we embrace around us with that same love of Christ.
Ecclesiastes had a bad day when he wrote this passage. Christ had a good day when he was asked a similar question by the man who wanted to share an inheritance. And he brings into focus the greatest inheritance that each of us have and will ever have — the love of God poured out in abundance upon us, so much that we cannot contain it, so much that we have to share it.
As we leave this Eucharist today let us remember the words of parting, to "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord," by carrying his love into our community, among our friends, and our neighbors.
AMEN
The Rev. Dr. Robert Certain
rgcertain@stmargarets.org
02 August 1998