But Not Today

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost - August 3, 2025

Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.

St. Columba's Episcopal Church

LISTEN HERE

Eccl. 1:2, 12-14, 2:18-23 + Ps. 49:1-12 + Col. 3:1-11 + Lk 12:13-21

Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. + I speak to you today in the Name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.

“Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” Whenever I hear this I think to myself, “Well somebody got up on the wrong side of the Bible today!” One could be forgiven for thinking this so-called “Teacher” we heard from the book of Ecclesiastes today was simply having a 5^th century BC mid-life crisis: “All is chasing after the wind…My days are full of pain and sleepless nights without rest.”

While the Teacher of Ecclesiastes does not mince words: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” By no means should we hear the term “vanity’ as we would in colloquial English today, implying “personal pride” or “conceit,” as in: “You’re so vain, you probably think this sermon’s about you, don’t you? Don’t you?” to echo Carly Simon.

No, in the context of Ecclesiastes, “vanity” refers to everything that is fleeting, elusive, ephemeral, hence, “chasing after the wind.” And thus, he is pointing to the perennial truth found in all the worlds religious traditions that happiness in not to be found in what is fleeting, elusive, ephemeral, ensuring us that the attempt to do so will only result in suffering.

I want to speak briefly to two experiences in which I have realized this to be true:

Listen to anecdotal story in podcast recording.

In both these experiences I felt an almost irreconcilable sense between how so much wealth and power held by one individual could seem to have so much concreteness to it, and at the same time be so ephemeral, so vulnerable, so impotent in the face of what matters most to us: life, happiness, personal fulfillment. The fragility of life seemed so palpable: There will be a day, a moment, when all of us will lose everything material in one breath: our last. Everything taken from us with one puff of air. That is the dividing line between having everything and nothing.

This sense of the precariousness of life is no less reflected in Jesus’ parable in Luke’s gospel today: Happiness does not consist of an abundance of possessions, of hoarding provisions for a future that will never come. 

But while both Ecclesiastes and Luke’s Parable warn against the futility of a life focused on material treasures – neither offers any real guidance as to an alternative. But certainly, Scripture as a whole does. Colossians, as we heard today for example, points us away from a focus on earthly things. “For you have died,” he says, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God… in which we clothed with new self, being renewed according to the image of our Creator.” And in this we discover a unity, a joy, a oneness in which “there is no longer, gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free” –Concluding his great affirmation of the unity of all in one of the most memorable and penetrating lines of all the New Testament: “Christ is all and is in all.” Don’t let that slip by: Christ is all and is in all. (Col. 3:11)

One need not be a spiritual athlete, life-long ascetic, or a hermit hiding away in a cave for a lifetime to unlock the mystery of joy and fulfillment in life that Christianity is pointing us to. But! we must be willing cultivate a spiritual practice that every aspect of our culture vehemently rails against, giving us every opportunity, every reason, every motivation to deny, ignore, and shun. To that end, I want to speak to the younger generation here today (by which I mean under 30!): 

• The anxiety and exhaustion of perpetually needing to cultivate your identity on social media, and the FOMO that arises in you when you don’t

• The endless, countless hours you are seduced into staring at random videos on TikTok (and the subtle uneasiness that you suppress in your gut when you realize how many hours you just wasted glued to idiotic videos that were decided for you by coldly calculated algorithms) 

• The pressure you feel for that perfect body, the obsession with youth, the unrelenting pressure to succeed even at the youngest of ages in sport teams, ballet class, and so on.

I know you know what I am talking about. But let me put some numbers on that to help clarify the extent of the problem. A 2023 Gallup poll found that teenagers in the United States (between the ages of 13-19) spend on average 4.8 hours per day on social media. That amounts 1,752 hours per year or roughly 73 days per year which amounts to 730 days per decade or what is 2 full years out of every 10 years of life. On average then a 20-year-old has spent on average 4 years of their lives on social media. Those are hours, days, years you will never get back. Reflect on that for a moment. Moreover, we now know there is a direct correlation between that amount of usage and soaring risks of anxiety, depression, and body dissatisfaction.

We have today one of the greatest epidemics of depression and anxiety the world has ever known. And mostly among our youth. Again, I know that the younger generation today feels this. My college students tell me constantly. You don’t need statistics to tell you what you are feeling in your gut. But I am not sure your generation always understands why you feel the way you do.

Western society since the Enlightenment has spawned a hopelessly materialistic view of the world that has led us down the path of destruction based on distraction and denial about the reality and eventuality of death. But the age of the internet has perfect it. None of us here who are middle aged or older grew up with the social forces the rest of you have been steeped in since childhood. Why would society do this? Because there are billions upon billions of dollars to be made by turning our youth into social media addicts. When you see an add on social media, it is not the product being sold, it is you that is for sale: your attention. You have become the product.

And the spiritual practice the scriptures today implore you to cultivate today is as counter-intuitive as it is radical…as it is socially unacceptable. And that is the spiritual practice to live ever-mindful of the inevitability of hour death. In fact, this is ancient practice known in Christianity as Momento Mori (literally: ‘remember to die’).

I know that sounds morbid, but it need not be. Let me, for example, rephrase that practice in light of the statistics I just cited. To the youth in the congregation: if you knew you had 73 days to live, how many of you would choose to spend them on TikTok?

In a class I teach regularly at USF on contemplative Christianity, I invariably begin my inaugural lecture with a kind of trick question: Why are you in college now? The question is carefully worded. I am not just asking “Why are they in college?” But “why now?” After I spend several minutes masking my impatience at their ever-predictable undergraduate responses (“…to get a degree, to land a lucrative job, to become an x, y, or z professional…”), when I can no longer take the pain of their floundering to provide me with an answer they think I want to hear, rather than a thoughtfully considered response, which is what I am always hoping to hear, I eventually put them out of my misery, and simply blurt out the existential answer I am seeking: “Because you are going to die!” I say tersely.

Think about it, if the average human life-span were some 500 years or so, we wouldn’t likely hit adolescence till somewhere around age 70 or 80 – which would make all of you a bunch of teenagers and by the looks of things, not a few toddlers. College students in that context average some 150 years old or so.

My little exercise is not really an attempt to shock them into a morbid reflection on death, but rather to move them into a deeper reflection on the brevity, fragility, and miraculous beauty of life. So I tell them about this little practice I have had for years not.

Listen to anecdotal story in podcast recording.

I half expect that for most of my students this little ritual I cultivated would fall of deaf ears. How do I explain it is not really about the coffee but about creating little rituals around the little things in life. Spiritual practices that open us to the beauty of a new day, the joy of being alive and healthy, of savoring the blessedness of a life that abounds in joy. The fact that in life is not to be found: but to be made.

In his book, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, the famous 20^th century Trappist monk and social commentator, Thomas Merton observes, “Christianity is not merely a message of salvation, but a call to a transformation of consciousness.” Here, Merton expresses one of his deepest convictions that Christianity is not merely about rote beliefs, creedal affirmations, or rituals that don’t ever put us in touch with an intimate relationship with Christ “who is all and is in all.” Rather, Merton insists, an authentic Christian spiritual life leads us (indeed demands of us) an inner awakening, and inner transformation of the heart.

While, it is often a challenge to convince my college students that Momento Mori, is not merely a morbid and depressing practice, but one that opens us to authentic spiritual awakening, it is also true that for anyone over fifty Momento Mori is simply a fact of life. The question is whether it will come a specter or a gift? Whether our approaching death will present itself as something to be feared, ignored, or suppressed? Or whether it will come as a transformative spiritual practice? The fact is, most of us in this church today hold memories that extend farther back in time than the years we have ahead. A sobering thought, indeed. But so too liberating, Intensifying: What am I going to do with the time I have left?

Of all the years I had been sharing my daily practice around that sip of morning coffee, convinced it had inevitably fallen on deaf ears, it happened that a young man, we’ll call him Lucas, who had taken my class asked for an appointment with me at the end of the semester. Naturally, I agreed. As he entered my office he held in his hand a small brown shopping bag, which he sat on his lap as he told me the story of how that practice had changed his life. “The idea of Momento Mori, changed my life,” he told me. I see things differently now: I feel freer to take chances, to enjoy new experiences, I asked that girl I was intimidated by to go on a date, and she said “yes,” (Full disclosure, they had since broken up, but that’s not the point! It was the risk to live that mattered!). He went on, “I talk more openly with my friends…I don’t hesitate to tell my parents I love them.” He shared like this for some time, and I would be lying if I did not say I was as deeply moved as I was stunned. “I wanted to thank you,” he concluded, “so I made you this gift,” he said as he stretched out his hands toward me extending in my direction that little paper bag he had been holding on his lap.

I thanked him profusely and after a moment or two reached into the bag which was stuffed with crumpled paper concealing what lay inside. Lucas had developed a hobby of making cup coasters from little square pieces of slate that he would engrave with names or personalized messages. As I reached into the bag, negotiating my hand around the crumpled balls of paper, I reached the bottom and took hold of a cold stone coaster that he had placed there. Lifting it from its concealment, I looked down at the coaster and could feel the stretch of an irrepressible smile spanning slowly across my face. Etched across the surface of the slate were three simple words:

…but not today.

And that coaster sits on my desk in the vicarage even now as a perpetual reminder of the precious, fleeting, ephemeral gift of this (and every!) day…and of a young man who learned what it meant not to squander it. And may that same joy be your own!

+ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen