An uncomfortable thing has begun happening all around me. People not much older than I have begun retiring. Honestly, it comes as a shock, since I love my work at Boston College and academics have no mandatory retirement age. I listen closely as people retire, or as parents become empty-nesters, and I hear them tiptoe around the questions in this morning’s first reading and Gospel. That first reading comes across more honest, even brutal, than most of us can be in open conversation – but some of us probably do wonder about what it asks: What do we get from all the toil and strain that we put up with year in and year out? How much was really worth it? 

The Bible, as you know, is especially emphatic about money – over 2000 references, and fully a third of Jesus’s own teaching. Money points to the power our possessions have over us. Yet money and possessions are only metaphors for the standards we use to measure our meaning in life. On this complex topic, the Bible makes two simple points. In fact, it makes them so tirelessly, so redundantly, so predictably -- that we may do what anyone does with a well-worn theme – tune out.

Two points. OK. Here they are -- but please don’t tune out.

In simple terms, this means that in the light of ultimacy – or in the eyes of God – you are much less and much more than what you control, what you possess, what you claim to be. Can we catch the invitation here to step back from our pursuits and hear an unfamiliar message? What you are is someone immensely lovable. Shut off that “but” that comes up in your mind when you hear that: in fact you are already loved regardless of your accomplishments, regardless of your failures.

Now go on --  use your imagination – use your memory – remember how often the things you once counted as successes  now pale in hindsight next to other things in your lives. Remember how what you once counted shameful failures, opened up whole new sides of life. As we grow older, this ability to re-arrange the way we assess our lives comes more easily . . . despite crises like divorce or sickness, despite joys like a promotion, a healing, or a birth … Life – God -- is constantly offering us a larger viewpoint.

So these readings don’t prompt a glum shrug of self-pity. They escort us toward an ultimate question: what base do we use to sum up our lives? More than this, can we leave the counting to others … to those our lives have and haven’t touched … to the hidden pattern of a God who loves us in ways too eccentric to figure out? Can we enter onto a lifelong process of belonging to others and to God – a constantly renewed letting go that puts the meaning of our lives in the hands of the ones we serve, of the ones who see us truly enough to love us, and at last into the hands of God? 

In this struggle to figure out what our lives mean, and what others may take from them, I find real role models at the other end of life – in the young adults I work with as a professor of spirituality. Those Boston College students live their questions out loud -- especially the seniors and recent graduates. They face full force their own vulnerability in a world that keeps falling apart like clockwork. Yet my young BC friends muster an amazing persistence: as I follow their lives beyond college, they insist on giving themselves to the world. They have opened their hearts to human misery by their service trips to third world countries. They have opened their minds to political dysfunction in  their courses in social justice. They have opened their souls to friends who share a passion for justice and healing … so by the time they wave their diplomas in the air, it’s a gesture of joyful defiance at an messed up world from hands held out to help it.

Just this week in the Times, Gail Collins told us that these young people are “not untypical.” She wrote that “Although no generation lacks warts, our 20-somethings are terrific. We worry about [them] turing into distracted Twitterers with superficial values … but every single day I trip over recent college grad[s] who … seem to be working on 14 different useful projects, most of them unpaid”, including both Jenna and Barbara Bush.(1)

Honestly, their imagination and their courage inspire me because they aren’t afraid to start small … as assistants in a lab working on a public health project, as advisors to micro-lending agencies, as statisticians for irrigation projects, and as teachers all across our inner cities … They can start small because they know that the most we can hope to do may be to make a small difference. They get the point – they live the point -- made by Paul Claudel: “Youth was made not for pleasure, but for heroism.”

Can we claim that truth for our middle and later years, too? In the verse of Tennessee Williams,
“Oh courage, could you not as well / Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in [their] golden tree/but in the frightened heart of me?(2)

My BC grads and the rest of us may never have the leverage to change major economic patterns, but like the disciples Jesus was trying to shake awake with his story this morning, they, and so very many of you in this parish,  try to be faithful to a calling,
         to a chance of a calling,
                  to the hope of a chance of a calling
by looking for a way that is bigger than ourselves. My students show me – what I think a lot of us in this parish show each other -- that success comes in a lot of different versions – that money isn’t the measure, only the means, and that once you confuse the two, you’ve lost your soul.

As God’s people, we are not what we have. What defines us rather is a calling to aspire to something greater than what we accomplish on our own. This is what Paul is talking about in our 2nd reading from Colossians. Using the metaphors taken from Christian rituals, he says that way down deep, the life we are leading – a life even deeper than our lives of quiet desperation –is
something more than our own life. Our life is no longer our own when we give ourselves away in love – whether it’s love for other persons, for a community, for a cause, or, yes, for God.

Once we give ourselves away, our life unfolds in a pattern larger than the self, a pattern wherein even failure can find forgiveness and self-emptying can bring fulfillment. Paul calls this new life our hidden life in Christ because it breaks down the walls of our self-enclosure the way Jesus broke down the walls of disease, dispossession, and social hierarchies. That kind of life tickles us, maddens us, lures us, whatever it takes until we start to feel how much we are part of each other, how much we owe each other and receive from each other as partners in a general dance.

In that way, as Paul dramatizes it, our particularity melts away and we are no longer Greek or Jew, Ivy League or community college, management or part-time, plump or slender. Rather, we are Christ – the hidden principle of cosmic love that Steve Winwood sings about in his classic “Higher Love”.  For in Jesus God became one of us, but in the pattern of this hidden life God is trying to become all of us.

I’m trying to say something here in Christian language that has a wider existential force. I do this also in the spirit of a nearby nature mystic who admits that she even uses Episcopal worship when it helps get the message right. Perhaps I should give her the last word – a little verse that our students excitedly bring in to me and my fellow teachers year after year when they discover it. Some of us even post it on our office doors. I am speaking, of course, of Mary Oliver’s poem, coincidentally called “The Summer Day”, where she  writes:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention …
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?(3)

None of us is exempt from these questions, which is why they echo from Ecclesiastes and Jesus right down to Mary Oliver. So thank you, friends in the parish and students here on a visit, for showing me and each other how gloriously we can live out these questions. And now, tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?