The world around us tells us constantly that if you want to be happy, to be fulfilled in life, then what you need is more stuff: a new car, a mobile phone. It’s the latest model –- it’s been improved, you can’t do without it! The world tells us this and we listen, we take it in, and we do what the world says. We all of us do this — I’ve done it myself. Society says you can have what you want TODAY. The credit card companies will lend you the money for the latest gear and charge you an interest rate which is usurious and wrong. Having these possessions, we are told, will make us happy.
Nothing could, in fact, be further from the truth. Salvation by stuff has never, and will never, work. The writer of Ecclesiastes, our first reading this morning, knows this well. ‘Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.’ (Eccles 1:2) Stuff simply leaves us empty, craving more and more, never satisfied. Hence Our Lord’s teaching in this morning’s Gospel: ‘Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.’ (Lk 12:15) Wanting more things is never a good idea; Christ tells us this and warns us against it. Yet we do not listen…
So Jesus tells us a parable – there’s a man who’s got loads of stuff, he’s well-off in worldly terms, he is successful. Yet all he is interested in is keeping hold of his stuff, by building bigger barns to stash things away, so that he can sit back, and relax and take life easy.
Then the man dies, quite suddenly, and learns that important lesson: you can’t take it with you when you go. You can’t put pockets in your shroud. When you are dead your stuff doesn’t help you at all. It may buy you a swankier funeral, a more expensive coffin, a more expensive hearse to transport your dead body – even horses with ostrich plumes on their heads – but basically you are dead. Even if you spend thousands of pounds having your head frozen in liquid nitrogen, you are still dead. Money and stuff can’t help you with that. It has never been able to, nor will it ever. So Our Lord encourages us to turn away from the world and its vanity, and to turn back to the true source of riches: God.
In St Paul’s letter to the Colossians, in the passage just after this morning’s second reading he says:
‘Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.’ (Col 3:12–15)
This is the life which stores up treasure in heaven, which we live when we have ‘Set our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth’ (Col 3:2) This is what a Christian life really looks like, when lived out in the world. This is the sort of radically different life which can and does both change and transform the world: offering it a way that is different to the way of possessions. The way of love and forgiveness, of knowing that as Christians we are loved and forgiven, no matter who we are or what we have done. There is another way to live: as a community which embodies radical love and forgiveness in the world and offers it a new way of being, which turns the ways and values of the world on its head. The Christian way of life is that radical, that revolutionary, and that revolution has to start right here and today. We are listening to Our Lord speaking to us through His Scriptures; he calls us to live this life for our own good, for the good of others, and for the glory of the God who made us. God our Father loves us. He saves us: from the tyranny of stuff and sin, so that we can be free.
This then is what the Church is meant to look like. We are called to be like a lamp set upon a lamp stand or a city upon a hill: shining, attractive, a light amidst the darkness of this world; we represent a radical alternative: life in all its fullness. So let us live it, together. Let us set our heart on heavenly things. Let us build on Christ, our sure foundation, knowing that where our treasure is our heart will be also. God is our treasure, and His wealth is self-giving love.
That is why we have come here, today, to be fed in word and sacrament, to be fed by God, with His Body and Blood and His Word. These things nourish us and prepare us for heaven. They transform our human nature and they fill us with the Divine life of love and forgiveness. We can start living out God’s kingdom here and now and change all the world; so that all may believe and be transformed to sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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