2019 Sermon Series: The Rich Fool

This Summer Was Meaningless…

With that being said, at this very moment I imagine, there are people all over the world struggling with the existential crisis that is today’s version of the question that needs answering. Today, we’re presented with a question that troubles every moody toddler, every angsty teenager, and even follows some people all the way through life. The question is simply: What’s the point?

Today, I’d consider all of us lucky. By the end of this, my hope is that if and when you are faced with the question of “how do I find meaning in my life” you think back to this service and can emulate the optimism, joy and hope generated from the words in Ecclesiastes. “Utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless”. Everything you’ve learned and experienced, every success, every failure, its all meaningless. 

Like I said before, I believe we gather in churches and around Bibles to find answers, but when the answer is “hey, nothing you do matters” that leaves us with another daunting question: Why do anything at all?

That’s where we find ourselves today, at the crossroad of “why do anything at all?” and “everything is meaningless”. This is a dangerous place to be.

The answer to why this is dangerous is located multiple chapters away from Ecclesiastes, in our gospel reading from Luke. In it, Jesus is confronted by two siblings arguing over splitting their inheritance. In typical Jesus fashion, he responds to them with a story (as my homie Reina would say, “it’s pretty on brand). The story is about a rich man, who’s lands were blessed with a harvest so plentiful that the crops couldn’t even fit in his barn. He decides that the best thing to do is to build bigger and better barns, store his crops, and after that he sits back and does nothing. He said to himself “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry”.  Well, let’s just say God wasn’t a big fan of this man’s decision… The rich man thought he had reached his peak, but when he got there the only thing waiting for him was a God size billboard that read “You fool”. In an instant, his best moments become his last and he’s asked a simple question by the Creator. “Who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”

The problem with that question is no one else is mentioned in this story. There’ s no mention of a family, which I think is a very important detail. What if the man would’ve replied “I’m giving it to my daughter”, would that have been enough for God? Potentially, and Jesus could have easily given this man that out. Instead, the response to “who?” was no one. So, the rich fool gets his life taken, leaving behind an abundant blessing that impacted no one. In other words, it was meaningless.

With this on our minds I want to come back to that image of our crossroad. Remember that dangerous spot between “nothing you do matters” and “why do anything”? The Parable of the Rich Fool outlines the danger of taking the “why do anything” path. It’s an easy path, tempting to the majority of people and once they get comfortable on it, they don’t do anything. They walk past the people they see along the side of the path as they take life easy, eating, drinking and being merry. However, our parable tells us that eventually people walking down this path are met by God. I like to imagine God holding one of those rotating signs construction workers use to direct traffic, on one side it reads “wrong way” and on the other it just reads “fool.”

So, the Gospel of Luke steers us away from one of the paths and leaves us to deal with the voice we hear in Ecclesiastes and the other path, which says “everything you do is meaningless”. Admittedly, not a seemingly hopeful spot, but I believe it can be. While the Parable appears to push us towards this path of meaningless existence and a lifestyle where accumulating things is bad, I think it does more then that. I believe it adds a sort of a comma like pause after the words “everything is meaningless”. It replaces the finality of it with a new, hopeful instruction that seems to say, “Everything is meaningless, if it only benefits yourself.”

 I’m going to challenge all of you to imagine yourself as the rich person in the story. Now, we’re going to pause for a second because some of you might have a point of contention already. You might be saying to yourself “Well, I’m not rich. So that’s not a fair comparison”. Fair point, but Jesus never mentions the man’s money in our Parable today. We’re told he’s rich in the sense he has an abundance of crops, but that’s it. Luke 12:21, the last verse of the Parable reads “This is how it will be for those who gather things for themselves”. Again, no mention of money, I’d argue, because it’s always been deeper then that.

Seeing yourself as the rich person, I want to draw attention to the fact that just like the man in the story we are all owners of a barn, and everyone’s barn is filled with the same two things. The first thing is the blessings and gifts you have received from God. Now, we are all blessed and highly favored children of God right? So, our barns should all be the same size as of right now. However, the other occupant of the barn is the privileges and experiences we carry, and these things are the reason some people appear to have bigger and better “barns” then others.

In the Gospel reading, the blessing is easy to identify, it’s the abundance of crops. This concept of privilege might be less obvious, but it’s definitely present. Consider if a person who owned no land would’ve been blessed with an abundance of crops. They could sell some of them off and maybe buy some land, then sell some more and build a barn. As we heard earlier though, one barn isn’t enough, so they sell some more and build some more barns. This person is now on par with the man in the parable, but they had to work so much harder to get there. They received the same blessing, the difference being one of them had the means to enjoy it, the other had to work to enjoy it. In short, that is the benefit of privilege.

I truly believe that God judged the rich man a fool because he failed to see his privilege as much as he failed to utilize his blessings. I don’t think God is saying if we stop for a second to eat, drink and be merry that it’s a problem, but we can’t become complacent. Complacency breeds indifference and causes us to do nothing. Jesus tells us doing nothing makes us fools, which inherently makes everything we do meaningless.

In terms of this community, as our summer at Wilderness comes to a close I would again challenge you to not let your experience in this place be meaningless. If you have been joining us for worship throughout the summer, you’ve heard multiple voices calling you to action. We’ve heard how intersectionality is present and important in the story of Moses. We’ve heard how separating ourselves from creation is problematic to both our relationship with God and the Earth. We’ve heard how God’s peace goes with us even when answering these calls to action feels urgent but unsustainable. For those same moments, we’ve also learned how to harness the strength of Mary and the Magnificat with the simple phrase “fake it till you make it”.

If this is your first Sunday or experience with Wilderness, you’re now a part of this community too. Throughout the summer, campers and guest flooded Wilderness, bringing with them their experiences and their stories. Countless conversations led to relationships being formed, strengthened and tested, seemingly all at the same time. Amazing things happened here and there were so many lessons learned.

The thing about it though, is all of it is meaningless…

If we leave from this place and don’t use the experiences we had, or the lessons we learned to impact both the communities we go back to and the communities around us… What’s the point?

If we fail to share the lessons learned here and don’t utilize them to be blessings to others. The only thing it becomes is another privilege we carry. Our hypothetical barn gets bigger, we go back to our daily routine (maybe it’ll involve eating, drinking and being merry) as we ignore the rest of humanity around us. According to Jesus, we become fools.

I know I began this message by saying I believed church was a place people go to try to find answers. Today, in under 20 minutes we’ve hashed out one of the most daunting questions life has to offer and turned it into a crossroad. I hope you realize that as we leave, we’re all going to have to chose which path we’re going to walk down. So, another question remains: Now what?

If (hopefully when) we start down the path of utilizing our blessings to bless the rest of the world, there’s no promise that we won’t hear people echoing the sentiment from Ecclesiastes. “It’s meaningless” “You’re not going to change anything”. These voices were around in Biblical times and they’re present and loud today. I pray that when you encounter them you find the courage to smile at those fools and keep going, the words we heard earlier from Joshua providing you endurance and strength: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go”

Amen