Trusting and Letting Go

A few years ago, my niece Rachel was diagnosed with adrenal cancer. After a difficult surgery she made a good recovery but always has to be careful because without functioning adrenal glands a bad shock could be life threatening. Earlier this year she learned that the cancer had metastasized into her lungs. She read books on diet and alternative treatments that could slow or reverse the disease, and she started on a strict regime of diet and exercise. But after a while she began to long for a good piece of sourdough bread. And she realized that she wasn’t enjoying herself very much, that the anti-cancer regime was getting in the way of her living her best and most joyful life.

So she had a dilemma; Should she continue to fight the cancer by restricting her diet and activity or should she just accept that her life was going to be shorter and enjoy herself and share her gifts with her friends and family for as long as she could?

I think this is the dilemma that Jesus is raising in today’s gospel. Are we going to live in fear and try to shore up our fear with an abundance of material possessions which take time and energy to maintain, or do we dare to live lightly in the knowledge that another world is coming and we can live into that future right now?

Perhaps it’s a little like the position St Peters is in. You are waiting for a new rector. You don’t know who they will be or when they will get here. It’s tempting to leave everything the way it was when Sid left, and hold on to the books and the folders and the tchotchkes, the service leaflets and the habits. But in order to welcome the new rector, you have to make room for him or her. Part of my job is to help you do that by challenging some of the ways you have always done things, not to deny the goodness of the past but to open up to new possibilities for the future.

Jesus says, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms.” And then follows that up with two stories about being ready, “You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour," he says.
“Sell your possessions” is perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to hear. Living in this country at this time without at least some possessions like a cell phone, a car, and access to a computer and a washing machine and hopefully a roof over your head seems almost impossible. Surely we think, Jesus didn’t really mean to give away everything, did he!

I think the key is how he connects it with fear. The man in last week’s gospel reading stopped feeling afraid because he had filled even bigger storage units with his stuff. He was confident because he had enough stuff, not because God loved him. In this culture it is very difficult to work out what is enough. How much stuff is enough stuff? How much do we need to have in order to feel secure?

Jesus points out that having security in stuff is pointless. And as we see fire suddenly decimating whole communities it underlines this point. Stuff can disappear in a moment. Everything in this life is temporary, even our most cherished relationships. Dealing with our existential fear by amassing things or by filling our lives with friends and activities, or by following strict regimes of diet and exercise simply doesn’t work.

"Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms.” Because we trust that God enjoys giving us the kingdom, we can live with an ethic of restraint and generosity. An ethic of restraint means that we think before we buy, we reuse and recycle whenever we can, and we let go of things we no longer need. An ethic of generosity means that we give consciously, intentionally and with love, again and again.

Yet the kingdom of God is not yet fully realized, so it requires faith in the love of God to dare to let go of the need to hoard, to let go of the need to have more than we need.

Instead, Jesus says, “Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

“An unfailing treasure in heaven.”

Heaven is not a place above the sky. We know that. We start the prayer that Jesus taught us, “Our Father who art in heaven.” So one thing we do know about heaven is that God is there.

How then can we make ourselves an unfailing treasure in heaven – the place where God is most profoundly present?

Friends, I think this must be about love. Love with a capital L. The kind of love that God has, that Jesus had, the love which took him to the cross and beyond, giving his life for the welfare of the world.

As we live with an ethic of restraint and generosity, our generosity means that we always seek the highest good for all beings. In the way we live, in the way we pray, in the way we talk we are always looking to assist God in bringing about the highest good in every situation.

And we open our hearts to worship, love and praise God. For we can be sure that heaven is full of the worship of God which underlies all Love because God is Love and the nature of God is Love. One of the early church fathers said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”

As we free ourselves from the possessions that we gather in order to feel safe, or the over-work, or whatever it is that you use to defend yourself from the fear of death and the fear that you are really just an insignificant ant in the great scheme of things. As we free ourselves from those fears and we allow ourselves to freefall into the love of God; as our lives are filled with capital-L love and with praise and joy, so we become fully alive.

My niece Rachel is a woman of deep faith. And she has decided that it is more important for her to live her best life, the life God gave her to live, than to cling to restrictive regimes with the hope that she might extend her life on this earth. She has decided to live to God’s glory, a human being fully alive for all the days that God gives her, trusting that it is indeed God’s good pleasure to give her the kingdom.

For Jesus said, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall