Proper 23 B                                                                 Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
October 15, 2006                                                        Psalm 90
St. Margaret of Scotland Episcopal Church                  Hebrews 3:1-6
The Rev. Linda McCloud                                            Mark 10:17-27 

Living Like There’s No Tomorrow 

            “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”  (Psalm 90:12) 

            Three weeks ago I was in Kentucky visiting my mother, who has seen the sun rise and set on ninety summers.  She takes a small pill each morning to keep her heart beating in the proper rhythm.  She looks wonderful for someone who has outlived her husband of almost sixty years, all three of her siblings, a twenty-year-old son, a son-in-law, and an eighteen-year-old granddaughter – not to mention a multitude of friends.  She says that she tries to make new friends each year so that when she dies she will have people to attend her funeral.  If you ask my Mother how she is doing, she will likely tell you that she is fine because, as she says, she does not like to go into an organ recital (“my heart, my lungs, my spleen . . .”).   

Lately my mother has been thinking more about the hereafter.  She will laughingly tell you that hardly a day goes by that she does not go from one room to another in her house and say to her caregiver, “Lucille, I wonder what I came in here after.”  She prays that she will be able to keep her mind sharp.  She openly wonders why God has allowed her to live so long, and yes, she and I discussed which hymns she would like sung at her funeral.  Since she reads her Bible through every year, Mother runs across Psalm 90:10, which says, “The span of our life is seventy years, perhaps in strength even eighty; yet the sum of them is but labor and sorrow, for they pass away quickly and we are gone.”  She wonders why she has gone beyond those limits. She knows that her days are numbered. 

My mother is not alone in her concern for aging.  Statisticians tell us that if we live to be sixty-five, we have a twenty-five-percent chance of living to be one hundred. Biotechnology would hope that we could live even longer. So far, the longest life for anyone in our modern times was 122.5 years. But even that person’s days were numbered. 

Baby boomers seem especially susceptible to the desire to have “ageless bodies.”[1]  Three years ago today the President’s Council on Bioethics released its report, which included this description of our wish for ageless bodies:  “It is, at its core, a desire to overcome the most fundamental bounds of our humanity, and to redefine our bodily relationship with time and with the physical world.”  This is because “Death is nature’s deepest and greatest barrier to total human self-mastery.”  What a profound discovery.  The report says that we have a store of wisdom and we want to continue to benefit from its cumulative effects. We seem hesitant to admit that our days are numbered.   

But they are.  Scripture makes no bones about that.  And we all want eternal life.  Scripture makes no bones about that, either.  Jesus came so that we may have eternal, abundant life.  Through our baptism and participation in Holy Communion, we share with each other and with Jesus in that eternal, abundant life He came to give.   

The man in our Gospel reading for today frankly asks Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  He had by his own proclamation kept the commandments.  He was doing everything within his human power to stay on track for eternal life.  I find it interesting in this man’s exchange with Jesus that Jesus looked at him and loved him.  After all, what else can you do with someone who is perfect -- except love them?  There was just one little thing that was holding this man back from eternal life that comes from following Jesus.  It was his attachment to his temporal goods.  

Jesus knows and we know at the core of our being, that our desire to accumulate wealth is a source of stress.  Stress can be a source of ill health.  This is one of those vicious circles.  There seems to be no way that we can manipulate our mortality to get off the planet alive.  There is no price that we could pay to God or anyone else in order to live forever and never taste death.  Maybe we should review our options for living a full and happy life as Christians, rather than worrying about our longevity or the lack of it.   

Why is it that Jesus was always messing with the status quo?  In Jesus’ day, a mark of the smile of God on your life would have been wealth and a big family.  But Jesus cautioned them to use their wealth responsibly.  We have heard the phrase “Don’t let your possessions possess you.”  According to our Gospel passage today, this is possible only through the grace of God.  Only through the grace of God is it possible for us to be more attached to Jesus than to what we have earned by the sweat of our brow.  But it all turns to dust in the light of eternal life.  Our use of material goods shows whether our heart is in the right place in the here and now.  Thomas Merton put this so well:  “The things of Time are in connivance with eternity.” [2]

 The way in which we treat the poor is very important to God, and this has eternal consequences.  In fact, the Gospels are clear that at the last judgment our treatment of the poor will be judged as being equal to the way in which we have treated Jesus. This theme of justice for the oppressed and poor is also a consistent theme throughout the writings of the Old Testament prophets – especially Amos.     

            It would be good for all of us to think more about the hereafter.  It is my duty as your priest to remind you – yea, to urge you – to make a Will.   

“The Minister of the Congregation is directed to instruct the people, from time to time, about the duty of Christian parents to make prudent provision for the well-being of their families, and of all persons to make wills, while they are in health, arranging for the disposal of their temporal goods, not neglecting, if they are able, to leave bequests for religious and charitable uses.” [3]  

Since it is most likely that we will not use up all our resources before we die, it is our Christian duty to have our house in order, so to speak.  This will make it much easier for our heirs.  But the best legacy that we can leave is that of eternal life, which starts in the here and now in our relationship with Jesus Christ. 

So, maybe it would be good to live to be a hundred or more years of age if we can keep our wits about us.  Maybe with a longer life we could all come to a deeper wisdom of how to bring about a better world.  Maybe old soldiers could find a way to bring about world peace.  Maybe the oppressive third-world countries would stop fighting long enough for us to feed their starving poor.  Maybe we could find some way to stop family violence, or cancer, or the spread of HIV/AIDS.  In fact, why should we wait to see if we have more time?  Let’s begin now to pray that even more fervently that line in Morning Prayer: “Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten; nor the hope of the poor be taken away.”   

Our Gospel for today tells us once again that God is God, and we are not.  Death is something we cannot escape, although we might be able to postpone it.  Jesus did not escape death, and neither will we.  Even if we all live to be a hundred, our days are numbered.  Let us therefore live each day as though there were no tomorrow.  Amen.