You all know the old joke about the two friends who loved baseball so much that they wondered if they could play it in heaven? One of them died and came back in a dream. He told his friend he had some good news and some bad news. The good news is that yes there is baseball in heaven, the bad news is that you are playing first base tomorrow.
Have you ever been caught up short?
Have you ever suddenly realized that you have been spending time on the wrong thing?
The wrong priority?
Like having a broken refrigerator and deciding to fill it with groceries rather than fixing it first?
Like being buried in debt and deciding to go on a shopping spree?
Like being on a sinking ship while arguing who gets to have the best seat?
Like spending a lifetime putting off things that matter to then die on the first day of retirement.
Like a lifetime of being blessed by God, and rather than sharing the blessing, hoarding it as our own, only to die and have God ask for an accounting.
We waste our time and then we die.
Vanity.
Foolishness.
Grasping at the wind.
Striving , anxiety, suffering and then we die anyway.
Welcome to the book of Ecclesiastes.
A book dedicated to the study of how we waste our lives on the wrong stuff and then we die and are soon forgotten.
It is not light reading, not something we would want to take to the beach.
However dark it seems it is ultimately not an exercise in self loathing or dwelling on human stupidity, he does find meaning in the midst of all our repetitive vanity and folly.
Ecclesiastes is harsh but he finds wonder and beauty in the middle of a life that is mostly wasted.
Ecclesiastes finds wonder in the hardnosed fact that despite the pain, despite the frustration, despite the injustice and despite the odds we are still here and what a wonderful gift it is to simply have this day.
Be thankful and love the gift of this day and the one who gives us this day.
That’s it. That is the conclusion of his lifetime study.
Receive the gift of this moment, enjoy the simple pleasure of simply existing before it is too late. Don’t let all the folly and all the fighting against the tide take the gift of this day.
Jesus tells a parable that fits right into Ecclesiastes. A farmer becomes rich and stupid and then he dies. Hoarding his blessings rather than sharing, and God asks for an accounting, calling him a fool.
Rich in possessions but poor toward God, he discovers too late that he is actually a thief, stealing from God that which he was blessed with to share.
The parable leaves us with a gut-wrenching anxiety. That’s how parables work, by the way, they leave us with a twist in our gut and a question about what do we do?
What am I rich in?
Am I rich toward God?
Where is my time and attention and treasure buried? Where do I hoard it?
What kind of folly and vanity am I pursuing?
Parables are inherently anxiety producing.
We all have a terminal case of mortality.
I am going to die. You are going to die.
How do we grow rich toward God in the meantime?
In Luke’s Gospel he says over and over again that it is to pray, to practice hospitality that crosses boundaries, to be generous beyond reason and to show mercy especially for the poor. It’s that simple. That is a life rich toward God in the Gospel according to Luke.
So what to do with life and God with the short time we have left?
Jesus is God lavishly wasting his time with and for the broken and the poor of this world.
Let’s waste some time growing rich toward God.
Let’s make our lives a holy waste of time.
There is nothing new under the sun.
But the Gospel makes all things new.
The Gospel is the study of how God wastes his time on the broken limping life of our humanity and dies anyway.
The cross is God’s folly lifting up the dead vanity of our lives.
Have you ever been caught up short by the gift of this day, that against all odds we are still here, that we can still say thank you, that even at the grave we can sing our song alleluia, alleluia, alleluia?
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