Sermon for St. Anne’s - Seventh Sunday after Trinity

Seventh Sunday after Trinity

Eccles.1. 2, 12-14, 2.18-23

Psalm 49, 1-12

Col. 3, 1-11

Luke 12, 13-21

Today’s readings take us on a journey of understanding.  From the bleak appraisal in Ecclesiastes that all we do is vanity to the reminder in Luke that life is about much more than simply accumulating an abundance of possessions today’s readings demand that we stop this morning and reflect on what’s really important about being alive.  Above all, they ask us to explore the idea of being rich towards God, to discover for ourselves a form of wealth which comes from giving to one another rather than gathering more and more for ourselves. A wealth which comes from discovering how by loving one another and by working to overcome everything that divides us we can give richly back to God, giving rather than taking and then, as Paul explains to the Colossians,  discovering Christ in ourselves and in everything around us. 

We’ve just come back from a walking holiday in Switzerland with some of our oldest and closest friends. The walking itself was often hard and difficult, crossing boulders and climbing steep slopes of shifting shale.  We had to travel with the absolute minimum; some spare clothes, a coat, a cotton sleeping bag, good boots and bread and cheese fruit and water for lunch each day.  We discovered how much we could do without; there was no mobile phone coverage, we were far away from roads and shops, but we found we could live very happily with one another’s company and just what we could carry on our backs.  We became aware of our bodies as we pushed ourselves to reach each day’s destination or swam in chilly mountain lakes, and sometimes we’d need to help one another, holding someone’s hand over a frightening stretch of path or sharing warm clothes in a mountain shelter as the rain poured down outside.  And when I came back and thought about today’s readings it struck me that ‘being rich towards God’ was a wonderful description of what we’d experienced in that simple act of walking, talking, looking after one another in those high places, sharing stories and companionship. 

Away from all the things we thought we needed we discovered that what really mattered was our enjoyment of one another’s company, our willingness to help one another through tough times and a readiness to celebrate the joy of simply being alive together.

Being rich towards God by appreciating life and all its richness.  And this of course is what pilgrimage is partly about- pilgrims through the ages have stopped here at St. Anne’s on their way from Winchester to Canterbury, a journey on foot involving companionship and prayer, solitude and silence,  letting go of stuff in search of what it means to be rich towards God. The idea of life as a Pilgrimage is one that has deep roots…A close friend of mine died recently of early onset dementia and in one of our last times together she led us all in singing that wonderful hymn of john Bunyan’s’ to be a Pilgrim’. She herself was a pilgrim through a mental landscape of lions and giants, but as we joined her in humming the tune we felt a joy in our friendship and togetherness which I think was itself an experience of being rich towards God- an experience of giving and sharing in a love which transcended the awfulness of her dementia .

We finished our walking holiday at Zurich airport, where shops sold watches for thousands of pounds and the sheer quantities of stuff, perfume and clothes and wine and spirits  for sale seemed overwhelming . After a week of living like pilgrims, walking and talking and enjoying life there seemed to be something empty and unnecessary about all that stuff on sale.  The pointlessness of wanting more than we need is a theme through all of today’s readings,  and they challenge us to ask what we really need from life, from one another and from God.  The world is very good at encouraging us to believe that buying stuff is what’s going to make us happy, when really we know that we’re at our happiest as human beings when we acknowledge one another with love and laughter, and , as Christians, come to understand that, as Paul tells the Corinthians, our love of life and laughter come from God.  And we don’t have to go very far to enjoy that experience; if we look for it, we’ll find it alive in our worship together now, or in our conversations over coffee later, or in visiting friends who are unwell.  When we acknowledge our love for one another and when we fully appreciate the gift of life itself today’s readings tell us that we’re being rich towards God- by loving life and one another we’re offering God something in return for his goodness to us. 

Jesus today tells us that our lives ‘don’t consist in the abundance of possessions’ but this is a hard thing to acknowledge when we live in a world where we’re constantly being told that happiness is about consuming as much as we want, whenever we want.  It’s a message which goes against everything that C21st society stands for, which is why it’ should be so easy for us to identify with the rich man in today’s gospel, whose selfish pursuit of more food and wine than he can ever eat, or drink blinds him to the life-enhancing possibilities of sharing his wealth and good fortune with others.  The question we most need help with today is just how do we do this?  How do we ensure that we are rich towards God? 

Paul in his letter to the Corinthians gives us a way forward - ‘you must get rid of … anger, wrath, malice, slander and abusive language’.  The mindset which prefers disliking others because they’re different from ourselves rather than loving them and listening to their stories- this Paul tells us is ‘the old self’, a way of living which  is earthbound and shaped by greed, distrust, selfishness and hatred rather than understanding and love.  If we want to be rich towards God, we have to  strip off all those negative and destructive impulses and emotions until finally we’re conscious of Christ within and around us, until we’re aware as Paul puts it that ‘Christ is all and in all’. 

Ultimately being rich towards God means that whenever we are kind and generous to someone else, by sharing our time, our talents, our companionship and our love we are giving something of ourselves to God.  And in a world which encourages us to be the rich man in the Gospel story today’s readings call us to live by a totally different set of values.   So, in the days to come perhaps we might reflect more deeply on how we can give more of ourselves to others, and in so doing understand what it means to be rich towards God.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.