Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Seventh Sunday after Trinity 2025

Luke 12: 13–21

But God said to him, "You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you.”

What is it that gives you life? That feeds and sustains you, makes the world a singing technicolour of depth and richness? And what is it that demands life from you? Leeches colour and music from the world, leaving it a drab grey that is all surface and apathy?

Jesus said: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

The theme of new, full and abundant life permeates the New Testament. There are quite literal versions, when Jesus raises Lazarus, or the widow of Nain’s son, or Jairus’s daughter. In the letter to the Colossians, the author speaks of the new self being renewed in the image of Christ. Jesus speaks to Nicodemus about being born again from above, and again and again speaks of the eternal life that is our sure and certain hope through his death, resurrection and Ascension.

We are called to abundant life, but in truth, there are times when life may feel anything but abundant. Like there is a wound somewhere, slowly leeching away all that is rich and good. I’m not speaking of the malignant monochrome of depression, the painful numbness of grief, or a physical infirmity – I have certainly known people facing the very end of their lives and yet somehow more alive than anyone I’ve ever met – but something more insidious; that nagging sense that there must be more to life, an absence of purpose or direction, a feeling of being stuck on the hamster wheel, forever moving but never getting anywhere.

We see this narrative in all sorts of shapes and sizes in our culture. The idea that someone has become stale and dry, and needs to find something in order to remind them why life is worth living pops up in everything from Romantic Comedies to A Christmas Carol – I’m sure you can think of more examples that I could name. In some genres that “drying out” is more than just a personal crisis: a common trope in Fantasy fiction is the idea that there is some kind of wound in the world, where some act of power, hubris, or greed, an “original sin” caused a rift to open out of which drains magic, life, hope – all the things that make for living abundantly. The goal is for the protagonist to fix the rift, often by sacrificing themselves, so that the balance of the world can be restored. The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula le Guin and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time take this as their central narrative. A Dragon in Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore describes it powerfully:

“The sense has gone out of things. There is a hole in the world and the sea is running out of it. The light is running out. We will be left in the dry land. There will be no more speaking, and no more dying.”

All this talk of abundance and our need for abundant life might seem odd when the Parable Jesus tells in today’s Gospel seems to be completely dead-set against abundance. The rich man has so many crops that he has to build new barns to hold them all, and has ample goods to last him many years, but on the very night that he tells himself to “relax, eat, drink, be merry,” his life is demanded of him. “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions,” Jesus tells us. So what does our abundance look like, and how can we avoid the wound in our lives and in ourselves that demands our life so that we end up with empty hands?

Jesus names the wound in our Gospel: Greed. We might think of greed as a kind of hoarder mentality, where people just keep adding to their wealth or possessions in order to have more wealth and possessions: a desire to make the numbers go up. It may not even be tangible assets such as crops or money, but greed for power or status; things that have social value. But greed can be more insidious than that. For one thing, greed is inherently selfish; if you consistently take more than you need, you will eventually be depriving others to do so. More than that, greed orients the heart so that your focus is consistently on what you want. We see this with the rich man. In the whole of the parable, there is no mention of anybody else. “Here is what I will do.” “There I will store all my grain and my goods.” “And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” This is a party of one; no one seems to be invited to enjoy the fruits of his (and presumably many others who did the work but are not mentioned by him) labour with him.

This orientation of the heart is crucial. Greed is a selfish attention placed on the wants of the individual, to the exclusion of other things; people, relationships, and ultimately God. Colossians reminds us that Greed is idolatry; our elevation of something (or someone) into the place of God in our lives. And that thing will always be inadequate, because only God can give us the fullness of being that truly allows us to live abundantly. This makes greed a vicious cycle. The elevation of material goods or societal value over our relationship with God opens that wound in us that can never be filled. We then throw more and more of ourselves, our lives, our time, our energy into that void in a desperate attempt to fill it, whilst ignoring him who alone can grant us peace. “Our hearts are restless, until we find our rest in you,” as St Augustine prayed. We are restless, ever moving in an attempt to get more, but never getting anywhere because we have blocked out him who renews and restores us in his image: the one who is all in all. Sense has gone out, the light has run out, we are left in the dry land.

Those authors were right about the wound in the world being caused by some kind of “original sin” – in both cases I mentioned, a hubristic desire for power, including power over life and death. Greed and pride doomed the world. In both cases, the protagonist is expected to sacrifice themselves (or something of themselves) in order to fill that void, but there our paths diverge: we are not called to redeem the world. In this place, at this altar, we come to meet the one who sacrificed himself so that our wounds of sin may be healed, and that we might be fed to be transformed into new life in his image. We are called to live lives not shaped by an obsession with “what do I want,” but lives in the pattern of him who came not to be served but to serve, grants us peace, and who sacrificed himself so that we can be in right relationship with him and with one another. When we gaze upon the cross and the wounds he bore for us, and then look around us at the wounds in our still selfish and greedy world with his eyes of compassion and love and set out renewed to live as good neighbours bound together in Christ who is all in all, then we are living abundantly.

Amen.