Ecclesiastes 1.2,12-14,2.18-23, Psalm 49.1-12, Colossians 3.1-11, Luke 12.13-21
“What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain and their work is a vexation?” The writer of today’s first reading sounds like he badly needs a break, a good long one, like I’ve just had. Maybe he did his research for this on an overcrowded, overheated commuter train coming back from London to Sevenoaks at the end of a long day…
It’s a blisteringly honest reflection on what most people feel sometimes, and some people feel all the time, questioning what on earth all their hard labour is really for. It’s a window into the mind of the person who is working multiple boring and backbreaking jobs and yet still not earning enough to be financially secure, or the person who has spent their lives climbing the greasy pole of a precarious career, at terrible cost to the family who never see them, and when they finally get to the top they wonder what it was all for. And even if you make a shedload of money, you can’t take it with you. “I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me – and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish?” Is this all there is to life? Whether you end up rich or poor, the days have slipped through your hands, and what is there to show for them?
It’s not just paid work which can seem pointless. There’s an old folksong called the Housewife’s Lament, which came to mind as I read this Psalm.
Life is a trial and love is a trouble [sings the housewife in the song]
Beauty it fades and riches they flee
Pleasures they dwindle and prices they double
And nothing is as I would wish it to be.
There's too much of worriment goes to a bonnet
There's too much of ironing goes to a shirt
There's nothing that pays for the time you waste on it
There's nothing that last us but trouble and dirt.
There are worms on the cherries and slugs on the roses
And ants in the sugar and mice in the pies
The rubbish of spiders no mortal supposes
And ravaging roaches and damaging flies
The song goes on, and on, like the work, but the final straw for the housewife is when she realizes that when she dies she’ll be buried in the same dirt she’s been battling all her life.
We can all come to the point where we wonder whether the game is worth the candle. But, I don’t think the writer of Eccleisastes means this to be a message of hopelessness, and neither does Jesus in the rather grim story he tells in our Gospel reading today.
Like a lot of Jesus’ parables, it’s meant to be over the top. I bet he hammed it up a bit as he told it, that there was a twinkle in his eye. We often miss that when we read his parables. But however ridiculous it is, it’s carefully told – every word counts.
Imagine for a moment that you were staging it, acting it out. How many actors would you need? Just one, really, until the very last line, according to the story. This rich man seems to live in a world in which he is the only inhabitant, despite the fact that this can’t be true. The land of a rich man produced abundantly, it begins. What? All by itself? I don’t think so. There are surely armies of unseen farm labourers working this land to make those crops appear, perhaps a family too – but this man seems blind to them.
When he realizes he has nowhere to store all this abundance, he says to himself “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones…” Again we ask, what? all by himself? Is he a master builder now as well? Is he going to be lugging around all the timber, man-handling it into place single-handed? I rather doubt it. But as far as he’s concerned, he’s the centre of the universe. In fact he is the universe. It’s only at the end that he realizes that he is wrong.
He addresses his soul again – he talks to himself a lot - he has to because there’s no one else in his world to talk to. Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years, he says, relax, eat, drink be merry. But that’s the point when his self-centred, self-obsessed world comes crashing down. All of a sudden, another voice booms out, another character comes crashing into the scene. You fool, says God This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?… His life isn’t his to do what he wants with – it never has been. It isn’t his to possess and control – it never can be. No man is an island, entire of itself, said the poet John Donne. We exist in relationship, to others, to God, to the world around us. We can’t go it alone.
Jesus tells this story in answer to a question he’s been asked about a family feud. It’s all about inheritance, money, as family feuds often are. But Jesus says that these rowing brothers are missing the point. Their argument about money is destroying something of infinitely greater worth, their relationship with one another. One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, he tells them.The worth of a life, the worth of a person can’t be reduced to the bottom line in a bank statement.
Jesus’ words here, and the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes, can sound very grim and gloomy, but in reality they are words of hope and life. They release us from the burden of thinking that we have to create our own sense of worth, whether that is by heaping up money, clinging onto status, chasing celebrity or self-righteously signalling our own virtues. Our desperate scrambles to prove our value, divert us from the truth God wants us to know, that we are already as precious as it is possible to be to him. Nothing we can do can make God love us more, or less, than he does anyway.
As the Psalmist puts it “We can never ransom ourselves, or deliver to God the price of our lives. For the ransom of our life is so great that we should never have enough to pay it,” The imagery is that of slaves buying themselves out of slavery, so they can be free to do what they want. We think we are independent, in charge of our own lives, but that’s an illusion. We are all actually interdependent, relying on each other and most of all, reliant on God, who gave us life, who gave us the earth we live on, the crops that feed us, the rain to water them, the sun to ripen them. Our lives are a gift, not a reward for anxious labour. We may have to work to earn the money to feed and clothe ourselves, but we don’t have to work to earn our worth in God’s eyes, and we can’t anyway, because our value is so great to him that we could never afford it. The good news of these readings is that our place in his heart is already secure, his gift to us. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are the proof of that to us.
So the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes points us us beyond ourselves to the truest and most lasting source of our value. Jesus reminds us that if we want really to feel rich, we will only do so when we are “rich towards God”, when we invest ourselves in the things that connect us lovingly and compassionately to God and to one another.
How might we do that? We do it by spending time with God in prayer and reflection, opening ourselves up to hear what he says to us – not leaving it to the last minute, like the rich fool in Jesus’ story. We do it by opening ourselves up to others – if we are priceless to God, so are they. We do it by treasuring and caring for all that God has made, that precious creation we see all around us, which is his delight and his gift to us.
We do it by looking for the path he calls us to tread and walking it with him.
Our lives are hidden with Christ in God, says Paul to the church in Colossae. It’s a beautiful phrase, which always comes as a great relief to me when I hear it. God knows us. God holds us. God wraps us in love. God cherishes us in the deep and secret places of his heart. God calls us out on a great adventure with him, just as we are. There is nothing we need to do except enjoy it, and let our joy spill out of us into the world around us. That is what it means to be “rich towards God”, to look to him for meaning rather than to our own anxious strivings, because the meaning he gives to our lives isn’t here today and gone tomorrow, slipping through our fingers like the morning mist, but lasts for ever, and can never be destroyed.
Amen
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