In our gospel (Lk 12: 32-40) Jesus says, "Do not live in fear, little flock, my Father is delighted to give you the Kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to those in need....and you will have treasure in heaven..." Jesus is inviting us to salvation, which is right relationship with God which begins in present and continues forever. In right relation, we will not get caught unprepared for whatever life throws at us. As the reading says, our lamps will always be lit!
The fundamental question is "Whom do you trust?" Do we trust in God or in ourselves -- our own abilities to grow and accumulate wealth, power and influence? Where is our allegiance, and in life what legacy will we leave behind?
In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt vehemently opposed Congress's plan to put "In God We Trust" on our money and currency. He considered it to be trivializing the Divine, bordering on the sacrilegious. And, no doubt, he realized the statement isn't true. It still isn't. From what I see, we Americans trust in our weapons, military aggression and imperialism, and in the accumulation of wealth and pursuit of pleasure. All things which Jesus despised.
Ramses II, believed to be the Pharaoh in office when the Hebrews escaped Egypt, was a widely- known warrior-king and delighted in statuary and monuments to himself. He may be the ruler who erected a colossal statue of himself in Egypt with an inscription challenging all other mighty leaders to surpass the greatness of even one of his works. The base of the statue has never been found, but the torso and head were discovered and delivered to the British Museum in 1816 When the exhibit opened, it was soon visited by poets Horace Smith and Percy Bysshe Shelley who both wrote poems about the statue, poems published in the same issue of the same English magazine in 1818. It was Shelley's Ozymandias that became a hit and well captures the irony of the narcissistic artwork now broken and dispersed. What kind of a legacy is that?
When we lived in the Midwest, there was a then-famous businessman who liked to erect cutting- edge structures as monuments to himself, while doing nothing for communities or charities. He erected three similar hotels in various locations, including one near where we resided. Later when we returned to that part of the country, we found the hotel gone, vanished! As it turned out, all three of his 'monuments' collapsed from bad engineering after about thirty years of use. Now what kind of legacy does this deceased businessman have?
When we put our resources at the disposal of Kingdom values, when we seek to do good for those in need, we are accumulating "treasure in heaven" and leaving a legacy which we can only acquire by giving it away. Whom do we trust?, that is the question. Ourselves and our temporal life, or God who calls us to build a world of peace, justice, equality and plenty here on earth?
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