Homily

There is a television show on the A&E channel called "Hoarders.” At the beginning of the show, there is the message explaining it, "Compulsive hoarding is a mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things even if the items are worthless, hazardous or unsanitary. More than three million Americans suffer from this problem.” On the program, they show the most severe of these cases. People write and ask for help; and the program provides a psychologist to help oversee the mental health of the person, also an organizer who specializes in cleaning up hoarding households, a whole crew of people to remove the trash from the home, and a cleaning crew. They also provide funds for counseling after the filming is over.

In these most severe cases, the homes are completely filled with stuff: clothes, boxes, books, magazines, items of every kind, piled up high in every room, and I mean every room. You can only get from one room to another by walking through pathways between the mountains of trash, and usually, even in those pathways, you are walking on top of stuff. Often, it is some crisis that gets the person to call the show and ask for help. For example, the city might declare the house condemned, or a spouse may threaten to leave, or the children are taken by CSD. But even during such threatening trouble, they still find it extremely hard to part with any of their collected stuff. You and I would look at it and say, "That's just trash – it's broken, torn, defaced, ruined – throw it out!” But for these people, they are valuable, useful items. There was one woman they spent a whole day with trying to get her to agree to part with just a tiny portion of her hoard, and they filled half a dumpster. When the crew came back the next day, they found she had gone back into the dumpster at night and pulled almost everything out and put it back in her house.

Why do they do it? Why do people fill their homes with mountains of stuff to the point where it threatens their physical health, their ability to stay in their home, their relationships with their spouses, children and other relatives and friends? Why do they do it? The mental health experts and sometimes the hoarders, themselves, explain that the stuff they buy or collect and hang on to is a way to deal with the stresses, the fears and the losses of life. The junk they hang onto is their protection against sadness, hopelessness and emotional danger, and yet WE see them as sad, hopeless and in danger. They believe their junk is somehow working for them, protecting them, satisfying certain needs and desires. They believe that. But we, looking from the outside can see how wrong they are. All their stuff has not brought them any good at all, and in fact, it is ruining their lives. We see that, even as they cling passionately to every item that someone else wants to throw away. They don't see it.

In chapter 3 of Colossians, St. Paul talks about the change that takes place in baptism where we die with Jesus Christ, we're raised with Jesus Christ and Christ becomes our life. But, I think, in a sense, we become hoarders during our lives. We, so to speak, put on Christ at our baptisms, but we become afraid it's not enough. So we go dumpster diving to look for other garments to also wear. Clothing that may be dirty, torn, badly fitting, button-less, shabby and mildewed. But in our minds, we see garments that are useful, helpful, comforting, attractive; items that protect us from the cares, dangers and troubles of life. These are the habits of sins that we hoard, and we can find it very difficult to throw them out. Even though we can see that they look horrible on other people, in our minds, they look good on us. And we need them. We can't part with them. We think they help us when we are afraid, lonely, sad, anxious, bored, angry, jealous. And just like a hoarder who cannot throw out a two-legged chair because he claims it can be fixed even though he doesn't have the other legs, we can also hang on to our sinful habits in the belief that they are actually worth keeping. Perhaps there are some that we, just like the hoarder, cannot even see because they are habits we have kept for so long that we can't even imagine throwing them away, or we don't even see the harm that they do to us. Like that threadbare sweater we think still has some use in it, or that pair of pants where we say nobody notices that little hole – we can become so very comfortable with sinful habits that we can fail to see the good that could replace them if we would only first remove these sad and sorry garments from our lives.

So St. Paul tells us today in the Epistle to strip off the old self and put on the new – which is the life of grace, which is Christ Himself. All you who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ – don't exchange Him for shabby garments. The best of all, the lasting, the eternal, the life without regret is not something that can be hoarded by mortal man, because it is freely and abundantly and continually offered to us by Christ our Lord.

Thanks be to God!