ECC 1:2; 2:21-23; COL 3:1-5, 9-11; LK 12:13-21
It was one o’clock in the afternoon on a mid-summer’s day. I was passing through the living room of my home in Berea. I was a professor then. I had recently turned fifty. I stopped dead in my tracks. The thought hit me: You will die one day. My parents were already deceased. I was looking at pieces of furniture I had inherited from them. I saw my mother’s china cabinet, the Duncan Fife dining room table, the mahogany sideboard. I noticed, too, pieces that once belonged to my grandfather and others, to my aunt Tina. I thought: they are all gone; these pieces, once theirs, remain. The next thought hit me hardest: one day I too shall die; these pieces will still be here. They will pass to others. God only knows who! They might even wind up at the Goodwill store, wanted by no one close to me. God says to the rich man in today’s parable: “The things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” They used to burn a piece of flax in front of the newly crowned pope and say: “Sic transit Gloria mundi” or “thus passes the glory of the world.” The great American playwrights, Kauffman and Hart wrote the classic comedy: You Can’t Take It With You. We know this, but when the reality hits, it stops us dead in our tracks. I will die one day. In the play, A Man for All Seasons, St. Thomas More reminds his accusers: “Death comes for us all, milords. Even for kings he comes.”
The question for us becomes: What do you take with you? As Job tells us, naked we came into the world and naked we depart the world. The medieval morality play, Everyman, tells us that when death comes, we take only our good deeds. Our deeds manifest the life of Christ in us. Ecclesiastes asks us today: “For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of heart with which he has labored under the sun?” It is Christ. Paul tells us today: “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.” He is our deep treasure, the pearl, the person of Christ, dwelling, as the poet Yeats says: “In the deep heart’s core.”
Deuteronomy says: Teach this to your children and to your children’s children. We are preparing to welcome a new religious education year. This congregation is a community of formators. By our example, we announce to our young people what is important, what holds us together: The person of Christ and him crucified and risen. To him we belong, not to our possessions. With St. Paul, we remind ourselves today: Our lives are hidden with Christ in God. “When Christ your life appears, then you, too, will appear with him in glory.”