Seventh Sunday after Trinity 2025

Jesus's warning about the dangers of wealth and the parable of the rich fool lead James to explore what genuine wisdom looks like — and why the accumulation of things is such a poor substitute for the life that is truly life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

And so, Heavenly Father, as we come now to reflect on your words to us today, would you send your Holy Spirit that we might be transformed into the image of your Son. Amen. I'd like us to reflect together this morning on something that I think is severely lacking in our world, and that is wisdom. I'm going to think primarily about our reading from Ecclesiastes, and then we're going to turn to the gospel. What is wisdom? Let me offer this definition. Wisdom is the ability to apply knowledge, experience, and sound judgment to navigate life's complexities. It involves discernment, ethical decision making. It's often linked to insight and deep comprehension of human nature. There's a whole set of books in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, that we refer to as the wisdom literature. And they're fascinating books. They kind of step out of the big story of the Bible from creation to new creation or from the development of Israel from Abraham into Egypt and then out into the Promised Land and then off into exile. That story is kind of put on hold for a few books, and uh a different type of literature is found there that we call the wisdom literature. And you can think of the wisdom literature as a series of voices that are in dialogue with one another. And I'd like to just emphasize two voices in particular: the voice of the book of Proverbs and the voice of the book of Ecclesiastes. Proverbs you could describe like this. It's a kind of naive wisdom. And I don't say that to denigrate it, because it's wisdom nonetheless, and wisdom that lots of people don't have. Proverbs offers a kind of cause and effect view of the world. Proverbs 10, 4 says this the hand of the diligent makes rich. Wisdom in Proverbs is optimistic, it offers a kind of moral structure to the world. If you work hard, if you fear God, if you live with integrity, generally speaking, life will work out for you. Many of us were raised on that formula, and in general, I think it's good advice. If you save a bit of money each month, at the end of the year, you'll have more money that you can uh go on holiday with or invest in or have as a rainy day fund. If you work hard and you get a good job and you go to university and you get a good uh degree, then you're likely to get a, you know, work your way up the ranks. That sort of uh wisdom, a sort of good teaching for life, that's the sort of thing that you find in the book of Proverbs. That's the voice that we hear, or we might call a kind of naive wisdom. The voice of Ecclesiastes does something slightly different, and I'd like to call it critical wisdom. Ecclesiastes famously opens with these words vanity of vanities, all is vanity. And that word in the Hebrew could also be translated smoke or vapor. The point of Ecclesiastes is to say all this stuff that we're worried about, all the things that we spend our times occupied with, it's insubstantial, it's fleeting. It's there, sure, you can see the smoke, but you wave your hand and it's gone. Ecclesiastes is tradition would have us believe the voice of King Solomon, a wise king in Israel, who, because he was king, had the time and the resources not to get worried and bogged down in the stuff of life, but to sit back and observe what is life really like. And he was smart and insightful, and so he applied himself to investigate the world, and here's what he found. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between the effort that you put in and the output that you get. You can work hard, you can play by the rules, and you can still be found. You can still find that life is fleeting and fragile and that ultimately out of your control. Surely we all know that experience, don't we? That you've worked hard with integrity all your life, and then you're the guy in the office who gets let go. Someone had to be let go, it was your turn. They chose you and not your person standing next to you. You work really hard, and just as you get retired, just as you hit retirement age, you get knocked by a diagnosis, or your partner gets a phone call from the doctor. You think, didn't you see how hard I worked, how diligent I was? And suddenly I've discovered that everything, poof, in a puff of smoke, has disappeared. Vanity of vanities, says the writer of Ecclesiastes. Now, before we go any further, a quick litmus test. Because I imagine as I was talking, you found yourself particularly drawn to one voice or the other. Some of us love the voice of Proverbs. Yes, meritocratic society. If I work hard or if my children work hard, they will do well. And other of us like the voice of Ecclesiastes. Do you know what? There's no rhyme or reason to this thing. Deconstruct or construct. What's the voice that you prefer? And let me then suggest that whichever voice it is, take some time to listen to the alternative perspective. Because it isn't the case that there's one right answer. The wisdom literature teaches us that these voices are in dialogue and we're meant to hear both and. Jesus, in our gospel reading this morning, sits himself well and truly within this wisdom literature. Someone in the crowd, as he's on his way to Jerusalem, says, Lord, help me with this legal and financial dispute I've got. It's almost certainly the case that what was happening here was that one brother had received a double portion of their fair father's inheritance, and he wanted it to be 50-50. In the ancient world, if you had a father and two sons, when the father died, you wouldn't split the inheritance 50-50 like we would probably today. The first son would get a double portion. That's what that phrase means. So you'd split it into three, and you give two to the older and one to the younger. And so someone from the crowd says to Jesus, Jesus, help me arbitrate this legal dispute. And Jesus answers a different question. The question underneath the original problem. And he offers a deeper wisdom. And so he tells this parable. A man builds, a man has a really good harvest. He's worked hard, he's been diligent. And so he goes and thinks to himself, hey, I've got a bump of crop this year. I've made more money than I expected. I've got a bit of margin to play with. What should I do? Well, I know. The obvious thing. I'll I'll build some barns, I'll store away that surplus, and then I've got a bit of respite. I can say to myself, hey, relax. All this hard work that we've been doing, all the anxiety we feel about living hand to mouth, we've got a bit of space now. I can relax. Soul, we've laid up some things, we've got some plenty. Eat, drink, and be merry. But God says, You fool, this very night your life will be demanded from you. Doesn't this feel like the voice of Ecclesiastes? Or as our reading said this morning, what does a person gain from all the toil with which they toil under the sun? Let me give you a modern-day rich fool. There's a man who's uh alive today, he's he's in his 40s or 50s, his name's Brian Johnson. He's a tech entrepreneur and a multi-billionaire. Uh, he uh designed a piece of software called Venmo, which uh Americans use to send money back to each other in a kind of uh quick and easy way. He invented that, made his billions, and he is currently spending two million pounds a year trying to reverse the effects of aging in his own life. He's created a project that he calls Project Blueprint, and uh this is what he does. He has this regime of biohacking uh that's quite extreme. He eats at precise intervals every day because the the science tells us that that's the best way to metabolize your um your food. He eats a carefully constructed regime of fats and carbohydrates and proteins. He's even gone as far as to take his son's plasma and inject it into himself because uh he's shares some biomarkers with his son, but his son's got younger blood, and so he takes it out of the sun and he puts it in himself in an attempt to uh improve his own life, and he tracks every day hundreds of biomarkers and he describes himself as the world's healthiest man to million pounds a year. He's one of a growing group of billionaires and tech entrepreneurs trying to use their incredible wealth and technology to greater and greater degrees of control, even to the point they hope of stopping death. And actually, as I was reflecting on this man this week, I found myself wondering maybe he's even more foolish than the fool in Jesus' parable, because at least the fool in Jesus' parable was able to eat and drink and be merry. This guy spends his life eating kale smoothies and uh injecting himself with someone else's blood. Goodness me, vitamin tablets all day long. A fool, if ever I've heard of one. And the voice of Ecclesiastes is fantastic at pointing this out. You can optimize everything, you can plan meticulously, you can build bigger barns and frenetically attempt to calm your anxieties, but all our attempts at control are nothing but an illusion. Like smoke. But notice, Jesus does not say everything is an illusion, just let go, there's no point planning, that's the end of it. Jesus is not a pessimist, he's not a nihilist, he's not a head uh um a hedonist. Jesus says in that final line, did you hear the final line of the parable? This is what happens to people unless they are rich towards God. Jesus says, I want you to be rich. Just rich towards God. Jesus doesn't say, do away with your desire to be rich. He says, your desire for richness is in the wrong place.

unknown 11:37

C.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

S. Lewis, someone I come back to again and again because of his wisdom, wrote a sermon called The Weight of Glory, which I tried to read at least once a year. In it, C. S. Lewis says this. It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us. We're like an ignorant child who wants to make mud pies in the slums because we cannot imagine what is meant by a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. And this is where I hear in this parable of Jesus the voice of Proverbs. There are actually some things you can do if you want to be rich. If you want to be rich towards God, you must take up your cross and follow Jesus. If you really want complete confidence and control over your life that you will live forever, you must hand over that control to Jesus. Give it to Jesus, and you can have whatever you want. Or as Jesus says in the Sermon of the Mount, those who want to save their life will lose it. But whoever loses their life for me will find it. So let me offer a second example, this time a rich and wise person. Chuck Freeney was the co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers. You know, when you go through the airport and you see those supermarkets, he invented that idea. And over the course of his life, he quietly gave away eight billion dollars. He lived in a small apartment with a fairly basic lifestyle. He called this giving while living. And he said, it's a lot more fun to give away your money while you are alive than when you're dead. Unlike the rich fool, Chuck Freeney didn't build bigger barns. He gave away his wealth. He reoriented his wealth towards others. And in so doing, whether he knew it or not, I don't know what his relationship with Jesus was like, he became an example of someone who was becoming rich towards God. It's often said that the last thing to get converted in a person's life is their wallet. Once you have been convinced by the claims of Christianity, once you've decided that Jesus really is Lord and really is your savior, you really is the person who died for your sins and rose again three days later, once you've decided that you really want to make church your home and that you believe in your salvation is in Jesus, once all of that stuff is in place, it becomes relatively easy, I found, for people to want to give of their time. Yeah, sure, I'd love to serve. How can I help do tea and coffee or to give of their treasure? I'm really uh of their talents, I'm really skilled in this or that. Could I help? Could I make the place a better place? It's the treasure so often that we find difficult to hand over. It's what we do with our money, with our stuff that says so much about who we are, about where we put our trust, about what happens when we're feeling anxious or we need more control. So, what would it be for us to live wisely today? To hear both voices, the voice of Ecclesiastes that says, All that stuff that you found yourself preoccupied with, remember, friend, it's only vapor, it's only smoke, it's here today, gone tomorrow. And how do we also hear the voice of Proverbs that says, sure, you want to be rich? You want to do some financial planning? You want to think long term about your investments? Think truly long term. And I don't mean next year or for your retirement or in five years' time, but think about your eternal future. What does it mean for you to become rich with God? Jesus is offering us a day at the beach. Let's not miss out on that because we're fond of our slums. Amen.