Father Thomas Welbers' Homily	Jump back to Homily Index
Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time August 1, 2004 Luke 12:13-21 Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23 Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11	Listen to Audio

Each of us, as individuals, family members, communities, societies, nations, races and classes of peoples – in whatever setting we find ourselves in our journey through this world, each of us faces many dangers and sources of anxiety and insecurity. The great national debate centers on how best we can protect ourselves as a people from the multiple perceived threats to weaken or destroy us.

These threats may come from outside, as the threat of terrorism and violence – the dangers we see all around us. These threats also come from within, as the culture of death that has our whole society in its grasp reduces human life itself to a commodity to be manipulated for motives of commerce, convenience, control, or pleasure. All these threats impel us to seek security, often by relying on material things or power and even violence. Yet we know that these give a security that is very fragile and even illusory.

Jesus tells us how to achieve real security, but it’s a difficult lesson, difficult to hear and difficult to follow. There is only one real security, and that’s not found in this life. Furthermore, that real security cannot be acquired through planning or work, or anything that we can do. In some way, we all know that, otherwise we wouldn’t even be here in church, but we also all know that we fall short of having that kind of confidence in God when we leave here and get about the business of journeying through life.

Here is where we find help in the message of St. Paul in the second reading from his letter to the new Christians in a city called Colossae. If you listen carefully, his message is no easier than what we heard Jesus himself telling us. He says: “Put to death the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire …” So far those are sins we easily recognize, but then he includes a particular sin that he condemns with considerable forcefulness: “greed which is idolatry.” He is saying that desiring more earthly possessions than we need, which is the meaning of greed, is in itself worshipping a false god.

And yet . . . how often do we compromise in this area – seeking more than we need, putting the stuff of life before the Author of Life? I know I do, and I suspect that you know you do as well. Perhaps more than any other sin, if we are honest, greed is the one that afflicts us most deeply.

What can we do about this? How can we overcome a sin that seems to be so ingrained in our lives as this tendency toward greed truly is? St. Paul’s answer is that we cannot change ourselves because we have already been changed by Christ, by our baptism into his death and resurrection. Our challenge as followers of Christ is not to change ourselves to become like Christ, but to realize that we have already been changed. Listen to what St. Paul says after he lists the sins that Christians should put to death in themselves: “You have already taken off the old self with its sinful practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in the image of its creator.”

Therefore our Christian life is not so much a struggle to change our habits or to become something new. The challenge of the Christian life is, instead, to realize who we are, and to act accordingly. Realizing that we have already died in Christ and have risen to new life in him gives us a powerful motivation to bring our actions and our attitudes into conformity with his, and to live in a way that we never dreamed possible, building up secure treasure for eternal life by imitating the love and total self-giving of our Savior.

© 2004 Thomas Welbers

Thomas Welbers 2004