My Great Aunt Frances, my paternal grandmother’s older sister, was a seamstress for Stone manufacturing in the fifties and sixties into the seventies. Her husband died young, she raised three children.
One year she was in Life magazine, for her sewing.
She would give me apple juice to drink.
We called her Aunt Fanty.
When she began to decline, it became time for her to move out of the home she had lived in most of her life. A house full of memories, full of furniture, artifacts, the accumulation of several generations of an old southern family.
I remember when she was getting ready to move.
She told me that she was relieved to be letting go of the house and most of her possessions. She said, “You know all those things try to own you, life is too short to keep up with all those things.”
She was sort of the anti-uncle scrooge, in fact she could have been Santa Clause like ghost of Christmas Present in Dickens’s Christmas Carol.
She never had to be visited by the ghost of an old business colleague, Old Marley chained to chests of money, weighed down by his own possessiveness. She never had to be warned like old Ebenezer Scrooge.
At least not that I know of.
Money, possessions, mammon.
They can be a blessing, a mercy and they can be a devouring demon that shreds the human soul to ribbons.
When does that angel of mercy cross the line and become gnashing teeth and poison?
I wish I knew.
But I do know this, my Aunt Fanty told me, “You know all those things try to own you, life is too short to keep up with all those things.”
Money, possessions, mammon.
They are not intrinsically evil, they are rather very, very dangerous.
We are warned.
The Christian understanding of wealth has always been that it is something to be shared, to be given away for works of mercy and justice, to ease the pain of others, and to lift up those who need a hand.
Give it away out of thanksgiving to God, pay it forward as the saying goes, to be blessed is to share the blessing with others.
It means doing without so that we can be generous to others, especially the poor. That is what we are to strive for, living more and more simply so we can be more and more generous. And we do this because God has been and is so generous to us, in so many ways, but especially in the gift of Jesus, for his death and his resurrection in which we find life.
That is the Christian warning and Christian approach to possessions.
It is very simple, and there is nothing simple about it,
Today we honor our teachers and students and we send forth our high school graduates.
We pray that the gospel message has taken root in our young people that they may remind us how it is done, free, unfettered and gracious.
We pray that they will live lives of simplicity and generosity, lives without regret, lives that when they come to their end they will say “thank you” rather than “if only”.