Homily
Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“Stuff”
Today the Church puts before us the question of greed. The pursuit of stuff.
You hardly need a degree in behavioral economics to understand that we're all in love with stuff...with shopping, buying and possessing lots of stuff. When we’re depressed, we buy stuff. When we're happy, we buy stuff.
And as a famous product of our Catholic schools once noted, buying the stuff is just the beginning, for then we need a place to put it, so we drive to the Container Store, where we buy something to put our stuff in. In fact that's what our houses have become: big containers for all our stuff, where we can lock it up and keep other people from stealing it and putting it with their stuff. Even when we travel we carry little bags of our stuff, which we keep with us wherever we go.
And then there's the updating of my stuff, for last years stuff is never as good as thus year's stuff.....and after purchasing this years stuff I need to do something with last years stuff, so it's off to the Container Store once again.
And before you know it, taking care of my stuff is a full time job. And all my time, my affections, and my life are given over to the getting and keeping of stuff...to the point where I’m not sure whether I own them, or they own me. Indeed, there are days, I fear, when we treat our possessions like little Gods, while we treat God and the people he sends us to love, like just another collection of things.
Which is precisely the problem the man at the beginning of today's Gospel is grappling with. He has apparently been cheated out of his a bunch of stuff by his equally greedy brother, and so he demands of Jesus: "Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” He wants what he has coming.
The tone of his demand is remarkably like the complaint of Mary against her sister Martha a couple of weeks ago. And once again, the Lord is not overly enthused about quelling a sibling rivalry, but rather chooses to teach a lesson, whose moral is right up front: "Take care to guard against all greed (the lust for stuff), for though one may be rich (with stuff), one’s life does not consist of possessions.”
What's wrong with spending my life seeking possessions? Three things: Time, Happiness, and Truth.
- Time
Time. None of my stuff lasts forever. Ultimately, it all rots, rusts, and turns to dust. For as “leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
None of my stuff, none of it lasts forever.
Prospero understood this in Shakespeare’s Tempest when, interrupting his short play he suggests that like this performance, all we see and touch is but “the stuff as dreams are made on," stuff that "shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded....be melted into air, into thin air."
2. What's wrong with spending my life for possessions? Happiness. You’ve heard it said before, money can’t buy happiness. By the way, there's a friend of mine who likes to challenge that old truism, by suggesting that money may not buy happiness, but you can use it to rent it for a short time.
But what about real happiness. That kind that that makes you sleep like a baby and giggle like a little child? In a recent survey of 114 countries, respondents were asked to tell whether they were very happy, happy, unhappy, or very unhappy. You know which country in the world was the happiest? Nigeria, with an average annual wage of $300 per person. The United States came in fourteenth in happiness with an annual wage of over $40,000 per year.
3. What's wrong with spending my life for possessions? Truth.
For what does it really gain a man to purchase the whole world, pack it all up in a nice new barn, and be called to heaven the next day. Rather, Jesus warns us, ‘store up treasure for yourselves in heaven, and seek the higher things, the things the only things that last forever, faith in God, hope in his promise, and love in the image of Jesus, his Son.
All the rest if vanity, as Qoheleth reminds us...all the rest distracts us from finding our lives hidden with Christ in God.
The obsession with stuff, and its care and feeding, is our primary distraction from the real purpose of life: loving God and my neighbor, seeking after holiness and building up of the kingdom of God.
So what do w do? Do we give all our stuff to God and to his Church. Well, while that might make Monsignor Moroney happy, I have to admit that its not quite that simple. For God, St Augustine reminds us, does not want your gifts. God wants you.
He wants all of you.
He want you to be detached from the things of this earth, not because they are bad in themselves, but because they distract you from him.
He wants you, in the image of his only-begotten Son, to spend yourself, not for the goods of this earth, but for the good of those who need to be loved.
He wants you to shower mercy on everyone who hurts you, not because it is deserved, but because it is just.
He wants you to run out to find everyone who is lost or afraid or alone, not because there is anything in it for you, but because the lost sheep needs someone to cary him home.
He wants you to pray and to praise him, not because you will thereby gain heaven, but because he is worthy of all praise.
He wants you to feed the poor and clothe the naked, not so you can feel good about yourself, but because they need you.
He wants you to be like Jesus upon the cross, freed from the grasping fear that makes us hoard all that stuff for ourselves. He wants you to so open your arms, to so let go, to be so emptied, as to be filled only with his love.
Monsignor James P. Moroney
Rector
