To be rich in God’s eyes….
The topic of retirement came up yesterday after lunch at our spiritual reading.
For many people in our world today, retirement is the time of life when, after many years of hard work and careful financial planning, you can finally just enjoy yourself. No more early morning office meetings or exhausting late-night shifts, no more long commutes through heavy traffic, no more 9-5 days or 60-hour work weeks — just one long vacation!
You can finally say to yourself, as did the rich man in St. Luke’s Gospel parable, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink, and be merry (Lk 12:13-21).
All of you here who have reached retirement age, 65 and older, that’s how it is, right? You’ve worked for long decades, you’ve put your time in, you’ve maybe saved a little money, and now you’re finally able to put your feet up; relax, eat, drink, and be merry. Well, that’s not exactly how it is, right?
As was mentioned yesterday, we Christians are in the world, but we’re not of the world. And so, retirement as the world sees it, and as this rich man in the parable saw it, is not for us. We don’t retire from our vocation, and we certainly don’t retire from being Christian.
The one thing we do retire from, however, is this world when we die. And we do want to get ready for that.
So, are you retirement ready? It’s a good question to ask ourselves, but it has nothing to do with how much money we have in the bank. Being retirement ready is not about our savings but about our Savior.
It’s about finding our ultimate security in him, not in our earthly possessions or our investment accounts, not in our own strength or intelligence or health or approval from others, all of which can suddenly be taken from us.
Finding our security in Christ is risky business and, as our foundress, Catherine Doherty, said, “Christ’s call is revolutionary. His commandments require risk, great risk. They infer an absence of the very security that most of us tightly cling to. He calls us to a holy insecurity.”
In the eyes of the world, the rich man in the parable was wise in storing up all those goods for his future needs. However, in God’s eyes, he was a fool. He was living and looking upon his future as if God, who gave him life and who sustained his very being, didn’t even exist. God was totally irrelevant.
And so he turns to himself, not to the Lord, to find out what he should do with all his crops, even though it was the Lord himself who had blessed him with such abundance.
And all the goods he laid up for himself were vanity of vanities because death would rob him from enjoying them. This man couldn’t live one second more than God ordained him to live, and yet he was utterly forgetful of God. That’s what was truly foolish.
Again, in the words of our foundress, “God offers us risk, danger, and an insecurity that leads to perfect security.” It is God’s security. It is living in God.
By our baptism, we were plunged into God, into Christ. When we’re trying to find our ultimate security in something or someone other than God, we walk away from that perfect security, and we become anxious, fearful, and self-focused.
Jesus’ warning to be on our guard against all kinds of avarice applies to all of us, not only to those who are wealthy, who have an abundance of possessions, like this rich landowner. We may not have a lot of possessions, we may not have a lot of money in the bank, but what we do have is the precious gift of time. And we can be greedy about how we spend it.
There is a kind of greed that wants to maximize my free time, my “me” time, that becomes overly protective of it and a bit perturbed when it’s infringed upon. It’s a kind of greed that really wants only to store up treasure for oneself.
Every moment we have is a gift from God, and yet we could be foolish like the rich man in the parable and be asking ourselves how to spend it rather than asking the Lord, who gives it to us. Lord, how should I spend this day? How should I spend this afternoon? Lord, how should I spend this evening?
In asking just our own self, often we’ll end up focusing on our self and our own particular needs. Or just simply our own wants and comforts.
To be rich in God’s eyes is to be generous toward our neighbor. That was another folly of the rich man in the parable. Why? Because he neglected to share any of his abundance with his neighbor, who might be in need of it. We think of Joseph, the patriarch in the book of Genesis, storing up all that grain. It was not only for himself to enjoy, but it was intended for so many others who would need it.
Again, as Catherine said, “It is so very simple, this love affair of ours with God. We go to him through another. Every time we meet another and love him, we have given ourselves to Christ. We must empty ourselves in that love.”
There is an interconnection between being rich in God’s eyes and rich toward our neighbor. Being rich with regard to God, is being open-handed towards others as God is open-handed to us.
The psalmist says, When you open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing (Ps 145:16). I like that image of an open hand. I think it’s a good image of how we are to use the gifts that God gives us, whether they be material possessions, time, or energy.
The image of an open hand expresses our willingness to receive and also to give, whereas when we think about a closed hand, it’s not free to receive or free to give. It is trying to make secure that which it is grasping, but in doing so it limits what it can receive or give, and it ends up choking even what it is grasping.
So, yes, it is risky to be open-handed as God is with us, because what’s in our hand can easily fall out or be taken away. But that’s the holy insecurity to which God calls us. Those without faith may call us foolish, for we maybe walking around, symbolically, with open hands, yet in the eyes of God we are wise in that holy insecurity.
“Lord, you will give me what I need.” And he does. As St. Paul reminds us in Colossians 3, You have been raised with Christ. … Your life is hidden with Christ in God. …When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
That is what our security is founded upon. Christ who reveals himself to us, Christ who is our life.
When, with God’s help, we are putting to death all that is earthly in us — fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed which, he says, is adultery — when we’re stripping off the old self with its practices, guess what we’re doing? We’re getting retirement ready.
Or, in other words, we’re getting heaven ready. Where Christ is all and in all.
That’s our retirement.
