Twenty-Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time
October 15, 2006


Do you like garage sales??

As many of you know, this weekend was the big garage sale in St. Ann parish Center. Doors opened at 8:00 yesterday morning. (Officially, though some people did some early shopping during the week). As I was vesting for mass, I looked out and saw a line of people outside the door waiting. Now I know one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, but I never cease to be amazed at the things which come in the door, and the things which go right back out the door in the arms of a new owner.

But more so, I never cease to be amazed at my own ‘bargain shopping mentality.” I am blessed to have everything I need as a human plus quite a few things that I merely want. Yet I found myself straying down there about twice a day just to see if there was a bargain waiting for me. And as much as I joked: “There is nothing here I cannot live without”, I found the allure just as real, just as tantalizing. Maybe the best bargain of all times has just walked in the door. Maybe the thing that I have always needed in my life was there, and I just didn’t know it until I saw it. Maybe, maybe, maybe… Do you like garage sales?

I think the readings this week and the garage sale coinciding are providential, at least in my life. Otherwise, it would have been easy to dismiss the demand of Jesus to the rich young man as something ‘out there.’ It would have been easy to think that I am so different from him, that Jesus couldn’t possibly be asking me to look at my own possessions, my own attachment to things, my own attachments to wealth. But twice a day, there I’d be, and there would this ‘allurement’ be going on in my heart. Then I’d go back to my room and look around and say, what can I contribute, what can I give away… and the hard truth is that though I could let a lot of the things in my room go, I just don’t want to… “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

And when that beggar knocks at the door, whom I have helped every month since January, and I am getting impatient with him, because they should have their life together on the whole $25 I am blessed to be able to send his way monthly, I realize that I am viewing my money as MINE, and not something I am a steward of… “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

And then I find myself listening to the baseball game on the radio or TV and then turning it off because I can’t stand the suspense, and then realize that I can care more about the outcome of an athletic contest than I do about the death of 10 soldiers in Iraq or the ongoing oppression in the Darfur region of Sudan; and I have spent more time agonizing over the fall and rise of the cardinals than I have studying the minimum wage petition on the upcoming ballot – and like the rich young man, my priorities are wrapped around the wrong thing.

But when I realize that I am just like that rich man, I also know this truth. I know that the wisest, most prudent he could have done at the moment Jesus invited him to sell everything was to say, "Lord, I place it all in your hands. It was never really mine anyway. Help me to take what you have given me and to direct it where it is most needed." Then I know the path I must take as well. “Lord, I place it all in your hands, even my life, even my time, my talents, my treasures - even my energies. They are not really mine anyway. Help me to direct them where you will…” And like Mary’s yes to the angel messenger that allowed Jesus to be born in her, my yes in God’s hands makes ‘everything possible for God.’

It is amazing what you can find at a garage sale. Incredible bargains. incredible junk. I found my sinfulness there, heaped upon those tables. And underneath, I discovered God’s grace, right there, offering me the way through the needle’s eye.