EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME 

Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23 | Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11 | Luke 12:13-21

Draw near to your servants, oh Lord.  Answer their prayers with unceasing kindness, but for those who glory in you as their creator and guide, you may restore what you have created and keep safe what you’ve restored.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The opening prayer that I mentioned sets the tone, as it always does, for what we should be looking for in the readings.  And there’s something in this reading, this prayer, rather, that strikes me.  It’s a word I haven’t really thought of before, but we’re praying to God to restore us to how we were created.  “Restore what you have created.  Keep safe what you have restored.”  Well, if something’s restored, it means it was one thing, and now it’s not what it was, and it needs to be returned to what it was.  And there’s a passage from Jeremiah that’s always struck me as so interesting, yet it doesn’t always sink in, because it’s a piece of wisdom.  And you know that the work that we’re always doing, as we listen to readings and open our heart to them, is we’re listening for wisdom.  Wisdom is the goal of the scriptures.  It’s the goal of my preaching.  It’s the goal that we are here to achieve.  That is to see things as they really are, and wisdom is not something that’s logical and practical.  The mind has a really hard time holding it, because there’s so many exceptions to it that we get all confused.  But it really does make sense to the heart, that mysterious organ that is like a brain and has the same cells that a brain has.  The heart thinks, and it ponders, and it wonders.  But when you give it wisdom, it just smiles, if that makes sense, and it feels comfort.  So what I’m getting at is a phrase from Jeremiah where it says, “God, before I was born, you knew me.  In my mother’s womb, you gave me a task, a work to accomplish, and I long to accomplish that work.”  When you think about that, it’s really fascinating, because it means that — if we believe that, it means that there is a reason for us being who we are, how we look, what gender we are, what race we are, where we’re living, what time we’re living in this place, and we have a role, a responsibility while we’re here.  And there’s something about that kind of notion of life that goes so far beyond what is practical and what is normal and that takes up all our attention during the day.

And so if we can believe that we have this kind of destiny, we have this self that’s beautiful, and yet we know that, when we grow up in families of origin, they’re all different.  And sometimes, depending on the dynamic of the family or just depending upon how we deal with the family — sometimes it’s not the family’s fault.  We don’t come into the world without a personality, without a kind of background.  I love even thinking about that background being the background — the person we were created by God has a certain capacity for things, an understanding of things.  But in any case, when you think about it, just think that we come into this world, and the very person that we are maybe stops growing and feels threatened and isn’t nourished, and that part of us doesn’t grow.  And it needs to be enlivened, awakened, enriched, restored. 

So I think the theme of this set of readings is how do we stay rooted in the role that God has given us, and how do we enter into that role more fully and not be distracted by everything around us, particularly not be distracted by ways in which we’ve figured out to live in this world.  The world is difficult.  The world that you and I are living in is really not that different than many other generations.  We may think things are worse.  People say the world is crazy now, and it is kind of crazy, but it’s always been crazy.  And there’s always been violence.  There’s always been pain.  There’s always been disease.  There’s always been pandemics.  This is the way the world is, and when you’re in that world and you’re trying to make it better or you’re trying to make yourself better, when you’re working hard to change everything so that it becomes something more palatable to you, that’s vanity.  And vanity is nothing other than trying to achieve something through a goal, and it cannot — it cannot achieve it. 

I don't know if you’ve ever thought this.  I think it often.  If it would just not be so hot, if it would just not be so violent, if we could just get past this pandemic, then everything would be okay, everything would be fine.  We’re not here to make the world into a place that is just comfortable and easy.  We have a different purpose, and the purpose is described in the second reading.  Jesus, or rather Paul, is saying to us, “Look, here’s the thing.  Jesus came into the world to do something, and what he was going to do, what he did — what he did was he taught us something about how to live in the world, and he used the most bizarre thing.  He used crucifixion.”  When you look at a cross, I don’t know whether you do what I sometimes did in the past, but you look at it, and you kind of don’t really want to focus on it so much, because it seems to be saying that God came into the world to create a world for us, and it’s going to be really hard, it’s going to be difficult, and you’re going to suffer and be in pain.  And the more pain you’re in, the more love that you show to God, and when God saw all the love coming out of Jesus to the Father, it made up for all the terrible things human beings did.  A very bad interpretation of crucifixion.  Jesus was teaching us something, and he said, what he was saying is that you have to understand that there is something you have to die to.  Put to death a part of you that’s earthly, and the earthly part of you that vanity points out is the part of you that wants to have a world that is created by you to be more comfortable, more full, filled with all the things you want.  The image in the gospel is so clear, a person thinking, “I’ve really done the right thing.  I’ve been in the world.  I’ve made money.  I’ve made possessions, or I’ve made a name for myself.  I’m famous.  I’m loved.  I’m respected,” whatever.  All of that is like, “Wow, I’ve got that now.  That’s wonderful.  That’s what I’ve been here for.”  And that’s not what we’re here for.  We’re here to go into a process of discovering who God intended us to be and the work that we’re here to accomplish.   

So when Paul is saying, “Look, put to death the parts of you that are earthly,” and then he uses greed as one of those things.  Stop lying to one another.  Let’s look at those two: greed and lies.  Greed is any time you want something more out of life than it was ever intended to give you.  You have a personality.  You look a certain way.  You have a certain gift, a certain talent.  People are not always content just to have that.  People, like me sometimes — because I grew up in a family where conditional love was the sort of way things were, I always feel like I have to find somebody that will appreciate who I am and tell me that I’m worth something.  So I have to work really hard in making myself into what they want me to be.  That’s a lie, but it’s also sad, because what it is, it’s sort of like I want to have a sense of my value and my worth, and I don’t have it because God tells me I have it.  I have to earn it.  I have to do something that makes me feel that I’m important or that I’m safe or that I’ve achieved what I’m supposed to achieve.  Isn’t it interesting that God is not so much asking you to create a person that you think he wants you to be.  He wants you to be the person he created, not the one you think he wants.  So one of the thing that’s interesting about Qoheleth in the first reading is that one of the big things he was working against by saying anything you do to make the world better, any time you try to make yourself comfortable or do something wonderful, it just doesn’t make any difference.  Life just goes on.  It’s sort of like — it’s depressing.  That’s the only word I come up with is depressing.  But what he’s really attacking is a thing called justice that has to do with the way the Old Testament kept seeing God’s relationship with you and me, and that relationship that we create, not that he created, the one that we create, is that we think, if we please God, he’s going to bless us and give us good things, retribution.  But if you do bad things, he’s going to take things away from you and make life miserable.  Now, that’s a major part of the Old Testament.  It’s still around.  It floats around.  It’s in prosperity gospels that talk about, if you just do everything that God wants, you’ll be rich, and you’ll have everything you have ever wanted.  That’s a kind of greedy way of being in the world, doing what you’re doing, because it’s going to feed you and your ego and what you want, the antithesis of what God wants us to be.  He wants us to die to that part of us that says, “I’m in charge of how God relates to me.  I’m in charge of whether good things or bad things happen to me.  And I’m working, working, working at it.”  It’s exhausting.  Qoheleth said that’s all vanity.

So what does God really want us to feel?  How do we deal with the world and the craziness of it and all the problems of it?  It’s pretty simple.  It’s something about believing in who God is and who we are, and the best way I can describe it is that God, who created you, made you exactly as you are, and he’s in love with what he created from the minute it was created.  The minute you came out of your mother’s womb, you were loved, and nothing you can do, nothing you can do can take that love away from God pouring it toward you, in you, for you.  That’s so hard for me to believe, that it is that unconditional.  I have to do something to earn that.  No, you don’t.  In fact, when you do feel you have to earn it, you can’t receive it and don’t get the full benefit of it, because there’s something so transformative knowing that you’re loved that way.  And then he tells you you’re safe.  He’s not going to let anything harm you.  He says it over and over again.  He holds us close in his heart. 

I looked up the word hold in the Oxford English Dictionary.  It means to keep close, to keep in mind, to watch over, to guard, to keep from falling, to sustain, to remain with, not to lose.  That’s who God is in your life.  That’s what this life is for, for you to believe that and live with that.  And then the last thing says not only are you safe, not only are you loved, but you have value, enormous value, and that value is not in your becoming somebody you think God wants you to be or who the world wants you to be or what your religion demands that you be.  No, it’s being authentically you, restoring that beautiful person that God created, that he knows everything about you before you came out of your mother’s womb.  And now we’re in this world, and first and foremost, we have to believe that the real world we live in is the environment of love, care, protection, hope, peace.  Doesn’t have a lot to do with what’s going on around us.  To find that is a miracle, but it’s what God created at the beginning.  So it’s there, and it’s waiting to be restored. 

Father, free us from the responsibility we sometimes mistakenly feel that we have to achieve something great before you pay attention to us, before you love us, before you bless us.  Give us true faith, true trust in who you are, and let us not doubt your love or your care, your protection.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.