THE HEART'S REFLECTION

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

            Got anxiety?  Hard to imagine anyone journeying through life without having some anxiety.  Remember your first day of school?  Remember being a freshman in high school?  Those teen years produced plenty of anxiety:  worrying about our looks, the whole dating scene, the incredible pressure to conform.  Homework itself produced anxiety.  Then we worried about grades and graduating.  As we came of age, some of us worried about our relationship with God.  Were we doing the wrong things?  Were we doing the right things?  Those questions were beginning to be important and anxiety-producing.  Then the question:  What should I do with my life?  Perhaps higher education.  Then marriage.  Then a family.  Then the beginning of a career.  And who hasn’t had to deal with a problematic boss?  Eventually we bought our first house.  Talk about anxiety-producing!  Then we began to deal with aging and health concerns.  Friends and family members died.  That caused us to face our own death.  Nothing like facing death to produce anxiety.  We endured 9/11.  We’ve weathered violent storms in the springtime.  Got anxiety?  How does one not get anxious from time to time?

            What’s more, we have another important pursuit in life.  We seek to lead a meaningful, fulfilling life.  We want to leave a lasting footprint in the sand of history.  We want our life to count.  We want it to be said of us that our life truly mattered.  We want to make some kind of positive contribution in the world.  As I listened to classical music in my young adult years, I thought of the composers whose names live on through the beauty they created.  I wanted my life to count like theirs.  What about you?  Did you read about the giants in science or medicine and fantasize becoming like one of them?  Maybe you saw your name attached with a cure for cancer.  Perhaps you were the one who would brilliantly educate students who would later become world leaders, famous scientists, or great authors.  Maybe you imagined yourself as bringing about world peace by your great and charismatic negotiation skills.  Somehow, somewhere, we want to make a difference.  We want to make a significant contribution in people’s lives.  We want the future to say of us that our life counted.

            Well, in whom or what do we trust to lead us to the fulfilling life?  In whom or what do we trust to reduce our anxiety?  If you’re anything like me, you put no small amount of trust in your own ability to take care of the future.  For some reason, I always worried about not having what I needed or wanted.  I had plenty of what I needed and wanted when I was a child.  But still, I prepared for a lack of whatever.  When I was a kid playing with toy six-shooters—westerns were all the rage on TV back in the early fifties—I collected toy guns so that I would never be without.  That trait stuck with me in life.  Rather than have one really great TV, I’d rather have several cheaper ones so that I would never be without.  I mean, how would I live if that one TV were ever to break down?  It would mean that I would have to—gasp—do without!  I always preferred redundancy to quality.  Why?  Because redundancy gave me greater control over the quality of my life.  Redundancy assured me that I would never do without.  One day, a number of us gathered here at the church for a work day.  Some workers were putting things out on tables, readying them to be discarded.  There were old Sunday school books and lots of things on those tables that were still usable.  I mean, we might need those things someday.  I started to rescue some of those items.  Then someone said to me, “Oh, Dick, you’re a hoarder, aren’t you?”  No!  Well, maybe.  Okay, yes I am!  I handle my anxiety about the future by taking charge.  I accumulate stuff, creating redundancy, so that I will have control and never do without.  The way many of us take care of anxiety is to strive to be self-sufficient.

            Not sure how you deal with anxiety?  Not sure how you strive to gain fulfillment in life?  Do this:  Follow the money.  Check out your checkbook.  Do an inventory of your credit card receipts.  Where does the money go?  It goes where your heart is.  Our checkbooks are a reflection of our hearts.  They reveal both our longings and what we trust to fulfill those longings.  Do our checkbooks reveal that we are striving to be self-sufficient?  Do they show that the consumption of stuff is a high value for us?  Are we trying to gain a better self-image through the accumulation of expensive things?  How we spend our money indicates where we put our trust to reduce our anxiety and to make our life fulfilling.  Our checkbooks are a reflection of the yearning of our hearts.  To use Jesus’ words, “. . . where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

            To our quests for fulfillment and the reduction of anxiety, Jesus offers this counsel:  “Sell your stuff.  Be generous and give to the needy.”  You want security?  Sell your stuff.  You want to reduce anxiety?  Be generous and give to the needy.  Sure, if your investment counselor gave you this advice, you would switch counselors.  But Jesus’ counsel isn’t in the area of investing money.  It’s all about how to invest your life in such a way that it matters in the world.  Jesus wants us to know that the fulfilling life, life in God’s kingdom, is a gift from God.  God makes that happen by giving it to us.  All we have to do is respond by “entering” God’s kingdom, that is, by accepting the values of God’s kingdom and living by them.  Such a life that God intends for us is marked by our loving neighbors, being an agent of reconciliation, helping the needy, working for justice.  God offers us a life that counts; and to have it, all we need to do is live by the kingdom’s values.  The fulfilling life is not achieved by storing up goods, Jesus tells us, but by living according to God’s rule.  Remember Jesus’ story about the rich fool?  His security was in the abundance of his crops.  He had become very wealthy.  His land produced so much that he couldn’t store it all.  So the rich fool decided to build bigger barns to store his crops.  He had achieved security and fulfillment, or so he thought.  Then God said to him, “You fool!  This very night your life is being demanded of you.  And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”  Jesus added, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”  Our attempts to reduce our anxiety by the accumulation of things reveals our lack of trust in God as our Provider, a lack of trust that by living according to the values of God’s kingdom our lives will truly be fulfilled.  So Jesus says, “Sell your stuff and give to the needy.”

            Then what are we to do?  Hold a big garage sale?  Empty our bank accounts and investment portfolios?  Are we to become financially poor in order to become spiritually rich?  The answer to that depends upon how much we have come to rely on ourselves and our own resources to reduce our anxiety and to gain fulfillment in life.  There was once a rich man who came to Jesus, seeking “eternal life,” another way of saying the kingdom life, life within God’s reign, the fulfilling life.  The man had done a number of things to live the faithful life.  “There is still one thing lacking,” Jesus told this man.  “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”  The rich man declined.  It is hard not to trust in our own resources to reduce anxiety and bring us fulfillment.  That more that is so, the more we need to trust in God, not in our stuff.  If our stuff gets in the way of trusting in God, then we would be wise to get rid of it.

            Look!  See!  Where people live by the values of God’s kingdom, lives make a difference.  People make a real impact on the lives of others.  Lives are changed by the loving actions of Jesus’ followers.  In their obedience, their own lives are changed.  A wonderful story comes from Ethiopia about the Suri church that wanted to spend all they had, invest it all in God’s kingdom.  They had accumulated about seven hundred dollars and decided that it should all be invested.  They decided to spend half of their money to help construct a new church in Jaba.  They also gave money for the construction of a church in Kibish and for an evangelist to work there.  The Suri church spent some of its money on a family whose breadwinner was sick with AIDS.  The Suri church reported, “Try as we might to spend God’s money wisely, we have not been able to get to zero.  Each time we give,” they said, “it seems to bounce right back up.”  Here’s a church learning to trust in God and give of themselves freely.  What they learned was:  the more they gave away, the more they had to give away.