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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