Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, July 30, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
July 30, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will get right to the heart of one of the most important questions any human being needs to answer: What I am living for? What am I working for? Many people live for money rather than for God. In the Gospel this Sunday, Jesus describes how we can easily make making money an idol, what the Book of Ecclesiastes in this Sunday’s first reading will call a “vanity of vanities,” or, in other words, an ultimate waste of time.
• Jesus made his point by means of the image of the rich farmer who just continued to build larger silos to store his crops, totally unaware that his life was soon going to be over and then none of it would matter. With increased urbanization, few of us today are farmers and therefore few of us would seek to build larger barns for produce, but many of us worry and some are even obsessed about increasing the size of our retirement accounts, pensions, bank statements and homes. Probably the most fitting equivalent of our grain bins would be the explosion of storage units everywhere. When we no longer need something for our day-to-day life, we just hoard it; we put it in a closet until we have no more room; then we move it to the cellar or attic, and when those prove inadequate, we just get big storage lockers. What we should be doing when we no longer need something for regular use is to give it away to someone who does. But even when we’re not using something, we still hold onto it. We still think we need it. Our possessions have come to own us, rather than the other way around.
• Jesus gives that parable about the farmer building larger grain bins unaware that he would soon die in response to someone in the crowd asking him, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Over the course of my priesthood I have been shocked at how many times I’ve had been asked to get involved in familial situations like the one Jesus was requested to resolve. This man obviously thought that his brother was wronging him and wanted Jesus, the just one, to intervene. I don’t hesitate to add that this man’s brother probably was wronging him. But underneath this appeal for justice, Jesus saw two things at play. First, the petitioner at a practical level was thinking that gaining the inheritance was more important than maintaining a good relationship with his brother. How many people today still think and act in these terms, allowing money or other vanities to separate them and keep them apart for years, decades or even to the grave! Second, Jesus saw that, despite what was likely a just request, the motivation underneath it was not justice but primarily greed disguised as justice. That’s why Jesus told not only the petitioner but the whole crowd: “Beware of all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions!”
• The problem for many of us and for so many of our contemporaries is that we think that life does consist in the abundance of possessions. We idolize the rich and famous. We watch programs and buy magazines about them, devouring whatever can give us a window into their life. We put in long hours of work to try to secure a little bit of it. While few of us spend much time setting our hearts on mansions, Bentleys, butlers and chauffeurs, we do spend our time dreaming about and working for much larger homes, new cars, housekeepers and the like. We may pretend that because we’re not rich, we’re not greedy, while many of us are obsessed about money. Many of us can think about money and material concerns more than we think about God. We spend far more time dedicating ourselves to growing our wallets than we do our souls. But because most people around us are greedily addicted to material things, too, we don’t notice it. Pope Francis calls this a ferocious idolatry, one that attacks us savagely at our core and changes us. Yet how many in our culture worship this false god, working for hours on end at the cost of their health, marriages, families and sometimes their lives, just to make more money? Sometimes people work themselves to death for their own survival or for their good of their families, but many times it’s just for vanities, for material possessions that we cannot take with us as we die. As the saying goes, you never see a U-Haul behind a hearse, because we can’t take our possessions with us as we go. The only thing we can take with us to the grave and beyond, the only thing that can fit through the eye of the needle that is the gate to heaven, is what we give away, our deeds of love for others.
• One of the surest signs that many of us and our contemporaries worship money would be the reaction a pastor would get if he mentioned that the following Sunday, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates or Carlos Slim, would be present at Church and give a million dollars to everyone who came to Mass. Even if there were just going to be a lottery for one person to receive a million dollars, the Church would still be a mob scene. Many would arrive early. Many would relativize everything else they might have on the calendar. They might even spend the week praying for luck. But many of those who would come for the chance at money won’t come with excitement or at all when it’s a question about meeting Jesus, hearing his words, receiving his only body and blood within us, and progressing on the path to heaven. As Jesus says at the end of this Sunday’s Gospel passage, many strive like the foolish farmer in the parable to “store up treasure for themselves” but not become “rich in what matters to God.” They are greedy for earthly possessions but not hungry for God and his grace.
• Elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus said in absolute termsthat we cannot serve both God and money. We have to make a choice. We’re either going to serve God and that’s going to change totally the way we relate to money or we’re going to serve money and that ferocious idolatry is going to change the way we relate to God. This choice between God and mammon was the one offered to the Rich Young Man, who approached Jesus knowing that something was missing from his life even though he was keeping the commandments. He came to ask Jesus what he needed to do to find fulfillment. Jesus told him that if he wanted to be perfected, to have it all, he needed paradoxically to sell all his goods, give the money to the poor, become rich in heaven, and then come follow him. What he lacked was that he had too many possessions! When faced, however, with the choice between Jesus and his stuff, between God and mammon, the young man chose his stuff, and went away from Jesus sad. He couldn’t free himself from a life that consisted of possessions, a life that while it can bring certain pleasures can never bring happiness, because our hearts will always be restless, as St. Augustine famously reminded us, until they rest in God.
• This Sunday Jesus will meet all of us, like the Rich Young Man, and tell us that we need to make the same choice. With love he will tell us to beware of all types of greed, of idolizing money, or of serving mammon. He will encourage us, challenge us, call us and help us to choose not the path of vanity, the waste of our time on earth, but to seek heaven and place our heart, and our treasure, in what we can take with us when we die: the riches that pertain to God. Elsewhere, Jesus said that we children of the light need to be just as savvy in storing up for ourselves the things of heaven as so many others today are in securing worldly fortunes. Just as a money-hungry man or woman needs to study, to work long hours, to persevere, to sacrifice various things they would like to do, in order to get ahead in New York, Boston, Chicago or LA, so the Christian needs to work just as hard and just as concretely to get ahead in the New and eternal Jerusalem. Just as a businessperson needs to put away teenage habits, clothes, vocabulary, immaturity and irresponsibility, and especially vices like dishonesty and laziness, so the Christian, seeking an eternal treasure, must put away whatever will prevent our achieving the goal. We need to make the choices to grow rich in the things of God. And one of the most important ways for us to store up a treasure in heaven, to treasure what God treasures, is by giving ourselves and our things away to others in love. The more we concretely serve others, the richer we are. We should all be making the time to grow this portfolio of charity.
• Sunday Mass is one of God’s greatest gifts of God to help us to seek the things that are above. When the priest says, “Lift up your hearts!” and we respond, “We have lifted them up to the Lord!” That’s the chief message, the principal conversion, Jesus is trying to help us make. He wants us to “Lift up [our] hearts” from the idols we make so easily of material things, praying that we will say with all the choices we make, “We have lifted our lives up to the Lord!” In the Mass, we not receive the greatest treasure in the world, Jesus himself, the pearl of great price, worth selling everything we have to obtain, but are helped by him to build not bigger grain bins but a life of far greater cooperation with all that he is trying to do in and through us, as he seeks to lead us, in this world and forever, to a treasure that moths can’t destroy, rust corrode or the IRS tax.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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