Sermon preached at Evensong on the Last Sunday after Trinity 2026

Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, all is vanity.

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan, in his dream, describes his main characters Christian and Faithful making their way into the town of Vanity; an unavoidable stop on their journey to the Celestial city. He beholds a great Fair in the town, selling all manner of merchandise including ‘places, honours, preferments, titles’, along with various kinds of ‘delight’, including ‘lives, blood, bodies, souls’. He sees crime, violence and immorality of every kind. Vanity Fair is ‘lusty’, Bunyan tells us, and that is not a good thing.

Christian and Faithful create a bit of a stir as they enter the Fair for three reasons: they wear distinctive clothes, they speak ‘the language of Canaan’, which is unknown to the people of Vanity, and, Bunyan tells us:

that which did not a little amuse the merchandisers was, that these pilgrims set very light by all their wares. They cared not so much as to look upon them; and if they called upon them to buy, they would put their fingers in their ears, and cry, "Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity," Psalm 119: 37, and look upward, signifying that their trade and traffic was in heaven. Philippians 3: 20–21.

Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.

The book Ecclesiastes is part of the wisdom literature in the Old Testament, like the book of Proverbs, but Ecclesiastes has a unique twist of world-weariness about it.

Remember your creator in the days of your youth, (we are told) before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them'; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain; on the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent…

And so on, and so on, in what feels like a descending spiral until the final heavy sigh of; ‘vanity of vanities…all is vanity.’

It can sound a bit nihilistic; as if nothing really matters; but that is far from the case. The writer, the Teacher, wants us to remember, to discover what truly matters beyond the ‘vanities’ of this life; those things with which we tend to get rather caught up, rather obsessed.

We may laugh at the thought of Faithful and Christian at Vanity Fair putting their fingers in their ears and looking up to heaven, as a parody of piety, a clutching of pearls, but the Teacher might think they were on to something.

The Hebrew word translated as ‘vanity’ is not so much about people spending too much time looking in mirrors (although it might include that). The Hebrew word is ‘hevel’, which has a nice onomatopoeic quality to it. It is barely more than a breath—hevel—hinting at things which are insubstantial, fleeting, barely worth talking or even thinking about, like the breath on a frosty morning that produces a cloud that so quickly evaporates.

It is interesting to note what the Teacher considers to be ‘hevel’, because it includes things that seem pretty substantial, pretty important, to most of us. Sowing seed, reaping harvests, youth and strength—all hevel, apparently.

Bunyan pushes this further—the vanities, the hevel, being traded in Vanity Fair include houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms—things we are inclined to take rather seriously, and to which we devote rather a lot of energy, especially round here. Good nonconformist that he was, I suspect Bunyan would have had no problem adding Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster to his list of vanities.

Again, we can read this as an implication that these things don’t matter, that they have no importance, that we shouldn’t be bothered with them. There is a strand of Christianity (a small one, I’m glad to say) that is inclined to say that we shouldn’t be bothered with measures to address, for example, climate change or war because the world is going to end anyway, and the sooner that happens the better. It takes a particular millenarian mindset to ignore all the encouragement in the scriptures to be good stewards of creation, especially for the sake of the poor, but there you go.

The mistake of Vanity Fair and the wisdom that the Teacher is trying to impress upon us concerns how we use all these things, which are in themselves fleeting, impermanent, even if they are sustained for centuries, way beyond our fleeting lifetimes. All things—houses, honours, countries and kingdoms, our very lives and all that sustains them—these are all gifts, he would remind us, gifts of God’s creation. Problems begin when we grasp at them, become obsessed with them, hoard them for ourselves and away from others—when we treat God’s gifts as our possessions; when we no longer owe them to God; when they become not a cause for thanksgiving, but for anxiety and fear over our own prosperity, status and survival.

Gifts become vanities—hevel—when they cease to be related to the God who gives them.

This is the trap that Christian and Faithful are seeking to avoid as they stick their fingers in their ears and look up into the heavens. The wares that are laid before them in Vanity Fair, including lives, bodies, souls, are being presented as commodities to be consumed; to stimulate and amplify their desires.

Bunyan tells us that Vanity Fair is very old—it has been around for ever—it was the place where Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if he would only bow down and worship him. If Bunyan were writing today, he might be intrigued by all the vanities we now carry in our pockets—a whole virtual Fair of vanities only a click or two away. Who needs market stalls, when an app can keep you scrolling for hours over desirable properties, cat videos, or whichever brand of political outrage takes your fancy. More seriously, people, or just bodies, can be swiped one way or another; algorithms guide us towards appetites and desires we barely knew we had. AI might mean that no-one is actually harmed in the process, but what does this amplification, this radicalisation of our desire, our fantasies, actually do to us and to our ability to relate to one another?

Sticking our fingers in our ears and looking to the heavens may not solve it, but it doesn’t seem like such a bad option.

Perhaps the psalmist can come to our aid.

Lord, I am not high-minded : I have no proud looks.
I do not exercise myself in great matters : which are too high for me.
But I refrain my soul, and keep it low, like as a child that is weaned from his mother : yea, my soul is even as a weaned child.
O Israel, trust in the Lord : from this time forth for evermore.

The psalmist knows how our desire can run away with us, and how important it is for us to step back from the stuff we get so exercised about—everything we want to possess—pleasures, honours, knowledge, power.

I refrain my soul—the psalmist says—and keep it low. I wonder how you, and how I, can do that restraining work in a world that is wildly over-stimulating, where vanities are on offer at every turn? How can we be like that weaned child on its mother’s breast—a beautiful image of the God who gives us birth and sustenance? How can we be that child, not hungry and demanding, but resting and trusting?

It is hard; it would be nigh on impossible, if it were not for the grace that reaches out to us in Jesus, by the Spirit; the grace that forgives and never despairs of us; the grace that restrains us and invites us to use God’s gifts to God’s glory, not reducing them to hevel; the grace that invites us to lift our eyes above all that is fleeting, to the eternity, to the love, that surrounds us and summons us in this pilgrimage of life.