Colossians 3.1–11, Luke 12.13-21
The Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 3 August 2025
Eldroth, Clapham
I don’t expect you to have much sympathy for me. I’m the man in the story who asked Jesus to persuade my brother to divide the inheritance with me.
I don’t expect you to have much sympathy for me because since that day I’ve felt condemned as the greedy one. And maybe I was being greedy then. But there’s more to my story than that.
Scapegoating me leaves everyone else to get away without thinking too hard about their own attitude to wealth and possessions. That’s not what The Teacher intended. That won’t help any of us.
You see, I don’t think my intentions were that dishonourable or unusual. There was money in the family, and I was dreaming of one day having a share in that money. Like you would, perhaps, if you were in the same position.
All I wanted was some capital to put into a small property. Somewhere in a slightly nicer part of town, a good environment for my wife and I to bring up our family, better schools there, better prospects. Just that little dream. I’d got friends who’d made that move – it had worked out well for them. I had all the leaflets from the estate agents. If my estimates about the inheritance added up, my little dream could come true.
I thought my brother would understand that. I know he had little dreams of his own that were very similar to mine. But somehow his estimates about the inheritance didn’t add up with mine. Somehow what had been a decent enough relationship between brothers went very sour, as neither of us would give up on our dreams.
As my brother held the purse-strings it looked like my dream was doomed to die. So when I saw him in the town that day I thought that Jesus might intervene for me.
I asked the Teacher to tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. I was shocked by his reply: “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”
Well, I thought Jesus was a judge and arbiter. I thought that was the whole point of a Messiah, to be a judge over our affairs. Every religion I could think of has placed a judgmental God at its core. I knew plenty of religious devotees who felt their beliefs entitled them to condemn others to hell and damnation.
But here was this man, Jesus, resisting my plea, refusing to judge my brother, refusing to arbitrate in our affairs, throwing the responsibility back onto us. This was breathtaking and very, very, challenging. Because now we had to face each other and work out a solution in the light of what Jesus said next.
He told a story about a man obsessed with the idea of building bigger and bigger barns to store more and more of his grain and goods, thinking this would set him up for life. The story ends with the man’s premature death, and God saying to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
The Teacher told this story to warn us against greed. To show “how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” It wasn’t a judgment on us, but it left us to make our own judgments about what we should do with our obsessions.
At first I thought the story condemned my brother. After all, he was the one wanting to keep the wealth to himself, to set himself up for life while excluding me and my dreams.
But then I realised it could also be about me. Because I too was storing up things for myself – in my head, by living in a dream stimulated by other people’s ideas about the good life, surrounded by estate agents’ marketing materials and glossy brochures from fancy schools.
The teacher’s words left my brother and I with a few options about seeing this problem in a different way. They all revolved around another question he raised but left us to answer: a question that seems to hold the key to a satisfied life. What does it mean to be “rich toward God”?
That’s a very challenging question. It suggests that what you most value in life influences the sort of life you live. If you most value wealth you’ll probably be very smart but very anxious; if you most value God you’ll also value things like love and community, peace and reconciliation, and you may not wear the most expensive clothes but you’ll be satisfied.
I imagine that if you are “rich toward God” then creating wealth means spreading kindness, doing good for others, protecting the vulnerable and defending those who are victimised.
My brother and I were left realising that we would only be truly happy and fulfilled when the things we think will make us rich become the same as the things we think will make us rich towards God. And we knew that that could take some time, some prayer, some work.
Thankfully there are many other religious devotees whose beliefs have inspired them to faithful, careful, generous living, whose lives and words help us to appreciate what it means be “rich toward God”.
People like Jean-Baptiste Vianney, known as the Cure d’Ars, a spiritual guide who the church remembers this week. He said, “Ours is a noble task: that of prayer and love. To pray and to love, that constitutes the greatest possible happiness for us in this life.”
Note
This sermon is a rewrite of Being rich toward God, preached in Croxteth in 2004. Other versions have included: Plan alone, build alone, indulge alone, and die alone! A rabbi breaks the rules (Eldroth, Keasden, 2019) and The rabbi who didn’t play by the rules, and his parable of the stupid rich man, (Somerset, 2016).
John Davies
