Homily – July 31

When I read the lessons for this week, my first thought was, well this sermon will practically write itself.  I mean, this is a very familiar gospel passage. We all know it, and it is very easy to understand.  Greed is bad.  The message is clear; don’t focus so much on money!  I don’t know about you, but I find that easier said than done.  Show of hands?  That’s what I thought.

But as I sat down to begin writing and spent more time with the lessons, a different picture began to emerge.  I began to wonder, what if Jesus isn’t talking about money here at all?  What if, as he does so many other times, he is simply using money as a metaphor to illustrate a larger point for us?  Listen again to this sentence.  “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded of you.”  And I started thinking.  Not about money, but about what would happen if this was my last day on earth.

When I was driving to church last week I heard a Kenny Chesney song on the car radio.  The title was, “everybody wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to go right now.”  Sound just like a country song, doesn’t it?  But there is truth there.  It is fine to know that we will be going to heaven one day for that is what we long for.  But very few people want to make the trip today, even though we know it will be a wonderful place.  We don’t want to go right now, but what if we had to?  Are you ready?

I spend a lot of my time thinking and planning.  I put a fair amount of effort into planning, budgeting, and thinking about the future and I am far from alone.  We have whole industries in this world that cater to this planning instinct; life insurance, retirement savings, financial planners, college savings plans, etc.  We devote a lot of time and energy into making plans, plans that we hope will better our situation in life.  It reminds me a bit of the words of the great prophet John Lennon who said “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”  Prophetic indeed.

Making other plans is largely our forte.  It is clearly what the man in the parable was doing.  “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops? I will do this.  I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.”  You could almost rephrase that for today to something like, “How will I plan for my retirement?  I know, I will build up a 401K, put the land into a tax exempt trust, and invest in high grade, low risk bonds.”  And if that doesn’t work, there is always the lottery or the casino!

But the man’s careful planning was thwarted as his life was ending that night.  All that he had worked for to make himself comfortable by acquiring more and more goods and money was for naught as he would not be around to enjoy it.  He obviously had missed the words of that other great prophet Mick Jagger who told us “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you find you get what you need.”

The story is even more tragic than that when you realize that, while we plan in an effort to accumulate more, the man in the story already had everything he wanted.  So much so that he needed to build bigger barns to hold it all!  Those of you who have a storage unit can probably relate to this.  The man had it all, so much so that he was about to allow himself to relax, eat drink and be merry.  But God had other plans.

I wonder what he would have thought had he known that this would be his last day.  I wonder if that would have changed his thought process.  He had been so focused on acquiring more and more that he hadn’t taken the time to enjoy the many blessing he already had.  Instead of being satisfied, he kept adding more and more.  There is likely a lesson there for us.

If you were going to die today, would you be worried about the balance in your 401K, or would you instead worry about what you hadn’t yet done?  Would you be focused on your life insurance coverage or would you regret the time you hadn’t spent with family, the grudges you had held against friends, and the times you had neglected to tell people that you loved them?

There is a song sung by Tim McGraw that sums this up.  “I was finally the husband that most of the time I wasn’t, And I became a friend a friend would like to have, and all of a sudden going fishin’ wasn’t such an imposition, And I went three times that year I lost my dad. I finally read the Good Book, and I took a good, long, hard look at what I’d do if I could do it all again and then I went skydiving, I went Rocky Mountain climbing, I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fumanchu. And I loved deeper, And I spoke sweeter, And I gave forgiveness I’d been denying. And he said, “Someday I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying.”

Live like you were dying.  An interesting concept.  It took the sure knowledge that he was dying for this man to finally get it and understand the things that matter in this world.  It’s not about acquiring more money or goods.  Have you heard the phrase “the one who dies with the most toys wins”?  Well that is just plain wrong.  Jesus isn’t really teaching us about money, he is teaching us to value the life we have.  We are given what we need, so we should focus our time on loving others, not for the wealth it may bring us, but simply for the joy of it.

We are called to live like we are dying because as Paul tells us, we already have.  “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”  We live in the middle times, for the old world passed away when Jesus died and was resurrected, but the new world won’t break through until he comes again.  Until then we live in the middle times.  As Haurwas and Willimon put it in their book, we are in reality a Christian colony, living as resident aliens in a world that is not ours.  So if we are dying, or in fact have already died with Christ, how are we to carry on with this life in the Christian colony on earth?

Paul tells us “you must get rid of all such things – anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth.”  Or as Tim McGraw told us, love deeper, speak sweeter, give forgiveness, and live this life like we were dying.  Then when we meet Jesus, we will have more to talk about than our bank balance.