The Tenth Sunday
after Pentecost - August 5, 2007
One True Thing
Deacon Carole Maddux,
St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church, Alpharetta, Georgia
Wow, these readings are pretty heavy.
As my high school German teacher would say, “Das ist ein boommer!”
She never could pronounce “bummer.”
First we have the author of Ecclesiastes
reminding us that all we do will pass away. Nothing in our life
matters. Everything we’ve worked for will be left for the idiots we
leave behind. Boommer.
In fact, this is known as the most
pessimistic of all the books in the Bible. Some scholars think it
wouldn’t even be in the Bible if it wasn’t attributed to Solomon.
The psalm’s not much better. We
all die, wise or stupid, rich or poor, prominent or anonymous,
we all die and are eventually as unknown as the beasts that died with
us. Another Boommer.
So, what can we do in the face of such
gloom but turn to the Gospel, and see what Christ has to say about it.
Just as we’ve been asking Christ about
our everyday lives for the past several Sundays. We have Martha
asking Jesus how to get Mary to help. A lawyer asking Jesus for the
roadmap to the kingdom; even to the detail of the legal definition of
“neighbor.” A seeker asking Jesus how to pray. And, in this
Sunday’s Gospel, a man asking Jesus to make his brother share his
inheritance. All issues we still wrestle with today.
For example, one day when I worked in an
inpatient hospice, there was an incredible commotion down one of the
patient halls. Two middle-aged women were slugging it out and cursing
each other just outside the room where their Mama lay dying.
They were so intense, we thought we
would have to call Security, but between staff and family finally
managed to separate them and remove them from the facility.
At team meeting that week, we learned
that they were fighting over Mama’s inheritance.
So, I asked what it entailed, thinking
the small, unassuming woman in the hospice bed must have millions.
“Two thousand dollars and a trailer,” replied the social worker.
It doesn’t take much to make us lose all
perspective.
So, how does Jesus answer this
distressed sibling? The same way he answers Martha and the lawyer. By
telling him that he is focused on the wrong thing.
Through the parable of the rich fool,
Jesus lets us know that our focus can’t be on the things of this
world. If you look at the original Greek, you find that the quote
from God in the parable, “You fool! This very night your life is
being demanded of you.” Literally translates as “Fool! In this night
your soul they demand from you.”
Making it sound less like the man will
literally die in the night and more like he is suffering a spiritual
death through his single-minded attention to his possessions. They
are demanding his soul.
Things that won’t even last have taken
this man’s very life.
But Jesus knows that in God there is a
richness that gives life. That there is something beyond the vanities
and futility in our Old Testament lessons.
But what is it?
What is the one true thing that Jesus
alludes to with Martha? What is the one thing that doesn’t perish with
us? The one thing that can cause us to pray, to help our
neighbor, to share, to stop what we’re doing and just listen?
What is the one true thing? The love of
God. The love of God for us. The love we return to God.
The love of God that we share with each other.
It’s the one true thing that Jesus
points to over and over. It’s the only thing that lasts.
And the good news for us is that we do
last within that love.
For as Paul proclaims, we “have been
raised with Christ” so we are with Christ in God. We must
abandon our old preoccupations and “seek the things that are
above.”
But daily life does intrude. We do
need to work, to cook dinner, to change diapers, to mow the
lawn, to settle estates.
How do we keep our “minds on things that
are above”?
How do focus on the one true thing when
the carpets need vacuuming, our tennis tournament is tomorrow,
we need to lose 20 pounds and our boss is demanding overtime?
How do we make the love of God permeate
everything we do?
First, there’s the easy step.
What is demanding our very soul? What are we too preoccupied
with to remember God?
I just got back from a vacation to
Yellowstone where we rented a cabin in Emigrant, Montana. A tiny
town. Literally no more than a gas station, a grill, a saloon
and a church (An Episcopal church, actually!).
Oh, and one more business,
mini-storage units.
Even in this tiny town, surrounded by
the hugeness of Montana, people still had more possessions than
they could hold.
When I left home to test a vocation to
the Sisterhood many years ago, I gave away almost all my possessions.
I got down to just two cardboard boxes that I could store in the
church’s attic. Just two boxes and not one expensive item in eithe
That really felt good. And I could see
the wisdom of a vow of no possessions at all. A life of prayer and
contemplation would be pretty hard to pursue without that freedom from
all those things.
Of course, when I found that my vocation
was in the world, it took me no time at all to re-accumulate a whole
apartment full of stuff. I still gather little treasures here and
there. A book, a bear, a face-jug. Things that have brought
me some pleasure.
But I try to always remember that it was
giving away my things that really freed me, not gathering them. If
that woman in the hospice had given her stuff away before she was
dying, maybe her daughters would have been better for it.
So, in tribute of St. Teresa of Avila’s
prayer: “Thank God for the things I do not own,” I think I’ll give
away some stuff now.
Of course, it’s not always possessions
that threaten to possess us. It can be a job, politics, the
internet, a sport, a vice, a virtue.
Yes, even a virtue, I’m sure we’ve all
known someone so obsessed by church that he forgets all about
God.
Anything that tears our focus from the
love of God for us and for each other is dangerous.
Now to the second step,
How do we infuse our everyday work,
not obsessions but just our daily duties, with the love of God?
Can we seek the one true thing even while emailing, cleaning, playing
or talking? How do we listen for God’s presence in the everyday?
While researching this, I came across a
wonderful passage from Gerard Manly Hopkins
It is not only prayer that gives
God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam,
white-washing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring,
everything gives God some glory if being in His grace you do it
as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but
to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives Him glory too. To
lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a
dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give Him
glory, too. God is so great that all things give Him glory if
you mean that they should.
Not too many slop pails in Alpharetta
any more, but I’m sure it applies to all our work, whether
accountants or bus drivers, nurses or writers, teachers or
engineers, parents or students.
We can all give God glory and
reflect his love in everything we do if we just remember that one true
thing.
God loves us, each one of us,
and as children of the resurrection, we can love each other, too.
Let us pray.
Almighty and eternal God, so draw our
hearts to Thee, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, that we
may be wholly thine, utterly dedicated unto thee; that in all our
works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy
Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
© Deacon, Carole Maddux. All Rights
reserved.
(top)
