I do not know who chooses the readings and it is always an effort, sometimes easy, sometimes not, to try to figure out how they all fit together. I think that for today the job it is fairly simple.

The creators of this ensemble of readings took sections of this famous beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastics and combined it with this passage from the Colossians, and especially this little scene from the Gospel of Luke, and talked about the danger of greed, that is, the danger of seeking for money. And this is a regular biblical theme; you cannot serve God and money. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom. This is a major theme throughout the New Testament.

But it struck me, as I was looking at these readings, that it is too bad that they very selectively chose this passage from Ecclesiastics because I think that in putting together this combination of readings they have somewhat trivialized what is probably, if not the deepest, the second deepest and most searching book in the whole Bible (the Book of Job probably being more so).

Ecclesiastics was written late, a couple hundred years before our era. It is probably an older person's reflection on the way that the world works. Their conclusion was that the world does not make any sense, that is, that all of the nice, causal, consequential patterns that we would like to see working in the world massively break down.

And so the people who assembled today's readings chose one out of an entire series of these breakdowns: namely, as is seen in Ecclesiastics, that somebody builds up something with knowledge and skill and then some moron comes and tears it down. And all of the urgent seeking for things (money being the assumed object in this case) is useless. But the author of Ecclesiastics is talking about a larger question than the search for money. I think the search for money in itself is simply indicative of some larger hunger. I think that money is a symbolic element in human life which is a surrogate for some sort of meaning. This is hardly a novel insight, but I think that it very adequately explains the passion that we all have for money. Money is the sacrament, money is the salvational agent because we have stopped looking for salvation in other places. And what Ecclesiastics, which does not focus on money, is really talking about is the inconsequentiality of all of our appetites and expectations in life. The author of Ecclesiastics is saying that nothing works. Forget it. You break your back doing this and spend enormous energy looking for it and it is all going to collapse. And so the question underlying the whole text is, "Why live at all? Is life meaningless?". According to all of our normal schemes of meaning, the author wants to say, "Yes, it is meaningless".

And so the question is, "What do we do now? What do we look to that will sustain us? What will get us out of bed in the morning?". The answer that the author of Ecclesiastics proposes is very interesting: "Do not have expectations". And how, unless of course you are crazy, do you do that? Because I know all kinds of crazy people who just live from moment to moment and do not have any expectations or any sense of consequences or responsibility. Presumably, this is not an injunction to go crazy, rather, it is the proffering of a view of reality which is radically different from the one that keeps us going on the basis of our expectations.

In a critical passage, the author of Ecclesiastics will say, "Enjoy the wine that you have today. Enjoy the wife that you love and live with...". In other words, he is offering a solution, if you will, to the mystery of life that sounds very Buddhist (but it is not Buddhist, it is Jewish): "You live in gratitude for what is here at this moment". Life is basically a gift. It seems clearly that is what Jesus had in mind. For instance, it is so easy to trivialize (and the Church does it with great regularity) those stunning passages in Matthew - - "Look at the lilies of the field. Look at the birds..." - - or how we have devastated by sentimentalizing it, the figure of Francis of Assisi, portraying him with birds on his shoulder, talking to wolves and all of this rubbish. This is sheer romantic nonsense because Francis was very aware of the harsh realities of life. And so his was not just some vacuous, Pollyannaish view of things. But I think that what Jesus was trying to get at, and the way he seemed to have been able to live out his own life, was from the sense that all of life is an act of benevolence, "I am surrounded by benevolence". And I think that only that can cut through the sacramental quality of money, reputation, sexual activity, pleasure or our regular list of salvation surrogates today.

And it is too bad because whoever picked the readings today really did trivialize this business of the depth of the question that the author of Ecclesiastics asks by focusing too narrowly on the question of money. The question is clearly larger than the question of money.

In the world, the Church ought to be the voice of alternate meanings to all of the different meanings that we get from stock market reports, M.T.V., Entertainment Tonight, Wheel of Fortune or all of those other things that sustain us so much. Somehow, the Church ought to embody and express that - - those deep issues - - instead of making sure every canonical "t" is crossed and "i" is dotted. Straining the gnat and swallowing the camel seems to be our stock-in-trade.

Finally, what is the technique, that is, how do we come to this business of gratitude? And here too we can look at the Eastern traditions and remember Christianity is an Eastern religion as well. And the answer is very simple and abrasive to me, and maybe to you as well: poverty. To literally disencumber oneself in all kinds of ways, and therefore, disencumbering oneself to be able to be comfortable with all of those other people who are in fact poor in our world. How am I to do that when I do not want to move out of my house or give up my CD collections? And, you might ask, must we do this when we do not even know if we are asking the right questions? But, I know it is a radical self-emptying which enables the meaning that Jesus embodied and represented in his life to address me. "Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher...All is vanity". This is pretty hard stuff, but we are talking about the great, central issue of humanity: "Is it worth getting out of bed in the morning or is it not?"