Get a Life! (Hidden with Christ in God)
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff.
About a year ago I moved across Salt Lake. Moving is widely acknowledged to be terrible, and this was a protracted and somewhat painful affair. As it dragged on, I went to stay with a friend for a few weeks after my lease had ended. She was very gracious about this, and while I was there she told me I was free to use her assigned extra parking spot in the apartment complex covered lot. This was generous and also convenient, and I remember the second day I was there, I drove home from work, pulled up coolly to spot #25, my new spot, thank you, and I was just infuriated to see someone else’s car, in utter defiance of the posted PARKING FOR RESIDENTS AND THEIR GUESTS ONLY sign, someone else’s car, pulled into what I had quite quickly come to think of as my parking spot, snug as a bug. Driving, I find, makes remarkably short work of any acquired emotional maturity or equanimity, and I had to laugh at the instantaneous rage I felt, the spinning hamster wheel of accusations and grievances, generating stories about whose car this might be, the audacity of it all, etc. It was comical, really: two days ago I had no parking spot, yesterday it was a gift and a gratuitous kindness, and today it’s something I own and have to hang on to, and I’m infuriated when it’s taken from me. Mine, mine, mine!
So I parked on the street—and had a good laugh about it. Trivial as the parking spot was, you can see the way this pattern of possessiveness works. First I had nothing, then I received a gift, and then I dug my little claws into it and latched on, trying to keep it, which had little effect on the absolute contingency of the world but did effectively stifle my love of God and certainly neighbor in that moment.
“Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” One’s life does not consist in abundance of possessions. So Jesus answers the person in the crowd who comed to him hoping to settle a family quarrel over inheritance in today’s gospel passage. And then he tells the Parable of the Rich Fool, the story of a man who did have an abundance of possessions, and thought they were his life. Having received the spontaneous gift of a bumper crop, so bountiful it won’t fit into his siloes, he immediately sets to figuring out how to hang on to it all. “He thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ ‘I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.’” Where I wonder is the gratitude? After a record harvest like this, so much that it can’t fit in your existing multiple barns, one might turn to God in thanks, as the giver of every good gift, or gratitude might similarly be expressed through generosity, sharing what we first received by giving it to others. But no, the rich fool is going to build bigger barns so he can keep it all. And though we have not all each been so fortunate in the harvest or the stock market or matters of inheritance (which is still a racket), we can recognize in ourselves I think his trait of possessiveness, that impulse to build bigger barns to hang on to what we have been given and keep it.
But we can’t keep it. One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, though we often act as if it did. Death will finally teach us this, if we refuse to learn beforehand. The fool quotes Ecclesiastes, planning to eat, drink, and be merry,” but he leaves off the end piece—“for tomorrow we die”! “This very night your life is being demanded of you!” What use are bigger barns now? Jesus tells this parable to the brother with the legal trouble as if to say, inheritance problems? I’ll give you an inheritance problem. All those things you are hoarding up, and quarrelling over, and building bigger barns to warehouse, that abundance of possessions you think make up your life, whose will they be when you die, huh? That’s an inheritance problem, one that raises questions about how to live now, and how to relate to the material things of our life, which we need, yes, but which are not our life.
There are many clues to be found in the surrounding texts from the Gospel of Luke. Two weeks ago, we heard the story of Mary and Martha, and Jesus drew our attention to Mary’s attention to the one thing necessary. Surrendered at the feet of Jesus she had chosen the better part, the part that would not be taken away, the part that would last. She was rich toward God. Mary found her life hidden in God with Christ. Last week, we heard the other disciples ask, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And Jesus teaches them to ask God to feed them each day with daily bread, looking to God as their loving parent who they can trust to provide for their needs. The verses immediately after this parable are illuminating commentary as well. Listen to the very next thing Jesus says:
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. 23 For life is more than food and the body more than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! 25 And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? 26 If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 28 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, you of little faith! 29 And do not keep seeking what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. 30 For it is the nations of the world that seek all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. 31 Instead, seek God’s kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.” (Luke 12:22-31).
The ravens “have neither storehouse nor barns” of any kind, did you catch that, “and yet God feeds them.”
So one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions. Where is life to be found? In what does your life consist? Or, to give the game away a bit, in whom does your life consist? According to the author of the Letter to the Colossians, real life is not a denial of death through continual material acquisition. Real life is only to be found on the other side of death, acknowledged and even welcomed. “You have died, and [now] your life is hidden with Christ in God.” We find our life through participation in Jesus’s death and his rising. This is the essential logic of Christian redemption. Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans: “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:3-5) We are saved not by anything we do but allowing ourselves to be lost and little and last, buried in Christ’s death and raised to walk in newness of life. “When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.”
Our possessions are not our life. Even our life is not our life. Remember, our life is hidden with God in Christ, and the Christ pattern, Jesus’s pattern is the way of non-possession, self-emptying and open-handed surrender. That is how he lives and dies and rises, pouring himself out, no trace of grasping ambition in his godliness but walking among us as one who serves. “Lose your life for my sake and you will find it,” he tells us. And as backwards as that might sound, it’s exactly right. He’s pointing us to the narrow gate of death that leads to eternal life. We need to die to our possessions, to our clutch on certainty, our desperate compulsion to be right and virtuous and recognized on our own merits. All that washes away in the death that is our baptism. It all goes under the water. And we are reborn to life that is pure grace, in a world where absolutely everything has been given to us. We’re called to walk in radical trust that God will provide.
As the psalm says, “He satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things”—and sends the rich empty away, as Mary reminds us in the Magnificat. Becoming empty and hungry, divesting ourselves of privilege and pretension and power, open-handed, carrying no bag or staff, this is how Jesus sends his disciples out. Finding our life hidden in God with Christ, we are to live from the trust moment by moment that God feeds us, that we will be cared for and given exactly what we need. There is no need to hoard up what is given in fear and scarcity, because we can trust we will be filled with good things, moment by moment. God gives us our bread and butter, day by day by day, just as the manna in the wilderness came down new each morning.
Finding our life hidden in God with Christ also means discovering a shared life with all the other people who have been buried in his death. In the newness of life that is being clothed in Christ “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” In this one Body of Christ the former divisions have been broken down and the truth of each person is revealed: we were each of us, every kind of person, made for union and communion with the living God. As we die to self-sufficiency we will find that Christ has already made his home in us and his life is yearning to live itself out in ours. Gently yet persistently he invites us to stop grasping and clutching and trying to own ourselves and the world and instead simply surrender to the open-handed trust we were made for: our true inheritance. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34).
Amen.