Wednesday 7 August 2019

Going Beyond Merriment: The Banquet of Life


A sermon preached at Croydon Minster on Sunday 4th August 2019, Seventh Sunday after Trinity. The readings were, Colossians 3.1-11; Luke 12.13-21

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The ‘Parable of the Rich Fool’ is a wonderfully vivid portrait of the way a life can totally lose sight of the deepest priorities of what it means to be human. It features a comfortable, overfed, over-wealthy, rich man who sees nothing more to his padded life than to ‘Eat, drink and be merry’.

This man has it all; in fact he has more than he can possibly want. And it’s pretty clear where his priorities lie.

It is a parable for our times.

The parable asks us to reflect on what really sets the bearings in our life; what is our hope and destination?

Will the many things we have, and the comforts we enjoy, blind us to the needs and pains of our world and her people?

The ‘eat, drink and be merry’ approach of the man in the parable is about self-adoration, self-satisfaction and self- gratification: ‘haven’t I done well? aren’t I marvellous? dash everyone else.’

For those us who were alive in the 1980s, it sounds a little like the character, created by Harry Enfield, called ‘Loadsamoney’ who just sneeringly bragged about how much money he had and waved wads of cash in the face of everyone else.

The ‘Loadsamoney’ character of the parable disregards everyone else and sits back to eat, drink and be merry. All that matters to him is a dogged pursuit of personal preferences and fulfilment. In that outlook other people are then either just tools to extract more money from or people to be pitied because they haven’t got what I’ve got.

The parable tells us about ourselves, or at least where we might find ourselves going if we take our eyes off the deeper, richer priorities of being human: of loving and adoring God; of seeking the Common Good; of seeing the legitimate and good generation of wealth as a means of creating a banquet in which all can share and no one be overlooked.

It has a personal and a societal dimension. It explodes the approach of ‘me, me, me’.

That self-absorbed approach to life was taken to its most horrific extreme in a story from the news last week: a mother who put her pursuit of eating, drinking and being merry above the care of her children and led, shockingly, to her killing them because they got in the way of her lifestyle.

Now that is a gross extreme, but a salutary example. How do I, how do you, prioritise our comfort, preferences and desire for security in relation to other people and indeed to our world and environment?

After all, since the industrial revolution our western world has effectively said ‘we’ve got everything we want, we have the comforts that previous ages don’t have so let’s eat, drink and be merry.’

It’s an approach that has led inexorably to the devastation of nature, the eradication of many species and as is becoming clearer and clearer towards a climate emergency that puts our own species under threat. We’re killing the environment in the pursuit of material comfort and security or just a bit of fun.

Politically there is a grave and current temptation and danger for our leaders to wish away complexity, to put their preferences over the Common Good and then to try to simplify real challenges by using the optimistic ‘eat, drink and be merry’ approach that says surely all will be fine.

The ‘me, me, me/eat, drink and be merry approach’ has not served human society and community well. The parable asks us to reflect on the priorities of our own lives and how we connect to other people: family, friends and wider community.

So where does all this take us?

Jesus promises abundant life (John 10.10); St Paul speaks of ‘taking hold of the life that really is life’ (2 Timothy 6.19).

The wonderful twist to all this is that we can ‘eat, drink and be merry’ when we are directing our lives to the feast of life, the banquet of heaven, from which spills out generosity, care for the weak, loving the creation rather than devouring the poor, the weak and anyone or anything who gets in our way.

What we are doing now in celebrating the Eucharist is the antidote to all of this and reframes the rich man’s phrase:
we eat the bread of life;
we drink the cup of salvation;
we enter into the joy of the Lord.

Life shaped in this way means that eating, drinking and being merry is a vision of a banquet to which all are invited, welcomed and fed.

It means that when we celebrate the Eucharist we are not self-indulgently consuming our own private, spiritual feast, that disregards everyone else, but we are participants in an action that tells us and the world what abundant life looks like.

We are anticipating the banquet of heaven, but making it real here and now!

This way of life puts away the old self, as described in our first reading; it cultivates habits that open us up to others and doesn’t shut them out; it reminds us that we are not self-made creatures worshipping ourselves; it reminds us not to exploit the creation or other people.

It is a strikingly different vision of the world from prevailing contemporary notions: that I am the master of my fate; that no one else can possibly impede me and what I want; that the way I see the world is the way the world is.

Through this banquet; through this eating, through this drinking we go beyond merriment -we go deeper – and enter into the abundant life and joy promised by the Lord.



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