18^th SUNDAY, Scripture Notes

We start today with a selection from Ecclesiastes.

The name refers to "an Assembly Preacher," who identifies himself

in the first line as a King over Israel, probably Solomon,

though that’s just a kind of literary pen-name.

Whoever wrote the book, this is one of the most human voices in the Bible.

It’s not a book about God’s doings, but about the

struggles of life, especially the problem of making sense of difficult times.

This is the book that contains the famous passage:

To everything there is a season, a time to be born, a time to die,

a time to plant, a time to tear up what is planted . . . .

You know the various musical versions of this.

In a certain mood, anyone of us might have written this book.

This is the only Sunday, every three years, where any of it is read in Church.

It is read because Jesus has a teaching very close to

the concerns of Ecclesiastes:

about the vanity of piling up profit from your labor.

Vanity: the word means emptiness, a thing without substance.

So the teacher from long past, and the teacher Jesus

are concerned about values, and how the greatest teacher of all

is death itself. Look at everything from that vantage point.

It’s interesting to hear this alongside Paul’s teaching in Colossians,

about the importance of really dying to thoughtless, addictive behavior,

because you just can’t get any life from it.

Don’t get put off by the old imagery of "earthly" things and things "above."

There is no Above in that sense, and it is not earth itself that is referred to.

It has to do with the tension between idolatry: of all kinds,

(addictions, reactionary thinking, rigid holding on, denying the truth)

and the bigger life of people, loved and cherished in God’s image.

The important life is our relationship to Christ, who is everything,

and in whom we live.

HOMILY 18^th Sunday C "Living with our Changes"

Ecclesiastes 1:1-2, 2:18-23; Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11; Luke 12:13-21

Not long ago I was ordering breakfast at Daybreak in Hyde Park Plaza,

part of a morning off. I had brought some reading,

not unusual for me on a Monday morning,

maybe a glimpse at the next week’s scripture.

So after awhile, a young woman sat next to me, more or less:

I was at the end of a long bench, and she sat on the same bench, next table;

she was alone for a few moments, and then her friend came,

with an infant in one of these carriers,

maybe just under a year old.

And now both women were caught up in greeting and conversation,

and what can I say, it was hard not to get some sense of it.

They looked to be thirty-something. And clearly both of them were moms.

They were friends who were sharing the first stages of motherhood.

They compared the times of the night when they’re awakened

(the second woman said, "he suddenly screams so loud it’s a shock.")

The mom right next to me had some older children,

and talked about the first pair of shoes, that big event,

and then she shared the amazement at what two kids can do

to polish off a gallon of milk.

"Wait till you see," she said.

And they talked about grandparents: "Sure, I want them to know and love

their grandparents, but I can’t just drop them off there all the time.

Besides, I want to be the one who is primary, who really cares for them."

Well, I thought, here are two young women caught up in change.

New lives, different lives, coming from their choice of love,

being drawn to love and to become pregnant.

It was on my mind last night presiding at a wedding,

two young people just barely aware that something very new was happening.

In a year and six months she might be sitting at a café with a friend

swapping stories of discovery. About children; or husbands.

And all the time the story is about changes, the unexpected,

and what it costs to live through changes,

the price of milk, the short life of shoes, the loss of sleep,

and how you have to make adjustments, give up some of your old ideas,

all for the sake of what’s next. You do it out of love,

you do it because life asks something, and you want to be

in tune with life, right?

This is a good example of having to loosen your grip on "earthly things"

for the sake of something more valuable, something bigger, other people.

This way of thinking and living,

this willingness to give up a little security

for the sake of other people, not to hold on so much:

this is a spirituality that Jesus himself practiced,

where the way forward to holiness

was not being good or being perfect, or ascending "above,"

but it was giving up what you hold on to

for the sake of what life was asking.

"He did not cling to equality with God," St. Paul says,

"but emptied himself."

Not to cling. I thought of that in the wedding yesterday,

those words of the vows: to be true to you in good times and in bad,

in sickness and in health, loving and honoring another person.

We all want a life that makes us happy, and is in tune with God;

but you can’t establish such a life in familiar, unchanging stabilities.

I like to think of a healthy parish as a place where people can be

encouraged in their changes, their letting go, their conversion.

Yesterday at the funeral for Skip Prosser, sitting with concelebrants,

I was often watching the faces of his family, Nancy, his mother and his sons.

What a new world they are entering now, not "above,"

but right here, achingly different, but you can only hope with them

that it shall be bigger, that they can find their way, loving and honoring but

not clinging to the one they loved and the way it all used to be.

Nothing else has life to it.

The man in the story from the Gospel

thought his life was secure and abundant,

but actually he had reduced himself, not enriched himself:

he was nothing but an owner.

The change from small barns to bigger barns

was not a change at all: it was the same old stuff.

So I end up thinking inside, God do you want to change even me?

Is there a bigger world of concern that you invite me to,

not "above" this world, but trembling with possibility right here.

Am I enriched by holding on to all I think I need?

What shall have to be given away?