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Contents: Volume 2 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time (C)August 3, 2025
1. -- Lanie LeBlanc OP -2. -- Dennis Keller OP - 3. --
4. --
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Blessings, Dr. Lanie LeBlanc OP Southern Dominican Laity
****************************************************** Eighteenth Sunday of Ordered Time August 3, 2025
Our first reading this Sunday is a little depressing. The author speaks about human life as being just a breath of breaths. That is the meaning of vanity. Its force is like the wind which moves things around but has no substance. He writes that a man works all life long to gain wealth, provide a living for family, gain some power to have some control on his and his family’s life and then dies. All he has accomplished is lost to him. No one has found a way to take wealth or power or fame to the other side of a death bed.
Or is there way? If so there is the basis for a purposeful and meaningful life. But first, the author continues wailing and moaning. Work all day and look for rest in one’s bed only to have troubling thoughts, denying rest. Righteousness would seem to demand a reward. Righteousness means treating everyone and everything justly. Even though a human is just, a completely just person has no guarantee of prosperity. More terrible still is the reality that wicked people are not always punished. Often, they succeed because of their wickedness. Only real certainty in life is death.
The gospel does little to reassure us. The first part of this Sunday’s gospel brings Jesus a person complaining about sharing inheritance. Jesus blames the family feud on the vice of greed. That greed is evident in the one complaining and the one withholding. Greed is a vice driving persons to seek more, always more. Greed is a thing of the world. Neighbors judge neighbors on the amount and quality of their possessions. Then comes jealousy or demeaning a neighbor because of apparent poverty or poor taste. Things are a product of the world and by their very nature are transitory. Life is a gift from God. Which has more value? The value of life is not determined by amount or quality of possessions.
Jesus instructs us about the value of life. The parable of the rich man with many possessions, now facing a bountiful harvest is the lesson. When we come into success through hard work and luck, are we satisfied that we have achieved the highest goal? The rich man in the parable has so many things and such a huge harvest that he lacks places to keep the abundance. His delight at his good fortune causes him to sing about his achievement, to boast to all who would envy him. Now he has enough to be able to rest, eat, drink, and make merry. Yet all his possessions, his newly built and filled barn, provide no lasting security for his life. What happens to all his savings when his time is up? The most common result is a lot of fighting among heirs and tax collectors.
Luke presents an understanding of wealth in two aspects. The first is viewing wealth and power from the point of faith. What ought the Christian do with power, with wealth, with fame? Power under the influence of faith is focused toward serving others. Wealth in the light of faith is a sharing of possessions with those in need. Repeatedly in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the sharing is first for the benefit and safety of widows, orphans, and aliens in our midst. The faith approach is in contrast with worldly scheming to acquire more and more. That scheming and effort is limited and denied by the transistorizes of life.
What is the answer to the author of the first reading? That person is often named Qoheleth. That man produces an answer. But it does not answer the problem of death, the ending of human pursuits. Qoheleth has an answer. “Here is what I recognize as good: it is well for a man to eat and drink and enjoy all the fruits of his labor under the sun during the limited days of the life which God gives him; for this is his lot. Any man to whom God gives riches and property, and grants power to partake of them, so that he finds joy in the fruits of his toil, has a gift from God. For he will hardly dwell on the shortness of his life, because God lets him busy himself with the joy of his heart.” While this is an answer, it still needs a sense of community, an answer to the shortness of human life. Human life needs the answer that Christ gives us in the Resurrection.
Paul, in his letter to the Colossians proclaimed this Sunday, provides another perspective for purpose of human life. When men and women put on a new self in Baptism, they are changed. Unless a person is changed in their goals and outlook on life their Christianity, their entrance into Community is not working for them. The change when becoming Christian is gradual. It is progressive from the day of Baptism till the last anointing and passage through death’s portal. What a person becomes through their choices and behaviors in living is the effect of Christian Baptism. What human life is for is for a constant growth in character. Some call this character the soul. In any case whether one’s life is full of sunshine or storms, each event, each choice adds to the growth of the soul or decays it. The pursuit of wealth is a mirage that continually beckons one to a narrow focus that centers on self. That focus is a sort of idolatry by which we make ourselves mini gods. Christian living widens one’s horizons so that all of creation becomes a text book revealing the Creator, the Father.
Christianity Paul says breaks down barriers. No more Greek – the proudest nation because of their philosophies that impacted the quality of their lives: no more Jew – proud as a nation chosen by God: no more Scythians – considered terrorists in the time of Jesus: and no more slaves – those not considered human in Roman culture, without rights even to marry or right to life itself. Christianity broke down all barriers of birth, of ritual and culture, and class distinctions. Life was released from those chains. Jesus truly liberated the human race.
When the pursuits of humanity focus on wealth, power, and fame, barriers are re-erected. People lose their freedom, and life becomes solely a vanity of vanities, a chasing after the wind.
As humans are liberated, they stop being the individual center of life. We are not big enough, smart enough, long lived enough to be a god. When we are true Christians, we live and work in the world under the terms of the world. Those terms can become chains. We can be successful because of our work, our connections, our insights, our efforts.
Dennis Keller Dennis@PreacherExchange.com
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****************************************************** ****************************************************** 5. ****************************************************** Volume 2 is for you. Your thoughts, reflections, and insights on the next Sundays readings can influence the preaching you hear. Send them to preacherexchange@att.net. Deadline is Wednesday Noon. Include your Name, and Email Address. -- Fr. John
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