19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C
What is the most important thing to you? Think about
it a moment. What is the one thing most precious to you, the one thing upon
which all other things depend?
Is it your family? Your health? Success in your
career? Your possessions? How about your life itself?
Isn’t it really time? All those other things exist in
time, and time is the one thing we have no control over. It rolls over and over
like a great river, and we are carried away with it from the moment of our
conception to the instant of our death. We exist in time, and it is the one
thing we can never get more of. All those other things are servants of time.
How are you spending your time?
Last week we heard the parable of the rich man who
planned to tear down his barns to build bigger ones so he could store up all
his riches and live a life of leisure, only to find out that he had run out of
time and would die that very night. Jesus is always calling us to be watchful
because the Son of Man will come when we least expect him. I think these
parables are not so much a condemnation of earthly riches as they are about the
proper use of our time. For time is the greatest treasure we have.
For where your treasure is, there also will your heart
be.
Show me your calendar and I will know where your
treasure is. If you’re like me, most of your calendar is filled with all the
stuff I need to do. Appointments and meetings and tasks to complete. The bulk
of my waking hours is spent on work and career. It’s probably the same with
you.
Most of my calendar is taken up with work things, but
there are many other appointments scattered throughout that deal with
relationships, with people. It may be dinner with some friends or helping one
of my kids work on their homes. It may be spending 20 minutes bringing
communion to a shut in or counseling someone who’s going through a rough patch
in their marriage. Those are things I do as a deacon, but you have similar
things on your calendar, without the title or the role. Those are the things
that make a difference. Those are the things that you will and should be
remembered for.
How will you be remembered? I was in San Clemente last
weekend and Nancy and I were walking down by the beach, and they had a bunch of
concrete benches set up facing the sea. There were about a half dozen of them,
and each of them had a little plaque on it with someone’s name. I guess those
people used to love spending time sitting there looking at the ocean, and so their
names are memorialized on a bench. And I thought to myself, “Is that how I want
to be remembered, with a plaque on a bench somewhere? Is that how people will
remember how I used my time?” I don’t want to be remembered for what made me
happy but for how I made other people happy. I want to make a difference in the
world, and I think you do, too.
You learn a lot about what was important to someone at
their funerals, when people tell stories about the deceased and the experiences
they had shared with them. The pictures the family puts out at the funeral tell
a lot also. Here in Park City there are a lot of skiing and outdoor pictures.
He was such an avid skier, she loved to hike in the mountains, and the stories
to me often seem empty and a bit sad. Is that what you want people to say about
you at your funeral? That you loved the outdoors? That’s a great part of life,
and we all enjoy it, but is that all there is?
You know, Jesus spent a lot of time outdoors. He isn’t
remembered for that, obviously. The stories we read and hear about him are
about his singular focus on other people. His teachings are not about nature or
science but about relationships. He healed and taught and died not for things
but for people. His people. His friends. Us. He spent such a short amount of
time here on Earth, but has anyone in history accomplished so much in a
lifetime?
At your funeral, your friends will come not because
you were such a good skier but because of the memories they have of the time
they spent with you. They will come to honor how you affected their lives and
made them better. I don’t want to be remembered for all the things I liked to
do. No one will care what I liked to do, they care about how I made them feel,
how made their lives a little bit better. I want to be remembered by how I
spent my time with people, bringing them to Christ.
I think there is something in every human being that
draws us to others, to give of ourselves to others. If God is love, every time
we do a loving act we are the image of God to the other. It doesn’t matter if
you even believe in God or not, by definition if we love, God is there. That’s
how we are wired and that is how God chooses to interact with the human race.
Through the love we have for one another. And the greatest sign of our love for
each other, the greatest gift we can give one another is our time. It’s not
about the amount of time you have been given, it’s about what you do with it.
For we Christians, it goes even deeper, it goes to
life itself. We spend our time with others not just because of the enjoyment it
brings, we do it because we want to draw others to Christ. Sometimes we spend
our time here, at Mass and celebrating the sacraments, but each and every
interaction with other people should have the effect of showing the love of
Jesus to them. I don’t mean we go around proselytizing and preaching and making
a nuisance of ourselves. If we live as true disciples, it will just be part of
who we are. It will actually be who we are. As St. Augustine said, “Love God,
then do as you will.”
If we just tried to look at people and our
relationships with them as Jesus did when interacting with his apostles and
those he met along the way, they will want to know what we know and have what
we have. They will see hope. And as we heard today in the letter to the
Hebrews, faith is based on hope. Faith is the realization of hope. Hope is
outside of time because we have hope for eternal life.
And the interesting thing, maybe even the most ironic
thing is, it is by using our time wisely for the glory of God here that we will
enter into timelessness with God in heaven.
