SERMON 1 August 2004

 Readings:    Hosea 11:1-11        Psalm 107: 1-9; 43        Colossians 3: 1-11       Luke 12: 13-21

God open our hearts to the good news, that we might hear and truly live. Amen. 

Knowing that we will die, how then shall we live?  

It has often been observed that we live in a death-denying culture. Despite the inevitability of both death and taxes, we seem to spend a lot of energy as a society trying to avoid both of them. We regard death as a failure of medical science. And yet it comes to us all. It is as inevitable as the heat of summer and the cold of winter here on the Southern Tablelands.  

Inevitability is much better faced, acknowledged and dealt with than denied. I suppose you could live here as if it were only ever winter. Indeed there may well be times when you might be tempted to think that it will only ever be winter. But that would not be wise. It would mean being radically unprepared for much of the year and over prepared for a short section of it. Plenty of heavy jumpers, boots, hats and coats but no t-shirts, thongs or lightweight clothing.  

And we can choose to live our lives as if we will never die, but again that would not be wise, leading us to twin follies: that of deferring all sorts of things, knowing that there will always be a ‘later’, and that of putting all our energy now into securing a comfortable future.  

Today’s Gospel reading points to the folly of focussing on the future at the expense of the present. The rich man’s response to abundance is to sock it away, to put all his attention into making sure that he can have a good time, as he sees it, in the future. But what about now? Why doesn’t he eat, drink and enjoy himself now rather than run off on a building project? Jesus points to the folly of this. 

It is also worth having a look at what the rich man means by ensuring the future. His idea seems to be a purely material one – it is about eating, drinking and enjoying himself. But what about friendship? What about love? What about praising God for the abundance of the harvest? Perhaps the word ‘enjoying’ encompasses all that but if he is off on a project building barns, will he really have time to nurture friendship, to deepen love, to praise God? 

As we look to the future, what truly matters to us? Has it to do with God, with our human relationships, or is it about having enough material things. Jesus generally gives the material world a bad press – not, I believe, because such things are bad in themselves, but because we humans have a tendency to lose perspective in relation to them and to put our hearts on things which are just transitory, which are ephemeral and incidental, losing sight of the eternal values of love, compassion, mercy and truth. 

The Lord’s Prayer seeks to put our physical needs in their proper place – the line ‘give us today our daily bread’ is a prayer seeking enough. Another translation renders the line as ‘give us bread for our journey’. Not too much, not too little. Just enough. Our desire should be that there is enough, and that we can be secure in the knowledge that there will be enough. Extra is excess and a distraction. As we try to manage it and salt it away for a rainy day, it takes our focus and attention away from the present, and from the truly important tasks that we have here – to love God, and to love our neighbour as ourselves.  

Some years ago, I heard the poignant story of a family whose young daughter had died unexpectedly at the age of ten. Her father’s comment was, ‘Had we had known there would be no tomorrow, we would have paid more attention to each today’. At our 9.30 service this weekend we are focussing on missing persons. The Missing Persons Unit from the Australian Federal Police has been working with us to put together a service dedicated to those who are missing, those who love them and those who search for them.  

The lives of the families and friends of those who go missing are changed forever by the experience. They know exactly how this father was feeling. In many ways it is like losing someone through death and yet it is without the finality of death. For them, however, hope remains, in some corner of the heart, that the missing person will turn up again one day. Grieving cannot follow its normal course. The loss remains open-ended.  

How well they know that life can change in an instant! That every plan you have laid, every imagining you have about the future becomes null and void.  

Such experiences and today’s reading challenge us to examine our own assumptions and the way in which we are living. What are the kinds of wealth that we are seeking to accumulate? Is it to do with money, or material possessions? Or are we seeking to invest all our emotional energy into one person, into one relationship – a partner, a child? Are we workaholics, investing all our energy and effort into a particular task and losing our perspective as a result?  

Knowing that we will die, and knowing too that the time and manner of our death is largely unpredictable, how then shall we live? And, having answered that question, do we actually do it? 

Does the reality of our life match the way we believe we should be living? Many of us put off the things we truly want to do in order to secure a future over which we have no control. The future may be utterly different from the way we imagine it will be. Indeed it probably will be utterly different from the way we imagine it will be. The rich man in the parable today had plenty of wherewithal to eat, drink and enjoy himself in the present and yet his concern was to store it up so that he could eat, drink and be merry in the future. How sensible was this?  

How many of us put off truly engaging with life now, fondly imagining that we will do it once we have bought a house, once the kids leave home, once we have that promotion at work, once we’ve lost weight, once we’ve tidied up the garage … and so it goes on.  

As we read the gospels, it seems that one of the primary calls of the Christian is to live mindfully, intentionally, day by day. Focussing on the here and now, living each moment. This can be hard for Westerners to achieve. Many of us are the genetic descendants of Northern Europeans who needed to have an eye to surviving harsh winters by making adequate provision for them. All our genes tell us to plan for the future, to make sure there will be enough to get through the hard times.  

I don’t believe that this is necessarily wrong. The question is how we do it: whether we are losing what is precious about the moment, about the present, in our focus on the future. Whether we are compromising our beliefs, our values, our relationships in the present, for the sake of a future which may never come. That is Jesus’ ultimate challenge to us – to live each moment as we are called to live. Much of the Gospel teaching is about this very point. Life is not about tomorrow, it is about today. Amen.

Sarah Macneil