Sermon Archive
The rich fool
Sermon preached by Donald Reid at Evensong on 29 August 2004
I want to talk to you about anoraks. This is perhaps a joke which would only work among the clergy but it's worth a try. One of our colleagues Pam Skelton raised a laugh (or was it a groan?) amongst a few of us once by telling us of an occasion when she was a guest preacher in another church and after sweating blood she produced what she thought was a pretty incisive sermon about prayer. So in the usual chit chat in the church hall afterwards she was understandably gratified when one of the congregation looked at her appreciatively and although busy with other people nevertheless managed to whispered urgently to her. 'Oh please, don't go before I have the chance to ask you something'. Pam was wondering what engaging question she was going to be asked about prayer as a result of her stormer of a sermon. As the hall cleared, the woman finally came back to her and said with obvious relief 'I'm so glad to catch you before you left. I just wanted to ask you' ? and she put her hand amiably on Pam's arm ? 'that's such a lovely anorak you're wearing. I was just wondering: where on earth did you get it?'
How to have your clergy depressed on Sunday afternoons. (Use the knowledge compassionately).
Well I don't know if Jesus was depressed when a similar thing happened to him in today's Gospel. There he is in midflow, with crowds gathered round him, teaching them about prayer, about God's love for each of us, that each hair on our head is precious and that the holy spirit will strengthen us when we are called to account for our faith ? and someone in the crowd, who clearly hasn't been listening to a word he says, pipes up with a 'What about me?' - type question and wants Jesus to settle a dispute between him and his brother over the family inheritance.
Jesus is clearly irritated by this, as he replies with a form of address which usually reserved for someone who's getting on your nerves but ? and this is why the incident is reported - he uses the occasion to talk about the dangers of greed. He tells a parable about a rich man who does so well out of one years harvest that he doesn't know what to do with it all and ? so he decides to store it all, tearing down the barns he has and building bigger one, so he can hoard all his produce and, thinking himself secure for the future, take life easy and eat drink and be merry. But of course he has forgotten the rest of that saying 'Eat, drink and be merry... for tomorrow you may die'... and indeed that very night he does die and all that he has put aside for his future profits him nothing.
And it's interesting that the man is described as a fool. Fool is a very strong word in the Gospel: you remember elsewhere we are warned that if we call someone else a fool we risk terrible judgment on ourselves? So it's a very strong word to use and reminds us of what might be regarded as the definition in scripture of a fool, to be found in Psalm 14:1 'The fool has said in his heart: There is no God'.
The rich man was a fool because he thought his security was in his grain stored in his barns. 'There is no God' because I have no need of God ? or other people. I am successful, self-sufficient and I am secure now in the future. The fool could see nothing beyond himself: the poor, God.
So whether it's pension schemes, or minor matters like overcoats or wrangles over daddy's money: there's a problem when our attention to things is such that it distract us from the word of God.
And it's not things themselves, necessarily: Jesus himself ate, drank and got merry and was criticised for it. He was supported in his ministry by some wealthy women followers. As was Mahatma Gandhi - apparently one of his sponsors said of Gandhi 'It's costing us a fortune to keep this man in holy poverty'. But the key thing is that neither of them saw things as ends in themselves but as gifts from God to be enjoyed in the moment and not to be accumulated. There is nothing in the Gospel which should make us anti-materialist, rather Christians should be the true materialists, appreciating the fruits of the earth and what human beings can add through their inventive skill. But always seeing these gifts as pointing beyond themselves to the giver, God.
So it's our attitude to things that matters. Franz Kafka said that if we have any possessions which we cannot give away, then it is not we who possess those things, rather they possess us. Where you treasure is, there is your heart also.
So we have to be careful and the more we have the more aware we have to become of the pitfalls. Andrew Carnegie ? from Dunfermline - apparently believed that 'the man who dies rich, dies disgraced' and he disposed of 90% of his vast wealth before his death. He didn't want to die a fool.
A fool who forgets that in spiritual terms a rich man is just a poor man with lots of money. That's the bad news. The good news is: that if you know your need of God, you are blessed. And lest we think this teaching is only for the super rich, remember that Jesus goes on to teach in the next part of the Gospel that even among the poor, worries and concerns about the tings of this world can also choke the growth of the word of God in us.
So perhaps our credit cards should have a wee message printed on them, like those health warnings on cigarette boxes: 'wealth can damage your health' or 'it will profit you nothing if you gain the whole world and lose your soul'.
So in a society hell bent on getting us to trade in our souls for things, what can we do to keep our perspective, spiritually? An important questions on a day when we have celebrated two baptisms, when we are acknowledging not just the physical birth but that we also have a spiritual life to be nurtured.
Well what about the idea of the Sabbath, the day of rest, for us and for the earth?
Ann Pettifor, the director of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, once remarked that not though an agnostic herself, through working with the churches for the cancellation of poor country debt, she had discovered the deeper meaning of the concept of the sabbath in scripture. Like the concept of jubilee, when supposedly debt were cancelled every 50 years and 'slates wiped clean', the idea of the Sabbath was to give us all, individually and collectively, a weekly day of freedom, a weekly jubilee, a day when we are set free from the grind of earning, buying, spending, working, toiling... consuming. So we can rest. So we can not be driven by those things. So we can see them for what they are but not be enslaved to them.
Ann was campaigning in the context, of course, of a world trade system which seems to be predicated on building bigger and bigger barns to store up wealth for the few at the expense of the many. In a system so avaricious, teachings about the Sabbath, which interrupts that system... and demands that we stop consuming and start communing... are an important corrective. Especially perhaps for the poor who bear the brunt of it. The poor deserve sabbaticals too.
I think there's something in that. We've lost the strict observance of the Sabbath day and I'm not mourning it, there didn't seem to be much joy in it. But in all our lives, we need to have some time in which we can withdraw to be refreshed, some place we can go to be renewed - some means where we can stop so that we can eat, drink and be merry - but without forgetting God.
And, fortunately, this is not the weather for anoraks.
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy, may we so pass through things temporal that we lose not the things eternal. Amen.
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