Vic Chesky is dead!  That doesn’t mean anything to you, I know.  But, it scares something unholy out of me.  Vic and I went to Hardin-Simmons together.  Graduated the same year.  Last week, on a flight somewhere, he got to feeling badly.  Went straight to the hospital from the airport.  They found the blockage.  Scheduled the procedure.  But, before they could get him into surgery, just like his daddy years before, he suffered a massive heart attack and was gone in an instant.  At the ripe old age of 47, Vic is dead and I can’t believe it!  Like stepping from the cool comfort of air conditioning into the blast heat of a late summer afternoon, news of his death sucked the breath right of me. 

That’s just a little too close for comfort.  Aside from accidents, none of my class is scheduled to start checking out of hotel earth for at least another ten years or more.  I know I’m not ready to go.  I keep calling the front desk asking for a late check out time.  Haven’t seen all the sights and I’m still packing.  It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, I think, as much as I’m not ready to not be here yet.  Vic’s death reminds me that whether or not I’m ready is irrelevant.  The only question is whether I’m prepared.  (Thanks to George Mason, “The Danger of a Good Economy,” The Wilshire Pulpit, Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas, TX, August 2, 1998)  Only a fool would live as though he’d never die.  As if just looking around wasn’t good enough to teach that lesson, Jesus said it, too.

A man had come to him all bent out of shape because his brother, probably older and apparently the executor of their late father’s estate, wouldn’t go ahead and probate the will and dole out the old man’s leftovers.  He wanted Jesus on his side against his obviously more selfish brother.  Know anyone like that?  In Jesus’ day, Rabbis were often called upon to settle legal matters.  Anyway, Jesus would have nothing to do with it.  Maybe he figured that when families start cannibalizing each other and lawyers have to be called in to settle what should be otherwise private matters, the feeding frenzy often shreds everyone in sight.  Besides, he also knew that the real frenzy didn’t have anything to do with how much this guy got in the end but how much he wanted to begin with and to which there was no end.  Calling a spade a spade, Jesus named the man’s real problem, ”‘greed,’” and followed the naming with a warning, “‘life does not consist in the abundance of a man’s possessions.’”

Those words aren’t difficult to understand.  No deeply imperceptible Hebraic metaphor here.  We either get it or we don’t.  And, either we live by it or we’ve found some way of justifying our choice to ignore Jesus’ warning.  Maybe by writing Jesus’ words as nothing more than a nice, first century sentiment.  A sentiment with absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the real world of NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange.  A sentiment usually uttered only by preachers trying to raise money for the church by working out their middle-class anger from the pulpit, right? 

But, we get it.  Don’t we?  We all know what those words mean.  And, if Jesus’ warning doesn’t get our attention, then someone like Vic will come along, or should I say, go on along, to remind us.  We spend an inordinate amount of time packing suitcases we’ll never unpack because that luggage will be permanently lost once our flight takes off to the place Vic already is this morning.  No sicker feeling, is there?  Standing there waiting for your luggage to drop through the chute and it never comes.  You’re in Dallas and your luggage is in New Orleans or San Francisco.  Terrible feeling, isn’t it?  To find that you made it but everything you packed for the trip didn’t.  That’s what Jesus meant.  Greed is bad, Jesus said, not because there’s something wrong with being rich in itself, but, because it keeps you packing the wrong suitcase.  It makes you lose focus.  And, when it comes to the trip we’ll all eventually take, focus is everything.

Toward the end of World War II, when American troops began retaking the Philippines, an elite unit of 121 Army Rangers was assigned the task of liberating a prisoner-of-war camp near the village of Cabanatuan.  Some 500 survivors of the Bataan death march three years earlier were still languishing there.  There was legitimate fear that the Japanese might massacre them while fleeing from the Americans.  So, under stealth of darkness, the Rangers made their way behind enemy lines, into the camp and neutralized all the guards.  But, because some 8,000 Japanese troops were still in the area, they knew they wouldn’t be anywhere near safe until they made it back across the Pampanga River closer to the American lines.  Like the Israelites fleeing the Egyptians centuries before, the Americans knew that they would be sitting ducks unless they made it across the water.  Everything they’d dreamed of, their freedom, their future hope and seeing their families again came down to this race to the river.

Like last night, the moon was full and the trek to the river took them across nearly a mile of open ground.  It was then that the prisoners began realizing that their clothes, mostly nothing more than white cloth g-strings after three years in prison, made them perfect targets for Japanese snipers.  So, in the race for the river, they began stripping off the last vestiges of human dignity and dropping them as they ran.  They were bare-naked crossing the river.  But, at least they got there alive.  (Hampton Sides, The Ghost Soldiers, Doubleday, 2001)  The crisis they faced brought everything into sharp focus and gave them clarity of mind.  Clarity about the difference between what really mattered and what really didn’t. 

That’s what Vic’s death has done for me this week.  That’s all Jesus wants for us, too.  Soul-sobering clarity about the sacred distinction between temporal and eternal suitcases and which we’ll spend our lives packing and our eternities unpacking, or not.  A clarity it’s rather difficult to come by in the course of, say, putting kids through college or getting ready for retirement.  That’s why we can’t really blame this guy in the parable Jesus told.  The one who wanted to tear down old barns and build bigger ones.  Can you imagine?!  Or, can you?  Stock market’s been good to you (or, maybe once was) or you got the raise or the promotion and the raise.  What to do with all this new wealth?  Why not, say, buy a house just for the lot so you can tear it down and build a bigger one?  His story’s too much like ours, isn’t it?  Twenty centuries have passed.  Not much has changed.  Clarity is just as hard to come by.

Unless one of two things happens.  For one, we can make a disciplined choice, born out of our baptism into eternal hope, to, as Jesus said, be “‘rich toward God.’”  In language that fits the sermon, that means packing suitcases that won’t get lost in the flight to eternity.  To invest ourselves and our resources in whatever pays eternal dividends.  This isn’t about earning our salvation.  It’s about living out our eternal salvation in this present moment. 

How do you do that?  Practically, how do you do that?  You can write a check or make an e-payment to, say, Texas Utilities.  The benefit is immediate.  Your house stays warm or cool no matter what the weather does.  But, how do you write a check to heaven?  And, how do you know the check gets cashed and clears?  Yet again, it’s not that difficult to decipher.  In 1 Corinthians 13:13, we’re told that only three packages will make the transition with us to eternity, “faith, hope and love.” 

To be rich toward God means to invest yourself, your whole self, in whatever prospers faith, hope and love.  To invest yourself in others in ways that express the faith, hope and love Jesus gave us.  To invest yourself and your resources in institutions where the causes Jesus made paramount in his preaching and teaching are promoted, like love and justice.  Institutions that aren’t and never will be perfect but that are, nonetheless, striving toward making eternal hope a present-moment reality.  Like your church.  There’s a novel idea. 

I sent a letter out recently telling you that our church’s budget needs your attention.  It still does.  And, I’m not ashamed to ask you for your financial support.  The people who got counseling, Bible studies, prayers and sermons, visits in the hospital and at the graveside this past week, and I’m not even talking about what the rest of the staff did, got those things because someone is packing eternal suitcases around here.  We just need a few more packers.  And, one reason I’m tithing and teaching my boys to do the same is because I want them to have soul-sobering clarity about what matters most.  One way to have that clarity is to choose it by focusing your faith in Christ as Lord and then living out the baptism of hope that faith produces in the ways you invest yourself in this world.  There is another option.  You can “‘take life easy; eat, drink and be merry,’” until you take your flight and see what happens when your luggage doesn’t arrive.

Jesus told the parable intending the greedy brother to overhear it as his own story.  Any chance you overheard it as yours?  He went so far as to call the man a fool.  Not because he was good at making money.  And, not even because he was planning for tomorrow as though making plans for tomorrow is foolish.  Better than getting to tomorrow with no plan.  Better than living as though there were no tomorrow.  But, Jesus called him a fool specifically because he kept

planning and living, not so much as there were no tomorrow, but as though there were no God.  He was a fool because he thought he would beat the rap – that he was in control of how long and how well he’d live.  With undisciplined indifference, he kept packing the wrong suitcase.  And, he finally got the clarity he needed about what mattered the day he heard his God say, “’This very night your life will be required of you.  Then, who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’”

He got clarity the day he arrived and all the luggage he’d spent his entire life packing didn’t.  So, Jesus says there are two ways to get clarity.  We can choose it now or wait till some crisis, even the crisis of death, brings it our way.  With rarest exception, one gift suffering brings is the gift of clarity about the sacred balance between the temporal and the eternal.  I revisit the memories of the death of my first marriage only with great pain.  It still ranks as the most devastating event of my life.  Though it sounds like terrible understatement, I can honestly say that I don’t miss the pain.  I do miss the clarity.  For one brief moment in time, I was real clear about what mattered most and what did not when I faced that death.  I’m thankful, too, for the other ways in which God brings it my way.  When news of Vic’s death arrived this week, along with sadness came the gift of clarity.  God does have other ways of bringing clarity. 

Lisa Hamilton told me a story from her sixth grade year when we were visiting about her mother’s death just before Chris Lewis’ funeral a couple of weeks ago.   She and her mom were in the car one day when Lisa announced that she intended to run away from home.  She was, however, going to wait until the next day so she’d have time to get her stuff together.  Chris immediately turned the car around and started home.  “If you’re going to run away you’re going to do it today, not tomorrow, ” Chris said.  Lisa protested that she wouldn’t have time to get her stuff together, her stereo and clothes and such.  Upon which mom gave daughter a lesson in clarity.  “Oh,” she said, “those aren’t your things.  They belong to your father and me.  We’re just letting you borrow them for a while.  You can leave.  Your stuff stays.”  Lisa never did run away.  And, she never forgot the lesson in clarity, either.

In biblical metaphor, death is sometimes pictured as the crossing of a river.  The only problem is that we think of the river that separates now from eternity as somewhere out there, at a distance, as something toward which we’re headed.  In truth, it runs right by our property.  It’s not that we’ll get to it and cross it of our own volition someday.  More likely, we’ll be walking along and just slip in.  In childlike curiosity, a beautiful little nine year-old girl two blocks down from our house picked up her father’s mislaid pistol late one night this week and suddenly slipped into the river.  Her mother stood on this bank weeping and begging her to swim back.  But, it was too late.  Vic thought his flight was taking him somewhere else when he slipped in.  We never know when it will be “‘this very night’” our soul will be required of us.  We’re never ready, are we?  But, that’s not the point.  The only question is whether we’re prepared.

A group of guys in our church goes river rafting on the Arkansas River in Colorado every year about this time.  The stories are legend around here; they’ve been doing it now for some twenty years or more.  Same river.  Mostly the same people.  They know exactly where the river is, how to get there and how long it takes.  They have the packing down to a science.  That river is too dangerous to ford unless you’re well prepared.  When you’re headed for that river, how you pack for the journey is everything.