Ecclesiastes 1.2,12-14;2.18-23
Colossians 3.1-11
Luke 12.13-21
So, Lloyd’s bank is back in profit - and RBS is on the way. Good news! Especially since these two banks are largely owned by us. Though, I have to admit, I’m still awaiting for my dividend cheque in the post. Not such good news is the proliferation of pay day lenders, and the embarrassment that the Church of England was discovered to be indirectly investing in one of their backers. For the few who enjoy bumper profits, there are the many who are being driven deeper into debt.
The Bible takes a long hard look at riches, money, property and profit, and generally is highly skeptical of them all. We’re reminded of that by Ecclesiastes this morning; this is part of the ancient Jewish wisdom literature, and is brutally honest about what life can sometimes be like. We’re to suppose that the author is a King of Israel in a great palace full of gorgeous things, and yet he clearly sees that true life and happiness are not to be found in them.
Yes, the Bible affirms that abundance is a blessing from God - but a blessing to be shared. God is generous so that we can be. Everything we have and everything we are comes from God. It is a gift, not something we create for ourselves. This is why attachment to possessions is regarded as idolatry - worshipping a false God, imagining that we can create ourselves by what we can grasp hold of. This is why those who have received an abundance of God’s blessings have a solemn responsibility to look after the poor.
And if we don’t understand that basic perspective, that all things come to us from God’s generosity, then these things can so easily become a snare, a trap, possessions that end us possessing us. The encounter in today’s gospel reading illustrates this snare of possessions.
A man asks Jesus, “tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me”. It was not unusual for a rabbi to be asked to adjudicate in disputes and interpretations of the law. But Jesus refuses to go along with that. He sees to the heart of the matter. This man is trapped in desire for the family inheritance, not because he needs it, but because his brother owns it instead of him.
This in fact is a basic human trait - we imitate one another’s desires. We desire what other people desire, not what we need. And usually we do it quite unconsciously. It’s how advertising works. But the imitation of desire has huge consequences, from Eden to Calvary. It is constantly working to divert us away from God, the source of all we truly need, into rivalry with one another for things we want to grasp and possess.
So Jesus does not adjudicate in this man’s dispute. He simply refuses to be complicit in human rivalry and greed. Instead, he tells the parable of the rich farmer - a caricature, an almost comic figure, but in the end one told with compassion. You end up feeling sorry for him, because he has missed what really matters.
This is a man who desires more than he needs. He already has barns which presumably he has been using for many years. They are therefore enough, they contain what he needs to carry on the business of the farm for the coming year. But he has a bumper harvest, so what should he do with the surplus? Jewish tradition and the Bible are quite clear: if God has blessed you, you should bless others. Give what you don’t need to those who don’t have enough. St Augustine, commenting on this passage, said, “The safest storehouse for surplus grain is the bellies of the poor”. But for this rich man, enough is never enough. He knows no limits, He has to keep grasping and holding on to more and more.
In fact this grasping and greed and possessiveness has swollen up to such an extent that he has forgotten who he is. He regards his soul, that is his true self, almost as a different person. He speaks to his soul as though it were someone else. “I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years.’” This is a man who is literally ‘beside himself’. He has constructed a huge all-demanding false self, ever swelling up with more and more possessions, and has come to mistake that illusion, that construct, for who he really is.
In fact he is experiencing what St Paul describes in our reading from Colossians - ‘wrath’. Wrath is an important concept in the Bible, one we need to pay attention to. It’s a bit of an old fashioned word, and we might think it means just anger or rage or losing your temper. But in the Bible wrath and desire are closely connected. The Greek word for wrath is orge. “Orgy” comes from the same word. It speaks of desire which is never satisfied, desire swollen up out of control, desire collapsing in on itself in a spiral of self-destruction. Wrath is, if you like, the flip side of our rivalrous desires, what those desires do to us if we are not saved from them. Instead of receiving our true self as God’s gift we keep trying to feed the false self more and more, like an addict needing ever higher doses of a drug. But this in the end will never satisfy us, it will always, ultimately, fail. And so we experience wrath, rage, frustration.
It’s important to note that there is no wrath in God. The Bible sometimes talks about “the wrath of God”, and sometimes just about “wrath”. But this is metaphorical language. God is not an organic being like us. God is light and in him is no darkness at all. There is no change or alteration in God, no passions or moods. The “wrath of God” is not something in God, but is what we experience when we try to hang on to our false selves and resist receiving our true self, our true life, as God’s gift. Wrath is something that happens in us, not in God. And it is something that God is saving us from.
Our true life is in God and from God, who gives without limit and without being diminished. Life we cannot grasp at or claim as our own. But to receive that means letting go of our rivalrous desires and attempts to construct ourselves. In theological language this means dying to sin and rising to new life in Christ. These are words which we will hear again in a few moments, addressed to the parents and godparent as we prepare to baptise Kareena and Kiera. “To follow Christ means dying to sin and rising to new life with him.” But they are words which are, really, addressed to all of us. We are all followers of Christ. Baptism is a life journey. It is a call to all of us to turn away from everything that would hold us back from finding our true self in God.
St Paul describes that life of the baptised today, in the extract we heard from the letter to the Colossians. Our new life, our true self, is Christ and is in Christ. It is entirely God’s gift to us, something to receive with thanksgiving, not something we can construct or possess. And it means putting to death whatever in us belongs to the old life. That’s strong language, but new life in Christ means sharing his resurrection and therefore his death. The old false self has to die if we are to truly live. That is why baptism, for all of us, is a life long commitment to follow Christ and to turn away from sin. A commitment to let go of all our attempts to construct ourselves, and instead to trust Christ to renew us in his image. And in that renewal all human greed and rivalry and division and conflict is overcome.
“Set your minds on things that are above,” says St Paul, “not on things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory... you have stripped off the old self and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”
That is the life of the baptised, which we celebrate today with Kiera and Kareena. But it is also God’s call for each and every one of us: to find our true self, our real life, as God’s gift in Christ.
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