I came across a story recently which I had first read a few years ago; it seemed singularly appropriate for today. It’s a true story about a minister with the mouth watering name of Dr. Waffles. Dr. Waffles, it seems, was a very hard working preacher (difficult to imagine, isn’t it!); at any rate, one of his practices was to do some extra duty visiting prisoners in the local jail every week.

After he had done this for about a year, he announced that he was going to take three months off while he and his wife visited Europe. The men insisted on giving him a "going away" party and they were so affectionate that he was deeply touched. "I’ll only be gone three months!" he kept saying as slapped him on the back, shook his hand and threw their arms around him.

When the party was almost over, one inmate gave a short speech and presented him with a clumsily wrapped package. "Now don’t open this until you get home. Nothing else could show how much we think of you. And don’t forget, we all had a hand in this gift."

"You shouldn’t have," Dr. Waffles responded. "I’ll only be gone a little while and you won’t even miss me. But thank you so much."

The party ended with lots of clapping and Dr. Waffles went home in a very happy frame of mind. He gave the package to his wife saying, "Look at what the guys at the jail gave me. Imagine them caring enough to spend their own money on me." When they opened the box, the Waffles had the surprise of their lives. There was Dr. Waffle’s wallet, watch, change, cuff links, appointment book, handkerchief, and cough drops. It was then he realized that all that backslapping was just a distraction so that others could quite skillfully pick his pockets without being detected.

The story has a point — or at least I would like to give it a point – and it’s not some point about teamwork either. It’s the same point we find in Psalm 49, which we might accurately call "A Psalm for Pickpockets;" the point is, in life, each one of us is frequently a pick pocket who silently lifts something of value from other people — often without knowing it and, unlike the prisioners in the story, usually without returning it gift wrapped to its owner.

Psalm 49 can be read from two perspectives. There’s the perspective of the poor man who has very little hope of achieving much more than simple survival. Most of the people in the Psalmist’s time fell into this category. To that person the Psalm says: "There is more to life than material possessions; through your suffering you will find a path to a deeper understanding of God. Persevere!"

But, frankly, I doubt that there’s any one of us here who truly fits in this category. For us, the Psalm should be seen from a different point of view: that of the comfortable and successful — those who have won the battle of survival and, maybe, even gained a little more to boot. And to us it poses some very important questions: How do we value our material possessions? What’s our attitude toward them? In life, what is it that really counts?

Psalm 49 has some interesting thoughts about these questions. For instance, it holds up the rather blunt point that death is a boundary that none of us can avoid. It is, says the Psalmist, the ultimate limitation; basically it’s God’s ultimate "No!" to human power, desire and ambition. The psalmist reminds us that death is the exclamation point which shows the final foolishness of the person who is conscious only of himself and his possessions.

To those of us who are rich — which, according to the standards of most of the rest of the world, is every one of us — the Psalmist says don’t believe the flip little saying that goes: "The person who dies with the most toys, wins." Wins what? What happens to those toys we’ve spent a life time collecting? Our "toys" won’t last forever; even they have their limits. And the ultimate limit, of course, is our own death.

Closely related to that thought is the Psalmist’s contention that death is the great equalizer. His position is summed up in the often quoted, but generally ignored, statement, "You can’t take it with you." His contention, which seems pretty valid to me, is that death eliminates all distinctions between people. Faced with that, we’re all pretty much the same!

All those things that we think are so important in distinguishing between people in life — brains, wealth, social position, job, skin color, national origin, religion — all of these lose their significance in the face of death. When the rich man dies he has to leave his riches to someone else. It’s as simple as that. The unspoken thought here is that for the person who places confidence in human power, death has the final answer, an answer which ultimately judges life.

It’s a situation that reminds me of the editor, photographer and reporter from the same newspaper who were walking down the beach one sunny day. They saw a bottle in the sand. The reporter ran over, grabbed it, rubbed it, and a genie popped out. The genie was so grateful for being released from the bottle that he granted each of them one wish. The photographer says, "I want to be on a mountain top with the wisest of the wise soaking up wisdom." And poof, he’s gone. The reporter says, "I want to be in a tropical paradise surrounded by all the wealth and luxury I’ll ever need." And poof, she’s gone. Then the editor says, "I want those two jerks back right now!"

What’s of ultimate value and what really lasts? The Psalmist contends that too often we make the wrong choices and place our confidence in the wrong things — things that are temporary and transitory.

So to sum up so far, the Psalmist says to us, "If you’ve put your confidence in external things, like wealth and social position and even intelligence, you’ve probably missed the meaning of life. Because there’s a point at which all human beings are equal, where none of the distinctions you think are so important make any difference at all."

And we know what that point is. Casey Stengle, the former great baseball manager once said: "There are two kinds of managers in baseball: managers who have been fired and managers who will be fired." And there are two kinds of human beings. Those who have died and those who will die. That’s the point of equality for the Psalmist!

But there are some more positive things here too, things that will eventually bring us back to Dr. Waffles and the pickpockets. The Psalmist’s positive affirmation is that for him God – not death – has the final say in life. So he calls for trust in a foundation different from human power and material treasure, a foundation which gives power over death and life. That power, according to the Psalmist, is communion with the ultimate reality of life — God. This is the solution to the decisive riddle of life: the victory of faith’s hope over the power of death.

It seems to me that the Psalmist has something very important to say to us in the early stages of the 21th century if we understand him clearly. It’s not that wealth, material possessions and the so-called "good things of life" are unimportant. That’s too easy an interpretation – for us or for the Psalmist.

No, the problem as the Psalmist sees it revolved around the misuse of these things. What he constantly reminds us is that these things can become dangerous and unreliable gods; gods that deceive and deprive us of the real meaning of life and existence.

Listen to this for a minute to get a feel of how dangerous just one of these gods can be: the average American child between the ages of 2 and 5 watches 3 1/2 hours of TV a day; the average adult watches nearly 5 hours. Only work and sleep occupy more of the average adult’s life — with TV effectively replacing community and family life, cultural pursuits and reading. At this rate the average American adult is seeing approximately 21,000 commercials a year, most of which have one identical message: "Buy something — you need it — do it now and your life will be better!" That’s the message you’re getting 5 hours a day!

And the Psalmist is charging us with a crime, the crime of being pickpockets. Only we’re the dumbest kind of criminal because we’re picking our own pockets. His claim is that we pick our own pockets of the meaning of life. We do it by passing over the true reality of life, namely God, and building our lives on an illusion — the illusion of the permanence and reliability of "things." And that leaves life hollow and without meaning.

And, of course, by implication we are picking the pockets of others too.

• We’re robbing them of life’s meaning and we’re notgiving it back to them gift wrapped.

• Silently, and sometimes without knowing it we do pick the pockets of others when we fail to see and respond to their needs.

• We do it when we enjoy the material things of life and ignore the source of it all and the obligation it places on us for its use.

•We do it when we rob life of its true meaning by our misconceived values and misplaced trust.

You know, the prisoners that Dr. Waffles went to see weren’t all bad. They picked his pockets but they gave everything back — and they gift wrapped it at that! According to the Psalmist, most of us are pickpockets too. If not in the literal sense, then in a figurative sense for we take things of value from people every day. Things like the meaning and purpose of life.

But fellow pick pockets, Psalm 49 is our Psalm. It not only tells us who we are but who we can be: those who know that true life belongs to those who trust in God first of all.