26th Sunday After Pentecost

I believe that this is one of the most misunderstood gospel passages and I get to preach on it today. It speaks of storing up treasures and I think it is a gospel about faith, faith in God and not in your stuff. I also think that what Jesus is getting at here is not that stuff is bad but rather we should not love those things in life that will not last over the stuff that will like the love of God. Simple, yes, but difficult at the same time.
We all love our stuff. Last week people stood out in line for hours to get the new PS3 game thing, that I will admit I know nothing about. I still like the old pong game from my youth. However, here are these people with nothing better to do staying out in all weather just to buy a game. And the worst part of that is that at a Wal-Mart near the village a person was shot waiting in line. The other part of this is that these were not kids standing in line but adults! I would say that these folks love their stuff more and they love God.
An interesting question is do you love your stuff so much that you would be willing to give it all up? Several times in the Gospel Jesus tells us to go sell all we have and give it to the poor. Have we done that? I am sure most of us have not. I know I have not. There is something very comfortable about my stuff, the laptop I am using right now for example. But we must be willing to give it all up.
Another question would be, do we trust God for what we need? How many of us are willing to just say God will provide? I am not saying that we should just lie about and say God will provide, not it won’t work trust me I have tried. God gave us talent and we must use that talent, but He will provide. Faith is the theme here of today’s Gospel. Faith in God and not in man is what we are getting at.