Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Glory to you, O Lord.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.
He replied to him, friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator.
Then he said to the crowd, take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one's life does not consist of possessions.
Then he told them a parable.
There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
He asked himself, what shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?
And he said, this is what I shall do.
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones there. I shall store all my grain and other goods.
And I shall say to myself, now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years.
Rest, eat, drink and be merry.
But God said to him, you fool, this night your life will be demanded of you and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?
Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God. The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: When we're young, we don't spend a lot of time thinking about mortality.
But as our hairs turn gray or our scalp becomes flesh toned, we start to think more and more about mortality.
And the Roman philosopher Seneca used to try to remind himself of that every day.
He did so by when he went to bed, the last thought he tried to have on his mind was, tomorrow you may not wake up.
And he would start his day before he got out of bed with the thought, I may not go to bed again tonight.
And he tried to do that every day as a reminder to focus in his life on the things that really matter.
And it is so easy for us to worry about all kinds of stuff, things that we think are so necessary, so central to who we are, but in reality, if we knew we were going to be dead tomorrow, we wouldn't give them a second thought.
They wouldn't matter.
Well, if that really is true in the way we behave, then why are we worried about them now?
Why do we spend so much time focusing on those things that matter?
Well, Jesus is trying to teach us here that profound truth, that there are certain things that matter and echo throughout eternity, and there are certain things that just aren't that important.
And while some of those unimportant things we still have to pay attention to, otherwise we're just going to be sitting basically in our own filth.
We don't have to have them controlling our lives and instead focus on the things that truly are eternal.
And those things are the things of God, not just the spiritual life. We don't want to get trapped there either.
But in recognizing that everything about our lives, including our very lives themselves, our gift, and those gifts are always meant to be shared.
So storing up more wealth, more property, more power for ourselves, gains us absolutely nothing.
But when we take those things and share them freely, we can find that the kingdom of God that we all desire to be a part of starts to get a bit closer, starts to become more real, more tangible.
We can decide to waste our lives worrying about things that truly don't matter, or we can focus on the treasure that is of God.
And it's the latter that's going to bring us the happiness we seek.
