This morning’s bilingual sermon @ Holy Trinity
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”
14 Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”
15 Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
16 And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop.
17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
18 Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.
19 And I’ll say to myself, You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’
20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
21 This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich towards God.”
These are, it is clear, days of financial uncertainty. What has been termed a ‘Credit Crunch’ has the capacity to negatively affect the livelihoods of everyone in the Western world, and possibly beyond. Even secular financial journalists and economic experts are saying that it is, in part, a result of greed / mae’n canlyniad o drachwant. We are already beginning to see the results of the instability of an economy; bankers and others losing their jobs, people losing their homes. The people Jesus told the parable in our reading to were living in even more precarious economic conditions; there was no welfare system to speak of to support anyone who lost their job or their home – such events would leave entire families destitute.
To them and to us, Jesus gives two warnings / mae Iesu yn rhoi dau rhybudd; firstly about thinking we can know the future and secondly about greed and the reliance or dependence upon possessions and money that goes with it. Both are traps into which many in today’s consumerist society have fallen or are falling, and we too must be on our guard against them.
A report out this week showed how life-expectancy in the UK is rising steadily, year on year. The ‘average’ British woman can expect to live to 81½, whilst the average British man can expect to live to 77.2 years of age. Yet, of course, that means that, in all likelihood, half of all Britons will live to less than those ages. Just living in the UK is far from a guarantee of long life / Dydy e ddim yn gwarant o bywyd hir. Of course, there’s nothing particularly wrong with young people making plans for living long into retirement, nor with those who have retired hoping and planning to live for many years yet. But the danger comes in assuming that long life is ahead, and consequently not making the best use of the time that you have. That time, Jesus says, is to be spent generously / dylech gwario’r amser yma yn haelionus. Again, it’s not that planning for the future is wrong – after all, Joseph is held up in the Old Testament as an example to be followed for having stored grain during years of plenty to be enjoyed during years of famine. The difference between Joseph and the rich man in the parable was in terms of who was going to get to enjoy the harvest. Joseph was generous in the time that he knew he had – the present. Choosing to store the country’s bounty was a choice to share with everyone what he could have enjoyed alone.
Does neb yn gwybod am faint byddwn yn fyw / None of us know how long we will live. There is a lighthearted website you can visit which predicts the date of your death based upon your age, health and outlook on life. Apparently I should be okay until Tuesday, November 15th 2072. I’ll have nearly reached 93 – not bad at all! But because it’s purely fantasy, I need to live as if tomorrow will be my last day. And to Jesus, that means being generous today with all that I have.
This brings us to Jesus’ other warning, which came first in the reading, against greed in all its forms. The problem, then, with the rich man, wasn’t simply his assumption of a long life, but the selfish way in which he lived it. What he had was his, and was for him to enjoy, no-one else. But that is not a Godly approach to life and all that we may have. ‘Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights’ James 1:17 tells us. Not only our life, but all that we enjoy in it is a gift from God / mae pob peth dy ni’n mwynhau yn rhodd gan Dduw. Were the rich man, and maybe the bankers who have been trying to profit from the financial misery of others to have understood from where all that is good and pleasant comes, maybe they would have avoided what befell them.
There is, then, a futility in relying on possessions and wealth, because we are called to live generously. To do otherwise is to live outside of God’s will. Money and possessions are not evil things, and Jesus never suggests such. One of the most misquoted verses in the Bible (1 Timothy 6:10) doesn’t say ‘money is the root of all evil’, but rather ‘the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil’. We have an alternative to cling to and to love, rather than our own life or our possessions; yr un a wnaeth eu rhoi i ni yn y lle cyntaf / the one who gave them to us in the first place.
