Vanity
The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
GETTING YOUR VALUES STRAIGHT
August 1, 2004, 13-C, Calvary
Church
Ecclesiastes 1:12-14;
2:1-7,11,18-23
Psalm 49:1-11
Colossians 3:5-17
Luke 12:13-21
There
was a cartoon in my desk diary. Four
men are sitting around, smoking cigars and having drinks at their club, and one
man says, "Shortly after I realized I had plenty, I realized there was
plenty more."
Today's
readings are ones that rather say it all without needing much explanation. If you listened, you understood. Perhaps you didn't register your
understanding because it is a message that we all would as soon avoid, but it
couldn't be clearer. The writer of
Ecclesiastes, who is often called the Teacher, says, "...all is vanity and
a chasing after wind."
St.
Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, "Put to death...whatever in you
is earthly: fornication, impurity,
passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry)."
And
Jesus says, "Take care! Be on your
guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the
abundance of possessions."
Let
me make a confession to you right now, right at the beginning of this sermon,
so that my cards are on the table: Much
of the time I do measure my life by my possessions. That's a dirty truth about myself that I
don't like, but I couldn't preach to you about this Scripture, if I did not
first confess my own shameful involvement.
I
know better, of course; and God knows, I have had ample opportunity in my work
to see the truth of today's Scripture.
But somehow I lose hold of that truth much of the time as I check my
portfolio, and note the sale of real estate in my neighborhood, and enjoy the
smell of my new car.
I
know, however -- I really do know -- that those things have nothing to do with
the value of my life. I really do know
just what Jesus meant when he said that one's life does not consist in the
abundance of one's possessions. Not only
is one greater than one's possessions.
One is entirely separate in value from one's possessions.
This
comes home for me whenever a death of a person close to me occurs. Many of us have lost parents to death; some
of you have lost spouses and children.
After the visitation and funeral are over, there comes that painful time
when personal possessions are gone through.
Does one ever feel more like an intruder than at a time like that? And no matter how much is there, it never
adds up to very much at all when one holds it up against the person who is no
longer here. One then knows the truth
of today's Gospel, that one's life does not consist in the abundance of
possessions.
As
a somewhat lengthy aside, let me say that coming upon such a teaching as this
on a Sunday morning makes me even more certain than I had been that those of my
fellow human beings who are walking a different spiritual path -- be they Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus
or Christians of another sort -- will find that their path often intersects
with mine, for we are all on the same great spiritual journey, the journey to
control the Self, the journey for Truth.
You see, those faiths and their teachers also teach what Jesus and the
Teacher teach today: that real life is
different from, and greater than, the possessions one has.
This
aside is not a back door way for me to preach universalism nor is it a way for
me to sneak in that trite comment that all religions are the same. It is, rather, only a recognition that
searchers for spiritual truth are often searching for the same thing, no matter
what teacher they follow, and some of them may do a better job in certain cases
than we Christians do.
We
have to learn, in this tiny world in which we live, to honor and appreciate and
respect other seekers of Truth, by whatever name they carry; and if this calls
us to question our claims of exclusivity, then we must do so. We must cease comparing the best of our
faith with the worst of another's faith, for that table can be too easily
turned.
The
dominant voices of Christianity today are, unfortunately, the voices of
exclusivity and arrogance, with their cries of biblical literacy and their
claims of doctrinal purity. You can
build magachurches on such things -- and many have -- or claim to be the only
church; but I believe such things are corruptions of the generous Gospel of
Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ to those of us who follow him. A better world will only come when we
realize that we are all seekers, that we are all searching for the truth, that
we are all trying to control the Self, that we are all living with blinders
that must be removed.
That's
why a parish like Calvary and a church like the Episcopal Church (or at least,
the Episcopal Church that we find in most places) must live and grow. We must be here to preach that generous
Gospel and to witness to a generous faith community. We must be here to show that there is another kind of
Christianity than that seen in many places in America today. We must continue to say, "I don't have
all the answers, but come along on the faith journey with me, and together we
may find the truth."
And
one truth that we would find is the truth in today's Scripture, that real life
does not consist of what one has. The
Scripture does not say here, please note, that possessions aren't important; or
that no one should have more than anyone else; or that it is wrong to be rich;
or that poverty is blessedness. And
that is not what I am preaching. I'm
not preaching that because, first of all, it is not what the Scripture today
says, and secondly, I don't believe it.
The Gospel is saying, simply, get your values straight, and when you do,
you will know that a person -- you, anyone else -- is more important than, and
different from, what he or she possesses.
Jesus
tells that simple, but strong, story of the rich man who had such abundant
crops that his barns would not hold them.
So he decided to build larger barns to store the excess grain that he
had. In my book, so far so good. What else could he do? Wasn't he being a good steward of what he
had to build those extra barns? His
mistake did not lie in his abundant crops nor in his new and larger
buildings. His mistake lay in what he
believed those riches meant: that he
was now the master of his own fate. So he said to himself, "I have ample
goods laid up for the future. So I will
just relax. I will eat, drink, and be
merry."
But
that night he went to his eternal reward, and what he had built was left to
someone else. And who ever knows what
one's children will do with what one leaves them? Who knows if they will be good stewards of what you have
worked so hard to produce?
The
value lesson there is quite clear: you
cannot pay attention to that one part of your life to the neglect of your
essential self. That one part, with its
emphasis on possessions, will be over and will prove to be just as transitory
as it is. The other part lives on.
You
are more than the sum of your possessions.
You are also a spiritual being, a person, St. Augustine tells us, whose
heart is restless until it finds its rest in God.
There
is no time when that needs to be heard more than the time in which we now live,
having just come out of the 90's with their unrealistic financial gains for
some. If one's heart was set on
WorldCom or Cisco or Enron, one is rather like the man in today's parable of
Jesus. You thought you could eat, drink
and be merry -- you thought you had it made and nothing else much
mattered. But alas, it all proved transitory.
That
is what all the great religions teach:
it is all transitory, or as the Teacher says in our First
Reading, it is vanity. What is not
transitory, what is not vanity, is God.
Through good and bad times, through thick and thin, through abundance
and scarcity, God remains the same. And
it is God to whom our Faith would always point us.
"Take
care! Be on your guard against all
kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of
possessions." That's what Jesus
says; and you can never do better than to listen to him.
Richard
H. Humke