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(This sermon was preached the
day before the new ‘Tesco Extra’ store opened in
Dumfries) He said: “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.” (Luke 12:18) You know what I’m going to say, don’t you? Think Dame Shirley Porter. Think Tesco! Think Dumfries! Relax! Eat, drink, be merry, for tomorrow the new store opens, having seen off the Coop, which I always regarded as the most peaceful place in the town. At the same time, Morrisons is rebranding Safeway, promising bigger and better things. The Lord has delivered Tesco into my hands this Sunday as it opens its new barn tomorrow! Does it not resonate with today’s gospel, the parable of the rich fool? We’ll come back to all that in a moment. First, a parable from 2004. One of our daughters has inherited a cat. It is black and white, and a sort of tomcat, if you get my drift. Its name is Mulberry. She kept him in the house for a week, and we were present on the day she let him out. He poked its nose out of the door, and - whoosh - he was gone. Up over a six foot high fence, up a tree in no time, and very soon he was terrorising the entire cat population of the neighbourhood. All this was very amusing, until he started to catch birds. The more squeamish members of the family condemned this as ‘gross’, and attempted to separate Mulberry from his lunch. I, being made of sterner stuff, insisted that he was only doing what cats do, and he should be left alone. Then I got to thinking about some cats mentioned in the bible. They are mentioned in the Old Testament, in Isaiah, in the context of a new and great age to come - the time when the Messiah will rule the lives of all humankind. In Christian terms, it is called the Kingdom of God, or the rule of God, or God’s way. This will be a time when all our values will be stood on their head, just like the gospel reading today, which I’ll come to in a moment. And the cats mentioned in the book of Isaiah? Well, they are big cats. “The leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together.” And I said, wondering out loud, “will it ever happen?” Can you ever think of a time when a lion won’t kill a gazelle, or a domestic cat a bird? If you can imagine such a time, then perhaps you can imagine the Kingdom of God, and then you can begin to imagine the message of today’s gospel reading. All our readings today were about life in a different dimension - a mark of God’s way of doing things. Hosea talks about his people repenting, rethinking, and turning back to God, who will in fact welcome them and have compassion on them; the epistle talks about setting our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth (in other words, repenting), and living a different sort of life. And the gospel - well that really is enough to make the modern, greedy, acquisitive world weep tears of repentance! Or, perhaps just feel a little uneasy! I don’t suppose there are many here today who have barns of any size - at least, not barns to put grain in. So at first sight it may seem a bit obscure. But don’t let that cloud the message for you. We have some interesting parallels in the modern world. Think Tesco! This is a parable about greed, and about priorities. It is a parable about choosing between God’s way and our way, which, left to its own devices is often a selfish way. It is, as the punch line of the gospel said, about “those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich towards God.” There has been a lot in the papers this week about the so-called ‘fat-cats’ - not only about their hugely inflated salaries, but also about the grossly unjust pay-offs they get when they fail to make the grade. I read in Friday’s ‘Herald’ that an exclusive deal is being offered to people in top posts in the civil service who are deemd to be ‘not leadership material’. Rank and file workers, however, will be made redundant in their thousands, with little in the way of an enhanced payoff. There is injustice for you. There is unrighteousness. There is something which is totally at odds with our gospel for today. But ( and it is a big ‘but’), you see, the life of the Christian disciple is not to be concerned with such things for ourselves. Look at it like this. If, as a follower of Jesus, you have embraced Kingdom values, if you have, by doing that, become what Jesus called ‘good’, then even the division of the family inheritance becomes an irrelevance, which is why Jesus told this parable. We are into the ‘can’t take it with you’ arena here. Material wealth is not a permanent possession, and if, like the rich fool we devote all our energy to amassing wealth and property, we have nothing we can call our own. The only things worth striving for, says Jesus, are those which death cannot take away. These are hard truths for us to embrace. Jesus is telling us that wealth is a peril, both to those who have it, and to those who do not. For if you are anxious about it, Jesus says that is absurd, pointless and pagan. Why? Because it may be an insidious threat to your loyalty to him. Insecurity of heart and mind can totally engross and weaken us. You can’t do anything by worry. Later in the text Jesus says, in effect, Do you think God would have given you the gift of life without providing the smaller gifts of food an clothing? Or lavish so much care on birds and flowers, only to neglect us? To worry, Jesus is saying, is pagan, for it implies that we do not really believe that God loves us and cares about us. Put God and the Kingdom first, and the rest will follow. That is what we call ‘faith’. And yes, perhaps our lives will be more simple, and our possessions fewer. Let me confess. After 2 years of being ‘sat down’, I am still trying to clear my study and rid myself of some of the fruits of a life time of work - things which I have stored up as being of value over many, many years. It is painful to bin stuff which has memories. But why keep it? It will be of no interest to my family when I am gone. Indeed, if I don’t deal with it, they will have to, and fat thanks I will get for that! For us, the question really is: are we storing up treasure for ourselves? Or are we being ‘rich towards God’ - in all that we do, do we put God first? That is the crunch question, and one we ignore at our eternal peril. God, who is love, and loves us, wants our love and devotion. Nothing could be more rich than that. |