Peace be with you.
I knew a priest who worked for many years in a parish far away from here. At first, he lived with two other priests in a terrible rectory that doubled as apartments for parish staff and some local college students. The building began its life as a fraternity house before the church bought it and converted it into apartments. It had a terrible old heating system and was plagued with bats and mice and other critters. Eventually, he got to know some of the more affluent alumni and convinced them to purchase some land and build him a condo to his own suiting. The idea was that he would retire at age 70 and remain living in the rectory as the Pastor Emeritus to raise funds for the parish. The new pastor could live in the parish-owned apartment until he raised his own money to live somewhere else. However, very much like in the parable Jesus spoke in the Gospel, my priest friend developed a very fast moving cancer and died less than a year later, shortly before he would have turned 70 and retired.
So, don’t save for retirement. It’s a sin to have a 401k or an IRA. And don’t get me started on life insurance or nursing home insurance. Just give any excess money you have at the end of the month to the church. (pause for the hope of laughter) Okay. Okay. I’m just kidding. Actually, it’s important to have a plan for your retirement, even if we know it could go very differently than we expect. The point of the parable is not the sin of savings but something much more meaningful.
Let’s look at the gospel through the lens of the first reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes. The author calls himself Qoheleth, a Hebew word that means “the reader” or “the one who addresses an assembly”. So, Qoheleth is the one who reads to us the message he received from God. The message repeatedly describes actions as leading to vanity. You may remember from Deacon Robert’s homily last weekend that vanity is one of the 7 deadly sins. When I think of vanity, I tend to think of a supermodel staring into a mirror smiling at how attractive she or he is. But, Qoheleth the reader realizes that it’s larger than that. He begins by trying to learn everything he can, to exhaust all knowledge. But he realizes that this is vanity and a “chase after the wind” another phrase Qoheleth repeatedly uses to mean something that’s impossible. No one can learn everything or know everything
So, since he can’t get all knowledge, he turns to pleasure and tries to be the happiest person in the world. He sees pleasure in the acquisition of things or, to echo what the man says in Jesus’ parable he want to be able to sit back some day and think, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’ He buys palaces, vinyars, pools for watering his orchards, herds, flocks, ane even people. He had every kind of treasure he could want but the search for more and more wealth made him miserable. Again, it’s vanity and a search after wind. After all, even the richest person in the world will someday die or get sick and the pleasure they feel in their things will be taken away. And, if he bases his pleasure on the fact that his name will be forever remembered because of the farm he owns or the palace he built, he realized that the names and stories of our ancestors only last as long as people remember them and they eventually pass away.
Qoheleth lands on a quandary similar to the one Jesus has at the end of the gospel: how do we build up for ourselves treasure in heaven? According to Qoheleth, we stop making it all about ourselves and our success and doing it our way and focus entirely on God and God’s will and seeing everything as a gift to be used by God. Which then changed the way we look at how we use our gifts, especially the gifts that are more than we can utilize today. It is our responsibility to first ask what God would want us to do before we ask what we want to do. Does God want us to allow concerns about our inheritance to rip apart our family? I think not. Does God want us to store up more money than would be necessary for a comfortable life in such a way as to impress others with all our stuff? Again, I think not.
The next pastor after my friend passed initially moved into my friend’s house but quickly decided he didn’t like it. He couldn’t invite his Associate Pastor or any seminarians to live with so he sold that house and bought an older, larger one closer to the church that could accommodate multiple people. I think he wanted to build up treasure in heaven. He could see that spending time with God and people was the most important treasure of all.
So how can we avoid the traps of vanity to build up treasure in heaven?
