The Legacy Game

Scripture: The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 18), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

There comes a time in life when we start to worry about legacy. What have I accomplished? How will I be remembered? What do I leave behind? These are very natural, very human concerns, as old as history. So let me put your minds at ease: no one will remember you. You will leave nothing of yours behind.

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Teacher, “All is vanity! I applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven … and see, all is vanity and chasing after wind.” I do so love Ecclesiastes. He speaks to the cynical heart.

There’s an old tradition—one I rather like—that Solomon wrote the Song of Songs in his 20s, the Book of Proverbs in his 40s, and Ecclesiastes in his 60s. Now Solomon was the wisest of kings. His rule was marked by astonishing advances in agriculture, irrigation, trade, writing, and transportation. He had more wealth than any Israelite before or since. Yet what did it gain him? All that Solomon accomplished, all that he built and accrued and so painstakingly designed, it was all squandered by his son. It all died with him.

And Solomon, wise as he was, could see it coming. “Sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it,” the Teacher laments. “What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation. Even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.” Oh, preach it, brother.

In this sense, you and I are not so far removed from the ancient Egyptians, a people whom Solomon knew well. Egypt was the first great civilization, the first great superpower. Their pharaohs lived as gods upon the earth; their rule was law; yet they too fretted over legacy. What will I leave behind? How will I be remembered? Indeed, for the Egyptians this was a religious concern, for they believed that so long as their names lived on, their souls lived on. That’s why the pharaohs erected so many monuments to themselves, chiseling their names upon every surface that might endure, while scratching out the names of hated rivals. If anybody had the means to succeed at the legacy game, it was the pharaohs. So how do you think they did?

Let’s put it this way. Out of more than 30 Egyptian dynasties over the course of some 3,000 years, how many pharaohs can you name? Tut, Ramses, Akhenaten? Three or four Thutmoses in there, with a Hatshepsut for good measure? And even these aren’t truly remembered as people but as footnotes, obscure names and dates from long ago. Their legacies have long since fallen, broken down by time, worn away by the desert sands. “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

It’s much the same today. We think that if our names live on, part of us might live on. If we’re academic, we try to publish books or make the next great discovery. If we’re rich, we plaster our names in neon on garish buildings or over the letterhead of charitable foundations. But it’s all vanity. It’s all chasing after wind. In two or three generations, no one will care. How many of us can name our great-grandparents? More to the point, how many of our great-grandchildren will be able to name us? Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

So then, dear Christians, if death claims all—if oblivion is our fate in this world—from where is our hope to come? Why, from the one who has conquered death, of course. “If you have been raised with Christ,” St Paul writes, some thousand years after Solomon, “seek the things that are above, where Christ is … For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Our real legacy, brothers and sisters, our real immortality, consists not in books or buildings or bachelor’s degrees. Our real legacy is with Christ in Heaven, where we are welcomed as sons of God and co-heirs with Christ! Our fate is to live forever in perfect love, perfect bliss, perfect selflessness, an abundance of life unlike any we can now imagine!

Do away with the things that trouble us—do away with fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed. Get rid of anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. The old self, the old Adam, has been stripped away and we are clothed forever in Christ! No more do we toil without hope of gain. No more do we let worldly concerns keep us up at night. For we have already died to ourselves in holy baptism; and we are already raised up to new and eternal life in Jesus Christ! And yes, it’s a process. And yes, we must die nightly to rise again each day, until that last day when our baptism is fulfilled in earthly death. But the real fight, the real struggle, has already been won upon the Cross. And we are free now to live as people who are already beyond death and the grave.

So then—what about our toil? What about our money? What about our legacy here on earth? Should we just live as ascetics, as the Cynics of ancient Greece, who preferred the life of a dog in the street to that of a man? Certainly not.

This summer I attended a lecture by Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute. And Arthur had an interesting story. It ends up that as a kid all he ever really wanted to do was play the French horn. There wasn’t a lot of money in it, but it was what he enjoyed, so he traveled and he played. Then one day he read a biography of Johann Sebastian Bach, and when Bach was asked why he composed his music, he said, “For the glorification of God and the enjoyment of Man.” And that struck young Arthur as a bolt out of the blue. If someone asked him why he played French horn, could he really say, “For the glorification of God and the enjoyment of man”? Apparently not.

So Arthur decided to devote his life to helping as many people as possible. And he came to believe that the best way to do this was to encourage capitalism. Now, this wasn’t an ideological or necessarily political claim on his part; Arthur believes in the necessity of a good social security net and that government should absolutely help the needy. But strictly by the numbers, he saw that capitalism, and capitalism alone, had managed to pull two billion people out of poverty in the last 100 years. Two billion people! Astounding! Now Arthur wanted to help pull up the next two billion.

But after several years of encouraging free trade, the rule of law, entrepreneurship and all the things that make capitalism function, Arthur ran into a problem: the rat race makes people miserable. Sure, it meets basic needs, it produces wealth, it pulls entire societies out of poverty, but after all that—people despair. They need more. Money doesn’t buy happiness. In fact, the richer folks grew, the more miserable many of them became. Wealth was a means to an end, but couldn’t be an end in itself.

So when he went back to the numbers—by this point Arthur was an economist—he discovered two things. One was that people, statistically, get what they want the most. Those who wanted to be rich and famous found some measure of wealth and fame; those who wanted to have many friends and family to love ended up with a lot of friends and family. But only the latter category, only the ones who focused on relationships, on other people, were happy. So be careful what you wish for; statistically, you’re going to get it. And the second thing he found was that if you want to be happy, you have to give things away. It wasn’t about being rich or poor. Nobody’s happy about abject poverty. What mattered was not being attached, not being ruled, by your stuff. “Pick something you really like and give it away, give it to other people,” Arthur said. “I promise you will be happier.” Statistics don’t lie. And neither does Jesus.

If we try to base our legacy on ourselves, on our names, on our wealth and accomplishments, we’ve already failed. But if instead we rest assured that God loves and remembers us no matter what—“God remembers,” said Elie Wiesel, “that’s what makes Him God”—then we are free to leave a very different sort of legacy here on earth: a legacy of anonymous generosity; a legacy of selfless love. It’s true, your great-grandchildren probably won’t remember your name. But they will be who they are, and they will do what they do, because of the love you gave, because of the relationships you built.

Our life on earth is like a pebble dropped in a pond. We seem to vanish, but only because God alone sees the distant effect of the ripples we leave behind. Every one of us who is baptized has already died, and our life is hidden in God with Christ. So live now for others! Live generous and fearless and free. Let God worry about remembering our legacies and our names. Let us worry only about how best to love our neighbor, for the glorification of God and the enjoyment of Man.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.