• Hosea 11: 1-11

This moving testimony to God’s enduring love for Israel combines God’s awesome power with God’s tender love, which is as intense and as gentle as a parent for a child. God regarded Israel in its ‘childhood’ as God’s own first-born.  In time, the rebellious youth pursued other gods, although “they did not know” it was God who nurtured them and loved them even during their rebellion.  They are now on a path back to slavery, either literally going back to Egypt or to another superpower, Assyria.  Everything sacred to them will be destroyed in their unison prayers to Baal.  Although Israel seems to persist in a willful denial of their parental history with God, God cannot forget it: “How can I hand you over, Ephraim/how can I give you up, Israel.”  God then makes an astonishing announcement: “A change of heart moves me.”  Israel will not suffer the consequences it deserves.  Why?  “I am God, not a mortal; I am the Holy One in your midst….”

• Psalm 107: 1-9, 43

The psalmist recalls a desperate time in Israel’s history when they had been scattered and were hungry and thirsty while wandering in the wilderness:  “they cried to the Lord… and the Lord saved them.”  The wise person recalls these memories and “takes to heart the Lord’s kindness.”

OR

• Ecclesiastes 1: 2, 12-14; 2: 8-23

Because of its unrelenting negativity about the foundational claim of God’s love for Israel, Ecclesiastes is at the “far edge” of a “counter-testimony” in the Hebrew scriptures, according to Walter Brueggemann, (Theology of the Old Testament, 393 ff).  All human effort ends in nothingness.  “The Teacher” writes, Everything I have achieved in my life  will come to nothing and there is no guarantee my heirs will do any better.  “So I turned and gave my heart to despair….”  Even at night, I cannot find peace.

• Psalm 49: 1-11

Echoing the sentiment of the futility of all human efforts to accumulate wealth as a from of security, the psalmist regards death as the great equalizer.  Those “who trust in their wealth/and boast of great riches–/redeem no one.”  The smart and the stupid both “abandon to others their wealth” when they die.

• Colossians 3: 1-11

The writer to Christians in Colossi writes that “if you have been raised with Christ…” [baptism?], your priorities shift from conventional passions, some of which he lists, to a “new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”  Through Christ that renewal is open to all, regardless of all past loyalties and identities.

• Luke 12: 13-21

In a story unique to Luke’s narrative, Jesus is asked to settle a dispute between two brothers regarding there father’s inheritance.  But Jesus ignores their question and instead warns about the deeper dilemma to which both brothers (and all humankind) are susceptible: “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”  He then tells a story about a successful man whose life had been consumed with accumulating more and more wealth.  The man thought he had finally achieved enough possessions to feel secure in this life and now he could “eat, drink and be merry.”  But that very night he was to face his reckoning.  Who will enjoy all that he had accumulated now?  “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

Biblical narratives do not use esoteric, specialized language to discuss concepts, principles or any sort of abstraction; they use plain, ordinary, quotidian language to tell stories that reach a life or death conclusion on which one can stake one’s life.  Today’s appointed readings and gospel address the question: When I come to the end of my life, what will I have discovered mattered the most?  And they answer that question with an urgent conclusion that impels us to realize that the sooner we answer that question, the fuller our lives can be.  In a plain sentence Jesus says: “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”  The nihilistic conclusion of “the Teacher” in Ecclesiastes, echoed by the psalmist, states that just as clearly the inevitable result of not making that discovery in time: “I gave my heart to despair.”

In his essay, “The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God,” (found in Figuring the Sacred), Paul Ricoeur writes first “of human logic, our logic.”  But then he writes about a very different kind of “logic,” the “logic” contained in the biblical narratives:  “But the logic of God, the logic of Jesus, the logic of Paul is quite another matter.  This logic is one of excess, of superabundance.”  (p. 279)  Choosing and living one’s life through “the logic of superabundance” — which Ricoeur finds originates in the biblical experience of creation, the gift of the Torah, the parables of Jesus and radical love revealed in his cross and resurrection– turns cynicism and nihilism inside out,  It replaces fear, hoarding, futility with generosity and hope.  “Hope means the ‘superabundance’ of meaning as opposed to the abundance of senselessness, of failure, of destruction,” Ricoeur writes in another essay in the same collection.  And then he concludes: “for seen from the standpoint of hope, life is not only the contrary but the denial of death…[ emphasis added].  It interprets in a creative way the signs of superabundance of life in spite of death.” (pp 206-207)  The personal tragedy of hoarding is that we die before death comes to us and only then do we discover that we have already been ‘dead’ for years!  Misplaced security leads to cynical assumptions; deciding that life is a gift of “superabundance,” (even if like the ancient Hebrews we failed to remember that God was always the origin and sustainer of which I am a recipient and can be a beneficiary to others), leads to generosity, hope, action, enthusiasm and the possibility that we will fully and really live before we die!  It cheats death before and at the moment of our own mortality!  The testimony of Hosea is that God patiently waits for us to “grow up” and figure this out.