You Can't Take It With You

Catholic Liturgy for the 18^th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Aug. 4, 2019. Gospel – Luke 12:13-21. Theme: You Can’t Take It With You…

Dale Schroeder was a simple man born and bred in Iowa. He grew up poor, never went to college, never married. He labored as a carpenter for almost 70 years, driving back and forth to work in his rusty Chevy pickup truck. His friends described him as a typical frugal Iowan, raised in the post-depression era: a blue-collar lunch-pail kind of guy who went to work every day and to church every Sunday. They also said he had a generous heart.

But they had no clue as to just how large his generous heart was! To everyone’s great surprise, when Dale Schroeder passed away in 2005, he left behind a 3 million-dollar fund that he had carefully saved throughout his working years. He had intentionally ear-marked this money for the purpose of enabling poor small-town Iowa kids like he had been to go to college and have a life he was never able to have.  In 2014, a group of 33 college graduates of various ages gathered in Iowa around Dale’s lunch pail for a ceremony honoring, remembering and thanking the man they had never met, but whose lack of greed had made a world of difference in their lives.

Kira Conrad, now a practicing therapist, was one of this group that was named “Dale’s Kids”. She shared about how at her graduation party she sadly informed her friends and relatives that, much as she wanted to, she would not be going to college. She had the grades and the desire alright, but not the money. That’s when she said her phone rang.  It was Dale’s Scholarship Fund calling and Kira, like the other 32, was given a full ride for all 4 years of college. They were told that since they could never pay Dale back as he was deceased, they must pay it forward by imitating his self-forgetfulness and generosity with whatever God blessed them with in this life.

And that is exactly the heart of Jesus’ teaching to us today in the parable of the foolish rich man.  This man, the polar opposite of Dale Schroeder, saw his wealth as his own personal treasure and made plans to keep hold of it for himself. And in the meantime, he figured he would live it up, enjoy the so-called “good life” and then retire in leisure and then have a worry-free pleasurable life for many years to come.  But how very wrong his plans turned out to be! Through this parable, Jesus teaches us that such a selfish attitude is really a delusion for two reasons.

The first reason is that we are simply the recipients of blessings from God, we are not their source or origin. Whatever capabilities we have in life are due to the genetics that we received, giving us our particular talents and aptitudes. They came from God through our biology and we had nothing to do with it. Even the circumstances in life that favored our education and development were a gift.

Yet in our pride and foolishness, we can so easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we are indeed the origin of it all. St. Paul urges us to avoid this way of thinking because it is the foundation of greed which is idolatry. Greed is such a destructive sin, a selfish way of living, that promotes the violence we see all around us, contributes to the neglect of the poor and destroys so many family relationships. He calls it idolatry because, if you stop to think about it, greed causes us to bow down and worship both ourselves and money as the most important focus of life.

The second reason flows naturally out of the first: the gifts we have been given are not meant to be hoarded but to be shared with others. Like Dale Schroeder’s Scholarship Kids, we are supposed to pay it forward and use what we have received as a means for growing rich in what matters to God. And what matters to God is that we love him and concretely express this love through our care and concern or others.

As the old saying goes, “you can’t take it with you.”  However, we can and do take our spiritual wealth with us when we die, and this kind of treasure is made up of all of our prayers, our faith and hope, the deeds of love while we carried out on earth.  These are what make us rich in the sight of God and reap for us an eternal reward of our investment in Heaven. 

Finally, in this whole topic of greed versus generosity, it is very important for us to remember that sharing God’s blessings isn’t something reserved for just the wealthy as many people often think. The life of Dale Schroeder shows us how anyone and everyone can reach great heights of Christian generosity with whatever they have been given in this life and grow rich in the sight of God. Because what counts in God’s eyes is not how much we give but the largeness of heart, the openness of hands, and the thoughtfulness of others that motivates our giving. 

When we stand before God at judgment, do we want to receive praise from him because we chose to use our blessings as a means to grow spiritually rich in his sight… or are we willing to hear the words addressed to the rich man in today’s parable, “you fool…”?